Teaching reading well is far more complicated than it might seem to a casual observer. Reading is a skill that can be developed by some learners regardless of the quality of instruction they receive, and an able and well-prepared child can make the experience of learning to read look fairly effortless. What casual observers may miss is the extent of knowledge and preparation a skillful teacher brings to a classroom that may include students with a range of impediments to learning to read. Successful reading teachers—and we include both teachers of elementary students in the early stages of reading, and teachers of older students who are struggling with reading—understand how students learn to read and how to provide the support they need.
Yet this description hardly captures the complexity of preparing students to flourish in the workplace and in a society that requires high-level uses of text. Teachers of reading are called on to prepare students to interpret complex ideas, critically analyze arguments, synthesize information from multiple sources, and use reading to build their knowledge. When literacy is measured by these criteria, the literacy crisis in the United States is evident.
According to the most recent “reading report card” for the nation (Lee, Grigg, and Donahue, 2007), 67 percent of 4th graders and 74 percent of 8th graders are scoring at minimal levels of reading competency. There has been no significant improvement in reading achievement at grades 8 and 12 since 1992, and the achievement gaps for historically underperforming subgroups have not been reduced (Grigg, Donahue, and Dion, 2007; Lee,
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Suggested Citation:"5 Preparing Reading Teachers." National Research Council. 2010. Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12882. ×
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Grigg, and Donahue, 2007). Furthermore, 4th- and 8th-grade students who are English-language learners scored 36 and 42 standard-scale points, respectively, below the performance of native speakers of English in 2007 (Lee, Grigg, and Donahue, 2007).
In this chapter we first briefly discuss the general state of research on reading. The next four sections address the four questions presented in Chapter 4 as applied to reading:
What are students expected to know and be able to do to be successful readers?
What instructional opportunities are necessary to support successful students?
What do successful teachers know about reading and how to teach reading?
What instructional opportunities are necessary to prepare successful teachers?
We then turn to what is known about how teachers are currently being prepared to teach reading, and we close with our conclusions.
