Every Child Reading: A Professional Development Guide

A Companion to Every Child Reading: An Action Plan

November 2000

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The Content of Professional Development

Agreement by experts in recent, comprehensive reviews of reading research is substantial: A successful teacher of beginning reading enables children to comprehend and produce written language, exposes them to a wide variety of texts to build their background knowledge and whet their appetite for more, generates enthusiasm and appreciation for reading and writing, and expertly teaches children how to decode, interpret, and spell new words from a foundation of linguistic awareness. The successful teacher adapts the pacing, content, and emphasis of instruction for individuals and groups, using valid and reliable assessments. The teacher's choices are guided by knowledge of the critical skills and attitudes needed by students at each stage of reading development. Beginning reading skills are taught explicitly and systematically to children within an overall program of purposeful, engaging reading and writing.

A "balanced" approach in the primary classroom does not mean that each component of reading instruction receives equal emphasis at every stage of reading development. Likewise, a balanced approach for teachers may not mean that they spend equal time learning every aspect of reading instruction simultaneously.

Teachers must never lose sight of the fact that all students need a steady diet of worthwhile and varied reading experiences shared with other people. Teachers also need the more technical skills required for teaching children how to read and write the academic language of books. Because so many textbooks and instructional programs have de-emphasized some challenging aspects of beginning reading, including the explicit teaching of alphabetic skills, word attack, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, gaps in teacher knowledge and skill may need to be remedied in these areas especially. They are pivotal for reading success and may deserve special emphasis.

Teachers ideally would have the tools to teach the essentials of reading and language as their children's needs were determined. Each dimension of reading acquisition is worthy of intensive focus in a long-range professional development plan. In addition, the study of any domain of reading and literacy development would be supported with readings that explain the psychological, linguistic, and educational reasons for the recommended practices.*

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Components of Effective, Research-Supported Reading Instruction for the Primary Grades†

• Phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and concepts of print
• The alphabetic code: Phonics and decoding
• Fluent, automatic reading of text
• Vocabulary
• Text comprehension
• Written expression
• Spelling and handwriting
• Screening and continuous assessment to inform instruction
• Motivating children to read and developing their literacy horizons

Phonemic Awareness, Letter Knowledge, and Concepts of Print

Phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge account for more of the variation in early reading and spelling success than general intelligence, overall maturity level, or listening comprehension.1 They are the basis for learning an alphabetic writing system. Children who have poorly developed phonemic awareness at the end of kindergarten are likely to become poor readers. Explicit instruction in sound identification, matching, segmentation, and blending, when linked appropriately to sound-symbol association, reduces the risk of reading failure and accelerates early reading and spelling acquisition for all children.

Teaching these skills well, however, is not as easy as it might seem. Teachers must themselves be aware of speech sounds and how they differ from letters in order to help students acquire awareness of phonemes and the symbols that represent them. There is growing evidence that many adults need explicit instruction about language before they themselves demonstrate the level of sound and spelling awareness needed to teach it well.2 In addition, teachers need to understand the developmental progression from spoken word and syllable identification to blending and segmenting all the phonemes in simple words.3 Finally, instruction in this domain begins with auditory-verbal exercises to direct children's attention to sound, but phonemes should be linked with letters once children understand that letters represent segments of their own speech. At that point, phoneme awareness becomes part of a well-designed reading or spelling lesson.

Table 1 outlines concepts (teacher knowledge) and practices (teacher skills) that contribute to reading success. The third column on the right suggests professional development experiences that can help teachers acquire knowledge and skill in this domain. The concepts and practices included in the teacher knowledge and teacher skills columns reflect consensus in research-based statements of the components of effective reading instruction. However, the specific professional development experiences suggested in the third column reflect our view, based on our collective experience and the limited research available, of the types of activities that are likely to lead to improved instruction and student achievement. The professional development experiences listed are neither all-inclusive nor necessarily superior to all other approaches. But, while dramatically more research is needed in this area, these listed experiences are the type that are likely to be found in an effective professional development program.

