Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World

Basic reading proficiency is key to success in all content areas, but attending to students’ literacy development remains a challenge for many teachers, especially after the primary grades. Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading presents recommendations for the essential knowledge about the development, acquisition, and teaching of language and literacy skills that teachers need to master and use. This important book is one result of an initiative of the National Academy of Education's Committee on Teacher Education, whose members have been charged with the task of creating a core knowledge base for teacher education.

COMMITTEE CHAIR:

Catherine E. Snow

Harvard University

Catherine E. Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, carries out research on first- and second-language acquisition and literacy development in monolingual and bilingual children. She chaired the committee that produced the National Research Council Report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children and the study group that produced Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education. Her research focuses on the social-interactive origins of language and literacy skills, the ways in which oral-language skills relate to literacy learning, the literacy development of English-language learners, and implications of research on language and literacy development for teacher preparation.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:

M. Susan Burns

George Mason University

M. Susan Burns, Ph.D., is co-coordinator of the Early Childhood Education Program in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason  University. She has been active in national education policy on young children’s early language and literacy development and the preparation of teachers for effective literacy instruction. Prior to her employment at George Mason University, she served as study director at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council for the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children and the Committee for Early Childhood Pedagogy. Reports produced under her guidance and editorship during this time included Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, Starting Out Right: A Guide to Promoting Children’s Reading Success, and Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers. Most recently she is coauthor of Preparing Our Teachers: Opportunities for Better Reading Instruction.

Gina Cervetti

University of California, Berkeley

Gina Cervetti is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education. Her current research agenda concerns the role of text in learning science and the potential of science-literacy integration to support students’ development of academic literacy. Before coming to UC Berkeley, Cervetti completed her doctoral work in educational psychology at Michigan State University, where she was a researcher at the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.

Claude Goldenberg

California State University, Long Beach

Claude Goldenberg is professor of teacher education and associate dean of the College of Education, California State University, Long Beach. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1984 from the Graduate School of Education, UCLA. Prior to that he taught junior high school in San Antonio, Texas, and first grade in Los Angeles. His research interests include home and school factors in Latino children’s achievement and the processes and dynamics of school change. He was a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow and received the Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading Association. His 1997 video Settings for Change described a five-year school-improvement project in a largely Latino, bilingual elementary school in the Los Angeles area. A book based on this project, Successful School Change: Creating Settings to Improve Teaching and Learning, was published in 2004 by Teachers College Press.

Peg Griffin

Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

Peg Griffin, holder of a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from Georgetown University, is a research affiliate of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition of the University of California at San Diego. She studies language in education, both as the topic of reading and writing instruction and as the medium for early education in mathematics and the social and natural sciences. She has collaborated on a variety of books: Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, Starting Out Right, Preparing Our Teachers: Opportunities for Better Reading Instruction, and The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in School. Her theoretical interests are best represented in a coauthored book on model systems, Socialno-istoricheskii Podhod V Psychologii Obuchenia, and the more recent article "Collaboration in School: ‘I (Don’t) Know’ Answers and Questions." She is currently collaborating on a study about the language, literacy, mathematics, and science content in preschools.

Louisa C. Moats

Sopris West Educational Services

Louisa C. Moats, Ed.D., recently completed four years as site director of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Early Interventions Project in Washington, D.C. This longitudinal, large-scale project was conducted through the University of Texas, Houston. It investigated the causes and remedies for reading failure in high-poverty urban schools. Moats spent the previous fifteen years in private practice as a licensed psychologist in Vermont, specializing in evaluation and consultation with individuals of all ages who experienced learning problems in reading and language. She has authored several books, including Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers; Spelling: Development, Disability, and Instruction; Straight Talk About Reading (with Susan Hall); and Parenting a Struggling Reader (with Susan Hall). She has also written numerous journal articles, chapters, and policy papers. She is currently collaborating with Sopris West Educational Services on the development of LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), a series of modules for teachers.

Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar

University of Michigan

Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar is the Jean and Charles Walgreen Jr. Chair of Reading and Literacy and a teacher educator at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the design of learning environments that support self-regulation in learning activity, especially for children who experience difficulty learning in school. She studies how children use literacy in the context of guided-inquiry science instruction, what types of text support children’s inquiry, and what support students who are identified as atypical learners require to be successful in this instruction. Palincsar has served as a member of the National Academy’s Research Council on the Prevention of Reading Difficulty in Young Children; the OERI/RAND Reading Study Group, The National Education Goals Panel, and the National Advisory Board to Children’s Television Workshop. She is coeditor of the journal Cognition and Instruction. She completed her doctorate at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

P. David Pearson

University of California, Berkeley

P. David Pearson serves as dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a faculty member in its Language and Literacy program. His current research focuses on issues of reading instruction and reading assessment policies and practices at all levels—local, state, and national. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2001, he served as the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Education in the College of Education at Michigan State and as codirector of the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement. Even earlier, he was dean of the College of Education, codirector of the Center for the Study of Reading, and professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois. His initial professorial appointment was at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The author of numerous books and articles, Pearson is a member of the National Academy of Education, the recipient of the International Reading Association’s William S. Gray Award and its Albert J. Harris Award, and founding editor of the Handbook of Reading Research.

Dorothy S. Strickland

Rutgers University

Dorothy S. Strickland is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Professor of Education at Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. A former classroom teacher, reading consultant, and learning disabilities specialist, she is a past president of both the International Reading Association (IRA) and the IRA Reading Hall of Fame. She received the IRA’s Outstanding Teacher Educator of Reading Award. She was the recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Award as Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts and the 1994 NCTE Rewey Belle Inglis Award as Outstanding Woman in the Teaching of English. She has numerous publications in the field of reading/language arts. She has recently authored or edited (alone or jointly) Learning About Print in Preschool Settings; Bridging the Literacy Achievement Gap, Grades 4–12: Improving Reading Achievement Through Professional Development; Language Arts: Learning and Teaching; Preparing Our Teachers: Opportunities for Better Reading Instruction; The Administration and Supervision of Reading Programs; and Teaching Phonics Today.

MaryEllen Vogt

California State University, Long Beach

MaryEllen Vogt is Professor Emerita of Education at California State University, Long Beach. A former reading specialist and special education teacher, she received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. A coauthor of five books, including Reading Specialists in the Real World: A Sociocultural View and Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model, her research interests include improving comprehension in the content areas, teacher change and development, and content literacy and language acquisition for English language learners. She was inducted into the California Reading Hall of Fame and received her university’s Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. She is a former president of the International Reading Association.

STAFF:

Helen Duffy

Helen Duffy has served as the director of the Committee on Teacher Education (CTE) since August 2003. Before joining the CTE, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a UC All-Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity fellowship to study a University of California outreach effort called the High School Puente Project. She has taught English and composition at the high school and university levels and served as academic coordinator for UC Berkeley’s English-teacher-education program. In addition to working for the CTE, she has been engaged in a three-year study of an elementary school literacy-reform effort in California’s Silicon Valley. Her research interests include preservice and inservice teacher education, school reforms that promote equity and access to higher education, and adolescent literacy.

Pamela LePage

Pamela LePage is assistant professor of special education and co-coordinator of the program in special education for those with mild-to-moderate needs at San Francisco State University. Before working as the director of the Committee on Teacher Education at Stanford University from August 2001 to August 2003, she taught at George Mason University in an innovative and interdisciplinary master’s program for practicing teachers. LePage earned a Ph.D. degree in special education from the joint University of California, Berkeley/San Francisco State program after teaching in special education for eleven years. She has coauthored or coedited three books, including Transforming Teacher Education: Lessons in Professional Development and Educational Controversies: Toward a Discourse of Reconciliation.