Haley Buss

Kristen McCann, the Reading Specialist at Center Street Elementary, has been in the

education field for 12 years now. She earned her master’s at Loyola Marymount University in

Child & Adolescent Literacy. She first started teaching in a classroom for nine years before

transferring to the role of reading specialist. Kristen has been a reading specialist for 7 years,

with the last four years taking place at Center Street Elementary. She works side by side with an

instructional aid with small groups focusing on intervention. The instructional aid will focus on

word work such as phonics and decoding while Kristen focuses on comprehension, fluency, and

anything tied to the actual reading of text. Her small groups are pulled out of the classroom and

meet in her resource room for intervention. The First, Second, and Third grade intervention

groups meet four times a week, for half an hour each day, with Kristen and her instructional aid.

The Kindergarten, Fourth, and Fifth grade intervention groups only meet once a week with

Kristen.

Kristen briefly discussed that part of her duties as a Reading Specialist include creating

professional development focusing on literacy for the teachers. She describes her job as working

with students 95% of her time and working with teachers the other 5% of her time. Her job

requires a lot of collaboration with the classroom teachers so she makes it very clear that she is

an open resource for anyone that needs her assistance.

Kristen brought a lot of her own training into her resource room when she first started working at

Center Street Elementary four years ago. She does not have a specific curriculum or program that

she follows with the intervention groups so she uses her own resources and training. When

working with the students she follows an Intervention/Reader’s Workshop model. She decides

the focus of the unit depending on the need of the group, then creates an explicit mini-lesson
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focusing on that skill, and pulls resources that correlate. She stresses that it’s important she gives

the students plenty of time to read instead of listening to her talk about reading. This gives the

students a chance to apply and practice their learned skill. She enjoys the free range of being able

to create her own guided reading model.

Kristen works closely with one other Reading Specialist in her district. She explained that before

last year, teachers were using all different types of running records to keep track of their

students. Last year, the two schools purchased the Benchmark assessments from Fountas &

Pinnell. Kristen and the other Reading Specialist created and presented multiple professional

development training sessions for the staff at both schools so that they would be fully prepared to

use this new tool. She was very grateful to have someone else to work with and as well as the

support from her principal during this process.

Last year, the school had a couple issues with staffing within their Learning Center, so a lot of

students with IEPs were getting their reading instruction from Kristen. This resulted in her

attending the IEP meetings because she was the teacher working closely with the students and

their reading. This became a very overwhelming task and at the end of last school year, Kristen

produced a solution with her administration. The children with IEPs were no longer attending

reading intervention with Kristen and her workload became a little lighter. She also attends SST

meetings for the students who attend reading intervention with her. She reassures the parents and

helps set goals for the students.

Kristen loves her job as a Reading Specialist and is even considering going back to school to

further her knowledge of reading with new courses. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Kristen

about her duties and she was happy to help with my assignment.