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Welcome to the Unbounded ELA Guide series! These guides are designed to explain what the new, high standards for ELA say about what students should learn in each grade, what they mean for curriculum and instruction, and how we can implement teaching practices that support them. This guide, which focuses on fluency in Grades 6-12, demonstrates how fluency practice can be integrated into ELA and instruction across content areas. It includes four parts. The first part defines reading fluency and why it is important for overall reading proficiency. The second part provides insight into how fluency can be fostered within thoughtfully structured ELA instruction. The third part provides proven and practical activities, framed by the expectations of the standards, that can be integrated into the ELA block. And the fourth part provides guidance on how many of these activities can be used to support fluency beyond the ELA Block.

Why do we focus on fluency? Nearly two-thirds of U.S. students in grades 4, 8 and 12 cannot read proficiently. This isn't a new problem, either: Only a small increase in the percentage of proficient readers has occurred in the last 25 years. http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#reading http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#reading http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#reading The stakes have never been higher, though, as it's increasingly difficult to meet the demands of college coursework and a range of careers without sophisticated reading and writing skills. The specificity and rigor of the new standards provide us with an opportunity to turn this tide, though-improving reading proficiency and life prospects for all students.

What is fluency?

It's likely that you have worked with students who stumble over words, sound them out very slowly, or read them too quickly in a robotic, monotone voice. These are examples of disfluent reading, and often indicate that these students are struggling with one or more of the characteristics of fluency. Fluency refers to how smoothly an individual reads and is defined by three characteristics:

1. Accurate decoding and word recognition.

2. Reading at a conversational pace.

3. Reading with appropriate prosody, or expression.

Why is Fluency Important?

Fluency is a critical link between decoding and comprehension. Although fluent reading doesn't guarantee comprehension, we know that disfluent reading hinders comprehension, especially with complex texts. Disfluent readers, instead of being able to make meaning as they read, spend a disproportionate amount of cognitive capacity sounding out words or wrestling with sentence structure, leaving little time and energy to actually comprehend what they're reading.

The good news is that fluency is an element of reading that can be improved relatively quickly with some attention and practice.

The good news is that fluency is an element of reading that can be improved relatively quickly with some attention and practice. We can work on building fluency during existing lessons, with few additional resources. The heaviest lift lies in planning to make time for a routine in which fluency instruction and practice is intentional and frequent.

Before we explore how to build fluency, let's consider elements of fluency in a bit more detail. As fluent readers ourselves, we have developed automatic and accurate recognition of a great many words, and the ability to quickly sound out (or attack) those that we don't automatically recognize. This automaticity allows us to maintain a conversational pace as we read. As fluent readers, we also understand intrinsically how to use intonation, pauses, stops, phrasing and inflection so our reading sounds as though we are speaking naturally to a friend. Our foundation of vocabulary and background knowledge provides support to help us make meaning of the text. These components that we rarely think about when reading are the foundations on which students' reading fluency rests. To grow and improve students' reading fluency, our goals must include:

Reading fluency can change with text content, genre or complexity, so we must continue to provide fluency practice for our students-beyond the elementary grades.

Reading fluency can change with text content, genre or complexity, so we must continue to provide fluency practice for our students-beyond the elementary grades. We can achieve the goals above by integrating activities and teaching practices that target fluency into the context of the work we do within complex, grade-level texts. For struggling readers, it may feel counterintuitive to use grade-level texts, but this is the most effective approach to building fluency for students at all levels. Using grade-level (versus reading-level) texts will require us to move more slowly, but the support that accompanies fluency work-rereading, modeling and feedback-will help all students access the rigor of these grade-level texts. We will approach our fluency work through modeled readings, shared readings and repeated readings, which will allow us to support students' productive struggle with the text. This shared struggle is designed to culminate in shared comprehension and success. Using complex, grade-level texts allows us to maximize gains within the short time we share with our students each day.

Let's begin by looking at fluency expectations. Then we'll look at some activities we can use to support fluency using complex, grade-level texts. We'll provide examples of where these activities can be included in lessons conducted with a variety of open educational resources (OER). Appendix A includes steps for how to conduct each activity or practice.

