Being Accountable to Children's Needs

I just finished grading exams and papers. For my reading methods course, I ask my Boston College students to write about how they will teach reading when they have their own classrooms. I’m particularly interested in they’re being able to provide a rationale for how they will teach reading. Certainly, I hope that they will be able to cite a research base that supports their decision-making, but I expect more than that. I also want my students to be able to talk about theories of reading (how people read and how they learn to read) that inform their reading program. Do they believe that reading is the fluent, linear processing of visual information (a cognitive-psychological view)? If so, how does their instruction – and the research base they cite to support their reading program – comport with this model of reading? If they view reading as a range of sociocultural processes that vary according to the text, the reader’s purpose, the cultural context, and so on, how does this affect their instructional decision-making and the research they draw on to support their work? Is their reading program theoretically coherent or does it include (theoretically) contradictory practices that send confusing signals to developing readers? To my chagrin, my students sometimes argue that their teaching will draw on both cognitive-psychological and sociocultural views of reading.

In any case, I think it is a reasonable expectation that all teachers of reading be able to provide a clear rationale for their instructional decisions. What they do as teachers of reading should make sense (that is, it should have some theoretical support), have a research base, and, perhaps most importantly, be based on the assessed needs of individual children. This is something else I tell my students (over and over and over again): what they teach must address the individual needs of their students. They should not teach what students already know nor should they teach what students are not ready to learn. Put differently, teachers should be held accountable for showing that their reading instruction supports INDIVIDUAL students’ developing reading abilities within a theoretical coherent framework. Regrettably, narrow standards and high stakes testing often leads to whole class approaches to reading that do not consider the needs and abilities of individual children.