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Companion Reading is a thoroughly researched and proven phonetics and language arts based reading program. Each element of Companion Reading was designed to help students master the subskills and integrate them into a fully functioning, fluent, comprehending, and independent reader.
Dr. Grant Von Harrison was a professor in the Department of Instructional Science at Brigham Young University. He received his EdD degree at UCLA with a major in instructional product research. His Structured Tutoring model evolved during his work as a graduate student working with Systems Development Corporation in California. Since that time he referred to his work as instructional systems, incorporating a wide variety of instructional methodologies based on whether they caused learning and on whether they followed one or another instructional philosophy.
Dr. Harrison believed that an effective instructional system would join both intellectual and emotional minds to create unequaled learning power. The unparalleled program Dr. Harrison created provides just enough skill, content, fluency and generalization to provide the evidence a student needs to assure the student BELIEVES he or she can learn. This component to the design of Companion Reading is a very powerful key to its success.
Selected for the National Diffusion Network, nominated as a promising practice in Right to Read and written up in the Harvard Education Review, Structured Tutoring and its classroom version, Companion Reading, have had a significant impact on thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of students. Authored by Professor Grant Von Harrison, the Structured Tutoring and Companion Reading programs are still in use forty years later.
At its inception, tutorial and classroom versions of the Harrison research exemplified direct or explicit instruction in the era of outcomes-based education. It contained each of the four focuses of the National Reading Panel’s recommendation decades before the Panel’s research was published:
Harrison’s work also followed the recommendations of Educational Programs that Work and Effective School’s research. Written over 25 years ago, the report found that there are unique characteristics and processes common to education where all children are learning, regardless of family background, or aptitude which was commonly thought to be the determinant. Structured Tutoring and Companion Reading proved effective for all children, especially those thought to be unable to master reading for all of the common explanations of failure to learn.
Each component of the Structured Tutoring programs and each element Companion Reading was designed to help students master the subskills and integrate them into a fully functioning, fluent, comprehending, and independent reader. The systems include instruction in phonemic awareness including identifying sounds and "hearing" sounds to produce spelled words, phonics such as blending and decoding (successfully reading unencountered phonetic words), sight vocabulary (reading high frequency, non-phonetic vocabulary on sight), writing, written spelling, comprehension, vocabulary development, fluency, and outside reading of high interest-relevant vocabulary literature intended to help students generalize in-program skills to their literature world.
The unparalleled Companion Reading program provides just enough skill, content, fluency and generalization to provide the success a student needs to assure the student believes he or she can learn, which is one of the most important elements in Dr. Harrison’s work – if you have a program that consistently builds skills, it will also consistently build confidence for students and teachers.
As Karen Zastra, a first grade Companion Reading teacher put it. “The children start reading from day one – they believe they can read from the very start which builds not only reading skills, but confidence. It systematically builds and builds. My reading average this year on the standardized test they gave my students was 94.5”.