Standards Expectations

We don't find any standards for Grades 6-12 that explicitly address fluency, as the expectation is that students arrive to these grades having already developed it. However, as previously mentioned, fluency can change with text content, genre or complexity. So it's important that we continue to provide models of what fluent reading sounds like and practices that allow our students to improve their own fluency. It is also important to recognize that the standards that we do address in these grades are inextricably intertwined with fluency. In order to read the range, quality and complexity of texts demanded by the standards, our students will need to develop insight into knowledge of language (ELA.RA.L.3) and structure of texts, (ELA.RA.R.5) which will also assist their understanding of the expression with which the texts are to be read. They'll have to develop background knowledge to fully understand the ideas expressed through text. With this background knowledge comes vocabulary (ELA.RA.L.4) - the development of which contributes to our students' ability to automatically and accurately recognize words, another key element of fluency. Finally, exposure to the range of genres exemplified by the standards (ELA.RA.R.10) will foster in our students greater understanding of how each has its own appropriate pace and cadence of reading. While we address the standards, we provide conditions for improving fluency. By explicitly targeting fluency in our instruction, we support students' comprehension of the texts they read.

Strategic word attack to build fluency

Before we look at strategies that practice incorporating all of the elements of fluency, let's first take a look at how we can strengthen our students' word attack skills. Remember, fluency requires automatic word recognition, and the ability to quickly "attack," or figure out, words that are not immediately recognized.

We can teach our students to analyze syllables and word parts by explicitly teaching them the six syllable types (see "The Glorious Whitewasher" example below) and providing them with practice blending and segmenting known syllables to form and read words, phrases and sentences created from those syllables. We need to teach our students to look for meaningful chunks in unknown words. Understanding how to break words into syllables will aid them in pronunciation of words that they do not recognize.

Our students who struggle in reading often have trouble with multisyllabic words. For struggling students, these word attack skills are critical if we want them to make progress. For some students, this may require systematic, intentional intervention beyond the ELA classroom. During ELA, however, our struggling readers can benefit from instruction and practice in recognizing the spelling patterns that comprise syllables and morphemes (meaningful word parts, like prefixes and suffixes), improvement of which can improve the automaticity with which words are decoded and recognized.

Analyzing Syllables

Syllable instruction and practice as part of a routine, will allow us to strengthen students' ability to quickly figure out unknown words. The grade-level text you are currently using in class can be used as a resource to reinforce how to divide words into syllables, analyze them and blend them again to read them. This blending and segmenting practice with known words will support students' ability to apply the analysis to unknown words.

When to use syllabic analysis:

Explicitly teach students the six syllable types and rules for segmenting words based on the syllable, providing additional practice opportunities for struggling readers as often as possible.

Texts to use:

Understanding the meaningful parts of words (morphemes) helps both strong and struggling readers to determine or infer word meanings. When they learn about prefixes and suffixes, they begin to understand that there are word parts that have common meaning across words. Knowledge of these word parts will support both decoding and comprehension and, with enough practice, recognition of words. Targeting these word parts can be quite efficient: The seven most common prefixes account for 70 percent of prefixed words in printed English texts for Grades 3 through 9:

The meanings of suffixes are often less concrete, but are more frequently used in students' oral language, so learning to recognize them, with instruction and practice, can also be a powerful step toward fluency (and for proficient students, support additional vocabulary acquisition). Again, when we teach a small number of these suffixes, we build students' ability to apply meaning to many words. The five most frequent suffixes account for 75 percent of suffixed words in printed English texts for Grades 3 through 9:

When we provide students skills that help them to recognize, decode and understand the most common syllable patterns and affixes, we provide them with word-attack skills that will help them to read words comprised of those parts. By strategically focusing our work on the affixes that appear most often, we can maximize results in the limited time that we have with students.

When to use morphological analysis:

Explicitly teach students common root, base and compound words, along with common prefixes and suffixes during ELA class, providing additional practice opportunities for struggling readers as often as possible.

Subsequently, choose words from the text that will enhance the meaning of what students are reading.

Multiple exposures to these target words will support memory and retrieval, expanding the student's repertoire of recognized words.

Texts to use:

Choose g rade-level texts and passages from grade-level texts that you are using in your classroom instruction.

CCSS Exemplar Text: From Tom Sawyer, "The Glorious Whitewasher"

Launching To Kill a Mockingbird: Establishing Reading Routines (Chapter 1)

Rereading passages and repeated reading of previously read grade-level texts will help students to recognize words and spellings. The more repetitions, the more recognition. Rereading is also an excellent strategy for helping students to comprehend increasingly complex grade-level texts, particularly when we pair rereading with discussion and scaffolding.

Sharing the text to support fluency

As ELA teachers, most of us would agree that great and rich texts deserve to be read more than once: Every time we go back to our favorite work, we have the opportunity to get something new from it. Several strategies for increasing fluency involve rereading:

Masterful Reading (Modeling)

When we read aloud-masterfully-to students, we can both model pronunciation and emphasize appropriate expression and pace. We can use read-alouds to draw our students' attention to changes in the way a text is read. Some of our students may not really know how elements in the the text cue fluency. This is one of the reasons why a masterful read-aloud to explicitly model (and discuss) what fluent reading sounds like is helpful. As we read, we can also draw our students' attention to and discuss the relationship between text structures, word choice, syntax and meaning. This allows us to foster in our students a habit of paying attention to language and not just the individual words in the text. This modeling will help our students imagine what their own reading is supposed to sound like. It is important that we give our students multiple opportunities to reread the passages that we model.

