Recommended Reading: American Educator

One of our favorite reads here at Early Ed Watch is AFT's American Educator--a great quarterly magazine on education that, if you're not currently reading, you should be. In recent years, American Educator has featured numerous articles relevant to early education--including a sobering analysis highlighting the poor quality of state standards for K-2 earlier this year, E.D. Hirsch on the importance of developing vocabulary and content knowledge for warding off the fourth grade slump in reading scores, and a terrific 2004 issue that focused on preventing early reading difficulties.

The Fall 2008 American Educator, out this week, is no exception. It includes a good reported piece describing the implementation of a scientifically based reading curriculum in Richmond, Va., and the gains disadvantaged students there have made in reading since the program was implemented. A separate sidebar asks whether the federal Reading First program, which supports implementation of scientifically based reading curricula like Richmond's, and for which federal appropriators have eliminated funding in the fiscal year 2009 appropriations bills, deserves a second chance. Researchers from the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, who are conducting state level evaluations of Reading First in 5 states, describe the positive impacts their research finds Reading First has had in those states, and raise questions about whether results from a recent, highly publicized national evaluation of Reading First tell the whole story about the program's impacts. American Educator is doing a valuable service getting quality, research-based information about curriculum and standards to educators in an accessible format.

Although it doesn't appear in the latest issue, one of our favorite thing about American Educator is Daniel Willingham's regular "Ask a Cognitive Scientist" column. Willingham, a psychology profesor at the University of Virginia, writes about application of cognitive science (an interdisciplinary field that studies the mind and how it affects behavior and cognition) to education--and much of what he writes is relevant to early education. In the Summer 2008 issue, for example, Willingham looked at the concept of developmentally appropriate practice, arguing that some common assumptions about developmentally appropriate practice--that classroom instruction should be matched to children's abilities and that children's development progresses in stages characterized by particular ways of thinking, for which some activities are developmentally appropriate while others are not--are not actually a useful guide to classroom practice. Considering how frequently the words "developmentally appropriate practice" appear in conversations about quality early childhood and early elementary schooling, Willingham's article is well worth checking out.

Willingham is adept at debunking commonly held but flawed beliefs about the brain and education. He recently made two great web videos looking at the problems with conventional wisdom around learning styles and "brain-based education," which are not only informative and research-based, but way more amusing than any discussion of neuroscience has a right to be. You can (and should) check them out on his website, which also features a listing of his American Educator commentaries, indexed by topic.

Photo of Daniel Willingham by Dan Addison, University of Virginia Public Affairs.