Schools all over the country are changing how reading is taught and they face two big questions:  What curriculum will we use?  How will we implement it? Decisions about what will be taught, when, and for how many minutes will determine the daily experience of students, and how much they’ll learn in school. Instructional time is limited, so building classroom schedules requires a series of choices that ultimately reflect our values. Looking back at my old schedules, I can see how my understanding of effective reading instruction has evolved. I see similar change unfolding across ..read more

I thought experiencing reading difficulty of our own could help us relate to the comprehension challenges that our students face, so I planned a professional development session for the teachers at my school. To select a text to share, I followed the parameters we often use when choosing passages for students: They could read the words with 98% accuracy. The text was on a topic relevant to our work. It was about something related to our real-world experiences. There were some interesting words and concepts that would require explanation. It was an appropriate length for the time available. An ..read more

When I began to learn about phonics instruction, I saw spelling puzzles in words I’d never noticed before, and I gained appreciation for the difficulty of learning to decode. Now, as an increasing number of students at my school can read accurately, the challenge of comprehension is looming large. It’s hard to identify potential barriers to comprehension when students read a text we ourselves can easily understand. And it’s harder yet to fix breakdowns in comprehension. “Language is pretty invisible if you know it well… if you don’t know it well, then it is a big wall.” Lily Wong Fillmore I t ..read more

Perfect Isn’t Possible I love the bustle of a new school year. In the days before school starts, I organize and label absolutely everything, from the books in my classroom library to the blocks of time in my planbook. I remember and laugh at my grandma’s joke– “Everything’s perfect until the kids come!”– but still I spend hours color coding and alphabetizing. Kids will doodle on their notebooks, glue sticks will dry out, and books will become dogeared. But the inevitability of wear and tear doesn’t quash excitement in the beginning of the year. Experience teaches us to anticipate mess and inst ..read more

This Letter Was Originally Published in The Hechinger Report To the Editor:  Re OPINION: A call for rejecting the newest reading wars Nov. 18, 2022 We are teachers who were sold the very story that journalist Emily Hanford describes in her new podcast: a myth about how students learn to crack the alphabetic code. So, we were disappointed to see the recent letter by fifty-eight professors, authors and curriculum developers responding to Hanford’s work. Instead of taking the opportunity to adapt their message, materials and pedagogy in response to a strong body of evidence, synthesized by H ..read more

As discussion of Emily Hanford’s new podcast builds, teachers are questioning stories we were sold by people we trusted. For some teachers, this is the first time they’ve doubted instructional materials that are ubiquitous in elementary and reading intervention classrooms. When we question the tenets of Balanced Literacy, teachers can unearth a trove of information. But how to make sense of it all? As researchers Stanovich and Stanovich explain: The current problem is how to sift through the avalanche of misguided and uninformed advice to find genuine knowledge. Our problem is not information ..read more

When we’re asked to switch to explicit, systematic instruction, many teachers worry that we’ll no longer be able to tailor our teaching to the students in front of us. Calls for whole-class phonics instruction lasting 30-45 minutes, for example, summon fears that our students will be bored by concepts they already know or aren’t yet ready for. And they resurface memories of teachers stripped of our ability to differentiate instruction as we recall problematic implementation plans during No Child Left Behind. Part of the enduring appeal of Balanced Literacy is that it acknowledges the vari ..read more

Though Balanced Literacy was wrong about some important things, it has practices worth saving. And understanding the good in that approach to teaching literacy can help us transition to more effective instruction. Seeing the Good Balanced Literacy taught us the… Importance of a print-rich classroom Love of reading aloud to children Value of students seeing us write Pride in having an extensive classroom library Power of a mini-lesson Utility of great anchor charts Procedures to teach students how to behave as readers and writers Events that bring joy and accountability  (author’s chair ..read more

Can We Please Stop Talking About Phonics? The discussion about the science of reading and its refutation of Balanced Literacy is often mischaracterized as being all about phonics. It’s not. But when reading researchers evaluated how a popular Balanced Literacy program addresses phonics, fluency, text complexity, building knowledge, vocabulary, and the quality of its supports for English Learners, only the part about phonics made front page news.  So a lot of people have been asking, “Can we stop talking about phonics?” because you’d be hard-pressed to find a primary grade teacher who isn ..read more

A GUIDE TO READING ADVOCACY, PART 1 (Click here to read Part 2.) A parent might assume, after seeing the special education teacher, specialists, classroom teacher, and principal gathered in the same room to discuss the progress of a single child, that collaboration is focused and ongoing. In truth, the team may not have the opportunity to reconvene until the next legally-required SST or IEP meeting. Many parents are unaware of how little collaboration happens in schools, but the impact of disconnected services is felt by the school specialists, administration, classroom teacher, and even the c ..read more