Literacy Lessons on Location

Abstract

MY FIRST day of teaching was a memorable one. I was standing at the door of my new classroom greeting nervous parents and their excited children, trying not to let them see that I was a novice and more anxious than they were at the prospect of introducing their little ones to the world of kindergarten. I encouraged the children to come inside and find a game or puzzle to play with while we waited for everyone to arrive. One child slowly walked to the front of the classroom, plopped herself down on the wooden teacher's chair, crossed her legs, and called out to me from across the room, Hey, teacher, when are you going to teach me to read? This was the expectation of a 5-year-old on her first day of school 28 years ago. At the time, little did I know that my professional life would keep taking me to places where literacy learning would be at the center of my work. Today I teach future teachers in a university program. My days as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and principal contributed to my present desire to make a difference in the lives of children by training teachers. With the current pressures on teachers to increase academic achievement for all students, high-quality teacher training is more important than ever. Elementary teachers are faced with high expectations for their students to achieve literacy proficiency, and these expectations became law with the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress toward proficiency goals are subject to corrective action and restructuring measures aimed at getting them back on course. With or without that legislation, I am committed to preparing teacher candidates to respond expertly to the challenge of helping children become proficient readers and writers to ensure their success in society. As I observe credentialed teachers in their classroom work, I am struck by the pressure to follow one-size-fits-all programs. Teachers must use the reading program the school has adopted, and they have little freedom either to expand on or to skip lessons as they see fit. They are required to be so tied to the text that they hardly look up to notice the possible confusion or boredom in children's eyes. When literacy instruction must be delivered to a whole class at once, there is little time for small-group or one-on-one instruction. I fear that my students will be placed in schools that follow the language arts pacing calendar to such an extreme that every classroom is on the same page, at the same time, on the same day. I fear that they will not have the freedom or courage to enrich the lesson, skip the lesson, or repeat the lesson, if that is what their students need. I fear that my carefully planned university classes will be in vain because these future teachers will soon learn that teaching is not about thinking, reflecting, observing, and making expert decisions about the best teaching intervention for a particular child. Still, I want my students to know that all reading programs adopted by schools have deficiencies and that it is impossible for any one program to meet the needs of every child. As I instruct future teachers, my challenge is to help them acquire the knowledge necessary to identify the gaps in these programs and the skills they will need to address them. My determination to give my students the best preparation possible, coupled with my growing concern about how some schools deliver literacy instruction, led me to approach the principal at a neighboring elementary school with an idea. He supported my request to hold our weekly literacy methods class on the school campus. In return, we would provide his school with an after-school Literacy Club for challenged readers and writers. Every week since we entered into this agreement, I have taught a lesson in a primary or an intermediate classroom for our new teacher candidates to observe, and the university students have taught small groups of students in Literacy Club for the last 45 minutes of our class sessions. …