1. If you could go back and talk to yourself as a young teacher, what is one piece of advice you might offer?
Be humble. You can be confident and still humble. Humility will help you learn from your students, their parents, your colleagues. There is always so much to learn and knowledge and even wisdom resides in communities, not in individuals. Don't try to do things on your own. Get a thinking partner or two. Join the National Writing Project site near your school ASAP as they are the kind of thinking partners you need!
2. What do you see as both the major challenges and a few (or at least one) potential solution(s) for reading teachers right now?
A big challenge is the impoverished way the wider culture thinks about reading and the influence it has on impoverishing instruction. One example is the Science of Reading -- OK (but only OK) as far as it goes, but it misses what is most important about teaching reading and learning to read and learning to love reading. I want kids inquiring into how language and reading and writing work from Kindergarten on up -- I want them doing analytic phonics since it works as well as synthetic for decoding and it positions readers as inquirers. I want attention on engagement, on visualization, on participating in story worlds, on making connections and inferencing, on reflecting on how authors created texts and relating to authors as the intelligence behind the text. I want kids reading to learn and follow passions and create learning artifacts for other kids. All of this stuff is essential to engaged and expert reading and we focus on minutiae. Tom Newkirk has a great book entitled HOW TO HOLD ON TO GOOD IDEAS IN A TIME OF BAD ONES. Though he wrote this ten years ago or more, the title and idea holds even more true today. All the censorship efforts miss the purpose of literature to show us how to navigate difference and trouble, and they ignore the cognitive science behind how literature works to uplift us and make us better, with more social imagination, etc. My own research shows this and there is another new great book called WONDERWORKS that explores it.
3. What message would you send to future teachers about the importance of literacy/reading?
If we want our learners to achieve their fullest possible potential, and to navigate their lives with power and conscious competence. If we want them to develop social imagination and become democratic workers and citizens who are wide awake to the challenges of the world, of the environment, of others - then literacy is an essential path. Nothing could be more important to this path than literacy. You are teaching something essential to engaging, knowing, thinking, doing and being in any domain.
in TEACHING LITERACY FOR LOVE AND WISDOM, I define wisdom as:
Wisdom is becoming increasingly more conscious of interconnectedness (between people, between groups, and between people and creation); developing a profound respect for others and other perspectives; cultivating compassion; being guided by a greater good than materialism, status and image; valuing stillness and reflection - and seeking guidance from an inner versus outer locus of control; developing inner awareness of one’s own identity, perceptions, motivation and possibilities; and a commitment to application and agency: to service and social action for a communitarian good.
And I argue that literacy is a path to wisdom. You can not do anything more important than teach literacy.
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