Concepedia

Abstract

Kindergarten (N = 23), grade 1 (N = 34), and grade 2 (N = 26) teachers, who were nominated by their supervisors (N = 45) as effective in educating their students to be readers and writers, responded to 2 questionnaires about their practice. As expected, there were shifts in reported practices between kindergarten and grade 2, although there was much more similarity than difference in the reports of kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 teachers. The teachers claimed commitments to (a) qualitatively similar instruction for students of all abilities, along with additional support for weaker readers; (b) literate classroom environments; (c) modeling and teaching of both lower-order (e. g., decoding) skills and higher-order (e. g., comprehension) processes; (d) extensive and diverse types of reading by students; (e) teaching students to plan, draft, and revise as part of writing; (f) engaging literacy instruction (i. e., instruction motivating literate activities); and (g) monitoring of students' progress in literacy.