Table 1: Phonemic Awareness, Letter Knowledge, and Concepts of Print

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Know the speech sounds in English (consonants and vowels) and the pronunciation of phonemes for instruction.	Select and use a range of activities representing a developmental progression of phonological skill (rhyming; word identification; syllable counting; onset-rime segmentation and blending; phoneme identification, segmentation, and blending).	Practice phoneme matching, identification, segmentation, blending, substitution and deletion.
Know the progression of development of phonological skill.		Order phonological awareness activities by difficulty level and developmental sequence.
Understand the difference between speech sounds and the letters that represent them.	Use techniques for teaching letter naming, matching, and formation.	Practice and analyze letter-sound matching activities (identifying how letters and letter groups are used for representing speech sounds).
Understand the causal links between early decoding, spelling, word knowledge, and phoneme awareness.	Plan lessons in which phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and invented spelling activities are complementary.	Observe and critique live or videotaped student-teacher interactions during phonological awareness and alphabet instruction.
Understand the print concepts young children must develop.	Teach concepts of print during shared reading of big books.	Role-play the teaching of print concepts during interactive reading aloud.
Understand how critical the foundation skills are for later reading success.	Have ability to monitor every child's progress and identify those who are falling behind.	Discuss children's progress, using informal assessments, to obtain early help for those in need of it.

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The Alphabetic Code: Phonics and Decoding

In addition to phoneme awareness and letter knowledge, knowledge of sound-symbol associations is vital for success in 1st grade and beyond. Accurate and fluent word recognition depends on phonics knowledge. The ability to read words accounts for a substantial proportion of overall reading success even in older readers. Good readers do not depend primarily on context to identify new words. When good readers encounter an unknown word, they decode the word, name it, and then attach meaning. The context of the passage helps a reader get the meaning of a word once a word has been deciphered.

The Report of the National Reading Panel provides solid support for the conclusion that systematic phonics makes a more significant contribution to children's reading growth than do alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics. Moreover, the superiority of systematic phonics instruction over unsystematic and no phonics instruction is even more evident for low-achieving students, students with learning disabilities, and especially for kindergarten and first-grade students from low-income families.^**

The ability to spell is generally improved with systematic phonics instruction even in children who read relatively well. Instruction in word recognition, moreover, should include not only sound-letter correspondences, but also sight words, syllabication (breaking words into syllables), and morphology (breaking words into meaningful parts). By the end of 2nd grade, students should be able to decode almost any unfamiliar word so that they can attend to uncovering the meaning. The extent to which students will depend on explicit, systematic teaching will vary, but teachers need to be prepared to teach everyone, including those who do not learn to decode with ease.

Teachers cannot teach the relationships between speech and print systematically, explicitly, and skillfully unless they themselves understand how spelling represents sounds, syllables, and meaningful parts of words. English is a predictable, albeit complex language that children can approach with confidence if their teachers present the system itself as one with logic and structure. Teachers need knowledge, guidance, and practice, however, if they are to teach in a way that improves on the ineffective drills and worksheets that may have been misused in the past.

Knowledge, skills, and possible learning experiences for teachers in the domain of decoding, phonics, and word attack are outlined in Table 2.

Table 2: Phonics and Decoding

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Understand speech-to-print correspondence at the sound, syllable pattern, and morphological levels.	Choose examples of words that illustrate sound-symbol, syllable, and morpheme patterns.	Practice various active techniques including sound blending, structural word analysis, word building, and word sorting.
Identify and describe the developmental progression in which orthographic knowledge is generally acquired.	Select and deliver appropriate lessons according to students' levels of spelling, phonics, and word identification skills.	Identify, on the basis of student reading and writing, the appropriate level at which to instruct.
Understand and recognize how beginner texts are linguistically organized-by spelling pattern, word frequency, and language pattern.	Explicitly teach the sequential blending of individual sounds into a whole word.	Observe, demonstrate, and practice error correction strategies.
Recognize the differences among approaches to teaching word attack (implicit, explicit, analytic, synthetic, etc.).	Teach active exploration of word structure with a variety of techniques.	Search a text for examples of words that exemplify an orthographic concept; lead discussions about words.
Understand why instruction in word attack should be active and interactive.	Enable students to use word attack strategies as they read connected text.	Review beginner texts to discuss their varying uses in reading instruction.