When to use masterful read-alouds:

Texts to use:

Developing Core Proficiencies English Language Arts / Literacy Unit"The wolf you feed"

© 2015 Odell Education

To facilitate meaningful discussion, we need to assess which parts of the text will challenge our students. These are the clauses, phrases and vocabulary that we must highlight, model and discuss.

Text-Based Discussions

Much of our work in Grades 6-12 will involve text-based discussions. We'll use these discussions to dissect complex texts with our students, to ensure understanding of both the text and the meaning. To facilitate meaningful discussion, we need to assess which parts of the text will challenge our students. These are the clauses, phrases and vocabulary that we must highlight, model and discuss. For instance, by making sure that our discussion includes talking about text features that cue changes in expression and pace, we help our students build fluency and understanding at the same time. Don't forget conversations about vocabulary-identifying morphological origins of words will support students' word recognition and understanding. Point out how words are grouped to form meaningful phrases that change the pace and expression with which they are read.

For our struggling readers, select words from the text to practice syllable and affix word attack skills. We can help our students to better understand by having them practice parsing and chunking complex (juicy) sentences into their meaningful parts. Make sure these sentences and passages are read more than once, to strengthen both meaning-making and development of fluency. Having students shift their intonation and expression each time they read the sentence or passage can help them to understand how expression, called prosody, can change the interpretation of the sentence or passage. With practice, a reader with good prosody can use his or her skill to experiment or problem solve in order to find the intonation and expression that applies the correct meaning to an otherwise confusing phrase.

When to use text-based discussions:

Texts to use:

To learn more about facilitating discussions and sentence deconstruction, see What Does Text Complexity Mean For English Learners And Language Minority Students? by Lily Wong Fillmore & Charles J. Fillmore.

United States. Preamble to the United States Constitution.

U.S. Constitution, pmbl.

Oral Reading

One of the easiest ways we can provide our students with practice and assess their progress in fluency is to listen to them read orally and to make sure that they have opportunities to listen to good examples of fluent oral reading. The oral reading activities described below provide models of what fluent reading sounds like, engaging all students in the task, and protecting weak readers from the embarrassment that comes from round-robin and popcorn reading. The activities below can be used individually, or in combination with one another to provide students with multiple opportunities to orally reread the same text.

Choral Reading

Model pronunciation, pace and expression while reading a passage to the class or group, then read the same passage in unison, with the students. Choral reading provides students with a model of fluent reading and a gradual release from group reading to independent reading of the passage. Repeat the choral reading over several days to increase students' fluent reading. As the week progresses, gradually release responsibility to transfer reading to our class.

When to use choral reading:

Use this activity to introduce an introductory excerpt from the first text about a new topic (for topically related text sets) or to introduce new genres.

Use this activity to introduce and practice pace and expression for poetry.

Assign choral reading passages as homework (repeated oral reading) after choral reading takes place.

Texts to use:

Choose p assages from texts used for instruction 2-3 minutes long (approximately 150-300 words), including:

Complex texts at or slightly above grade-level for shared/supported reading.

New or previously read texts or passages.

Reader's Theater

For reader's theater, students rehearse reading of a text containing parts for multiple readers in preparation for oral presentation. Be sure that presentations are expressive oral readings and not memorizations of the text. It can be tempting to have students memorize scripts and poems, but for the purposes of fluency practice, it is the reading that is important.

When to use Reader's Theater:

Texts to use:

Choose g rade-level texts that provide an authentic purpose for presentation such as poems, plays, personal letters, speeches and narrative texts that include dialogue.

A Choral and Dramatic Reading of Macbeth

© 2014 Public Consulting Group

Repeated Oral Reading

Repeated reading of previously read grade-level texts helps students recognize words and spellings. The repetition from rereading provides great practice and new learning. It is also an excellent strategy for helping students to comprehend increasingly complex grade-level texts. Repeated reading provides our students with increasing familiarity with the text-its words and its literary and syntactical features.

When to use repeated oral reading:

Texts to use:

Choose c omplex grade-level texts for shared / supported reading.

Use selections from texts are being used for instruction, or use the topic related texts.

