Someone once said to me a long time ago, if you feel you are getting nowhere and you want to get somewhere, quit rocking on the same horse. Get off the horse and start moving. Well, that surely lit a fire under me. In those days we had to have a master’s degree in order to keep a teaching license current in Indiana, and I decided it was time to get with it. I did not want to waste my time with more general education courses, so I decided, with the help and insistence of my mentor (everyone needs a mentor), to get a reading endorsement as part of my master’s degree. I did and then later professionalized it.
In today’s environment, a reading license can be a dual license within many college undergraduate elementary programs and a second subject area for middle school teacher education candidates. Then it would be wise to go on to get a master’s degree in reading. There are lots of opportunities out there to use this fabulous training in addition to making efficient use of time and money. In other words, do not waste time taking frivolous electives within undergraduate or graduate training programs.
So what does it mean to get off the rocking horse? Well, let us face it. We are getting nowhere fast in the present world of teaching kids to read. Why?
We talk more than we do,
Teachers and professional assistants are not sufficiently trained for their roles, and
We talk too much about literacy and forget that a special emphasis needs to be placed on reading—reading is reading is reading. Let us not forget that. There is more, but that is enough for now.
Why do middle school teachers need a reading license? We are addressing the needs of elementary age students. Then it stops.
The NAEP scores for middle school students are not significantly improving, and high school dropout rates are not improving. We give
all kinds of reasons, but the bottom line is if you cannot read, you will not succeed in school or life. I work a lot with GED and college
programs in prisons. Many of those individuals have said that not being able to read and understand the content made them just give up.
Then they turned to other things and there they are.
I asked some middle school teachers who have a reading license how it helped them as classroom teachers. Overall, the answers were that the training has helped them become aware of the reading difficulties of their students; they can actually help students improve; they understand the developmental process much better because they are trained to work with the various levels of students and various levels of difficulties; they have much more confidence in their abilities to improve student learning; and they can easily find out where their students are and then get them where they need to be in their learning. In addition, they now have the knowledge of strategies to not only help their own students but coach other teachers and paraprofessionals as well.
All the money, time, and resources in the world are not going to raise reading scores on those ever-present tests and more importantly, help students be better readers, if our teachers are not specialists in the area of reading. That is just common sense. So, you middle school teachers go out there and get that reading license. You can do it. Success is in the works if you are in the works and off that horse. PS. We grandparents are depending on you.