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Fluent, Automatic Reading of Text

Beginning readers must apply their decoding skills to fluent, automatic reading of text. Children who are reading with adequate fluency are much more likely to comprehend what they are reading. Thus the concept of independent reading level is important: it is that level at which the child recognizes more than 95 percent of the words and can read without laboring over decoding. Poor readers often read too slowly. Some poor readers have a specific problem with fluent, automatic text reading even though they have learned basic phonics.

Recent research has highlighted the value of specific classroom activities to build reading fluency in slow readers.4 Some useful techniques include several readings of easy material to a tape recorder or partner, guided oral reading with teacher or partner feedback, and choral reading or simultaneous oral reading. The idea of silent reading across a series of books at about the same difficulty level is thought to be helpful but is not so well supported by research. Repeated reading techniques, however, are only effective if children can read the individual words in the selections with acceptable speed.5 Word-by-word readers or those who sound out words with difficulty may need more basic instruction in fluent application of phonics to single words. Teachers need to know how to match instruction to individual needs.

A professional development program for teachers focused on issues of reading fluency could include knowledge, skills, and experiences listed in Table 3.

Table 3: Fluent, Automatic Reading of Text

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Understand how word recognition, reading fluency, and comprehension are related to one another.	Determine reasonable expectations for reading fluency at various stages of reading development, using research-based guidelines and appropriate state and local standards and benchmarks.	Practice assessing and recording text-reading fluency of students in class.
Understand text features that are related to text difficulty.	Help children select appropriate texts, of sufficiently easy levels, to promote ample independent as well as oral reading.	Organize classroom library and other support materials by topic and text difficulty; code for easy access by students, and track how much children are reading.
Understand who in the class should receive extra practice with fluency development and why.	Use techniques for increasing speed of word recognition.	Use informal assessment results to identify who needs to work on fluency. Devise a system for recording student progress toward reasonable goals.
	Use techniques for repeated readings of passages such as alternate oral reading with a partner, reading with a tape, or rereading the same passage up to three times.	Conduct fluency-building activities with a mentor teacher.

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Vocabulary

Knowledge of word meanings is critical to reading comprehension. Knowledge of words supports comprehension, and wide reading enables the acquisition of word knowledge. At school age, children are expected to learn the meanings of new words at the rate of several thousand per year. Most of these words are acquired by reading them in books or hearing them read aloud from books. Networks of words, tied conceptually, are the foundation of productive vocabulary. Key in developing this foundation is active processing of word meanings, which develops understanding of words and their uses, and connections among word concepts.6

Word meanings are not learned from a single context or single encounter. More typically, they are learned from repeated encounters and incorporated into a working vocabulary as they are used.7 Teachers must learn a rationale for word selection, techniques for vocabulary instruction, and the theoretical knowledge to interpret students' word learning efforts.

For comprehension of a text, words that are central to passage meaning should be directly introduced before students read a selection. Additionally, words most useful to teach are those that are high frequency in a mature language user's vocabulary and are found in varying contexts and content areas.8 To be effective word learners and word users, students need a variety of strategies such as those that help them get meanings from context and strategies that help them make connections between words they already know. Table 4 lists the knowledge, skill, and professional development experiences that may be relevant in improving vocabulary instruction.

Table 4: Vocabulary

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Understand the role of vocabulary development and vocabulary knowledge in comprehension.	Select material for reading aloud that will expand students' vocabulary.	Collaborate with team to select best read-aloud books and share rationales.
Have a rationale for selecting words for direct teaching before, during, and after reading.	Select words for instruction before a passage is read.	Select words from text for direct teaching and give rationale for the choice.
Understand the role and characteristics of direct and contextual methods of vocabulary instruction.	Teach word meanings directly through explanation of meanings and example uses, associations to known words, and word relationships.	Devise exercises to involve students in constructing meanings of words, in developing example uses of words, in understanding relationships among words, and in using and noticing uses of words beyond the classroom.
Know reasonable goals and expectations for learners at various stages of reading development; appreciate the wide differences in students' vocabularies.	Provide for repeated encounters with new words and multiple opportunities to use new words.
Understand why books themselves are a good source for word learning.	Explicitly teach how and when to use context to figure out word meanings.	Devise activities to help children understand the various ways that context can give clues to meaning, including that often clues are very sparse and sometimes even misleading.
	Help children understand how word meanings apply to various contexts by talking about words they encounter in reading.	Use a series of contexts to show how clues can accumulate.

