This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
Topic of today's podcast is how to prepare expert teachers of reading.
Now, we want master teachers.
Knowledge is important in becoming a master in any field.
What separates novices from expert is knowledge.
Teachers have more of it, novices have less of it.
And expert teachers have four kinds of knowledge.
They have content knowledge.
That's knowledge of what they're teaching.
If you're a math teacher, this would be math.
A science teacher, this would be science.
If you're an elementary education teacher, you have to have knowledge of a lot of stuff.
For example, when I was a second grade teacher back in the day, I took a geology class.
This gave me a deeper understanding of geology.
And I needed this to create some basic geology units in my second grade classroom, content
area knowledge.
The second one is you need pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of basic teaching strategies that
can be used in any curricular area, like discovery learning or question asking, discussions,
inquiry learning, cooperative learning.
The third is pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of teaching strategies in a specific
area.
In reading, this would be reading strategies.
In writing, this would be writing strategies or science strategies.
And the fourth area, knowledge of learners and learning.
You know how humans learn and develop.
This is the end psych stuff, the basics of all things.
Now to move from novice to expert is a rather simple thing.
Simply increase knowledge in all four areas.
It's not that complicated people.
We want expert teachers teaching our students.
This to our society's great advantage to have the best most masterful expert teachers teaching
our children.
They're preparing the next generation of human beings and trying to get by in the cheap as
we seem want to do only damages our society.
And by the way, there's this talk of a teacher shortage.
And that's not quite right.
As a matter of fact, it's poppycock.
Yes, there is a shortage, but it's not a teacher shortage.
It's a willingness to put up with bad teaching wages shortage or willingness to put up with
poor working conditions shortage.
That's not a teacher shortage.
There's plenty of teachers.
It's just that many have said to hell with you.
I'm not taking it anymore.
I can do better.
I'm going to retire.
Now how do you get all the high quality teachers we need?
You pay them a professional wage, give them professional working conditions, provide legitimate
professional development opportunities and for God's sakes, but out.
Stop foisting all these useless mandates on them that only serve to drive good teachers
out of the classroom.
So how do we create expert teachers?
We want expert teachers in our classrooms.
And as I said, to develop expert teachers, we need professional, legitimate professional
development that enables teachers to develop their knowledge in the four areas we described
at the beginning.
And master teachers are continually, continually learning.
This is because the field of education doesn't stand still.
It's continually evolving as we learn new things.
To think that you've learned it all, you don't need to learn anymore to stand still is to
regress or to devolve.
And the best professional development still comes from legitimate graduate programs in
education accredited graduate programs are still your best bet.
We are not influenced by profit motives.
A real graduate program, an accredited graduate program, I would choose programs that are
aligned with the international literacy association standards as well as accredited.
And not one of these for-profit clowns at Pearson Publishing or these other places.
Good marketing is different from good education.
To develop expert teachers, again, we need high quality, legitimate teacher professional
development and not the clown shows put on by these for-profit entities.
And yes, I'm talking about you letters.
Sadly, because of the tax cuts given to the wealthy, higher education, including graduate
education is becoming more expensive and becoming out of the reach of some.
But what about college?
You ask, don't we create expert teachers at the undergraduate level?
No.
What?
Aren't graduates expert teachers?
What are we paying you for if you're not doing your job?
Well, the state of Minnesota pays me to develop my expertise in literacy instruction and teacher
education.
That's what they pay me for to become an expert.
And I use this expertise to prepare our teachers to teach reading and other things.
So if you're not an expert, why aren't we graduating expert teachers if you're an expert?
Why aren't our new teachers experts?
Well, it's not possible.
Newly graduated teachers of any teacher preparation programs are not expert teachers.
That's not possible.
See that proves it.
You professors aren't doing your job.
I knew it.
We need more laws and regulations.
We need to hire expensive for-profit programs to come in.
We need more tests and more standards.
We need to get the business community involved.
And we need a new mandate.
That's the ticket.
A mandate that every graduate of every teacher preparation program is to be an expert teacher
and an expert teacher of reading.
That's the new rule.
Now hang on there, Polypanguon.
There is not a program in the world that can create a finished teaching product in three
semesters, plus student teaching, much less an expert teacher.
It'd be very tough to do this in three years, much less three semesters.
To think otherwise shows how very little you know about teaching, human learning, and teacher
preparation program.
At teacher preparation programs such as ours at Minnesota State University, we're like
most teacher preparation programs.
We prepare teachers to begin the journey and we do a vine job of it all and all, but we
don't prepare finished teaching products and we certainly don't create expert teachers.
Being and becoming an expert teacher takes time.
It's more than just learning a bunch of tricks.
Learning is not like programming a computer.
It's knowing how and when to use these strategies and why you use them as well as knowing a
bunch of strategies.
You need to know about learners and learning and all the other stuff that makes teaching
a very demanding job and you must develop knowledge in the four areas.
Content knowledge, pedagogical strategies, content area strategies, and knowledge of
learners and learning.
You don't learn this adequately in three semesters.
The Congressional Research Services says there are about 18,000 state approved teacher
preparation programs at institutions of higher education in the United States.
That seems like a large figure, but that's what I got.
Our elementary education program at Minnesota State University is much like these others.
We usually get students at the start of their junior year.