Partner Reading

Partner reading is a strategy that allows your students to provide support to one another. Pair students to practice reading orally to one another, alternating sentences, paragraphs or pages. Provide guidance for students regarding how and when to correct one another. In doing so, more proficient readers will model for their peers important elements of fluent reading including pace, expression and self-correction. In turn, the more proficient readers will gain reading exposure that continues to strengthen and grow their own fluency. We can also conduct a "whisper" partner reading, where students read to one another in pairs or small groups at a whisper level. Whisper reading will create a less distracting background if small group work is being conducted at the same time as partner reading. In either case, circulate through the groups or partnerships, to assess students' fluency.

When to conduct partner reading:

Allow students to read to one another during small group work with other student or while rotating to monitor progress.

Texts to use:

Choose g rade-level texts that are the focus of instruction.

"St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell

© 2014 Public Consulting Group

Sets of Texts on Related Topics

Reading sets of texts on a related topic across subsequent days supports fluency by reinforcing vocabulary and content. Two or more authors writing about the same topic will use many of the same words, and this repeated exposure builds vocabulary and content knowledge, which supports the development of fluency and comprehension.

It is important for us to make the distinction between topically related and theme-based texts. Although themes, like struggle, friendship and heroism, can connect texts, these texts won't likely include much overlap in vocabulary. The theme itself may have some vocabulary associated with it (e.g., hero, villain, courage), but the texts likely will be about different situations or characters representing the theme. Topics, or domains of knowledge, on the other hand, bring with them the vocabulary of the topic (e.g., the topic plants has a common vocabulary of root, leaf, stem, photosynthesis, nutrient, etc).

Occasionally reading aloud from sets of related texts will support our students' development of language, vocabulary and content. This repetition supports word recognition for shared and independent reading. These text sets provide benefits similar to repeated reading-increased exposure to and repetition of a set of common words, but also offer the benefit of allowing our students to read a different text rather than rereading the same text.

When to use related texts:

Texts to use:

Intervention and support for struggling readers must include opportunities to read and must not come at the expense of interaction with grade-level texts or knowledge- and vocabulary-building content.

A Note about Struggling Readers

Students who are reading behind grade level need many opportunities to engage in a volume of reading that includes a wide variety of genre and topics. Remember, it takes a repeated exposure to a large amount of text to acquire a deep inventory of words that are instantly recognized. This additional reading also deepens the reader's knowledge of the world, which increases comprehension. Unfortunately, struggling students-as a result of their poor reading-often lack the motivation to engage in the amount of reading that will, in turn, improve their reading. It is incumbent upon us, across all content areas, to find ways to support and encourage reading throughout the day. This additional reading (i.e., reading beyond the texts we are teaching) can be guided or not, it can include reading-level texts as well as those above the students' reading levels, and it can be fueled by interest to the reader. Intervention and support for struggling readers must include opportunities to read and must not come at the expense of interaction with grade-level texts or knowledge and vocabulary building content.

The standards call for an increasing balance of fiction and nonfiction, and not just in the ELA block, but other parts of the school day as well. Some of the nonfiction reading can take place in the social studies and science blocks. We can use reading of content area texts as opportunities to include additional lessons and activities build students' reading fluency. Many of the same activities and practices can be used to support fluency in the content areas, with minimal shifts and nuance.

Modeling Fluent Reading of Text

Use read-alouds of content area texts to emphasize expression and pace while reading aloud during social studies and science. Through read-alouds you can introduce new topics and model pronunciation of related content area vocabulary before students have to read these words on their own. This gives students a solid footing for their independent and scaffolded reading about the content.

Sets of Text on Related Topics

Use a variety of books, articles, digital sources, etc. about content area topics of study to provide exposure that reinforces common vocabulary and concepts through different texts. Reading across texts about the same topic will support development or word recognition along with content knowledge.

Text-based Discussions

Engage students in discussions about complex sentences, text structure and new vocabulary found in content area texts. Parse complex sentences into their component parts, having students describe the meaning in of each part in their own words. Be sure to bring closure to the conversation by allowing students to put the component parts back together, discussing meaning based on their new understanding of the component parts of the sentence.

Also have students reread complex sentences and passages as part of text-based discussions aimed at eliciting meaning from the text.

Repeated Oral Reading

Assign a passage from the text as homework to be read aloud nightly, at home-or provide such text, related to subject area content, to ELA teachers for their use.

Choral Reading

Use choral reading to introduce an introductory excerpt from the first text about a new topic (for topically related text sets). This passage can also be assigned as homework (repeated oral reading) after choral reading takes place.

Reader's Theater

Use reader's theater for content area texts, like speeches, plays and poetry, allowing rehearsal time in class or at home. Have all students prepare for presentation, even if time doesn't permit individual presentations. Different students can present each time this activity is used.