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Text Comprehension

The undisputed purpose of learning to read is to comprehend. Although children are initially limited in what they can read independently, comprehension instruction can occur as soon as they enter school. Comprehension depends, firstly, on a large, working vocabulary and substantial background knowledge. Even before children can read for themselves, teachers can build this vital background knowledge by reading interactively and frequently to children from a variety of narrative and expository texts, chosen in part for their ability to expand what children know about the world around them. Further, comprehension is enhanced when teachers make sure students understand what they are reading by asking questions and encouraging student questions and discussions.9 Effective instruction will help the reader actively relate his or her own knowledge or experience to the ideas written in the text, and then remember the ideas that he or she has come to understand. As Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children points out, "Every opportunity should be taken to extend and enrich the children's background knowledge and understanding in every way possible, for the ultimate significance and memorability of any word or text depends on whether children possess the background knowledge and conceptual sophistication to understand its meaning."10

Engaging children in text comprehension may occur before, during, and after reading a text. From kindergarten onward, specific comprehension strategies can be taught explicitly. Techniques that have been shown to enhance text comprehension include self-monitoring for understanding, using graphic and semantic organizers, answering questions and obtaining immediate feedback, asking questions about the text, becoming aware of story structure, and periodically summarizing key points.11 Although these strategies can sometimes be effective if taught alone, they are generally more effective if taught in clusters and used with flexibility. The teacher can explicitly model ways to raise questions, think about the text, and deepen comprehension as reading proceeds. However, these modeling skills require educators to practice, learn from coaching, and observe mentor teachers.12

Previewing, especially for expository texts, should help children become aware of what they already know about the topic and what they would like to know. During reading, children should learn to monitor whether they understand and to apply strategies such as rereading to "fix up" comprehension problems. They also should be able to ask themselves clarifying questions about the author's message. After reading, they need to summarize what they have learned and extend their comprehension beyond the text itself. Connecting new information to known information, evaluating the author's intent, retelling or summarizing, or constructing a graphic representation of the information may be appropriate at different times. Again, a combination of techniques is likely to be most effective.

It cannot be assumed that teachers need less practice in this domain than in others. Teaching comprehension is complex, and prior research suggests that it is seldom taught well.13 Teachers often spend too much time on literal questions that test literal comprehension, in place of queries that encourage deeper engagement of the text with higher levels of thinking. Even though much more research is needed to discover how best to help teachers improve comprehension instruction, professional development may include the knowledge, skill, and activities listed in Table 5.

Table 5: Text Comprehension

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Know the cognitive processes involved in comprehension; know the techniques and strategies that are most effective, for what types of students, with what content.	Help children engage texts and consider ideas deeply.	Role-play and rehearse key research-supported strategies, such as questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and using graphic organizers.
Identify the typical structure of common narrative and expository text genres.	Choose and implement instruction appropriate for specific students and texts.	Discuss and plan to teach characteristics of both narrative and expository texts.
Recognize the characteristics of "reader friendly" text.	Facilitate comprehension of academic language such as connecting words, figures of speech, idioms, humor, and embedded sentences.	Consider student work and reading behavior (written responses, oral summaries, retellings, cloze tasks, recorded discussions) to determine where miscomprehension occurred and plan how to repair it.
Identify phrase, sentence, paragraph, and text characteristics of "book language" that students may misinterpret.
Appreciate that reading strategies vary for specific purposes.	Communicate directly to children the value of reading for various purposes.	Interpret the effectiveness of instruction with video and examples of student work.
Understand the similarities and differences between written composition and text comprehension.	Help students use written responses and discussion to process meaning more fully.	Practice leading, scaffolding, and observing discussions in which students collaborate to form joint interpretations of text.
Understand the role of background knowledge in text comprehension.	Preview text and identify the background experiences and concepts that are important for comprehension of that text and that help students call on or acquire that knowledge.	Discuss and plan to teach ways of helping students call on or acquire relevant knowledge through defining concepts, presenting examples, and eliciting students' reactions to the concepts in ways that assess their understanding.

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Written Expression

Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. Both depend on fluent understanding and use of language at many levels. Each enhances the other. From 1st grade onward, children benefit from almost daily opportunities to organize, transcribe, and edit their thoughts in writing. A variety of writing assignments appropriate to their abilities is desirable, including production of narratives and exposition. While they are building the skills of letter formation, spelling, and sentence generation, children also should be taught to compose in stages: generating and organizing ideas, initially with a group or partner; producing a draft; sharing ideas with others for the purpose of gaining feedback; and revising, editing, proofreading, and publishing.

To teach writing well, teachers themselves should model writing and the writing process for their students. Professional development in this area often combines instruction in the organization and management of a writing program with opportunities for teachers themselves to write.

Research-supported practices in writing instruction that can be fostered in professional development programs include those in Table 6.

Table 6: Written Expression

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Understand that composition is a recursive process of planning, drafting, and revising.	Organize writing program to support planning, drafting, and revising stages before publication.	Examine student work at various stages of the writing process and identify strengths and weaknesses.
Know the value and purpose of teacher-directed and student-directed assignments.	Include writing daily as part of the classroom routine, employing a variety of tasks and modes.	Participate in shared writing and personal writing in response to various assignments.
Understand the role of grammar, sentence composition, and paragraphing in building composition skill.	Teach sentence and paragraph awareness, construction, and manipulation as a tool for fluent communication of ideas.	Practice several approaches for building sentence- and paragraph-level mastery, such as sentence combining, analysis, and elaboration, and coherent linking of sentences in paragraphs.
Know benchmarks and standards for students at various stages of growth.	Generate and use rubrics to guide and evaluate student work.	Work with a team to achieve reliability in evaluating student work.
Understand that different kinds of writing require different organizational approaches.	Teach several genres through the year, such as personal narratives, fictional narratives, descriptions, explanations, reports, and poetry.	As a team, teach each genre and evaluate the results with peers.
Understand the value of meaningful writing for a specific audience and purpose.	Promote student sharing and publication of student writing for a suitable audience.	Host an author's conference.

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Spelling and Handwriting

Recent research supports the premise that written composition is enhanced by mastery of the component skills of spelling and writing just as reading comprehension is supported by mastery of fluent word recognition. Fluent, accurate letter formation and spelling are associated with students' production of longer and better-organized compositions.14 Word usage, handwriting, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are the necessary conventions of written expression that must be taught alongside strategies for composing. Students learn spelling and handwriting more readily if those skills are taught explicitly from 1st grade onward and if they are applied in the context of frequent, purposeful writing assignments.

Spelling knowledge is acquired in well-researched progression.15 Children first string letters together randomly. Then, with insight into the purpose of the alphabet, they begin to spell by sounding out words; then they progress to one-syllable spelling patterns, syllable combinations, and the spelling of meaningful parts of words (morphemes). Systematic instruction in sound segmentation, sound-symbol association, and awareness of spelling patterns leads to better spelling achievement. Children who are taught directly and systematically-including through exercises in transcription-and who are asked to apply their skills often in purposeful writing, learn to spell more readily than children who are taught random lists of words to memorize.

Teachers need to be reassured that they can and should teach these basic skills in an organized, explicit manner. Professional development should emphasize techniques for teaching spelling, handwriting, and punctuation that generalize to written composition, as suggested in Table 7.

Table 7: Spelling and Handwriting

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Describe and identify the progression in which spelling knowledge is gained.	Tailor instruction to students' developmental levels in spelling.	Give and analyze the results of a developmental spelling inventory.
Understand the similarities and differences between learning to read and learning to spell.	Coordinate the timing and sequence of spelling lessons to complement instruction in word recognition.	Develop time line, scope, and sequence for teaching spelling in relation to the reading program.
Understand the organizing principles of the English spelling system at the sound, syllable, and morpheme levels.	In instruction, emphasize concepts and principles of the spelling system.	Practice explaining, illustrating, and providing meaningful practice with spelling concepts.
Understand the relationship between transcription skills and spelling and writing fluency.	Use techniques to build fluency, accuracy, and automaticity in transcription to support composition.	Practice teaching self-correction, dictation, think aloud, proofreading, and other strategies.

