A New Look at Teacher Education: The Skill of Teaching Reading

Reviews the book, Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World edited by Catherine E. Snow, Peg Griffin, and M. Susan Burns (see record 2005-13853-000). This book is the companion text to Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). This second volume covers the teaching of reading and the components that are crucial to making sure children are learning to read in pre-K through 12th-grade classrooms. Beyond a focus on reading scores by the federal and state governments, along with the obsession of the school districts, is the question of what our teachers are being taught about reading. Snow and her colleagues, all from prestigious institutions known for their teacher preparation programs and their expertise in teaching reading, look at this question. The book begins by asking why we need another report on teacher education. This book offers a set of recommendations for the design or redesign of a teacher preparation program that will ground the teaching of teachers in the research on how to teach reading. New teachers need to learn about literacy development in children and how to instruct children in the literacy skills needed to establish the foundation for learning to read. New teachers need to be able to add the theory of literacy learning to the theories of teaching reading. The value of this book to teacher preparation programs is that it makes the case for what needs to be covered in a program that is going to prepare a successful, reflective teacher to teach literacy and reading skills. The only thing missing from this text is a discussion on the importance of family involvement in the child's reading development. Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World could be used as a guide for developing a reading program for new teachers or as an assessment instrument for evaluating an existing teacher preparation program's reading component. The text is grounded in the current research in reading instruction and provides a framework for establishing a reading program in a teacher education program that can meet the needs of all learners of reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)