How Can We Better Prepare First-Year Teachers to Teach Reading?
Think back to the first day of your teaching career. You came prepared with textbooks, materials, and lesson plans. But did you come fully prepared to teach reading?
Some teachers believe that you can’t be fully prepared to teach until you start teaching—that hands-on experience is the only way to really learn how to effectively present reading instruction.
If that were true, if the only way to gain the confidence required to teach reading effectively was through hands-on experience, think of all the students we would fail on our way to becoming proficient teachers.
Research shows that 70% of students will learn to read regardless of how they are taught. But that 30% require explicit, systematic phonics-based instruction to become successful readers. If a teacher needs five years of instruction under her belt before being able to teach effectively, and she has had 30 students per class, then she will have taught 150 students before hitting her prime. Of those 150 students, 30% will have failed to receive the instruction they need. This means that 45 students over the course of five years will struggle with reading as a result of the teacher’s lack of instructional skills. We cannot stand idly by and accept that hands-on experience is the only way to become an effective teacher.
In a perfect world, teachers would be fully prepared to teach reading before ever setting foot in a classroom. Unfortunately, there is a deficit between how prepared we are as first-year teachers and how prepared we’d like to be. In order to resolve the deficit, we need to prepare teachers at the university level so they can teach effectively from day one.
This is why we want to inform you about the RISE online reading workshop. RISE is a non-profit literacy organization that offers this free training to every pre-service teacher. So far, over 50 universities have used this resource to help prepare pre-service teachers to understand how to teach explicit phonics instruction in the classroom.
Request Free Access to the Workshop:
Even if you’re not a pre-service teacher or a first-year teacher, it’s never too late to brush up on your reading instruction.
Related Articles:
Misconceptions about Phonics Instruction: College Fully Prepares Teachers to Teach Reading ›
Preparing Pre-Service Teachers to Teach Beginning and Struggling Readers [WEBINAR] ›
20 Tips for