Personal journeys: Teaching teachers to teach literacy

Abstract This study is a description of a teacher research project. The purpose of the project was two‐fold. First, I wanted to use it to help me carefully reflect and examine my own teaching, so that I could move past the “naïve” label. Second, I wanted to understand how my instruction impacted my preservice teachers. Results from this teacher research project suggest this reading methods course was effective in adding some strategies to the students’ understandings of reading. Students seemed more willing to add reading strategies in areas where they lacked prior knowledge and experiences, such as fluency and assessment, while demonstrating more reluctance to change in areas familiar to them, such as word identification and comprehension. Results imply a need for educators to do more teacher research at the university level and further research into the role prior knowledge plays in the preservice teachers’ willingness to adapt new instructional strategies.