We spent three days on the components of balanced reading, the identification and production of speech sounds, the teaching of phoneme 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 U.S., it is a rare teacher who knows the difference between a speech sound and that of a 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. Out of the hundreds of teachers I have surveyed about their theoretical orientation towards reading, five to ten percent, at the most, are able to name any of the theorists or researchers who, in fact, have made the major contributions to our understanding of reading development, individual differences in reading proficiency, or the components of effective instruction. The question we must all keep in mind is which children need what type of teaching, at what point in their development, in what type of setting, with what type of teacher, and for how long in order to become 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, require and enforce accreditation for preparation programs, evaluate teachers based on performance as well as content knowledge, encourage partnerships between colleges and school districts, and build incentives for teachers to demonstrate expertise as they gain experience.