"I Felt Like My Brain Was Going to Explode": Positioning Beginning Teachers as Struggling Readers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Preservice Teachers Negotiate Learning Through Struggle

Abstract

Beginning reading teachers’ successful reading histories means they often cannot relate to the struggles of adolescent readers. To combat this, on the first day of a course on teaching reading at a selective university, we asked our beginning English teachers to read a section from an electrical engineering textbook and answer the questions at the end of the section. Data collected include student reflections, researcher observations and field notes, and transcribed debriefing discussions. Results indicate that the highly academically successful beginning teachers displayed reading behaviors strikingly similar to K-12 struggling readers. Results also show that the exercise helped reposition reading as a process for these beginning teachers, highlighting components of expert reading that were previously invisible to them.

Authors

• Emily Pendergrass, Vanderbilt University

• Dan Reynolds, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College