What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching About Reading–and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning

National Council on Teacher Quality:

In this groundbreaking report, NCTQ studied a large representative sampling of ed schools to find out what future elementary teachers are–and are not–learning about reading instruction. The report, the most comprehensive of its kind, determined that education schools are ignoring the principles of good reading instruction that would prepare prospective teachers how to better teach reading. View the Executive Summary or Full Report, or order multiple copies of the Executive Summary free of charge.

NCTQ website.

One thought on “What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching About Reading–and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning”

  1. First, I think the idea of a study like this is great. The roots of some problems in education are what is and isn’t being taught in Ed. schools.
    Second, I don’t think this is a very good study. The selection of courses to include is too wide. This could lead to the inclusion of some courses where teaching reading was not one of the elements. It also leads to the inclusion of many texts that where the evaluation criteria are irrelevant. As a result the percentage of texts that they found unacceptable is very, very high — but these aren’t reading texts, so of course they don’t function as reading texts. Looking at the syllabi, it appears that if one of their desired elements was not explicitly listed on a syllabus, then the researchers assumed it was not part of the course. Anyone who has been in a college classroom knows that this doesn’t make sense.
    Third, there is an obvious bias in what approaches to teaching reading were desired and this bias is reflects the political agenda of the funding source (the D & D Foundation). I do not believe that this bias also reflects current research.
    So, by design they found what they wanted to find. The title kind of gives this away: “What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching About Reading?” I think a more interesting and significant question would be “What Are Education Schools Teaching About Reading?”
    TJM

Comments are closed.