Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources
Principles of Effective Professional Development
To determine how teachers of literacy, both in general education as well as reading classrooms, might best develop their ability to implement sound practices, we looked to the research on effective professional development. We summarized what we found into four tenets.
Continuous and Sustained Learning
Practitioners and staff developers alike have recognized the limitations of one-time workshops for learning. The National Staff Development Council (2000) has issued standards that advocate more comprehensive models, such as peer mentoring and coaching, which are a commitment to learning over an extended period of time.
Locally Based Initiatives
Faculty study teams can investigate relevant topics and implement programs that meet the needs of their students. Through the World Wide Web, educators have ready access to research and educational resources. The International Reading Association has begun a professional development project called Schools as Learning Communities. Professional development activities should be directed toward the development of such locally based learning communities.
Adaptation Rather Than Adoption of Programs
Giroux (1990) proposed the work of the teacher as "intellectual," rather than one of implementing the prescriptions of instructional programs. Experienced teachers object to instructional initiatives that script their actions, denying them the opportunity to be an instructional decision maker. Professional development activities should lead teachers to adapt sound instruction to their unique contexts.
Teacher as Researcher
The National Reading Research Center articulated a model of professional development in which teachers conduct classroom research and examine their own literacy practices (Allen, Shockley, & Baumann, 1995). In the work of Moll and colleagues (1992), teachers became ethnographers, visiting homes and communities to design more meaningful reading instruction. Effective professional development can also provide teachers with opportunities to select reading strategies appropriate for their struggling secondary readers, a sustained period of time to apply this instruction, and a planned effort at evaluating its effectiveness. The notion of teacher as researcher allows the teacher to formatively evaluate struggling readers' progress and their instruction at improving it.
Key Points about Struggling Secondary Readers
These students . . .
- comprise about one fourth of all secondary students
- struggle with the reading required for academic survival at their grade level
- come from varied populations, including
- some second language learners who
may read in their native language
may need social interaction to develop oral proficiency in English - students with learning disabilities
- students marginalized from the culture of school
- students who have received inappropriate reading instruction
- some second language learners who
- likely suffer psychological, emotional, and cognitive consequences of years of lack of reading success
- need support in orchestrating strategies and in transferring reading skills beyond the remedial reading context, such as into content classrooms and nonschool settings
- may lack motivation
- need meaningful materials and tasks
- may struggle with decoding
- challenged by multisyllabic words
- need to acquire and apply morphological knowledge
- need reading practice to develop fluency
- may have limited language comprehension
- limited linguistic knowledge
- need for language differences to be recognized and honored in the classroom
- need multiple opportunities and sources for active learning of words
- limited background knowledge
- need to connect experiences beyond the classroom with school reading
- difficulty making inferences
- need scaffolded reading of complex texts
- difficulty in self-regulated comprehending
- need explicit strategy instruction
- need to use metacognitive assets from second language learning
- may not transact with text
- need models for making personal responses to text
- need support following principles of effectiveness that have emerged from years of research in
- reading instruction and
- teacher professional development