Lessons for Leaders on the Preparation of Literacy Educators

Abstract

In this commentary, drawing from reviews of research on literacy teacher preparation, the authors discuss points of leverage in preparation of literacy educators for deans and associate deans. Categories that leaders might attend to include: mediated field experiences, faculty development, and external reputation.

We have read the articles in this issue a number of times and from varied perspectives, and one inescapably prominent lens in our minds is the one we get from our jobs as college-level administrators leading teacher education programs. Randy Bomer is a dean of a college of education, and Beth Maloch is an associate dean of teacher education at a different college. For most of our careers, each of us has been closer up to the action of preparing teachers. We have been observers and supervisors in classrooms as preservice teachers teach, instructors in university classrooms, and coordinators for cohorts of preservice teachers as they move through their professional development sequence. In all of these spaces, adjusting our practice to support novice teachers to be their best was more direct than doing so is now. In our current positions, we have a different and potentially more powerful influence on the work of preparing teachers, while at the same time we are much more removed from action. Simultaneously, the demands on our time, energy, and attention have grown exponentially.

Moreover, we are even more aware of the institutional constraints and regulatory pressures at work in teacher preparation programs and realize the difficulty of any one person having much of an impact on social endeavors so widely distributed across time, space, communities, and individuals. This wide distribution of teacher education across actors in a social system complicates any one individual’s purposeful efforts to bend the system toward deliberate ends. Within the university setting, our programs and curriculum are organized and structured in 3-hr courses, with students mostly arranged in cohorts, within degree plans and pressures to graduate within 4 years, and timed according to traditional academic semesters. All of these complexities exist within a political context in which the authorities of institutions are in question and teaching is undervalued. For-profit organizations have moved in to the teacher preparation space, particularly in Texas (where alternative certification programs prepare more than 50% of the teachers). These programs vary widely in quality. State requirements and regulations are intensifying in an effort to rein in and regulate these alternative certification programs, which has meant increasing curricular requirements and record keeping, alongside a state restriction on the number of course hours that can occur within a college of education.

In this confounding context, reading these complex reviews in this issue, we have wondered, in a universe in which leaders can only attend to a limited number of things, what should those things be? Where and how do we insert ourselves into the scene of practice? The reviews included in this issue inspire reform in literacy teacher preparation. In this essay, we identify from the findings possible points of pressure for administrators to consider in making changes within their literacy teacher preparation programs. To be clear, many things are important, but here we try to identify the fewest things to keep in mind that might make a difference. We identify three spaces for consideration as an administrator works to develop a practice-based teacher preparation program: (a) high quality and diverse field experiences, mediated by knowledgeable field supervisors and faculty; (b) faculty growth and development; and (c) the relationship of teacher education to external audiences/constituencies.

Mediated Field Experiences

First, we revisit a finding that is evidenced in reviews of teacher preparation more broadly, not just in literacy—that it is important for preservice teachers to have opportunities for field experiences in high-quality placements with responsive and substantive facilitation by a more experienced other. In literacy teacher preparation, it is not just about field placements with opportunities for observation and teaching. It is also about the opportunity to engage in face-to-face interactions with children or adolescents as a part of their learning about literacy methods and approaches—what often manifests as tutoring in elementary classrooms. Hoffman et al. outline the research on these opportunities for in-class field opportunities and recommend we consider these opportunities as “mentoring” rather than “tutoring,” in an effort to move away from positioning these engagements with deficit framings.

Literacy teaching is not (just) about building up a set of pedagogical skills or accruing certain knowledge about the reading and writing process; instead, it is about engaging in a social practice. That means engaging with children over time and with appreciation for the literacies they bring with them from home and community. But to create more equity in the ways children are regarded in schools, we need to do more than merely provide opportunities for practice; these practices should be supported, mediated, and interrupted by knowledgeable and experienced others. In real classrooms, the idealized readings and theories about literacy come face-to-face with real children and teachers with real institutional constraints and pressures. Our preservice teachers encounter children who are racially, socioeconomically, and culturally different from themselves, and in these encounters, there are often stumbles and confusion. For a novice teacher, it can be all too easy to march forward with literacy instruction that misses the strengths and assets that children bring. Expert and knowledgeable facilitation by a faculty member or graduate student can mediate these experiences and provide the preservice teacher support and challenge. This finding comes out across the literature reviews included in this. If we are to mediate and develop preservice teachers’ notions about children in ways that orient them toward socioculturally rich understandings of children and schools, opportunities to engage in practice with the support of knowledgeable others are vital.

As administrators, we work to ensure that our teacher preparation programs include many and varied opportunities for field experiences. We also work to prepare faculty and graduate students who can take up the role of field supervisor to mediate and interrupt a preservice teacher’s meaning-making in response to an urban field placement. In our large programs that also include master’s and doctoral programs, this role is often taken up by graduate students whom we call facilitators. What that means, practically, is that we push on specific spots: (a) having the right number of facilitators to manage up-close support and work with preservice teachers and (b) preparing those facilitators with the knowledge and skills to engage in that work.

