Let the Records Run!

Having never ever heard of “running records” before, I found Clay’s Chapter 5 absolutely fascinating. Math and Language Arts are my two areas of concentration as a Middle Childhood Education major, and it never really occurred to me how similar they could be to teach because of how grading and progress are handled. Math is much more simple- you can tell who is practicing and who is not, where their mistakes are on homework based on which step they made an error, whether they understand previous concepts, how they are thinking on their own, all because so much work is shown for each problem. Reading always seemed so different and impossible to understand in such a mathematical way, but running records takes a reading passage and makes it mathematically understandable, which of course, I love.

I tried to think back to my early reading days to think if I can ever recall anything like this in my experience, but of course my memory isn’t so great. I wonder what mine would have looked like, and I can’t help but think that mine may have been somewhat like the example from “Claire” (appropriately) from Clay. My speculation is that I was very much a self-corrector. I was never a particularly fast or flawless reader as “Emma” was in her example, but I know I tried very hard to be perfect, which I think would have shown through on a running record if I had one from when I was beginning to read.

The fact that you can tell so much about how a child is learning and processing reading from the marks made word by word in a running record is absolutely brilliant. I loved that bits that the “teacher” wrote after each sample running record. I am sure it takes a lot of practice, but it seems so incredibly practical that it only makes sense to use this technique. I know Clay mentioned that it’s best to start with average readers, but I think if you mastered the process enough, this could be very helpful to every variety of learner. My only question is that I couldn’t help but wonder how English language learners fit into the mix. Is there any sort of special mark for different pronunciations? What happens if the student says the word in their primary language?