We spent three days on the components of balanced reading, the identification and production of speech sounds, the teaching of phonemic awareness, and how children learn to read and spell. Another teacher reported with dismay that she was just finishing a masters degree in reading at a local university and none of the essential information communicated in our session had been taught to her. They also reward professional growth and excellence. Reading education in America, indeed all of education, can learn something from other professions and from our counterparts in Europe and Asia. In Poland, for example, teachers must take five years of linguistics, child development, educational psychology, and pedagogy before they sit for the first round of licensing exams.
Scholarship is combined with supervised teaching practice.
In the states, it is a rare teacher who knows the difference between a speech sound and letter, or who can frame instructional choices according to a credible theory of reading development and reading difficulty. Those who are loyal to methods tend to be ideological and rigid. When teachers are wedded to philosophies, programs, or methodologies such as Whole Language or Reading Recovery, they are less open to the findings of objective studies that could improve their practice, less interested in questioning the assumptions of their favored methods, and less effective at problem solving when the approach they use is unsuccessful with a given learner. The question we must all keep in mind is which children need what type of teaching, at what point in development, in which type of setting, with what type of teacher, and for how long, in order to be literate adults who love to read and write. To establish a profession of teaching reading, we must delineate what all teachers of reading should know and be able to do.