Educational & Counselling Psychology

Faculty of Education
McGill University
Education Building
3700 McTavish Street
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1Y2

Tel/Tl : (514) 398-4240

Fax/Tlcopieur: (514) 398-6968

07.12.15

Dear colleague:
I have been supervising Julia through my project coordinator Kristina Maiorino on a Pan Canadian
Reading Intervention here at McGill University. Julia was a volunteer for the project from September 2014 to
June 2015 and her duties included interacting with school staff, working with children one-on-one or in small
groups and administering standardized language and literacy measures to them. She also assisted with classroom
observations, during which she observed 60 minutes of an ELA lesson and then rated it using the ELLCO tool.
Julia also took sole responsibility of running a phonics-based intervention with 3 struggling students at a
Montreal school for 9 weeks during the winter of 2015. Through her work on the intervention, Julia visited the
school three times weekly to work with the children in a small group. She taught various phonemic skills such as
phoneme-grapheme correspondence and blending through direct instruction and interactive practice through
games. Through her intervention, Julia demonstrated the ability to adapt her lessons to meet the needs of each
child in the group, most notably with a young girl with special needs. Furthermore, her gentle, encouraging
manner led her to establish an ongoing, positive relationship with the children participating, notably with one
young girl with special needs. Her ability to make each child feel comfortable and excited to learn was an asset
to the project.
Throughout her involvement with the project, Julia has demonstrated a constant willingness to learn as well as
openness to assist in whatever was needed. Her ease in interacting with school personnel, her coworkers and the
children involved in the project made her an asset to the team. I have no doubt that Julia would continue to
demonstrate these qualities in her future role as a teacher.
Sincerely,

Professor Robert Savage

William Dawson Scholar
Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology