Rx for struggling readers
HGSE Professor Catherine Snow

The presence of struggling readers in most U.S. classrooms leads to a simple proposition, states HGSE Shattuck Professor of Education Catherine Snow: teachers need to be teaching reading, not just in 1st – 3rd grade but throughout the grades, and not just in 'reading class' but in literature, science, math and history classes as well.

Snow, co-editor of the newest report from the National Academy of Education's Committee on Teacher Education, along with a panel of experts, propose a radical revision of thinking about teacher preparation. Recommendations involve distinctive expectations for teaching performance throughout a sequence of career stages. Snow argues that participation in a continuous learning cycle serves as the foundation for better preparation of teachers, and to improved performance by U.S. students. Read Snow's summary or view a series of video excerpts of a recent presentation featuring key recommendations from each chapter of this latest National Academy report, Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World.

Video Excerpts

View video excerpts of key findings from six chapters of the National Academy of Education's latest report, Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: Co-editor and Professor Catherine Snow presents at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, March 1, 2006.

Teacher professional development
<view video>  (requires RealPlayer) <view text>

School structures to improve reading performance
<view video>  (requires RealPlayer) <view text>

Recommendations

The National Academy of Education report outlines key recommendations¹ to guide reform efforts for teacher preparation as well as teacher professional development. Among these recommendations:

• Teacher preparation programs should view the development of literacy as important for all teachers to cultivate, including those teaching disciplines such as science, math and social studies. Teacher candidates best serve students if they have strong knowledge about reading and its development in addition to knowledge of their own content areas.
• Declarative knowledge about reading and its development must be made usable and concrete for beginning teachers in order to ease the transition into classroom teaching.
• Teachers need enhanced training in how to sustain students' motivation in reading. Teacher candidates should be prepared to work with children from different backgrounds and encouraged to hold high expectations for all students' achievement.
• Teacher programs should confront the harmful myths that may be held by beginning teachers concerning the reading potential for children, especially those with disabilities, who are second language learners, and who are members of socio/economic minority groups.
• Teachers should understand the basic principles underlying quality assessment, have familiarity with a wide range of assessment tools and practices, build knowledge on how to use assessment outcomes to inform instructional decision making, and increase their skills in communicating assessment results to students, parents, administrators, and other members of instructional teams.
• More collaboration is needed between novice teachers and more expert teachers as well as other consulting professionals within schools, thus creating teams that will serve students better than any individual teacher could.
• And finally, ongoing professional development should be designed based on the expectation that teacher expertise develops over time. Both preservice and professional development programs should adopt a "Learn – Enact – Assess – Reflect" framework, and schools/districts need to build in enhanced rewards as well as responsibilities for teachers as they progress from novice to expert.

¹Previously published online (2.15.06) by the National Academy of Education at http://www.naeducation.org/About_CTE_NSTR.html. Reprinted with permission.

Summary

HGSE Shattuck Professor of Education Catherine Snow Summarizes the Newest Report from the National Academy of Education: Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World

Every day in U.S. classrooms teachers are confronted by students who make errors like reading negotiated as negative (thus rendering the sentence in which it occurs meaningless), reading The secret life of Walter Mitty without understanding the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Mitty, or reading a chapter on photosynthesis in a biology text and, despite answering the end-of-chapter questions correctly, failing to grasp the basic principle that plants convert sunlight into sugar. Such students probably have no problems reading simple narrative texts, though some of their classmates might. But they certainly would be described as 'struggling readers.' They do not live up to our expectations for successful students in the middle and secondary grades – that they can decode multisyllabic words accurately and figure out something about their meaning, that they pay enough attention to what they are reading to know if they have understood or not, that they can make inferences about characters, plot, and theme in literary texts, and acquire new knowledge and understandings from expository texts.

The presence of struggling readers in most U.S. classrooms leads to a simple proposition: teachers need to be teaching reading, not just in 1st – 3rd grade but throughout the grades, and not just in 'reading class' but in literature, science, math and history classes as well. If teachers are to meet this challenge, then of course they must have access to knowledge about reading as it relates to their subjects, to knowledge about how students learn to read and where they are likely to fail, to procedures for assessing students and pinpointing their reading problems, and to familiarity with effective instructional techniques. This is knowledge that has not typically been part of preservice teacher education programs, especially those preparing middle and secondary school teachers, and that is insufficiently addressed in professional development. Yet it is crucial to raising the achievement of American students in math and science as well as in reading itself.

Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading argues that the knowledge teachers need to address problems like those sketched above is complex, sophisticated, and unlikely to be fully mastered in a preservice program. First, there is simply not enough time, as long as we are restricted to fitting teacher certification requirements into a few one-semester courses, to cover the many topics relevant to teaching reading successfully: knowledge about the structure of the English language, about the nature of alphabetic writing systems, about the structure of texts in different disciplines, about normal variation across students, about typical and atypical reading errors, about students' development of knowledge in different domains, and about the instructional strategies that are most likely to work. Second, what one needs to know to respond appropriately to the students struggling with negotiation, with Walter Mitty, or with photosynthesis goes far beyond the declarative knowledge that can be acquired in the preservice classroom; the crucial knowledge is active, situated, and accessible to enactment in the press of real lessons. Third, it is unreasonable to assume that a single teacher, no matter how well prepared or how experienced, will know enough to deal with the full array of student struggles and content area literacy challenges autonomously; professionalism dictates participation in collaborative efforts to devise responses to instructional challenges and to engage in ongoing learning and professional development.

Thus we argue that the knowledge teachers are expected to possess about the teaching of reading should, like many other aspects of teacher knowledge, be defined as both expanding and mutating over the teacher's career. The preservice teacher possesses mostly declarative knowledge, of the sort acquired through reading, listening to lectures, and observing practice. The novice teacher who has had the benefit of good practicum experiences has started to add some situated knowledge-for-use to the declarative knowledge; such a teacher is capable of enacting knowledge about literacy instruction, but typically only with the support of a well-designed curriculum, well-articulated procedures for classroom management, and helpful colleagues and mentors, and as long as the range of student demands is not too great. The novice teacher cannot reasonably be expected to respond to the most challenging students—those with learning difficulties, for example, or beginning English learners just arrived from another schooling system—autonomously. Only much more experienced teachers should be expected to have the level of adaptive knowledge to address the needs of such students. Unfortunately, all too often the classrooms where such students are present in the largest numbers are staffed by the most inexperienced teachers in the district.

Teachers whose knowledge stores have grown, both through continued study and through experience adapting that knowledge to the needs of a wide variety of learners, ultimately develop a level of reflective, analyzed knowledge that equips them to function as consulting or mentor teachers, or as leaders of school-based professional development. If such roles for excellent and reflective teachers were defined (and appropriately remunerated), then the accumulated knowledge of such teachers would be systematically recycled to the benefit of the novices who most need their guidance.

We propose, then, a radical revision of thinking about teacher preparation. Currently, finishing a certification program triggers an expectation of competence to deal with any instructional challenge. We advocate a system of progressive differentiation: teachers' ongoing participation in opportunities for learning is expected, and is acknowledged by the possibility of progressing through a sequence of career stages, from novice to experienced to master teacher, with distinctive expectations for performance at each stage.

Teacher learning at each of these stages mixes declarative with enactive knowledge. It should be characterized by an ever widening cycle we characterize as Learn – Enact – Assess – Reflect. Declarative knowledge acquired from books or lectures gets enacted in real classroom contexts, its effectiveness is systematically assessed, and the data reflected upon to generate new learning, and launch the next Learn – Enact – Assess – Reflect cycle.

And if this cycle characterizes teacher learning, it is even more applicable to the learning that should be going on in the institutions responsible for teacher learning – teacher education programs and districts implementing professional development programs. Those institutions should start with what we know about adult learning as a basis for designing their programs, but then assess the effectiveness with which that knowledge is enacted in teacher preparation classrooms and professional development sessions, and reflect upon ways to do it better. Institutional participation in the Learn – Enact – Assess – Reflect cycle is a prerequisite to the better preparation of teachers, and thus to improved performance by U.S. students in literacy and in all the subjects they are expected to learn through literacy.

By Susan Henry, doctoral student in Learning and Teaching at HGSE.