Are you a primary school teacher- or training to be a teacher? How much of your degree included learning how to teach reading?

[Parents-Aboard]

"The public assumes that colleges of education are preparing aspiring
teachers to teach kids how to read by requiring rigorous courses in
how to do so. One would think that the teaching of reading would be a
college of education’s Prime Directive. To test that assumption, the
Washington, D.C.–based National Council on Teacher Quality launched a
sweeping examination of reading courses and textbooks at the nation’s
colleges of education. The results are appalling"

Surprised? Interested in this article? Read on- and please do let me
know how much help you were given at University if you trained as a
teacher- or during Professional Development courses- or your views on
this article?

Emma
Read Australia™



March 23, 2009
Why Johnny Still Can't Read


In 1955, the bombshell book Why Johnny Can’t Read disturbed a few
nesting hornets. A half-century later, per-student education spending
in inflation-adjusted dollars has quadrupled, but Johnny (and today’s
Jareds and Jessicas) still can’t read.

According to a report from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, more than two-thirds of the nation’s fourth-graders are
reading below proficiency level. And they’re not outgrowing the
problem: The American College Testing Program reported that an
astonishing 49 percent of the 1.2 million students who took its
college admissions test in a recent year lack college-level reading
skills. Minorities and the poor fare worse: Only 21 percent of blacks,
33 percent of Hispanics, and 33 percent of students from families with
annual incomes below $30,000 have mastered the complex reading tasks
required for college success. Not counted, of course, are the 30
percent of high-schoolers who drop out and thus don’t take the test.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Too many parents have been
dot.conned into buying for their kids every piece of digital silliness
Silicon Valley dishes up. Kids who used to sometimes pass the hours
with a book—or being read to—now molder in front of computers, DVD
players, PlayStations, and X-boxes, when they’re not engaged in
narcissistic twittering. They wallow in iconography and visual imagery
and “text” impoverished messages in a way not unlike life in the Dark
Ages, before the printing press spread the gift of the unhurried but
enriching processes of sustained written language. Shoot, we can even
watch people play video games on television. What’s next? Watching
people play computer solitaire?

But the blame doesn’t stop there.

The public assumes that colleges of education are preparing aspiring
teachers to teach kids how to read by requiring rigorous courses in
how to do so. One would think that the teaching of reading would be a
college of education’s Prime Directive. To test that assumption, the
Washington, D.C.–based National Council on Teacher Quality launched a
sweeping examination of reading courses and textbooks at the nation’s
colleges of education. The results are appalling. What masquerades as
reading pedagogy is, with painfully few exceptions, a soggy confection
of political correctness, collectivist social indoctrination,
diversity training, and fluff courses that make basket weaving sound
like advanced biophysics. An overgeneralization? To a degree, and some
colleges of education actually do a bang-up job. But not enough.

Examples abound. One reading course syllabus says, “Knowledge is …
constructed by individual learners through social interaction …
learning occurs within a collaborative community.” Another says,
“Reading and writing are acquired through social collaborative
interactions and life experiences.” A popular reading textbook
advocates “classrooms that allow children to design their own route to
further knowledge about print; the role of the teacher is supportive
assistant.”

According to the professionals, then, reading teachers don’t really
have to teach reading. Like cheerleaders, they can lend sis-boom-ba
support while kids magically teach themselves to read through
“collaboration” and “social interaction” and “life experiences”—in
much the same way they teach each other to reproduce bodily noises
with their armpits.

Many of the courses are laughable in their lack of rigor. Here’s an
assignment worth 20 percent of the grade in a college course in
reading instruction: “After reading the book, design an original cover
for it. . . .Make a commercial that convinces others to buy and read
the book. Make a diorama of the book.” Here’s another: “Each person
will choose a book from the book choice list to discuss and share as
part of a small group.… As a group, plan a way to share what you
learned about literacy learning and teaching from that book. Some book
sharing ideas include poster/murals, puppet shows or plays, reader’s
theater, role play, traditional book review, diorama or other 3-D
method.”

These are teachers in training, captive to professors who in many
instances owe their sinecures to taxpayers. They’re going to be your
kids’ reading teachers, armed only with dioramas, posters, and puppet
shows—and perhaps the ability to strum “Yellow Submarine” on the
ukulele.

This grotesque abdication of responsibility has lifelong implications
for kids. While the colleges of education spout their cant, they deny
too many kids a shot at a meaningful higher education, higher earning
potential, and more satisfying life work.

Worse, they deny kids the ability to connect with the timeless wisdom
found in a novel by Faulkner or a poem by Frost, locking the next
generation in a twilight world where the written word becomes alien
and threatening rather than a source of liberation and enlightenment.

Posted by Michael J. O'Neal
Source- http://blog.leximo.org/2009/03/why-johnny-still-cant-read.html