After a short snack in the cafeteria, elementary schoolers and tutors meet one-on-one in Prospect Elementary School's library to work on worksheets and other literacy exercises.
			Students Help Teach Oberlin Youth to Read Text and Photographs by Mark Graham The U.S. Department of Education challenged the country "to help all of our children learn to read well and independently by the end of third grade." Oberlin's America Reads program is the community's response to that challenge. The program--coordinated by the local nonprofit Oberlin Community Services and the College's Center for Service and Learning (CSL)--employs 26 student tutors in Eastwood and Prospect elementary schools. When Caitlin Scott, director of youth-education programs at the CSL, sent a letter to potential tutors, she received 80 replies from interested students. The selected tutors show the children that reading is important and fun by using various tools, including newspapers, food labels, Mad Libs, playwrighting, and worksheets. The curriculum for the Prospect program is modeled after a fourth-grade-math tutoring program designed by Oberlin Community Services. "These kids are really bright," says Danielle Hirsch, a junior from Wilmette, Illinois, who helps organize the Prospect program and creates lesson plans for the after-school tutoring sessions. "I am wowed daily by how intelligent these kids are." Some of the children lose attention in classrooms or group settings or aren't exposed to reading at home, she says. "Each student is in the program for different reasons." In both schools, teachers selected children they thought would enjoy and benefit from tutoring. Throughout the process, tutors keep in contact with the teachers. At Prospect, teachers and tutors talk about the students, and teachers leave assignments for the tutors in folders. Tutors at Eastwood help in the classrooms. Aura Russell-Bedder, a senior from New Gloucester, Maine, tutors at Eastwood. While discussing the holiday season, one of her pupils came up with the idea to make a Thanksgiving play. She says that creating a play has proven a valuable lesson because the children practiced expressing ideas and a plot to others. As with anything, there are good days and bad days. "Some days I feel useless, but then the next day the kids really take off," she says. "I think that just by being there in their classroom, they can become excited." Being in the classroom doesn't only help the children. The tutors--over two-thirds of whom have expressed interest in pursuing a career in education--get an opportunity to explore teaching and training in pedagogy. Teachers, community members, and Scott--who is a former teacher--run training sessions. Trainers teach the students about curricula, behavior management, and teaching arts and other subjects with reading. "The sessions also provide time for reflection and problem solving," Scott says. The training has helped students feel more comfortable in their roles as tutors. "I feel like I have lots of support if I run into problems," says Russell-Bedder. Training also helped the college students better understand what they would face. "I didn't think about difficulties," she says. "I didn't know that you can't just tell any first- or second-grader to 'sound it out' when they have trouble reading." And for the students who didn't get the chance to become tutors, Scott says, "we hope to expand next year."
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