During reading time at Westview Elementary School in Northglenn, student teacher Jonathan Brown gathers a group of four or five students and listens closely as they read aloud.
He listens for the words that make them stumble, tells them to sound out letters and helps them find clues by looking at word roots.
“Maybe that root of the word is something they’ve learned,” said Brown, who is earning an elementary teaching license at the University of Colorado at Denver.
Brown does this to gauge whether his students have “phonemic awareness,” one of five reading components that state and national experts say teachers must know if their pupils are to learn to read proficiently.
State education officials say the concept is so crucial that they will no longer approve teacher-preparation programs that fail to teach the five components: phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, fluency and vocabulary.
If teacher-preparation programs don’t include those components, the State Board of Education has “the right to shut down these programs,” said William Moloney, commissioner of education for the state’s 1,700 public schools.
The Colorado Department of Education in April created a “reading directorate” to scrutinize all teacher-preparation programs that deal with literacy, said Debora Scheffel, chairwoman of the initiative.
It will address what the department considers a reading conundrum in Colorado. A little more than 60 percent of public-school students can read at grade level on state tests, and a national assessment found that just 32 percent to 37 percent of the state’s students are proficient, Scheffel said.
For years, the Department of Education has reviewed teacher-preparation programs and typically grants approvals that allow programs to operate for five years, Moloney said.
With the directorate in place, three institutions in the state – Adams State College, the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Phoenix – have all been granted only year- long provisional approvals while they undergo a state review.
But leaders of the state’s colleges and universities that offer teacher-preparation programs have taken issue with the new directorate.
Eugene Sheehan, dean of the School of Educational Research, Leadership and Technology at the University of Northern Colorado, said the reading directorate was imposed on higher- education institutions without specific details.
“They didn’t have their criteria in place,” he said.
Scheffel acknowledged that the department has not yet completed the criteria to guide higher-education institutions.
The five components for reading were originally outlined in 2000 by a group of literacy experts, parents, teachers and others, said Peggy McCardle, a reading expert with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the panel’s report.
“We kind of always knew these were the parts of reading,” she said. “What people weren’t really paying attention to is how you teach them.”
Cheryl DeLong, director of literacy in the Douglas County School District, agrees that in many districts, teachers don’t understand the significance of the reading components. Teachers, she said, “should come with knowing those components and understanding what they are and how to teach them.”
Lynn Rhodes, dean of the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, said she hasn’t seen evidence that a child’s inability to read is directly linked to teachers coming out of higher-education programs.
“They have absolutely no data to suggest that the new teachers are the contributors to this,” she said. “Learning is lifelong. … We can’t train them to do specific reading curriculum. We teach them how to think about and teach reading in general.”
