Preparing Our Teachers: Opportunities for Better Reading Instruction

Today's teachers face huge challenges, especially for teaching reading in the primary grades. They must understand as much as possible about how children develop and learn, what they know, and what they can do. They must be able to apply a variety of teaching techniques to meet the individual needs of students. Equally important, teachers must identify students' strengths and weaknesses and plan instructional programs that help students make progress. But a recent study reveals that fewer than half of American teachers report feeling "very well prepared" to meet such challenges.

Preparing Our Teachers seeks to improve that statistic by extracting practical information from the groundbreaking report issued by the National Research Council in 1998. This new book carefully outlines what classroom teachers need to know and what they need to be able to do to give children in preschool through grade 4 the essential opportunities to become good readers. It discusses what teacher education programs need to do to make their students good teachers of good readers and looks at what schools and school districts need to do to keep their teachers up to date for teaching reading.

Students at risk for educational failure represent the fastest growing segment of our school population. Preparing Our Teachers demonstrates to educators, parents, and policy makers alike that the first and most enduring way to meet children's literacy needs is to support their teachers and teachers-to-be.

Dorothy Strickland, Catherine Snow, Peg Griffin, M. Susan Burns, and Peggy McNamara for the New Brunswick Group