As we said at the outset of this guide, fluency is an element of reading proficiency that can be improved relatively quickly with little in the way of additional time and resources. A few last things before you embark on targeting reading fluency:

Frequency is important-embed fluency activities into lessons within and beyond the ELA block as often as you can. With attention and practice, fluency can be improved for most readers.

Fluency changes with text complexity, context or genre-that is, students who read one text fluently may not read another type of text with the same level of fluency. Supporting fluency is an ongoing endeavor, rather than a goal that is achieved.

Intervention and support for struggling readers must include opportunities to read and must not come at the expense of interaction with grade-level texts or knowledge and vocabulary building content.

Providing topically related sets of texts

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Building Fluency: Unbound A Guide to 6-12 ELA/Literacy Practices

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These guides are designed to explain what new, high standards for english language say about what students should learn in each grade, and what they mean for curriculum and instruction

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After writing my book, "Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parents Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention," parents and teachers asked me if I could write a book about reading at the secondary level. Although I had plenty of experience with struggling readers of all ages, secondary education is outside of my wheelhouse. After reading "Thinking Reading," I finally have a book that I can wholeheartedly recommend that is written in plain English for anyone who wants to learn about adolescent literacy. This book offers a nice balance of research and practical solutions. It's also a quick read - I'm not one for fillers and fluff. This concise book is packed with information! I highly recommend it!
- Faith Borkowsky, Certified Dyslexia Practitioner and Literacy Consultant
High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching

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Thinking Reading: What every secondary teacher needs to know about reading

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Amazon.com: Thinking Reading: What every secondary teacher needs to know about reading: 9781911382683: Murphy, James, Murphy, Dianne: Books

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https://www.branchingminds.com/blog/mtss-secondary-schools-challenges

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Secondary teachers and leaders often cite difficulties and frustrations when they are asked about their current RTI/MTSS practice or implementation. My own experience with this work started when a district-level administrator walked into my office (about 2 seconds into my first year as a high school Asst. Principal) and dropped off a thick binder titled MTSS (that used to be titled RTI) . Here you go. Run with this and see what you can do. MTSS? In high school? Why, how?

Some leaders don't see the point of MTSS in secondary schools and think of it as a framework that belongs in elementary schools. Others understand the importance of implementing a strong practice, but when they take steps towards establishing the structures and procedures they meet many challenges and quickly get frustrated, which was my experience almost immediately.

Though implementing MTSS at the secondary level can present unique considerations and complications not present at the elementary level, it is a worthy endeavor that will inevitably lead to improved student outcomes, including decreased behavior incidents, improved student achievement, and increased student graduation rates.

MTSS at both the elementary and the secondary level is a proactive and preventative framework that grounds all decisions on data. The main components are the same for both:

1. Core instruction should meet the needs of 80% of students.

2. Valid and reliable universal screeners should be administered to all students; enabling professionals to identify those at risk and provide differentiation to diverse learners.

3. Student support plans should be created based on data, key indicators of success and evidence-based strategies, programs and practices.

4. Consistent problem-solving meetings should be scheduled to review progress monitoring of student data and make adjustments to the intervention plan.

5. The work needs to be collaborative and aligned across all stakeholders.

MTSS Framework

Common Challenges Implementing MTSS at the Secondary Level and How to Overcome Them

1. In the absence of trained interventionists, teachers should be provided with research-based programs and trained in strategies to help students with elementary grade performance levels. Some examples of programs or strategies are Read 180, The challenge: Secondary school teachers see themselves as content experts and are not trained in teaching basic skills. Unlike elementary school teachers, secondary teachers become more specialized in their content areas. "I don't teach Reading, though, I teach Chemistry." How many times have you heard something similar from teachers? Bottom line is, though, that when students are missing basic math or literacy skills, they will not be successful in any content areas or courses. If a student has difficulty reading, that student will struggle in Chemistry and Government. Though teachers do not consider themselves reading teachers, they are not meeting their students' needs unless they address these basic reading skills.

The solution: Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention , Click or Clunk? , and Reciprocal Teaching. The assumption that teachers will be able to provide adequate support simply because they are educators is just not accurate. An hour of tutoring can be a complete waste of time if the tutor is not using the right strategies.

2. The challenge: Secondary students are often not engaged in their growth and learning. Students should be empowered to monitor their growth and be active participants in their own learning. This can be especially difficult for students who have experienced years of failure. Schools should always work on providing a culture of student motivation, engagement, and participation.

The solution: One common best practice is to provide students with a goal and progress monitor tracker, and to ensure these trackers become a part of their daily routines(*). As a high school administrator, I would often approach students and ask them their goals. They would pull out their tracker and show me their progress. Do they know their goals for their end-of-course exams? Do they know what credits they are missing for graduation? Do they know what learning objectives they need to focus on?

