Should academic faculty be expected to teach reading skills? Masters degree in college teaching.

Sadly, I am encountering more and more college students that are struggling in college because of missing or weak basic skills like reading and basic mathematics. Even more sad has been the colleges' attitudes towards these individuals. There is a strong belief that the students' struggles are not the colleges' responsibilities and other agencies exist to handle those problems. This whole situation bothers me at many levels.

1. So many agencies proclaim to have student learning at heart; and yet, a teacher-centric focus in these agencies and measurements of success that only cares about seat time and behavioral compliance all tell a different story about what the focus really is. High schools need everyone to graduate on a time schedule or else funding falls off. Colleges need butts in seats to offset their operating costs. At least from a financial standpoint, agencies just need to have the student show up, evidence of learning would be a nice offshoot.

2. A lack of competency or proficiency evidence continues to be a barrier in identifying and assisting those that struggle. Around 5-7th grades, there is a large population of students that begin to struggle in mathematics and those struggles continue to build until the student is unsuccessful in high school mathematics. Students that fail a subject treated more with a punishment attitude rather than a supportive attitude. At a college level, the frequent need to seek outside help services continues to send a life long message to students that learning is an individual fault in their make up. The reality is that the systems involved are not set up to support individual learners' needs well. If the evidence shows that a student struggles with linguistic or logical intelligences, the student will fail at school rather than the school failing to address the other intelligences or learning styles at all. 

3. Having worked with educational support programs, it is alarming at to see some ineffective practices in place. Many of the strategies are to "help the individual through this" as if it is simply a scary dungeon we need to traverse and then everything will be pink meadows after we get out. This focus on just surviving an event rather than identifying and supporting learning skills or strategies is a main reason why many educational support agencies do not find success. An agency may even have great numbers (attendance) and yet the student continues to struggle when processing similar situations in college and in the work places. One student shared a statement that always resonates with me. "I guess it's your turn to work on me. When you get frustrated and give up on me, just make sure you set me up with someone nice like you will ya." This was after our first 3 hour session with each other. I ended up having to do more psychological triage with this student than academic support for her to find the success in life she was striving for. 

As to your question, Dave, about the university programs and college teachers offering student reading support, I have to share another disappointment. I teach because I passionately care about helping others find success in their life paths. My focus starts and ends with the individual as my focus and I need to adapt all the time to best support individuals I meet. In contrast, I work with instructors all the time that simply show up and do their lessons and feel very successful in their teaching practice. Some of these same teachers may ridicule struggling students when talking with me in private. This is shocking and disappointing and I wish my meeting with such "teachers" was more rare. Perhaps it is a difference between teaching and instructing? Instructing is "detailed information telling how something should be done, operated, or assembled.". Teaching is "to impart knowledge of or skill in". It sounds like CELT is trying to help support Instructors to move over to Teaching practice and I feel that is a much needed thing at all levels. I am sad that this is not a requirement of the profession, but it is a positive step in the right direction. 

Do people in adult education find there are more instructors compared to teachers? Are there benefits to having both in the education adult education offers? If so many at the college level are instructors, how do we best support our adult ed learners to be successful when the learner may best thrive with a teacher instead?

Hi Dave:

Would you say a bit more about the reading skills you have in mind?  I'm familiar with college faculty teaching students the ins and outs of reading in their specialty.  For example, one history professor I know would spend a considerable amount of time the first month helping students change their thinking, reading, and writing to be more like a historian's.  This included digging deep into vocabulary, breaking down a reading, encouraging questions and small group discussion, addressing how historical readings are structured, etc.  This process might border on the Reading Apprenticeship framework (discussed in the LINCS COP).  Or, do you have something else in mind?

Cynthia

Chapter 4 of Learning to Achieve (L2A) offers a research-based framework for understanding reading disabilities, as well as strategies for working with students to take greater ownership of their learning needs.  Could the Learning to Achieve (L2A) and Differentiated Instruction and Lesson Planning courses available through the LINCS Learning Portal serve as a reference for higher education faculty in the U.S. to develop similar competencies to what is offered by MALTHE in the U.K.?  If not, what is missing from the L2A resources that would help make it more applicable to higher education faculty in the U.S.?

Mike Cruse

Disabilities in Adult Education Moderator

michaelcruse74@gmail.com

Good question, Dave! Thanks for the good points made by all here regarding reading instruction.

I suppose that most teachers regard reading instruction like that of grammar instruction - you need to have special training to do it right. At very early literacy practices for children and adults, that may be true.  Later? Hummm... I have often heard college faculty tell me, "I don't know the first thing about teaching reading, and I don't have time to learn or to implement it if I did!" I hope that more PD is geared to helping those instructors grasp the fact that reading isn't all about prefixes, main ideas and details, outlining, spelling, phonics, or speed. Perhaps it would help upper-level teachers identify what reading actually means and to further reflect on how they might be of service to needy students without great effort or disruption to the syllabus.

Research provides strong evidence that if children in our public schools don't read well by the end of Grade 3, they are not likely to catch up. They are the adults that come to us in ABE instruction. In the graduate courses that I teach among K-12 teachers, apparently teachers from Grades 4-12 simply do not and do not want to address reading challenges among students. They might refer students to remediation, but they don't feel competent to address reading difficulties in their classes. Resistance to integrating reading and writing instruction in higher levels and different disciplines is a common factor.

But then, I believe in integrating everything: reading, writing, math and technology into all disciplines and all disciplines into reading, writing, math, and technology instruction. I wonder what that would look like and feel like? If you are old enough, you might be familiar with the general doctor who used to make home visits to address all kinds of ailments. What would that look like in education? Old fashioned? Leecy

Leecy Wise, Moderator
Reading and Writing, and Diversity and Literacy CoPs
leecywise@gmail.com