Linnea Lindquist
Imagine you are a medical student. You look forward to helping sick people. During the training, you will learn that it is a duty to save lives. You ask when you will learn how and the lecturer answers – in practice. After the last internship, you are disappointed. You still don’t know what to do. The lecturer replies that you can solve it on your own.
Of course, it doesn’t work that way in the medical program. During the training, the future doctors learn the craft.
The teaching program, on the other hand. There, teachers are forced to find out on their own how one teaches.
The public probably believes that all new teachers have been taught the best method for teaching reading. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you. The training is theoretical, with the exception of a few touches in real life. You learn about reading but not the best method and above all not how it must be taught.
Researchers agree that the method phonics is best for learning to read. In Swedish: to listen to reading. At my school, we consciously work with reading already in the preschool class. We give students strategies, keys they need to crack the reading code.
We start with mouth grafting to learn how to form letter sounds. Step two is to learn how a letter is converted into a sound. Then we go through how the sound sounds and that sounds put together become words. Finally, they learn to fly between the sounds and decode, i.e. read.
Teaching children to read is a craft. It is difficult and time consuming.
There are of course other methods, but with them students do not learn to read as quickly and as well. It seems silly to teach in a way that produces worse results.
The real crisis is that prospective teachers are not being taught the craft.
When I point out shortcomings in teacher education, I often get the answer that students are taught to read in practice. The most important content of teacher education is thus outsourced to practice.
But for it to work, all tutors must use the best method. In the right way. In addition, the internship must take place at the same time as the tutor’s lessons in early reading are taking place outside the schools. I wonder how they thought it would work in our unregulated school. There are approximately 5,000 primary schools that are organized in different ways.
When the universities shirk their responsibilities, they fail new teachers.
I usually ask student teachers who come to my school if they feel confident about learning to read. Not a single student answered me that they had to learn the craft. You have to learn What and why but not concrete enough: how. Apparently, the teacher must figure out which method is best. It is difficult when you are new to the profession and may have never taught on your own.
The politicians, on the other hand, seem surprised that the students read poorly. There is of course a connection between teacher training not teaching how to teach students to read and them reading too poorly.
Politicians compete to see who can use the word reading crisis the most times. The problem is not that students read worse, have poor reading comprehension or read fewer books. The real crisis is that prospective teachers are not being taught the craft. When teachers don’t teach the right way, students won’t learn either. School becomes boring and a struggle.
The government says they will restore the knowledge school. Good! The solution to the reading crisis is for all student teachers to learn phonics during the training.
Linnea Lindquist is an independent columnist on Expressen’s editorial page. Read more of her texts here.