Every Child Reading: A Professional Development Guide

A Companion to Every Child Reading: An Action Plan

November 2000

Conclusion

The type of professional development the Learning First Alliance calls for is a radical departure from the one-session, publisher-funded workshops that were typical of the past. This document, Every Child Reading: A Professional Development Guide, envisions schoolwide responses to the message of Every Child Reading: An Action Plan and other comprehensive consensus papers on reading development, reading success and failure, and reading instruction. This guide presumes that the end goal of learning to read is to comprehend and that continuous improvement in the practical skills of each component of reading instruction is the goal of every competent teacher. It assumes that improvement in teaching is a lifelong enterprise that requires mentoring, observation, follow-up evaluation, and problem solving with peers. Improved teaching is most likely to occur within a supportive, collaborative context that allows sufficient time for understanding of new ideas and approaches.

The most effective staff development programs are embedded in the culture of the school. They take time, resources, money, commitment, and expertise. The intellectual growth of teachers should be continuous and promoted in interaction with students, peers, and mentors. Vehicles for promoting best practice may include professional workshops, grade-level planning groups, professional development plans generated by individual teachers in relation to designated competencies, guided peer observation and feedback, monthly meetings for discussion of professional readings, teacher research groups, and scheduling of demonstration lessons by master teachers. Activities such as these may be used to best advantage if the goals and content of professional development in early literacy are clearly articulated to and by the entire educational community.

The design of optimal learning experiences for teachers is in many ways analogous to designing optimal learning experiences for students. Not everything can be learned at once. Of necessity, some components of instruction may be more difficult to learn than others and may take proportionately more time to understand or practice than others. To be effective, professional development experiences must provide enough information and enough practice in any given component to allow teachers to develop genuine expertise. An expert teacher possesses a broad set of techniques for addressing the learning needs of each student in a class, the ability to determine rapidly which technique is needed at a given time for each particular student, and the ability to integrate these techniques effectively while teaching a diverse classroom. Therefore, a novice teacher may require extended focus on selected aspects of reading or writing before the fluent integration of practices characteristic of proficient teachers* can be expected. Many components of reading and writing instruction require more than a few hours of cursory overview before they are understood well.

A worthwhile program of professional development will encourage expertise in the components of instruction while maintaining a clear sense of the complex whole to which those components belong. Pacing guidelines, models for lesson planning, time management strategies, and daily schedules for the classroom will all be helpful in this regard. In a comprehensive reading program, skills are taught explicitly and sequentially in support of their purposeful application. Learning to integrate and manage all of the components of language arts instruction is a significant challenge for many teachers, a challenge that can be met over several years of opportunity.

Finally, the suggestions in this guide are offered with the understanding that the education of teachers, both preservice and inservice, deserves a concerted, well-funded program of research. Although we have made progress understanding adult learning, and we have reached consensus around some long-standing issues in early reading instruction, we do not yet know with any degree of certainty the best way to create expert teachers of reading. There can be no more urgent agenda at this point in our quest to become a society that educates everyone. Well-prepared teachers who are confident of their instruction are indispensable for children's reading success.

* See Reading Instruction That Works: The Case for Balanced Teaching, by M. Pressley (New York: Guilford Press, 1998).

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Glossary

Accuracy: The ability to recognize words correctly.
Automaticity: Fluent performance without the conscious deployment of attention.
Blend: A consonant sequence before or after a vowel within a syllable, such as cl, br, or st; the written language equivalent of consonant cluster.
Decoding: Ability to translate a word from print to speech, usually by employing knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences; also, the act of deciphering a new word by sounding it out.
Fluency: Achieving speed and accuracy in recognizing words and comprehending connected text, and coordinating the two.
Grapheme: A letter or letter combination that spells a single phoneme; in English, a grapheme may be one, two, three, or four letters, such as e, ei, igh, or eigh.
Literacy: This includes reading, writing, and the creative and analytical acts involved in producing and comprehending texts.
Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit of language.
Morphology: The aspects of language structure related to the ways words are formed from prefixes, roots, and suffixes (e.g., "mis-spell-ing"), and are related to each other.
Onset-Rime Segmentation: Separating a word into the onset, the consonant(s) at the start of a syllable, and the rime, the remainder of the syllable. For example, in "swift," "sw" is the onset and "ift" is the rime.
Orthographic Knowledge: Knowing that letters and diacritics represent the spoken language; attending to predictable and frequent spelling patterns. (A diacritic is a mark, such as the cedilla in façade or the acute accents of résumé, added to a letter to indicate a special phonetic value or to distinguish words that are otherwise graphically identical.)
Phoneme Awareness: The conscious awareness that words are made up of segments of our own speech that are represented with letters in an alphabetic orthography; also called phonemic awareness.
Phonemes: The speech phonological units that make a difference to meaning. Thus, the spoken word rope consists of three phonemes: /r/, /o/, and /p/. It differs by only one phoneme from each of the spoken words, soap, rode, and rip.
Phonics: The study of the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent; also used to describe reading instruction that teaches sound-symbol correspondences, such as "the phonics approach" or "phonic reading."

Phonics instruction can vary with respect to the explicitness by which the phonic elements are taught and practiced in the reading of text. Synthetic and systematic phonics instruction includes the planned isolation, pronunciation, and blending of individual speech sounds (phonemes) represented by letters and letter groups (graphemes), and usually provides opportunities for children to practice using known sound-symbol associations while reading decodable text. Conversely, embedded and incidental phonics are characterized by an implicit approach in which teachers do use phonics elements in a planned sequence to guide instruction but instead find opportunities to highlight particular phonics elements when they appear in text.
Phonological Awareness: A more inclusive term than phonemic awareness-it refers to the general ability to attend to the sounds of language as distinct from its meaning. Phonemic awareness generally develops through other, less subtle levels of phonological awareness. Noticing similarities between words in their sounds, enjoying rhymes, counting syllables, and so forth are indications of such "metaphonological" skill.
Reading Comprehension: The ability to understand written language. Comprehension includes both getting the gist of the meaning and interpreting the meaning by relating it to other ideas, drawing inferences, making comparisons and asking questions about it.
Self-Monitoring: The mental act of knowing when one does and does not understand what one is reading.
Syllabication: Breaking words into syllables.
Word Attack: An aspect of reading instruction that includes intentional strategies for learning to decode, sight read, and recognize written words.

Glossary Sources

Burns, S., Griffin, P., & Snow, C. (1999). Starting out right: A guide to promoting children's reading success. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Moats, L. C. (2000). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore: Paul Brookes.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health

Snow, C., Burns, S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

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