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In an era of teacher quality reforms, one overlooked area for assessing readiness for teaching is education majors’ self‐efficacy for teaching reading. This gap is unfortunate, as teaching reading is a common responsibility among general and special education teachers. In the current push for RTI—one in which more general education teachers are increasingly called upon to provide reading support to students with learning disabilities, in addition to the support received from special educators—it is important to determine preservice teachers’ self‐efficacy for teaching reading. Self‐efficacy is an important construct to consider as it is related to eventual teacher attrition. The purpose of the current study was to develop a scale to measure elementary and special education majors’ self‐efficacy for teaching reading. With a sample of 110 education majors, a three‐factor scale was developed and demonstrated strong psychometric properties. Implications for the future of teacher education programs are discussed.

Author/illustrator school visits are literacy events that positively impact children's motivation to read and write. The emergence of COVID‐19, however, made face‐to‐face visits impossible, forcing visits to use video conferencing platforms. The assumption is that these virtual visits are a “lesser version” of the face‐to‐face visit: less engaging, less effective, and less inspiring, but our experiences (and data) offer a more nuanced perspective. We analyzed data generated during a virtual author/illustrator school visit with Sara Varon to better understand what kinds of interactions emerged between authors/illustrators and children in virtual spaces. We aimed to answer: How do children, teachers, and authors/illustrators co‐construct meaning during a virtual visit through the use of the chat function? The implications of our work have the potential to redesign author/illustrator visits moving forward—whether those are virtual or in‐person.

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