Can We Do Better?

Good Information Is Hard to Get

Few of today’s most popular textbooks for teacher preparation in reading contain information about the known relationships between linguistic awareness, word recognition ability, and reading comprehension, although more good textbooks have been published in the last decade. 24 Texts may not include information about essential concepts—such as the differences between speech sounds and spellings, the fact that every syllable in English is organized around a vowel sound, and the existence of meaningful units (morphemes) in the Latin layer of English. Widely used textbooks still do not contain accurate information about the role of phonology in reading development, or why many children have trouble learning to read or what to do about it. Teachers are often given inaccurate and misleading information based on unsupported ideas. For example, for the past several decades, one of the most common misconceptions has been that knowledge of the phonic system can be finessed with attention to sentence structure and meaning, and that new words should be deciphered by predicting them from pictures and context. 25

Textbooks for teachers must attain a much higher standard of accuracy, currency, depth, clarity, and relevance if teachers are to be well prepared to teach reading. University courses are our best opportunity to engender understanding of the “why” and “what” of effective teaching, setting the stage for the “how” of classroom practice.

Widely Used Programs Are Uninformative or Misleading

Inadequately prepared novice teachers often find themselves dependent on the information given in the teachers’ manuals that accompany virtually all commercially available reading programs to learn about spoken and written language concepts and to generate strategies for teaching students to read. Many of the most widely used classroom teaching manuals and materials in language arts omit systematic teaching about speech sounds, the spelling system, or how to read words by sounding them out. The most popular programs being used today are relatively strong on literature, illustrations, cross-disciplinary thematic units, and motivational strategies for children, but very weak or simply wrong when it comes to the structure of the English language and how children actually learn to read the words on the page. 26 Ideally, students should be asked to apply code-based skills during reading, spelling, and writing, and there should be sufficient time prescribed for instruction in all essential components.

At this writing, Mississippi and the District of Columbia were the only states/jurisdictions to make substantial progress in fourthgrade reading on NAEP since 2002. 27 However, many districts (for example, Upper Arlington, Ohio; Oakland, California; Rapides Parish, Louisiana; Brownsville, Texas) have committed to rigorous teacher training and support; as a consequence, they are seeing improvement in reading outcomes. In these initiatives and others, teachers’ knowledge and classroom practices are prioritized over mandated materials or programs that alone are not sufficient to produce change.

Courses and workshops in these states and districts that are improving avoid the old practice of offering teachers a smorgasbord of activities and encouraging teachers to pick what they like based on a personal philosophy. Specifically, teachers must understand how the brain learns to read, how students move through the phases of reading development, how strong readers differ from weak readers, how the English language is structured in spoken and written form, and the validated principles of effective reading instruction. Cultivating expertise in designing and delivering lessons to academically diverse learners, selecting validated instructional methods and materials, and using assessments to tailor instruction are all central goals for long-term, continuous improvement in teacher practice.