Don’t Teachers Know How to Teach Reading?
To hear parents and the media talk, teachers don’t know how to teach reading. In Alabama, Education Week is bragging about a $48 million literacy program. It teaches teachers how to teach reading.
Why? I find it a strange phenomenon. Reading instruction and identifying reading problems used to be a large part of learning how to be an elementary school teacher.
While it is good of Alabama to train their teachers how to teach reading, if they need to, it doesn’t speak well for the teaching profession, and it raises many questions. Alabama’s program is for disadvantaged children, but why aren’t teachers prepared to teach in their college education programs? The message that teachers don’t know how to teach reading is prevalent, across the board and directed at public schools.
What has happened in the last 30 years? Why don’t teachers seem to know how to teach reading anymore?
Teachers have always picked commercialized programs to teach reading, but it used to be more a professional decision on the part of the teacher. They were given credit for understanding what made a good reading program and they didn’t have to go through massive instruction to learn how to teach the program. A workshop or two, if anything, was good enough.
I like to use the example of when I was learning to be a teacher in the 70s. I student taught, in part, in a third grade class in an elementary school near Detroit. The school served many students whose parents worked in the auto plants. It was not a wealthy public school, but it was a good school. It was especially well-run when it came to reading instruction.
There were three third grade teachers who would meet regularly to discuss the reading progress of their students. They combined their classes and placed students into small groups according to skills the students needed.
There was no Response to Intervention or massive testing to seek out problems. Teachers just figured out where the students were by looking at their work and reading Don’t Teachers Know How to Teach Reading?: