Synthesis of Preservice Teacher Education Research Studies in the Field of Reading
Recommendations
The following recommendations provide critical insights for enhancing preservice teacher education programs.
Recommendation 1
Teacher education programs need to align their curriculum and methods courses for K-12 teacher preparation to teacher national and state standards, student state standards, and state departments of education requirements for certification and licensure.
Action Plan
Conduct a yearly program-effectiveness evaluation within teacher education programs to ascertain the alignment process and effectiveness. Title II of the Higher Education Act, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the International Reading Association, and the National Council of Teachers of English can help with the process of ensuring alignment with teacher education programs and state departments of education requirements.
Recommendation 2
Preservice teachers in K-12 teacher-preparation programs who are seeking certification or licensure need to have a sound understanding of theoretical reading principles, child development, and the relationship of these two areas to the implementation of practical teaching experiences.
Action Plan
Redesign methods courses to include a strong theory-to-practice component, which will provide preservice teachers with the opportunity to gain a knowledge base of a wide variety of theoretical principles. Preservice teachers also should have quality time—as individuals and with their peers—to reflectively plan meaningful instruction around these theoretical principles. The teaching and learning experiences within methods courses also can be used as training and preparation for increasing the clinical experience and evaluation process of preservice teacher education to an interactive, ongoing, formative process. In this process, preservice teachers have an active role as the primary evaluator in their teaching and learning process. Preservice teachers also should be thoroughly coached and mentored in the process of self-evaluation and evaluating their peers.
Recommendation 3
Reading educators need to systematically analyze and empirically test what works best in preservice teacher education in the field of reading. They can develop a database of the process and levels of effectiveness concerning what works best. The database should include the evaluation process of schools of education, levels of alignment, enrollments in reading and language arts programs, elements that contribute to the success of their program, and elements that contribute to the program's limitations.
Action Plan
Conduct rigorous and multidimensional program evaluations for schools of education. The evaluations should have strong methods of triangulation. Faculty can conduct action research in reading methods classes to learn valuable lessons for improving teacher quality. Twice a year schools of education can conduct a pretest and posttest survey on preservice teachers' knowledge, skills, and perceptions concerning teaching and learning for children in the area of reading and language arts. These surveys would provide the teacher education program with a database of yearly progression that could be shared within a larger database of schools of education or preservice teacher-education programs in reading or language arts. The synthesis of research studies provided within this paper provides insights concerning the valuable information that is ascertained through teacher preparation research and evaluation within a given reading course.
Recommendation 4
To meet the needs of a diverse society, universities need to recruit high-quality minority preservice teachers. These preservice teachers represent and understand the cultural context of students from cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Action Plan
Use current models of recruiting minority preservice teachers as a guide for implementing the recruitment of highly qualified minority teachers. (Refer to Recruitment of Minority Teachers.)
Recommendation 5
Teacher education programs need to work closely with state departments of education to align what preservice teachers learn and are required to know within teacher education programs, and what they are actually required to know and are tested on for certification and licensure.
Action Plan
Reevaluate the teacher preparation program to ascertain areas of missing links within the program concerning the alignment of what is offered and what is actually required of the preservice teacher for testing at the state level. The programs at the elementary level should match with state departments of education concerning preservice teachers demonstrating a strong knowledge base in phonetics, vocabulary, fluency, reading comprehension, and assessment.
The programs at the secondary level should match with state departments of education concerning preservice teachers demonstrating a strong knowledge base in the teaching of content-area reading and instructional strategies for integration and content mastery.