Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell are Heinemann staples. Their literacy foundations are the best products on the market, hands down. With educational philosophies in sync with Heinemann's, it is no wonder they are two of our absolute biggest authors. Hear excerpts of their story first hand below. For more information, go here.
"In the early 1990s both of us had been working in Reading Recovery© (early intervention involving one-to-one tutoring; see whatworksclearinghouse.com). We found that comprehensive plans lead to higher achievement when classroom and intervention teachers worked together as a coherent, cohesive team.
We knew that it was essential to match books to readers and to provide differentiated instruction through working with small groups in reading. But we could not find a focused professional book that offered practical advice and discussions of research-based practice in this area. So, we teamed up to write Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Students. It was a wonderful surprise to find that we could produce more helpful materials for teachers when we worked together, so we just kept writing in response to the questions teachers gave us, the needs they expressed, and the challenges we observed in our hundreds of partner schools.
"Almost 30 years ago Irene had begun to create the gradient of text from A to Z with teams of teachers in school districts. We refined this tool and published it for the first time in Guided Reading, but we continued to explore just what made one book easier or harder for readers. We needed to analyze in great detail the text characteristics of fiction and nonfiction books at every level of the A to Z gradient to understand the demands of each level on the developing reader.
"We decided to write specific behaviors and understandings to notice, teach for and support for each level A to Z — following the outline of twelve systems of strategic actions that we had identified in several other publications. So that exercise resulted in the creation of the Guided Reading section of The Continuum of Literacy Learning, and that lead to more work!
"As we created the continuum, we thought constantly about those students who were having difficulty meeting the curriculum goals. What kind of—and what level of— instruction would they need? We decided to systematize our supplementary work by designing a small-group intervention that would be highly structured and sequenced, intensive, and highly engaging for students. We called it Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) because it was based on the work we had done on the continuum, and it allowed teachers to make highly intentional teaching moves based on the gradient.
"But as we began our work on LLI, we realized that we needed a way to reliably assess children’s reading levels so that we would (1) know who needed intervention immediately; (2) know where to start LLI lessons; and (3) be able to document progress to release children from the intervention. We channeled our time into designing, producing, and field testing our Benchmark Assessment System. It gives every teacher reliable data for placing students on the Fountas & Pinnell A–Z Text Gradient.
As we look at these publications, we sometimes feel we were working on one continuing publication over the last eight years. Together they make a cohesive and coherent set of tools to make teaching efficient and transformative. All of our thinking has come together in a way we hope will help teachers work in highly effective ways with students and learn more about literacy teaching and learning by using them."
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