CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING AND TEACHING
2.5 R EADING T EACHERS
2.5.4 Teaching reading teachers
There is a deafening silence in the South African literature regarding the initial preparation or continuing development of reading teachers, particularly teachers in the Foundation Phase.
This may well have to do with the status of early years teachers, and with the fact that until fairly recently they were not trained in Institutions of Higher Learning in which there is an emphasis on research and knowledge production. However, there have been several surveys of the preparation of teachers to teach reading in the US and the UK. Scrivens (1998) details three UK reports which noted that in England most Higher Education Institutions gave very little time to the preparation of teachers to teach reading , that there was a lack of connection between theory and practice in reading teacher education and that only 10% of reading teachers were satisfied with their initial training.
Hartse, Leyland, Schmidt, Vasquez and Ociepka (2004) set out to explore their observation that no matter how innovative a teacher training programme, many teachers ―adopt practices that reflect those of mainstream practitioners, rather than those advocated by their teacher education courses.‖ This is an issue of great concern for teacher educators in South Africa as well, where classroom practice is invariably of the teacher-talk and rote and drill type, in spite of in-service and pre-service training to the contrary. Hartse et al. explain this observation in this way:
Most prospective teachers are not enrolled in a teacher education programme at all, but rather a hodgepodge of coursework from a hodgepodge of professors having a hodgepodge of theoretical orientations and are placed for practicum purposes in a hodgepodge of settings. The only clear bet is that what student teachers believe and what their supervising teachers believe about teaching and learning will differ. (Hartse et al., 2004, no pagination)
They go on to argue that it is crucial that teachers should learn to operate consistently out of a theory of reading. Their research showed that teachers who can theoretically justify their practice are more likely to accomplish change, while teachers who do not fully understand the relationship between theory and practice are more likely to ―get sucked into doing school as it has always been done‖. This is important for South Africans considering the legacy of Bantu Education. Their solution to this problem is for teacher educators themselves to be explicit about their own beliefs about teaching and learning, and for students to have the opportunity to observe these theories in action in the classroom.
Hoffman and Pearson (2000) distinguish between training and teaching of reading teachers.
Training is about the direct actions of a teacher to enhance automatic behaviour (i.e. skills) whereas teaching is about intentional action of a teacher to ―promote personal control over and responsibility for learning‖ (2000, p. 32). They argue that:
Your granddaughter‘s teacher will teach in a classroom quite different from the one she or he attended. There are few assumptions about that classroom of the future that we can use to extract a training mode. We subscribe to van Manan‘s standard that ‗to be fit for teaching is to be able to handle change.‘ (Hoffman & Pearson, 2000, p. 42)
They admit that training models are attractive because they show results, are cheap and efficient, supply teachers faster, can be easily communicated to the public and result in conformity of practice, but argue that:
[Training] will not help teachers develop the personal and professional commitment to lifelong learning required by those who want to confront the complexities and contradictions of teaching. (Hoffman & Pearson, 2000, p. 37)
They conclude that training should be situated within a broader vision of teaching and teacher learning.
Similarly the International Reading Association (IRA)‘s Commission on Reading Teacher Education argued that ―competency-based‖ programmes and programmes that deliver a lot of content in lectures ―do not promote engagement in any deep sense of learning or preparing students to use, adapt and transform professional knowledge‖ (International Reading Association, 2003, p. 4). The IRA Commission argued that student teachers should be placed for field experience with effective role models who share the philosophy of the teacher training programme. This investigation into 1150 teacher preparation programs in the USA found ―tremendous variation‖ in the content, timing, and experiences provided in teacher
education programs relating to reading. The IRA investigation singled out the following 8 critical features of excellence in reading teacher programmes (International Reading Association, 2003):
Content: a comprehensive curriculum is needed for teachers to develop a comprehensive knowledge base and be able to make effective decisions in the classroom.
Apprenticeship: a variety of course-related field experiences should be provided and student teachers should have the opportunity to interact with excellent mentors and models.
Vision: teacher educators should construct their programmes around a vision of quality literacy and teacher education.
Resources and mission: the teacher education programme needs to have sufficient intellectual, financial and professional resources to support quality teacher education.
Personalised: teacher educators must be responsive to diversity.
Autonomy: teacher educators need to adapt and negotiate with institutions so that students receive the most effective training.
Community effectivity: teacher educators work to create an active learning community.
Assessment: teacher educators continually assess themselves as well as their students to guide their practice.
The IRA‘s Commission on Reading Teacher Education‘s major criticism of reading teacher education relates to lack of comprehensive content. The IRA suggests that at a minimum the reading teacher programme should cover:
Early literacy, including oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, word identification;
Vocabulary, fluency and comprehension;
Assessing all aspects of literacy learning;
Organising and managing literacy instruction across the grades.
However, the IRA argues that knowledge of this content is not sufficient:
[Effective reading teacher programmes] adopt a pedagogy that encourages students in learning how to transform knowledge into action – i.e. students must be able to manipulate and make decisions about knowledge to fit the needs of particular students or situation. (International Reading Association, 2003, p. 2)
The report suggests that this is possible in programmes that organise knowledge into broad principles that students revisit repeatedly, have assessment driven instruction, offer explicit instruction and provide models of practice.
The IRA commission argued that student teachers should be presented with a coherent understanding of literacy which they can take into the workplace, and that undergraduates should not be left to make sense of competing visions of literacy. At the former University of Natal, the Language in Literacy Teaching (LILT) course offered to student teachers in the 1990s corroborated this recommendation. In this course, learners were presented with written accounts of two views of reading, a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. Academic staff who taught the course recounted that when asked to present their view of the reading process, virtually every student recounted the bottom-up approach, despite the fact that the course materials were clearly in favour of the other approach (Personal communication with Carol Thomson, 2005).
In 2008 a critical analysis of research on reading teacher education in the USA, based on 82 empirical investigations, was published (Risko et al., 2008). This study identified that changes in beliefs and pedagogical knowledge are possible for teachers; that teacher education programmes have greatest impact when theory and practice are linked, including through guided practice of teaching strategies in practicum settings; and that demonstration (modelling) of practices is key. The study supported explicit teaching of teachers, including explicit explanation, use of examples, modelling, practice within the university classroom and practice in field settings, though it cautioned that teacher educators should be assessing on an ongoing basis whether this kind of explicit instruction is leading, as it should, to construction of knowledge for problem-solving, as opposed to merely technical knowledge (2008, p. 277).
The Risko study also highlighted the positive effects of getting trainee teachers to examine their own personal use of reading strategies, their own literacy development and their own beliefs about teaching reading (2008, p. 277) as well as the positive effect of collaborative learning in teacher training programmes.