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A Teacher's Best Friend

	Kate Solar, 8, reads to Jazz and owner, Margot Montgomery, during Ottawa Therapy Dogs' R.E.A.D. Program at the Sunnyside Branch, Ottawa Public Library on February 5th, 2011.

By William Burr

More and more dogs are heading into Ottawa classrooms, where their listening skills are in high demand. The Ottawa Therapy Dogs R.E.A.D. program works on the premise that children who feel uncomfortable reading aloud to people can feel more comfortable reading to a dog. In the past year, the number of dogs on reading duty in the city has shot up from two to ten.

R.E.A.D. stands for Reading Education Assistance Dogs. The program originated in Utah 12 years ago and has since spread across the U.S., Canada and Britain. Some of the animals were recently on display at the Sunnyside branch of the public library, where volunteers allowed kids to try them out.

Eight year old Kate Solar said she found reading to Gogo, a dark reddish Dachsund, a nice change from reading to a human. "A person is normally laughing and trying to peer over your shoulder but a dog's just sort of quiet," she said. But the usual workplace for the dogs and their owners is in the classrooms of public schools, where they make a weekly or bi-weekly visit and focus on the handful of kids who are having the most trouble.

At Lady Evelyn Alternative School, six year old Leah Davidson sat on the floor with a book, her arm resting on Jazz, a black, wavy-haired Portuguese water dog. The book happened to be about the adventures of a dog called Floppy.

When Leah struggled, mistaking a "that" for a "the" or a "were" for a "where," Margot Montgomery, Jazz's owner, was there to help. A R.E.A.D. dog's owner is always present.

Montgomery patiently guided Leah through the text. The twenty minutes that Leah gets to spend once a week like this are a precious moment of one-on-one tutoring. But Leah was excited about getting to spend time with Jazz. "He can help me," she said (note: Jazz is actually female). Leah has tried reading to her own dog, but she said that he always runs away.

Leah was the first of three students Montgomery worked with that morning. Another one, eight-year old Dylan Magnet, did not cozy up to Jazz the way Leah did. He sat a few paces away from her and focused on the book. But he also got through it with Montgomery’s help.

Montgomery is a former librarian who said she is happy to be back among the books and the kids: "I enjoy getting reacquainted with the early readers and I enjoy going to the library and picking the books, and just generally being in the reading world again." She said sometimes the younger kids think the dog is reading along with them.

The R.E.A.D. program at Lady Evelyn has improved the reading of every child who has been through it, according to Lynn Champagne, the special education teacher who looks after it. She said it has been particularly good for students whose first language is not English. And sometimes, there is the "side benefit" of helping kids get over their fear of animals. One boy who used to go into a panic attack upon seeing Jazz enter the school is now able to walk up to her and tentatively give her a few pats.

At Ottawa Therapy Dogs, the animals must volunteer for a whole year before they can start reading with young children. Karen Luker, a volunteer and former head of the program, says choosing a R.E.A.D. dog is more a matter of temperament than training. "They really want to ensure that the dog is essentially bombproof," she said. Testers will observe how a dog reacts to disruptions like loud noises or the arrival of another dog into the room, or the presence of temptations like food.

Luker said dogs sometimes fall asleep while listening to a kid read. She'll try to convince the child that the dog is not bored but rather just soothed by a good bedtime story.

As reading dog programs have spread around the world, many schools have tested the reading capabilities of children before and afterword and found positive results, but it has always been anecdotal evidence. For the first time last spring, researchers at the University of California proved the effectiveness of the approach with a formal study. They found that third graders who read to dogs once a week for 10 weeks improved their reading skills by 12 per cent. A third grade class that acted as a control group had no improvement over the same period. To measure reading skill, researchers tested how many words the students could read per minute and how many errors they made per minute.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the large Pets as Therapy charity, with about 4,500 therapy dogs, is planning to launch its Read2Dogs program to schools nation-wide this year.

For all the results they've achieved, reading dog programs are usually run entirely by volunteers. Certainly in Ottawa, the folks at Ottawa Therapy Dogs give their own free time to share their dogs with kids. The animals, on the other hand, don’t necessarily have a choice about going along with it. But they tend not to complain.