3. To meet graduation requirements, students need to earn specific credits. Different states will often offer several graduation plan options, college and career readiness programs, and student electives. Balancing all of this makes scheduling a nightmare.The challenge: Secondary school scheduling is incredibly complex.

The solution: District and school leaders need to be flexible and creative when planning intervention times. Some districts use homeroom or WYN (what you need) periods, some pull students out of electives, and others ask students to come in before or after school. These decisions will vary greatly, and there are many factors to consider in each district, but ensuring students have intervention time in their schedules is critical.

4. The challenge: Students are often so far behind, that interventions can feel pointless. As a young teacher working with at-risk high school students, I was guilty of this. My students had such large gaps that I often felt powerless. If I felt this after working with my students for just one year, imagine how frustrated these students felt after experiencing these frustrations and failures for so many years.

The solution: In addition to providing academic interventions, it is critical that we provide teachers with the skills to address student motivation after failure, and that we work on developing a growth mindset for these students. Small successes are incredibly powerful and easily achievable if we make the time to provide the support these students need.

The solutions needed to achieve effective MTSS at the secondary level will always vary as the factors that lead to success from campus to campus are complex and unique. However, having a strong implementation plan that considers these common challenges is a great place to start.

(*) C.A Farrington et. al., Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners. The Role of Noncognitive Factors in Shaping School Performance: A Critical Literature Review (Chicago: University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, 2012), 10.

Ready to build capacity for your educators, and deliver positive outcomes for all students?

Learn about the Branching Minds Infrastructure Coaching Series, that helps school and district leaders streamline and improve their RTI/MTSS practice at the systems-level, helping them to achieve consistent high-fidelity practice, build capacity for educators, and deliver positive outcomes for all students.

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MTSS in Secondary Schools: Major Challenges, and How to Overcome Them

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Though implementing MTSS at the secondary level can present unique considerations and complications not present at the elementary level, it is a worthy endeavor that will inevitably lead to improved student outcomes

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Much of our knowledge of the components of MTSS and their successful implementation is based on experiences in elementary schools. However, given the structural and organizational differences between elementary schools and secondary schools, this evidence has its limitations when implementing MTSS at higher grade levels. The essential components of MTSS may be the same, regardless of grade level or context, but how they are translated into effective practice and integrated into a middle or high school's processes may differ from elementary school models.

Implementing an early warning system to identify students who may be at risk for poor educational outcomes and providing targeted supports is one way that secondary schools may consider implementing MTSS. AIR's Early Warning Intervention and Monitoring System (EWIMS) is an evidence-based process for identifying and monitoring students who are likely to miss key education milestones and provide supports to help get them back on track (Faria et al., 2017). It is important to emphasize that students are not identified based on their demographics (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, status as an English learner) or other unchangeable factors (e.g., students with disability, socioeconomic status, member of a single-parent household). Rather, students are identified for demonstrating one or more mutable early warning indicators (e.g., attendance rate, inappropriate behaviors, or poor course performance).

EWIMS is a systematic approach used by dedicated teams of school staff to identify students displaying symptoms of at risk of not graduating on time, assign students to interventions, and monitor their progress. Schools use data every day-the challenge is to turn the data into meaningful actions and positive student outcomes. By following the 7 steps of the EWIMS process, educators can turn their data into action. The EWIMS process helps educators in early identification of students who are not on track for on-time high school graduation, postsecondary readiness, or other milestones, and then guides educators through evidence-based steps to get those students back on track. By acting early, and then continuously gauging and fine-tuning support, educators following the EWIMS process can efficiently help more students succeed.

Step 1-Establish roles and responsibilities. Schools establish a team to lead and carry out the EWIMS process, determine the frequency and duration of meetings, and develop a shared vision for the team's work.

Step 2-Use the tool. The EWIMS team uses the tool to update lists of available interventions and strategies to support students and run automated or customized reports.

Step 3-Review the early warning data. The EWIMS team focuses their attention on student- and school-level data, using a combination of research-based and locally validated indicators available in the tool. This data review process is intended to identify areas of focus and further investigation and this step is revisited any time new data become available.

Step 4-Interpret the early warning data. The EWIMS team seeks out additional data (besides the indicators) to better understand the needs of individual students or groups of students. This step focuses on the underlying causes that might lead students to be identified as at risk on one or more indicators, using additional formal data (administrative records) and informal input (from teachers, family, and students).

Step 5-Assign and provide interventions. The EWIMS team members make decisions about assigning individual students to specific interventions in the school, district, and community. The EWIMS model does not prescribe specific interventions for schools to implement. Rather, the model provides schools flexibility to decide which interventions are best suited to their students' needs.

