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BOX 9-1 Preparing Preschool Teachers to Promote Literacy A 15-year partnership between the Erikson Institute and Head Start staff in Chicago has evolved into professional development that spans 10 months of the year and includes seminars as well as work in preschool centers. Preschool practitioners have durable preconceptions of what activities are appropriate and productive for the children they work with, as McLane and McNamee (1990, 1997) point out. When the Institute staff introduces the Head Start teachers to new activities, strategies, or concepts that can foster literacy. the effort can be undermined unless attention is paid to the adaptations practitioners make to the new activities, strategies, and concepts when they take them into their classrooms. The institute researchers found it especially important to grapple with Head Start teachers' preference for oral over written communication. When the in-service curriculum focused on shared storybook reading, it tended to be realized as storytelling by the Head Start teachers in their work with the children; emergent group writing tended also to turn into storytelling; dramatic play that once had a literacy focus would turn into play devoid of reference to written language (McLane and McNarnee. 1997). When the teachers transformed the activities, the results might be enjoyable and valuable for the children, but the part of the activity that was intended to foster literacy often disappeared. Only given more extended collaborative work between the institute staff and the Head Start teachers were such problems ironed out and the new approaches refined for maximum value for literacy support. McLane and McNamee came to recognize that the teachers valued oral language artistry and creatively provided occasions for children to develop it. Some of the teachers, though, as they grew up in the same communities that the children currently in their care are being reared in, had developed no fondness for reading and writing. It was easy, then. for the teachers to de-emphasize and eventually lose the literacy aspect of new activities when doing them with the children. With continued effort to address the literacy purpose of the new activities in seminars and in the context of the specific preschool classrooms, the in-service education was more complete and the literacy aspects of the new activities appeared more reliably.

A critical component in the preparation of preschool teachers is supervised, relevant, clinical experience in which pre-service teachers receive ongoing guidance and feedback. A principal goal of this experience is the ability to integrate and apply the knowledge base in