They are, for the most part, 19 and 20 year old students whose only experience with teaching
is their own experience as students.
They have limited life experience and very limited experience as teachers when they graduate.
Now, here's where that fourth area, knowledge area comes in, knowledge of learners and learning.
This is where it comes into play.
Knowing how learners learn and how learners best learn is an important part in preparing
teachers.
Knowledge of learners and learning means that you understand how undergraduates learn, where
they're at developmentally and experientially, and how they best learn and what they can
learn.
Now, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to simply assign a whole bunch
of things for them to read, to include more lectures that I just described stuff, to dump
a bunch of information and strategies over their heads, to give them lots of assignments
that really challenge them to do more tests and assignments to hold them accountable.
This would be the easiest thing to do, but it wouldn't prepare our students.
That wouldn't mean more learning takes place.
As a matter of fact, too much would get in the way.
It's not the best way to get teachers ready to meet the real world demands of real students
in a real classroom.
Now, in our program here at Minnesota State University, much like every program, I encounter
students in block one of a three block program or a three semester program.
They get my literacy course for 15 weeks.
That's it 15 weeks.
That's all I've got.
This course is taken in the context of three other courses at the beginning of their program.
So they're taking my course and three other courses during their first semester.
They're taking four, four credit courses for a total of 16 credit hours.
Now, let's do the math.
The rule of thumb is that you should spend three hours studying outside of class for
every hour in class.
So 16 credit hours of class would mean 48 hours of studying a week.
Add this to the 16 hours they spend in class.
That's 64 hours.
This is on top of the jobs that most students have to have because those tax cuts given
to the wealthy have resulted in cuts to higher education and tuition goes up.
As well, most 19 and 20 year olds are doing the social and emotional things that 19 and
20 year old people do as well as just trying to figure out who they are and having a bit
of fun along the way.
Oh yes, you have to schedule teeth brushing there along the way.
And if you're working just 20 hours a week, well, that's 88 hours a week.
Well, what about if you only study two hours outside of class for every hour in class?
That would still be 32 hours of studying each week plus 16 hours of class for 48 hours.
And that's still a busy, busy schedule.
It's reasonable to assume that most students would spend two hours each week studying and
doing their assignments for a course.
That's reasonable, but you get the picture.
Now pre-service teachers usually take two literacy methods courses of some kind in a
program, but on top of this, they're taking a whole bunch of other courses all required
by our accreditation boards.
And these courses are related to science and social studies, health, math, educational.
You get the idea.
It's a whole bunch of stuff.
We've got tons and tons of standards that we have to address.
So what about expert reading teachers?
Successful reading instruction and intervention are dependent on having teachers who are experts
in reading instruction.
So how do we create expert reading teachers?
I'll give you a hint.
It's that through letters training or Orton Gillingham training or any of these other
for-profit boondoggles.
Expert reading teachers have knowledge and a broad understanding in six areas.
First, human learning, how humans learn.
We've already addressed that.
The second, you know the processes used by the brain to create meaning with print, the
reading process, the writing process.
The third, literacy, teaching and learning, how to best teach reading and writing.
The fourth, literary literacy research.
You know how to read research and you're familiar with a wide body of research in reading, writing
and education.
The fifth, literacy assessment and diagnosis, far more than just giving a standardized test.
You understand and know how to use miscue analysis, running records, qualitative reading
inventories, authentic assessment strategies.
And the sixth, literacy pedagogy.
This is content area pedagogy.
You have a toolbox full of research based strategies for teaching, reading and writing.
This is different from how to follow directions in a teacher's manual toolbox or how to implement
a one size fits all program.
Now, what are the answers?
Perhaps we should hire Emily Hanford to design our graduate programs.
Maybe we should hire her to design our reading intervention programs.
I'm sure she's had lots of experience and immersed herself in peer reviewed academic
research tongue in cheek.
It's impossible to become experts in these six areas of becoming a literacy expert in
three semesters or even three years.
The knowledge and skills related to these six areas are best learned in the context
of an actual classroom while you are a teacher.
And again, this means continued legitimate professional development of practicing teachers.
And it takes five to 10 years to fully develop the expertise necessary to become expert reading
teachers.
Now, there's a Facebook group called Science of Reading, What I Should Have Learned in
College and I sigh, What I Should Have Learned in College.
The implication here is that teacher preparation programs are not teaching the right things
or enough things.
But how do you know what is and isn't being taught in teacher preparation programs?
What are the right things and how do you know these are the right things?
Did Emily Hanford tell you?
Are you basing your premise on I think isms, anecdotal evidence, and random data, which
is often the case with Science of Reading advocates?
Or do you use a wealth of peer reviewed research published in peer reviewed academic journals
to come to conclusions?
Not I think isms, but research.
What I should have learned in college.
And I just say, Poff, please pull your heads out of your collective asses.
Stop seeking experts tease from non expert clowns like Emily Hanford.
Stop seeking input for those who have a profit motive like Louisa Motez.
Your best avenue for legitimate professional development is accredited graduate programs.
Or if you want to do it yourself, immerse yourself in peer reviewed research published
in academic journals.
This has been the reading instruction show.
I've been talking about how to prepare expert teachers and I am your host, as always, Dr.
Andy Johnson.