Step 6-Monitor student progress. The EWIMS team examines the student risk indicators on an ongoing basis to monitor the progress of students who have already been assigned to interventions. If students continue to be identified as off track, the team may consider assigning them to different interventions; if some students are no longer at risk, the team may consider ramping down services. Over time, schools may refine their catalog of interventions based on their effectiveness, adding new interventions and dropping those that do not help students get back on track.

Step 7-Evaluate and refine the EWIMS process. Through active and structured reflection, EWIMS team members revise specific strategies or their general approach as needed and determine how best to allocate resources to support at-risk students. This step encourages EWIMS teams to make course corrections to any aspect of implementation.

To learn more about our early warning intervention and monitoring system (EWIMS) process and MTSS, please visit: https://www.air.org/resource/early-warning-systems-education.

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Much of our knowledge of the components of MTSS and their successful implementation is based on experiences in elementary schools. However, given the structural and organizational differences between elementary schools and secondary schools, this evidence has its limitations when implementing MTSS at higher grade levels.

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Speaking: Dr. Mark Shinn, Dr. Laura Moran, Dr. Jennifer Collins

This session is intended to assist secondary administrators with the conceptual underpinnings and fundamentals related to scaling Multi-Tiered Systems to the secondary level. Secondary MTSS has lagged behind elementary level implementation and for good reasons. Although many of the principles are the same, the focus of WHO we serve and HOW we serve them has been unclear. This session sets the stage for the components of stronger Tier 1 core CONTENT area instruction and strategies to support students with basic skill needs at Tiers 2 and 3. Transformational leadership practices related to infrastructure and implementation within the context of data-based decision-making and equitable access to evidence-based practices will be discussed.

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Systemic Change: A Focus on Secondary MTSS & Equity

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This session is intended to assist secondary administrators with the conceptual underpinnings and fundamentals related to scaling Multi-Tiered Systems to the secondary level. Secondary MTSS has lagged behind elementary level implementation and for good reasons. Although many of the principles are the same, the focus of WHO we serve and HOW we serve them has been unclear.

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Read an interview with neuroscientist Guinevere Eden.

"We knew something wasn't right," said Billy's mom, Maggie Gibson.

"You can tell things are off, but you don't know specifically what," said Rob, Billy's father.

The Gibsons, from Baltimore County, Maryland, have five kids. All of them have dyslexia. They know, because they paid thousands of dollars for private testing.

But when the Gibsons showed the test results to their children's schools, administrators didn't buy it, says Rob. "The schools essentially said, 'Yeah, we understand this is a test showing abnormalities from a reputed institution that recommends a child with dyslexia have this, that and the other. And, oh, we don't agree with it.' And when we got to that disagreement it was almost like we were disagreeing over reality."

The Gibsons gave APM Reports an audio recording of the meeting where they discussed the test results with staff at their son Eddie's school. In the recording, a staff member says, "We do not suspect a learning disability."

The Gibsons wanted their children to have Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. Those are the specialized education plans that students with disabilities who are behind in school are entitled to by federal law.

But in the recording, the school staff says Eddie can't have a disability because he has passing grades and average standardized test scores.

More than a dozen families across the country interviewed by APM Reports reported getting into similar fights with their child's school. Parents say their children figure out ways to compensate for their dyslexia and get by in school, but they aren't being taught to read. Children with dyslexia need specialized reading instruction.

"I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school."
- Billy Gibson

But specialized instruction is expensive. The average cost to educate a student in public school is about $12,500, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost to educate a child receiving special education services can be more than twice that. When the federal special education law first went into effect in 1975, Congress committed to covering 40 percent of the extra cost of educating children with disabilities. But the federal government is only covering slightly more than 15 percent. States and local districts pay for the rest.

That's one reason schools have avoided using the word dyslexia, according to Fran Bowman, a former special education teacher who now runs an educational services company that works with school districts to train teachers. "They would say, 'We don't use the word dyslexia.' Because once you open Pandora's box, you have to serve those children."

In other words, if schools acknowledge a student has dyslexia, they may be legally obligated to provide special education.

Six special education directors from around the country interviewed by APM Reports denied their schools were refusing to use the word dyslexia to keep students out of special ed.

Kevin Gorman, director of special education in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and a former school principal in another Ohio district, said schools were avoiding the word because it wasn't a term used by the state on IEP forms. Instead, the state used the umbrella term "specific learning disability." Gorman explained that schools are so concerned about adhering to the letter of the law that they are reluctant to use terms that do not appear on official paperwork.

Avoiding the word was such a problem in schools across the country that in 2015 the U.S. Department of Education issued a special letter reminding schools that not only can they use the word dyslexia, they should use the word if it can help them tailor an appropriate education plan for a student.

