http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teachi ... ading.htmlTennessee Seeks New Teacher, Principal Requirements in 'Science of Reading'
By Catherine Gewertz on February 3, 2020
In a move that already has the governor's support, the Tennessee department of education is proposing major legislation that will require all current and new K-3 teachers—and those who train them—to know about evidence-based reading instruction.
The bill was filed just as Gov. Bill Lee was getting ready to deliver his State of the State address this evening. In the governor's prepared remarks, he said he was setting aside about $70 million in his fiscal 2021 budget to support the suite of early literacy requirements.
More states are getting interested in—and instituting—requirements that their teachers have mastered reading instruction that's solidly grounded in research. Among other things, decades of cognitive science research have shown that young students need explicit, systematic instruction in phonics to learn to decode words. And they need strong vocabulary and background knowledge to comprehend what they read. But even on a landscape of rising interest and action, the changes Tennessee is proposing are among the most comprehensive and far-reaching.
Word of these changes made its way onto social media, notably after a Jan. 21 meeting of the Tennessee Dyslexia Advisory Council, where Lisa Coons, the state's chief of standards and materials for K-12, made a presentation. In a series of tweets, Anna Thorsen, a parent member of that council, reported that Coons said that the state will take steps to make sure that "schools follow the science of reading," and that "cueing"—a common practice in which teachers encourage students to identify a word through context, picture, and other cues—will be "absent" from classrooms and teacher-prep programs.
It's vital that multi-cueing word-guessing strategies are totally discredited for lifting the words off the page. This means that intervention programmes, too (such as Reading Recovery) need to be identified and either change to be in line with the science - or go.