Running Records: A Self-Tutoring Guide

If you want to learn how to assess and interpret young children's oral reading, this book is your teacher. Johnston's writing is so refreshing and so explicit, you'll think he is by your side coaching you to success.
Susan Pasquarella
Roger Williams University

Here is a practical guide for teachers learning how to take running records of children's oral reading. If you know how to take running records, you can sit down next to a child who is reading and with only a blank sheet of paper and a pen you can make a record of the child's reading strategies. These records can be used to show growth, reveal problems, and provide a place for instructional conversations with children or colleagues.

Invented by Marie M. Clay, running records are unquestionably the most practical reading assessment technique for primary school teachers. This book and tape provide the most efficient way to learn how to use them. Peter H. Johnston walks you step by step through both recording and analysis as you listen to carefully selected examples of children's reading on the accompanying tape. This process of "ear-tuning" will change the way you listen to children read—and the way you respond to their reading.

Peter Johnston grew up and taught elementary school in New Zealand before coming to the United States to earn his Ph.D. at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. At the time his plans did not include staying in the United States let alone getting married and raising a family. He now lives in Albany, New York, with his wife Tina, and a cat left behind by one of his (three) children returning briefly from college.

Peter's research and writing spring from his fascination with children's learning and, no less, teachers' teaching. Perversely, he believes that education is not simply about delivering information to children. He thinks it is more about building a just, caring society and that doing so will not detract from our more obviously pragmatic educational goals. In his most recent Stenhouse book, Choice Words, he uses his fascination with the relationship between language and learning to show how this works moment to moment in the classroom.

A professor at the State University of New York at Albany, Peter and his colleagues Becky Rogers and Cheryl Dozier recently researched their own teaching of beginning teachers in Critical Literacy/Critical Teaching: Tools for Preparing Responsive Teachers. Knowing Literacy, his most recent book on assessment, arose from his interest in the ways assessment teaching and learning are linked. His research on assessment has given him reason to be skeptical of high-stakes testing because of its effects on teaching and learning.

When asked to describe himself as a writer, he says that he "binges." While not recommended, this approach has resulted in some eight books and about fifty research articles, along with occasional awards from professional organizations. Some of this, of course, is accounted for by age. The departure of his youngest daughter into a teacher education program, along with his recent election to the Reading Hall of Fame, asserts his "old fart" status.

Beyond his family, research, soccer, singing, and humor sustain him. Failing that, a glass of chardonnay helps.