What's the first sound we hear in the word at?" Leanne Clark Bier, CHEP '96MEd, asks the first-graders sitting around a table in her classroom at Pleasantville Elementary School near New Castle, Del.

A little girl named Amanda shyly repeats the right sound. She and her classmates place a colored plastic chip on white boards in front of them.

"What's the next sound that you hear in the word at?" Bier says.

"T," says Jeffrey.

"What's the sound that we hear, Jeffrey?" Bier says.

"Tuh," Jeffrey says. He and the others line up a different colored chip next to the first one on their boards.

"Do we hear any other sounds in the word at, boys and girls?" Bier asks. When they shake their heads, she goes on: "How many chips do we have? How many sounds do we have altogether? How many letters will we need?" Two, the students answer correctly each time.

By using colored chips to represent sounds, Bier's students are developing phonemic awareness, a basic component of reading. "I know they know most of the letters. They don't know most of the sounds," Bier says later. While some of her students, like Jeffrey, can connect a sound to a specific letter, many cannot. Without the link between sounds and letters, children are unable to decode words.

The phonemic-awareness activity is included in "Strategies for Teaching Struggling Readers," a workshop Bier developed as one of the first fellows in the Delaware Reading Project, a program offered in CHEP's Delaware Center for Teacher Education (DCTE). Modeled on the National Writing Project, the curriculum, which focuses on research and theory in literacy instruction in kindergarten through 12th grade, was designed by Gwynne Ash, assistant professor of education at UD and co-director of the Delaware Reading Project.

Bier, who teaches reading as part of the federally funded Title 1 program, was one of 14 teachers and administrators who participated in the project's first Summer Invitational Institute in 2000. Another 12 joined the program last summer. Nearly all of Delaware's 19 school districts have been represented. By the end of the 2000-01 school year, Bier and the other fellows had conducted 104 workshops around the state. Ash and the project's other co-director, Bonnie Albertson of DCTE, also conducted more extensive sessions to improve reading curriculum and assessment at schools throughout Delaware.

"The overriding objective of the Delaware Reading Project is to make teachers informed decision makers--teachers who can and will effectively guide the balanced literacy development of students and the professional development of other teachers," Ash says.

Most of the fellows have been nominated by their districts. "These are already teachers who are recognized as leaders in their building, recognized as excellent teachers of reading, recognized as scholars who keep up with current theory and pedagogy," Albertson says, calling the five-week institute "very labor-intensive." Fellows keep response journals about the required readings, meet to discuss research and classroom techniques and then design workshops to share practices validated by research.

"It was one of the best classes I've ever taken in terms of interacting with other professionals, helping me examine what I do, and changing and challenging some of my thinking," says Bier, who is pursuing a doctorate in education at UD. Institute participants earn six graduate credits, toward either a master's or a doctoral degree.

Bier developed her workshop around some of her favorite teaching techniques, based on approaches and research she learned in her master's degree courses and other workshops. "I built this workshop on what I do. ... I've done all these things in my classes with my kids," she says. It was participation in the Delaware Reading Project, however, that caused it all to jell, Bier says.

"It was a big step in my whole professional development ... because it made me stop and think about why I'm doing what I'm doing," she says. "To me, it makes my instruction flow together. There's more of a logical continuum."

With the school year under way, Bier is presenting her workshop to other teachers around the state. Though she has taught children for nine years, she found the prospect of instructing her peers "scary at first." To her relief, workshop participants have been appreciative, she says. They especially welcome the portions of the session when she gives them a chance to try for themselves some of the activities she recommends for children.

That hands-on approach is key to the first tenet of her presentation – the constructivist learning theory, which asserts that students internalize information better when they learn it through personal experience. "Now they're making sense of the world, and they're solving problems. They're not memorizing something and forgetting it," she says.

That's why Bier believes struggling readers need to focus on sounds to grasp how the alphabet functions. With that focus in mind, she begins by letting colored chips stand in for letters and dry-erase boards take the place of paper.

In her own classroom, her first-graders quickly grasp the concept of using colored chips to represent sounds. "Once they can see that the patterns of the sounds are the same, we can move on into word families," she explains later.

With chips still in place on their boards to represent at, she asks her students to think about another word: cat.

Quickly, they put down a chip for the beginning sound, placing it underneath their line of chips for at.

The class continues the lesson by listing the sounds in bat. Bier plays along, drawing colored circles on a board on the wall. As the end of class approaches, Bier fills in the appropriate letters next to the colored circles on her board.

"I bet you guys can read these words already. Read them with me," she says. And, without hesitation, they do.

--Sandy Dennison-James