Educating Educators about Reading Development

A HGSE News Interview with Shattuck Professor Catherine Snow

Shattuck Professor Catherine Snow discusses her new book, Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading--edited with Peg Griffin of the University of California–San Diego, and M. Susan Burns of George Mason University--and the ideas behind it. It is one of two major reports resulting from the National Academy of Education's Committee on Teacher Education, the members of which aim to create core guidelines for teacher education programs at schools of education and beyond.

Q: How did you get involved with the National Academy of Education's Committee on Teacher Education, and how did this project come about?

A: The National Academy of Education received a grant from the Institute for Education Sciences to review literature and write a report about teacher education. John Bransford of the University of Washington and Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University chaired a committee which took on the task of writing guidelines for teacher education programs.

There was a much bigger research base in literacy development than in many of the topics covered. So they asked me to chair a subcommittee that would produce a report focusing on what teachers need to know about literacy. We ultimately constructed our task not as one of preparing teachers to teach reading, but as one of preparing teachers to support reading development across grades K–12. In other words, we asked, what do you need to know about reading to be a history teacher in high school, or to be a math teacher in middle school? Because each of those teaching challenges relies on literacy skills that students may or may not have, teachers need to be prepared to develop old and to teach new literacy skills in order to function in those domains.

Our ideas are presented in Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading.

Q: Were the committee's conclusions based on research within the classroom, personal experience, or something else?

A: They were based on all sorts of warrants, as we attempted to give a comprehensive perspective of what we thought teachers needed to know. For some of the claims we had direct empirical evidence about effectiveness; for some we had evidence about child development and what children need to know in order to read well; and for some we had theory and practice-based wisdom.

"The book is an argument for what needs to be studied, as well as an argument for what we think we know."

The book is an argument for what needs to be studied, as well as an argument for what we think we know. In fact, we argue that teachers and teacher educators need to continually implement a cycle of accumulating declarative knowledge based on research and evidence, enacting that knowledge, assessing the effectiveness of the enacted knowledge, and then reflecting about the adequacy of the declarative knowledge and the enactment in improving child learning.

For example, a teacher may go into a classroom and say, "I'm going to try this because research says it should work." But while it may work for eight kids, it doesn't work for six [other] kids. So what is different about those six kids? The teacher must assess and reflect on that question, and try something else. Similarly, that's what teacher educators ought to be doing in teacher education classrooms.

Q: Do you think it will be difficult for teachers to integrate your suggestions into the curricula in their classrooms?

A: Being a teacher is an ever-growing task, which is one of the reasons we argue that you shouldn't give the entire task to first-year graduates of teacher education programs. In fact, the entire task needs to be tackled by teams, using distributed cognition. But I don't see what we're recommending as "yet another thing for teachers to do." I see what we're recommending as a way of doing what they're trying to do better.

There is not much time for specifying the knowledge about language and literacy development in teacher education programs. There are other priorities. Nonetheless, I would stand by the claim that some of this knowledge is crucial for future teachers to get, partly to confront misunderstandings that they have. It's one thing to walk into a classroom not knowing everything you need to know. It's much worse to walk into a classroom "knowing" some things that are absolutely wrong. Countering those incorrect beliefs is a key challenge of teacher education programs.

The agenda we lay out is going to require shifting from a notion that teachers learn everything they need in a teacher education program and a one-year induction program to the notion that teacher learning is ongoing.

"Novice teachers or relatively inexperienced teachers can do a good job with the kids who are not problematic. But even perfectly competent teachers might need consultation with experts or collaborative support to brainstorm alternative approaches for problematic kids, or kids who need more adaptive knowledge."

Novice teachers or relatively inexperienced teachers can do a good job with the kids who are not problematic. But even perfectly competent teachers might need consultation with experts or collaborative support to brainstorm alternative approaches for problematic kids, or kids who need more adaptive knowledge. That's something you can't reasonably expect a first-year teacher to do, but you can expect of an experienced teacher. Let the first-year teacher do a good job with the 60 or 70 percent of the kids who are moving ahead as expected, and get some help for those other kids.

