EDTE 384: Secondary School Reading Methods Course

California Commission on Teacher Credentialing Requirement for a Single Subject Credential

The requirement to complete a content-area reading methods course has applied to all secondary teaching credential candidates in California since 1972, I believe. When I checked several years ago, I found that an equivalent course has long been a requirement in almost every state.

My first assignment to teach the course happened fall quarter, 1987. Since then, except for six years when I worked in a middle school and completed my doctorate, I have taught my fair share of EDTE 384. Before becoming emeritus I loved teaching the class for its level of challenge and rewards.

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Across and even within teacher preparation programs, the content of the course varies, but a handful of textbooks rooted in a common research base has been revised and republished many times. These are excellent methods books evolved to provide candidates with pedagogical strategies for using digital texts as well as print. The theoretical framework remains constructivist in nature and grounded in concepts like prior knowledge, interest, and purpose; vocabulary; texts as cognitive blueprint; reflective abstraction; consolidation and studying; and writing.

During my time, faculty teaching this course were prepared in graduate work and had a penchant for teaching secondary preservice teachers—often having done doctoral work under renowned content-area reading pioneers—and were hired to teach that specific course.

Teaching this methods course has not always been a welcome assignment among faculty with an elementary credential focus. Unlike multiple-subjects teachers, single-subject teachers are single minded even in preservice. The within-discipline focus is powerful and produces markedly different pedagogical priorities and interests in contrast with the broadly interdisciplinary affordances of the self-contained elementary classroom.

It can be a difficult course to teach even for old hands. The instructor can count on meeting a group of as many as 30 aspiring high school teachers from across the curriculum together in one room, all wondering why they must complete a course in teaching reading.

Isn’t that the responsibility of the English Department? Nobody expects the English teacher to teach biology. Shouldn’t high school students know how to read? I’m the last person to come to if a kid can’t read.

Fortunately, I had teaching experience in regular middle school English classrooms as well as professional development experience working with a History Department faculty to develop a local content-area reading instructional framework. Without this experience I might have been among those faculty, bless their souls, who would rather teach elementary methods.

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It makes sense that teachers place primary responsibility for teaching reading and writing on English teachers. Aspiring English teachers, on the other hand, wonder what teaching reading has to do with their field of study. Physical Education, Mathematics, Music, and many other teachers got confused. “Dr. Underwood, I think someone in scheduling made a mistake. I’m going to be a high school band director.”

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Research has been done over time to find out whether the course has any impact on teachers in the field. Teachers with a subject-matter degree assume that their job is to assign reading, and the student’s job is to read the assigned pages.

Preservice teachers quickly learn in their field placement, however, that they can count on students’ coming to class having not read the assignment. Nobody teaching in the real world assumes compliance.

As a result, a cycle is enacted: Teachers assign reading expecting that students won’t read; when students come to class, teachers lecture on the content that could have been learned through reading. Single-subject teachers are by nature and nurture lecturers.

We called it the rubber band effect. In the course the instructor tries to stretch the rubber band. In the field the rubber band snaps back to its original position.

Research gurus in this sub field of reading pedagogy concluded that during the course and for a short while during the first year of teaching, single-subject teachers try to apply what they learned. Within five years most of them no longer try, so strong is the erosion of preparation in practice.

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I often began the course with a discussion of this cycle. Students acknowledge its existence. Some students admit having gone through an entire undergraduate program without buying a textbook.

Some describe courses in college they’ve taken where reading the assignments was optional, and often they would read after lectures only as much as necessary to pass an exam.

Gingerly, I would steer them toward the issue of space and time for teaching reading—not phonics, but comprehension, reading to learn. Physical Education teachers get K-12 credentials and tend to be more varied, sometimes harboring a desire to teach elementary grades. I’d seek out PE teachers to get the juices flowing.

In many ways, reading goes against their grain; they seek to evoke and teach physical activity. So I ask a question about rainy days. What do you do with a group who get shut up inside?

Mathematics teachers sometimes surprised me—depending on their view of math pedagogy as numerical model-building and proof-based reasoning, the colonized curriculum for architects and engineers, or as practical problem-solving using numbers as a language, they saw spaces for writing.

Using the simple view of reading as a heuristic was fruitful early in the orientation session. Imagine person A could read a passage aloud but did not understand it; can we say person A had read the passage? Imagine person B understood the passage perfectly but could not read it aloud; can we say that person had read?

Occasionally, I would have a student who had heard or read about this view. For most, it was a novel idea. Discussions ensued about reading in silence, doing impromptu think-alouds—I worked to arouse their curiosity about the course content, to raise interesting questions about this fascinating business we call reading.

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My first serious foray into remodeling their understandings involved looking at the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. We would wobble toward a stipulative, provisional definition of comprehension, and I would offer mine: To identify the important ideas in a passage and to discern the relationship among these ideas, this is comprehension.

But who decides what’s an important idea?

I would gradually add vegetables to the stew until the water was simmering and I could see glimmers of interest at the back of the room. Then I’d raise a question of pedagogy: Will any of you ever have to teach vocabulary? Take a minute and write down ten words or phrases at the core of your discipline.

Emancipate? Epigenetic? Elegy? Any words starting with F? Fraction? Fracture? Fragment?

I would make the point that anyone who teaches vocabulary is teaching reading. By modus ponens all teachers are reading teachers.

For me personally, vocabulary growth and its role in human consciousness is a source of wonder. As I taught the course over time, I observed hundreds of preservice teachers warm to the idea that it is impossible to separate vocabulary from content, and it is ludicrous to try to separate content from comprehension—just as it is impossible to separate comprehension from reading.

After the National Reading Panel (2000) published its report, I pulled a useful passage from the chapter on comprehension for discussion:

Of course, every discipline taught in any formal school has its precision vocabulary requiring ever finer distinctions and interrelated nuances. This is the nature of expertise. Then there is the abstract vocabulary of epistemology: memory, learn, behavior, experiment, observe, compare, etc. What are we trying to accomplish as learners?

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Stretching the rubber band so far that it could never snap back into is original form, this is the objective of the course. Teaching a pedagogy of possibilities in ordinary classrooms, demystifying words like dyslexia and metacognition, modeling strategies that afford learners opportunities to strengthen their capacity to self-correct and self-teach, this was my work.