My dream had finally come true! After endless hours of writing and studying, I earned my doctorate degree in Reading and Language. I was ready to settle into a new career as an assistant professor of literacy at a university in fall semester. How would I impart what I learned to the next generation of teachers tactfully? I wondered about this goal as I prepared coursework for five classes for the upcoming semester.

New Possibilities in the Collegiate Classroom

The prospect of putting together a substantial experience for the teacher candidates made me slightly nervous. Sacrificing personal time during the summer to thoroughly read texts and create syllabi and learning activities for students was necessary. In plainly written lesson plans, I developed assignments deliberately that would require students to do more than memorize facts in texts and regurgitate rationales for why the best teaching practices or theories were adopted. A signature assignment was created to encourage students to read current research in the field of education. This assignment would change the way my students and I viewed the integration of research into a literacy methods class.

The Professional Journal Article Defense assignment was created to help teacher candidates defend the use of current research in an intermediate classroom. The teacher candidates are allowed to choose an idea that was published in The Reading Teacher, Teaching Exceptional Children, or the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy to complete the project. The teacher candidate is expected to read the contents of the article, integrate the information into a current lesson that will be taught during a field experience in a public classroom, and obtain three student work samples to describe how the idea helped children learn a new skill or strategy. My intention was to create an assignment that would prepare teacher candidates to convince any parent or administrator why the research-based idea is beneficial to the school curriculum.

Trial and Tribulation

The teacher candidates enrolled in the class were initially horrified by the project’s content. They expressed their fears openly in class and were not afraid to share their disbelief that the project was possible to complete. The teacher candidates were equally unsure about collecting work samples to describe how an idea from a journal can be integrated in a lesson plan to help children learn. I assured them that they engage in the practice more frequently in the program than they realize. Similar tasks are completed when the teacher candidates visit www.teacherspayteachers.com to purchase materials to teach lessons or when they visit www.pinterest.com for ideas to create lively holiday bulletin boards for the class. The task of completing the Professional Journal Article Defense assignment is no different from informal tasks they complete each semester.

However, the assignment requires teacher candidates to seek scholarly resources to borrow ideas and report the results of its integration into instruction. For example, teacher candidates are responsible for providing a written explanation of how each work sample (e.g., written quiz or composition) demonstrates how the children were able to complete the task successfully.

I was pleased when the teacher candidates were able to push aside skeptical thoughts and find outstanding literacy, motivation, or math ideas from the research journals to integrate into class instruction. For example, one teacher candidate found an article that encouraged educators to allow children to define causes and effects of events in expository texts. In order to help children understand the definition of each term, the teacher candidate used the research to provide them the opportunity to reenact several stories in the presence of their peers. The class was encouraged to identify the cause-and-effect component in each scenario. One child demonstrated how an individual who does not get enough sleep (cause) can become very tired (effect).

Although the teacher candidate did not collect samples of this initial task, the idea influenced her to present more scenarios to the students to identify how causes and effects can show that relationships exist between concepts, objects, or humans. The children were later encouraged to independently read sentences and identify the cause and effect in the sentences. For instance, the students were asked to use their knowledge of relationships to identify the cause and effect in the following sentences:

• The blizzard hit the city, so all schools were closed.
• You should brush your teeth often so you don’t get cavities.
• I fell off the bike and scraped my knee.

The teacher candidate was able to collect work samples demonstrating the students’ understanding of causes and effects in written texts. The teacher candidate acknowledged that the content in the journal article motivated her to engage students in active simulations to learn the concepts in the class. As a result, the activity increased student involvement and academic progress of the participants.

The Professional Journal Article Defense assignment not only promotes reading engagement, but also supports an educator’s effort to purposely adapt research ideas from established scholars. More important, teacher candidates are encouraged to think carefully about why their ideas should be included in the curriculum. The study of research should be welcomed in literacy methods classes because it motivates participants to share with others why the idea is beneficial to the school curriculum. We should encourage the next generation of teachers to fully indulge in reading and adoption of contemporary research.

Claudia Gates is an assistant professor at literacy at Minnesota State University Moorhead.