Before I began pursuing this degree, I stared discussing this topic up and down with friends of mine from undergrad. Did they feel they were prepared to teach literacy? Because I didn’t feel like we were prepared to teach literacy. How were they doing teaching literacy if we weren’t prepared to do it? Most answered negatively and echoed my sentiments that many high school students need a lot more support in reading than we were able to give them. I started finding articles like this one, http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/voices/3qtr2001/adlit.shtml that further supported my decision to go into a reading program. The author, Christine Cziko, had experiences similar to mine – students needing to be lead through texts to the point where she felt she was enabling them not to read. Cziko later goes on, though to show some measure of success at bringing literacy into the classroom.
In talking with my current colleagues, two of them felt that the education that I and my other colleague who just graduated got was much better in terms of preparing us to teach literacy. K is in her first year of teaching, and I am in my third, and our colleagues have been teaching far longer than that, but I don’t necessarily agree with their assessment. I really feel that my undergraduate professors assumed that students would have a much better grasp of reading skills by the time they got to us at the high school. I know there are others who feel this way, too. K approaches teaching literacy in a very systematic way, using many different strategies, but has expressed that she feels the interventions she can do are limited because her own knowledge of what to do is limited. She also feels trapped because of time constraints. It’s, of course, crucial that we teach literacy skills, but with so many content standards to cover, there seems like there isn’t always time to do so. That ends up leading to a lot of reteaching. She emphasized, though, that she feels like she does a lot of the same things I do as far as teaching literacy goes. I think it’s great that we’re on the same page and that we work well together, but hope that it doesn’t mean that we’re both making the same mistakes when it comes to teaching literacy.
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