Participating undergraduates vouch for the program’s benefits. “This clinic helped give me the tools to feel like a real teacher,” one aspiring educator reported. “I knew what to teach and how to teach it.”
Closing the Gap
Last year, the clinic helped about 120 school-aged children by offering various services, including reading assessments and research-based instructional strategies to address their needs in decoding and spelling, vocabulary development, oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. University faculty and staff supervise all tutors, guiding the young educators toward success. “Our pre-service teachers learn how to look at an assessment, observe a child's strengths and weaknesses and use what they know from their course to plan instruction,” Hudson explained.
The clinic offers two avenues of experience for pre-service teachers. First, tutoring is provided for a fee at the clinic’s facility in the Charlotte Sharp Children’s Center. Thanks to generous support for the clinic, though, tuition costs may be waived for some children based on financial eligibility.
Secondly, the clinic partners with local elementary schools to offer tutoring at no cost during the school day. Many of the students who participate in the school-day tutoring program are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and do not come from “literacy rich” households.
To help children maintain their literacy skills over the summer, the clinic will also offer a tutoring program over the break. Educators often find that student skills regress over the summer when children are not in school, and the program will offer a bridge to keep readers on track.
