The Teacher and the Classroom

In Becoming a Nation of Readers (BNR) (1985), Richard C. Anderson, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A. G. Wilkinson argued that the quality of teaching is a powerful influence on children's reading development–more powerful than the influence of the general teaching approach or materials used. In this article, we focus on one research tradition in the area of literacy teaching quality: case studies of teachers who are identified as effective or exemplary as literacy educators. Review of these studies reveals a wide range of well-coordinated practices used by effective literacy educators, echoing, expanding, and deepening points made in BNR.