My ultimate goal in teaching is to show young people that a magic exists in reading that rivals any other pastime.
After my first year of teaching, I realized a dire need exists for teachers who know how to intervene and work with older students struggling to read. When I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education, I was simply not prepared for the real-life classroom. My undergraduate training prepared me for a utopian classroom with on-level and above-level readers all interested in striving to reach bigger and better goals. My real-life classroom, however, held very few on-level readers and even fewer above-level readers. This made me realize that I needed more education and preparation that on-the-job training simply could not provide.
I wanted to earn a degree from a reputable university that would challenge my thinking. If I’m going to invest two years of my life to earn an advanced degree, I want to emerge from the experience as a more well-rounded and well-informed individual with a challenging and useful master’s degree program. The University of Alabama has given me just that at a competitive and affordable tuition rate.
The online format is not impersonal, as some might think. My professors were caring and involved in my progress, and we stayed in frequent communication via email, telephone and Skype. In fact, I was observed more often in this online master’s degree program than I was in my face-to-face bachelor’s degree program. I recorded myself completing lessons with my students, my professors viewed the recordings, and then we Skyped as a follow-up.
This degree has done exactly what I hoped it would. The knowledge I gleaned from my professors has helped me in the classroom. I have applied strategies I learned to help my lower-level readers by bringing them closer and closer to reading at grade level. I learned how to assess the current reading levels of the struggling readers in my class — often inclusion students — and diagnose the specific skills with which they struggle, and work with them as I track their progress. I feel that the knowledge provided through this program has better equipped me to help all of the students who enter my classroom regardless of reading level.
To anyone interested in pursuing Reading Specialist certification, I encourage you to look into this fully online program. If you desire to help your students read better, this program will provide you with the information and tools you need to do just that. You will acquire more than a degree; you will gain a better understanding of the process of reading, and you will gain a better understanding of what it means to be an effective teacher.
Published: May 17th, 2018