In early June, Manhasset Middle School reading teacher Sally Doulton will learn whether she has been named an Educator of Excellence from the New York State English Council for her work on the school district’s Scholastic System 44 and READ 180 programs, which help struggling readers and non-native English speakers improve their phonics and comprehension skills.
Doulton was nominated for the award in March by the school district’s English coordinator, Patrick O’Reilly, and if selected would be awarded at the 63rd New York State English Council conference this October in Albany.
“Sally’s work with the System 44 and Read 180 programs help those students achieve at similar rates and levels, and that provides a gateway for those students to continue to develop as proficient readers and writers,” O’Reilly said.
Doulton, who moderates the System 44 blog on Scholastic’s Web site and has appeared on the NBC news program “Education Nation,” with Brian Williams, said the conference’s theme of teaching the common core to the uncommon learner aligns perfectly with the work she does.
In System 44, Doulton said, students are taught phonics skills using a combination of computer software and small group work.
“It’s very structured, but highly-engaging program that really gets teens reading,” she said.
The READ 180 program focuses on improving the students’ comprehension skills, analyzing a text’s central idea or theme and making inferences of the author’s purpose for writing.
“They may not have significant cognitive impairments, but they just haven’t caught on to the system of making sense of written text,” she said. “If you give them a paragraph of text and they can only interpret a part of it, they would be eligible.”
Students are considered for the programs, Doulton said, based upon requests from parents and teachers or if they’ve had a history of struggling to read up to grade level.
Doulton offers recommended students a reading assessment, which tests their reading rate, speed and comprehension, and if they score two to three years below grade level, they are considered eligible for her reading programs.
“The programs themselves are scientifically researched and tested programs for reading fluency,” O’Reilly said. “Because Sally has mastered them so well, she’s really been able to bring a very high level of excellence to a group of students who have those particular needs.”
Doulton described her teaching approach as “holistic,” one that goes to painstaking efforts to ensure her lessons are learned and put into practice.
“If I’m teaching the students what a barrier is, I’ll show them examples, like a boulder on a road,” Doulton said. “I present words with visual images – this is an example of an obstacle that keeps you from achieving success – and I use the words as I speak. I have the kids use the words as they speak, and even try to get the parents on board using the words at home.”
Students who use the program have been known to improve by two to three grade levels within a year.
“She’s really built the program to help our neediest readers and to also help some of our second language learners to achieve tremendous success in mastering phonics and then reading ability in those two programs,” O’Reilly said.
Doulton has also been nominated for the “Middle School Teacher” category of the second installment of the Bammy! Awards, in which committees of educators from across the field honor those who have made positive contributions to the students with whom they work.
“I didn’t know what they were at first,” Doulton said. “I had only just started reading about them. My colleagues really hadn’t heard of the Bammy!’s, either, because they’re so new, but they’re getting to be a big deal now.”
Doulton has also been nominated for a Scholastic Outstanding Educator Award for her work with the company’s READ 180 program in each of the last three years.
In that time, Doulton said other districts from New York City and Long Island have reached out to Manhasset about implementing READ 180 and System 44 programs in their schools.
Doulton said the programs have also grown within the Manhasset district as well, expanding to the elementary schools and even a class section at Manhasset High School for READ 180 students.
“When you get down to it, I’m passionate about teaching adolescents make sense of text, teaching them to read and get excited about it,” she said.