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Screening and Continuous Assessment to Inform Instruction

Frequent assessment of developing readers, and the use of that information for planning instruction, is the most reliable way of preventing children from falling behind and staying behind. A clear message from longitudinal studies of reading development is that most children who become poor readers in 3rd grade and beyond were having difficulty right from the start with phonologically-based reading skills.16 In addition, instruction that targets the specific weaknesses most likely to cause reading difficulty often prevents later reading failure and facilitates the reading development of most children.

Several kinds of informal (nonstandardized) assessments are the responsibility of the classroom teacher. Children can be screened by mid-kindergarten with a high rate of accuracy to find those at risk for reading difficulty. Curriculum-based assessments, generally given every 6-10 weeks in the 1st grade, are helpful in determining what students have learned and what they need to learn within the classroom program. Ideally, ongoing assessment, based on observations of children's reading behavior and writing products, is an integral part of daily instruction. Finally, because group and individual assessments are used to compare children with normative standards, teachers should know how to interpret standardized test results.

Professional development in reading assessment should emphasize valid, reliable, and feasible practices for the classroom teacher and avoid those that have little theoretical or empirical support. For example, a kindergarten assessment designed to predict reading success in 1st grade would most likely include measures of phoneme segmentation and blending, letter knowledge, and sound-symbol correspondence. * However, by 2nd grade, phoneme awareness adds little power to a screening measure that already includes word recognition, spelling, phonic decoding, and paragraph reading for comprehension and fluency. Learning to use assessments purposefully should include supervised practice in their administration, opportunities to view and respond to expert modeling, and team discussion of assessment results in relation to goals and standards. Professional development programs that teach theoretically sound, reliable, and manageable reading and writing assessments might emphasize the activities in Table 8.

Table 8: Assessment to Inform Instruction

Teacher Knowledge	Teacher Skills	Possible Professional Development Experiences
Understand that assessments are used for various purposes, including determining strengths and needs of students in order to plan for instruction and flexible grouping; monitoring of progress in relation to stages of reading, spelling, and writing; assessing curriculum-specific learning; and using norm-referenced or diagnostic tests appropriately for program placement.	Use efficient, informal, validated strategies for assessing phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, sound-symbol knowledge, application of skills to fluent reading, passage reading accuracy and fluency, passage comprehension, level of spelling development, and written composition.	Participate in role-play of assessment after modeling and demonstration with surrogate subjects. Receive feedback in role-play until skills of administration and scoring are reliable.
Select a program of assessment that includes validated tools for measuring important components of reading and writing.	Screen all children briefly; assess children with reading and language weaknesses at regular intervals.	Administer assessments and review results with team for purpose of instructional grouping.
Know the benchmarks and standards for performance.	Interpret results for the purpose of helping children achieve the standards.	Evaluate the outcomes of instruction and present to team.
Understand importance of student self-assessment.	Communicate assessment results to parents and students.	Develop or select record-keeping tools for parents and students.

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Motivating Children to Read and Developing Their Literacy Horizons

As we have emphasized earlier, a successful teacher of beginning reading generates enthusiasm and appreciation for reading. Research reviews have repeatedly stated that children who are read to often, who are led to enjoy books, and who are encouraged to read widely are more likely to become good readers than children who lack these experiences. Teachers who are juggling the technical challenges of program organization and delivery may lose sight of the fact that purposeful reading and writing is the goal of instruction. Information on the importance of daily reading aloud, the selection of varied reading material, the use of the library, and the integration of topics across the curriculum will bolster literacy instruction, even as teachers focus on teaching specific reading and writing skills. Team and school initiatives to promote a love of books and wide reading should be ever-present.

Appreciation of the language found only in books can be fostered by teachers who read to students from challenging material and who encourage students to read widely from worthwhile texts. Classrooms and libraries must have a sufficient selection of reading material, especially for students with limited reading ability, and adults need resources and strategies to match students with reading material in their areas of interest and at a level they can read.* If text is too easy, students do not develop their vocabulary or comprehension; if text is too difficult, students may become frustrated and revert to ineffective reading strategies, such as skipping important content vocabulary. Professional development that would help teachers foster independent reading of quality literature might focus on:

• Methods to evaluate text for readability, quality, and purpose in reading instruction.
• Strategies for encouraging, recording, and celebrating students' independent reading, in cooperation with families when feasible.
• Selection of supplementary read-aloud material and sharing reviews of children's literature among teachers.

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