What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading
This guest essay features Claude Goldenberg, Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University, who shares how his thinking about teaching reading changed through close work with colleagues who held very different views, and how that experience points to a broader lesson about how teachers learn, how assumptions shift, and how practice can improve. It is adapted from a recent podcast episode of Literacy Across Languages. Learn more in his Substack 'We Must End the Reading Wars... Now."
When I went to college, I thought I'd go to law school or something like that. Education was not in my sights. But I found out in college there was a program you could take to get a teaching credential. My roommate told me, you know, before we go to law school, it might be good to get a teaching credential. It won't mess up your schedule. You don't have to take bulletin boards 101 or anything, and it will give you something to do for a year or two before going to law school. I said, okay, that sounds okay. As it turned out, over the remaining years I got more interested in education and less in law.
By the time I graduated from college, my parents were living in San Antonio. And I thought, well, I could go back there and teach because in addition to being interested in education, I spoke Spanish. So I thought that was sort of an additional skill I could bring to the proceedings.
I considered different places, but I always wanted to work with kids who just, you know, don't have the opportunities that I grew up with, and how many of the people in my socio-demographics grew up.
I wanted to teach history, my major in college, but I was offered a job as an eighth grade reading teacher in probably the poorest school district in Texas. Back then I thought, well, the more impossible the assignment, the more I wanted it. The students I’d teach were kids who, in eighth grade, were reading so poorly that the principal said, you can’t have your elective—you’re going to take remedial reading. And he assigned me, a first-year teacher, wet behind the ears and with very little preparation. And I struggled. I mean, it was hard. I had a lot of “ganas,” you know, a lot of wanting to help. But I realized I just didn’t know that much. I really didn’t have very good teacher preparation. Not to disparage anyone or any program, but I just wasn’t prepared. And so I decided to go back to graduate school and try to learn something—to understand why these kids were arriving in seventh and eighth grade so far behind academically.