Teacher Education

Jennifer Buckingham, recipient of the 2019 LDA Mona Tobias Award, reflects on the difficulties of bringing about the changes required to implement effective reading instruction for all children, based on the scientific evidence of what works.

Initial teacher education students, and the children they eventually go on to teach, are being short-changed. This report adds to the evidence supporting the need for urgent and dramatic improvement in initial teacher education by looking at the extent to which literacy units in undergraduate initial teacher education courses provide evidence-based information on how children learn to read; and the most effective ways to teach them.

an the science of reading contribute to improving educational practices, allowing more students to become skilled readers? Much has been learned about the behavioral and brain bases of reading, how students learn to read, and factors that contribute to low literacy. The potential to use research findings to improve literacy outcomes is substantial but remains largely unrealized. The lack of improvement in literacy levels, especially among students who face other challenges such as poverty, has led to new pressure to incorporate the science of reading in curricula, instructional practices, and teacher education. In the interest of promoting these efforts, the authors discuss three issues that could undermine them: the need for additional translational research linking reading science to classroom activities, the oversimplified way that the science is sometimes represented in the educational context, and the fact that theories of reading have become more complex and less intuitive as the field has progressed. Addressing these concerns may allow reading science to be used more effectively and achieve greater acceptance among educators.

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.