Faculty Development

It seems clear to us that faculty development is one of those places administrators can provide support that might make a positive difference. Faculty development can be about developing content knowledge and coverage, but it also should be about other kinds of knowledge—sociocultural knowledge, knowledge about oppressive conditions of schooling for many students and the ways teachers might be educated to resist or disrupt these conditions, and knowledge about the world and society and how new teachers learn within these contexts.

Faculty need substantive opportunities to learn and grow in their knowledge and practice—toward a more professionalized and richer understanding of all the different aspects and knowledge that play into preservice teacher learning. We see tensions around structuring professional development in ways that are inviting and rewarding to faculty, including those faculty (such as clinical or adjunct faculty) who may move in and out of our teacher preparation programs at times. Professional development is especially tricky for large programs; trying to get everyone pulling in one direction and in ways that advance their own learning is complicated. We have started to think about this in terms of concentric circles of engagement. Our ideas of professional learning and engagement should extend to all members of the community, those in the outer circles and those closest up to practice, but not all of those people will be involved in setting priorities or strategies for learning. It is also important that the administrator is not the only person establishing the vision and priorities. An intermediary faculty-driven group, working in consultation with the administrator(s), can help establish these priorities, better understand the issues and questions of the faculty, set goals, and determine strategies and structures to carry out curriculum change across the program system.

External Reputation

As we write this, we find ourselves in a moment that seems to be cyclical—facing another round of criticism from individuals outside teacher education for the way new teachers are prepared to teach reading. The content of these critiques has been familiar for decades: that universities fail to instruct new teachers in the true science of reading, which focuses mostly on the relationships of phonemes to graphemes. In a case that arose while we were writing this article, American Public Media released a report and podcast by a reporter whose opinions were shaped and then hardened through conversations with a very small group of scholars. Titled Hard Words: Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught to Read?, it included well-worn tropes of scientific certitude, frantic parents, redemption narratives, binary thinking, and blaming of “whole language.” Citing no evidence, neurologist Mark Seidenberg claimed that colleges of education do not value “scientific” research:

Prospective teachers aren’t exposed to it or they’re led to believe that it’s only one of several perspectives . . . . In a class on reading, prospective teachers will be exposed to a menu in which they have 10 or 12 different approaches to reading, and they’re encouraged to pick the one that will fit their personal teaching style best. (Hanford, 2018)

As literacy teacher educators, we do not know where Seidenberg’s claim could be coming from. A director of a nonprofit reading organization in Mississippi is quoted recounting a conversation with an education dean who asked her, “Is this your science, or my science?” (Hanford, 2018). The question is left hanging, as if it answers itself and explains its own significance—clearly the dean was delusional, the author insinuates, because science is science and produces definitive answers. A review of reporter Emily Hanford’s Twitter account and the online response to her report are very concerning to us as leaders of teacher education programs because there is a clear intent to undermine public confidence in our institutions and our work.

We worry about the responses of people outside our colleges—legislators and trustees, provosts and state officials—to media reports like this. We wonder about the effects such reports could have on faculty relations, on alumni attitudes, and on student trust, as well as on other education deans, chairs, and associate deans who may not be sufficiently aware of the totality of literacy research to place these kinds of critiques in a wider historical, ideological, and scientific context. First, we want them to realize that the assertion in these attacks, that teacher education programs do not teach letter–sound relationships, is not based on any research in teacher education. It is based on anecdotes at best, and often anecdotes by people who have a financial stake in selling what colleges of education supposedly fail to provide. The research reviewed in this issue makes clear that in a given 14-week course about the teaching of reading or literacy, instructors approach the (widely critiqued) National Reading Panel (2000) report in many vastly different ways. The emphasis in these popular press articles on exposure to methods of direct instruction in phonics is uninformed regarding the necessary scope and organization of such courses and the learning of students in university classrooms. Even in the domain of letter–sound relationships, the issues are complex and not settled by research, such as whether it makes a difference for preservice teachers to learn letter–sound relationships first in relationship to teaching reading or teaching writing. Although it is clear that alphabetic reading is processed (for hearing and sighted readers) in a relationship between visual signs and the sound of speech, the learning processes are not delimited in research, and preservice teachers’ learning of phonics as content knowledge and the related pedagogical content knowledge are not even researched, much less finalized. In other words, not only are there many elements of teaching besides phonics that are important for preservice teachers to learn, but the learning of new teachers is complex in relation to all of them.

Closing

In attempting to extract lessons for leaders from the reviews in this issue, we have to note the nature of the knowledge produced by most of this research. It does not “prove” an approach or a curriculum, though at times there are signals toward things that are helpful (e.g., tutoring). Much of the research is designed to open up the complexity of an issue, to produce more nuanced understandings about a phenomenon. The reviews of literature do not provide everything that we, as administrators, might like to see—like how many courses are needed in literacy, or how much fieldwork should be done in what kind of context, or how much early literacy should be emphasized versus intermediate, or what materials should be purchased, or even what kind of faculty development has actually helped teacher educators become more effective at appropriately shaping students’ understandings and dispositions about race and culture. Student teachers seem to learn what they are presented with, so thoughtfulness about the “what” seems important, but there is no final word on what, how much, what sequence, or how. It would be helpful to us as administrators to have those kinds of answers more often, though if we saw them, we would likely be suspicious of them.