Preservice teachers as kidwatchers: Learning to observe and document how children read

Liwanag, Maria Perpetua Socorro U., & Kim, Koomi. (2011). Preservice teachers as kidwatchers: Learning to observe and document how children read. Talking Points, 22(2),15-21.

The authors tell us how having preservice teachers conduct miscue analysis procedures with children helped those preservice teachers understand the reading process, look in new ways at students’ miscues, and learn more about their students as readers. The article is anecdotal, rather than a more formal research report. We read about how these two teacher educators built assignments that involved miscue analysis and reflection on that process into their preservice course, which included a 20-hour practicum in an urban or rural school. Several excerpts from the preservice teachers’ reflective writing assignments are shared, and those excerpts were the most powerful pieces of the article for me, more so than the authors’ descriptions of course assignments and the rationales behind those assignments were. I always am interested in hearing the voices of learners more than in the voices of those who are observing the learners, and would have liked to see more excerpts. What the authors have to say here about miscue analysis, though clear and well-grounded, is nothing really new, especially to the typical readers of this journal, most of whom are quite familiar with miscue analysis and have a good deal of experience with it. I’m not sure how far this article advances what we know, but I did appreciate it as an affirmation of my own practices as a literacy teacher educator.

Like the authors, I also am the instructor of an introductory literacy methods course, and I also introduce miscue analysis during that course. Although I see miscue analysis as a valuable tool that preservice teachers will need in their assessment “toolboxes”, the actual competency with the procedure as an assessment tool comes later, in a more “clinical” course taught by one of my colleagues. For me, the value of introducing miscue analysis early in a preservice program lies in the way miscue analysis helps us to understand the reading process. Reading is a stunningly beautiful and complex process of meaning construction that is different for each reader, and though that is challenging to us as teachers, it is also a miracle. Purely quantitative measures simply cannot show us this process. Even miscue analysis, as with all assessments, is still just a reflection, or an echo; we are always “seeing through a glass darkly” and the picture is always incomplete. Still, miscue analysis gives more hope of revealing a child’s reading strategies and processes than any other tool I have come across. It certainly tells me more than counting children’s “errors” as if they were all created equal, or judging how good a reader someone is by the number of words they can pronounce in one minute. No assessment tool can provide a full picture of a child; we probably need combinations of various kinds of data. However, miscue analysis can provide a lot of useful information about how reading “works” for each individual child, and should be a part of every teacher’s repertoire.

As the authors did, I find that the preservice teachers in my classes have developed conceptions of reading based upon the more quantitative kinds of assessment. These conceptions come from the kinds of reading assessment and instruction that were used with them as students, and since the conceptions are rooted deeply in the preservice teachers’ experience, they tend to be unquestioned and difficult to revise. Miscue analysis can provide some powerful evidence to help those conceptions broaden. I see this most strongly when I share an audio recording of a miscue analysis procedure I conducted with a third grader in an urban school. Just like “Dana”, the child in the video used by the article’s authors, my third grader, “M”, sounds like a struggling reader when you listen to her oral reading with the purpose of counting “errors”, but when you listen to the retelling, my third grader, like Dana, shows amazing comprehension and even what Louise Rosenblatt would call aesthetic engagement with the text. For both Dana and “M”, reading is a process of active meaning construction; merely counting errors devalues them as readers. Sharing examples like this creates powerful developmental moments for my preservice teachers. I’m glad to know that others have had the same experience, and this article, though not breaking new ground for me, still deepened my intention to continue introducing preservice teachers to miscue analysis, even though some have discouraged my doing so on the grounds that this approach is “no longer in favor.”