"Walking the Walk" With Teacher Education Candidates: Strategies for Promoting Active Engagement With Assigned Readings

Teacher educators can use active engagement strategies to help teacher candidates interact meaningfully with assigned readings for literacy methods courses. This approach to active engagement with required readings helps teacher candidates learn the content, concepts, and processes from text, and enables them to experience as learners the techniques, strategies, and processes advocated for use in K‐12 classrooms. The authors believe that helping teacher candidates understand, value, and apply research‐based practices in their own teaching is facilitated by modeling, application, and reflection on using such practices with their own reading and learning. The strategies described are • Alpha boxes • Making connections • Double‐entry journals • Text coding • Teachers as readers Also provided are a rationale for each strategy, a description of how to implement the strategy with teacher candidates, an example, and application ideas for the strategy in K‐12 classrooms.