We really need to think about this in terms of how schools need to change. How does the organization of the teaching profession need to change to make it possible for teachers to take on tasks that are sized reasonably to their levels of expertise?

Q: Do you think that this framework lends itself well to a system that is heavily organized around standards and standardized testing? Does it have any implications for this kind of testing?

A: We argue in the book that a little bit of test preparation isn't a bad thing, as long as the explicit test preparation is around the formats for the test. And that seems perfectly fair to me. If kids haven't seen multiple choice tests, they should get a little practice with multiple choice tests and they should learn a few of the tricks. If they have not had much experience with writing short answers to open-ended questions, then they should get trained. In fact, you could argue that that's good general preparation.

Now what's clearly counterproductive for student learning is the kind of preparation that involves spending a couple hours of day going through all of the old MCAS questions, just in case one of those questions might recur. That's a waste of time. If teachers are being told they have to do that, this book will give them the tools to argue against that practice.

Q: Have you encountered any resistance among teachers or educators when presenting your suggestions?

A: I think people will say some of this book is a little utopian. We lay out a huge amount of stuff that we think teachers ought to be exposed to, and it will not be easy to put the full quota of declarative knowledge into teacher pre-service programs, nor to have the personnel to organize the ongoing professional development that we argue should come after teachers have spent six months or a year in the classroom.

"After you've moved from no teaching to some teaching, then there needs to be another kind of change. The only place to go then is to figure out how to do better teaching, more informed teaching, and more differentiated instruction."

The standardized test accountability system might actually be the mechanism that would lead school districts to think about this. As my colleague [Anrig Professor] Richard Elmore says, you can get a big bump in responses of students to the accountability system by moving from no teaching to some teaching. But after you've moved from no teaching to some teaching, then there needs to be another kind of change. The only place to go then is to figure out how to do better teaching, more informed teaching, and more differentiated instruction. I think that's what this book can really help with.

Q: When it comes to making these changes and ensuring that teachers have the ongoing training that they need, who should be responsible for ensuring that they are trained and paying for that ongoing collaboration and training?

A: School districts spend a huge amount of money on professional development. And much of it is less generative than it might be. So I don't think there's a financial constraint on providing good professional development, but there clearly would need to be some redistribution of effort.

I would like to see professional development that depended on recruiting the efforts of more experienced teachers within a school to work with less experienced teachers. Therefore, some of the compensation might actually go to the more experienced teachers, rather than to external bodies. But this business of paying folks from the local university to come in and do a workshop, I think, has really got to stop, because it has been demonstrated not to be effective.

Q: What, if anything, is HGSE doing to try to address these suggestions?

A: I would have to respond that the Teacher Education Program at HGSE could devote even more attention to content-area-specific literacy demands in the preparation of their teachers. On the other hand, a lot of that information about literacy is not probably very accessible to pre-service teachers. The pre-service teacher is really focused on task one: How do I maintain order? How do I select lesson material? How do I organize a lesson? How do I master my own area of expertise enough to make sure that I can analyze it for utility by the students?

You can tell a pre-service teacher, "If you go work in Boston teaching eighth grade history, there will be kids in your class who can't read the book." But that's hard to come to grips with that reality and the need to address it until you're actually confronted with such kids. At least we could tell pre-service teachers that when students can't read the book, their response should not be to read it for them. Instead, they have to figure out what it is about the book that the students can't read, and teach them to struggle with that, and comprehend, work, and wrestle with it. That's the level of preparation that you might be able to provide in a pre-service program.

Ultimately, though, the model for making this work would be to inject more of the knowledge about literacy we organize in the book into professional development we provide to the mentor teachers and the other teachers at the schools where our Teacher Ed students have their practica. That would be a first step in building the kind of ongoing learning for all teachers that is envisioned in the book.