It's a legal requirement for schools to identify all children who have disabilities and provide them an "appropriate" education. But many schools have resisted the approaches to reading instruction that students with dyslexia need - and that would help all children read better - because of a long-running dispute about how to teach children to read.

The reading wars

You can trace the debate in the United States about how to teach kids to read all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement. In the 1800s, Mann railed against the idea of teaching kids that letters represent sounds. He believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words.

This came to be known as the "whole language" approach. On the other side of the debate are people who say children must be explicitly taught how sounds correlate with letters. This is commonly referred to as the "phonics" approach.

The argument over which approach is best has been intense and political, with phonics cast as a traditional, conservative approach. Think of children sitting in front of a blackboard, sounding out words as a teacher points to the letters that represent each sound.

Whole language, on the other hand, holds that learning to read is a natural process and that kids don't need explicit instruction. Expose them to lots of good books and they will learn to read. That approach is seen as the more liberal, progressive way.

As with many ideas in education, there have been big pendulum shifts over the decades. Whole language was big in the 1920s, for example, as progressive education became influential. The pendulum swung back toward phonics in the 1960s. By the 1980s, whole language was popular again.

Bowman, the former special education teacher, got extensive training in phonics in the 1970s and used that approach early in her teaching career. But she says she soon got a supervisor who told her she wasn't allowed to teach phonics. "You should be teaching by the entire word, instead of these little sounds," she recalls the supervisor telling her.

Bowman says it's easier to train teachers to use the whole language method than to train them to use phonics. She thinks that's one reason whole language has been so attractive. "School districts were like 'Wow! We can just give you a bunch of books!'"

Proponents of whole language say the approach is more than that. They promote a set of strategies that emphasize comprehension, engagement, and helping children to develop a love of literature.

But by the late 1990s, there was rising panic in the United States that too many kids were not reading well. Scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress showed most students were not reading proficiently.

In 1997, Congress called for a National Reading Panel to determine how best to teach reading. It reviewed more than 100,000 studies and in 2000, the panel published a 449-page report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement. There was no evidence to show whole language worked and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship among sounds, letters and spelling patterns improves reading achievement.

This is for all kids, not just those with dyslexia.

Andrea Rowson was teaching in a public school in Ohio when the report was released, but she says she didn't learn about the findings until years later. "What happens in public education is a lot of initiatives come through, a lot of information gets thrown at schools. New regulations, new this, new that," she said. "And I think it was just one of those things where (schools) said 'OK' and didn't really realize how huge it was."

'I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams'

In 2012 when the public schools in Baltimore County refused to give the Gibson children IEPs, Rob and Maggie decided to hire a lawyer. "All we wanted was to secure their right to learn in public school," said Maggie.

Their son Billy was in middle school and struggling. "It just got so overwhelming," he said. "I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school."

Trying to get him the help he needed for his dyslexia was turning into a long and contentious process. Maggie and Rob felt that for Billy and his older sister, time was running out. They decided to send them to the Jemicy School, a private school for students with language-based learning differences in Owings Mills, Maryland.

Jemicy has about 380 students in grades one through 12. The hallways are covered in student artwork and there's a woodworking shop where students can take geometry. For students who struggle with written language, learning by doing is especially helpful.

Class sizes at Jemicy are capped at 12. The school also provides intensive reading remediation in small-group tutoring sessions.

In a recent tutoring session, Josie and Christopher - fifth-graders in their first year at Jemicy - were seated at a table with a teacher. They were working on the letter combination double vowel "oo."

"I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and we didn't have that opportunity."
- Pam Guest

"What are the two sounds that 'oo' make?" the teacher asked.

Christopher responded confidently with the long vowel sound that "oo" makes in the word "school." But there's another sound "oo" makes. Josie and Christopher didn't catch on.

"'Uh' as in 'book,'" said the teacher.

This tutoring is based on an approach known as Orton-Gillingham, named after Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, early 20th century pioneers in dyslexia research and remediation. They figured out that children with dyslexia struggle to understand how sounds and letters correspond. To teach them to read, they need to be explicitly taught the rules of the way written language works. Orton and Gillingham developed a systematic approach for doing this. Their ideas form the basis for a number of effective instructional approaches in use today.

When Billy Gibson started at Jemicy as a ninth grader, he wasn't sure he would finish high school. His dream was to be an artist, but his middle school art teacher gave him C's because he didn't follow written directions. Billy went into Jemicy thinking, "I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams."

But Jemicy's small classes and intensive reading instruction helped him catch up and gave him confidence he'd never felt in school. On his first day, he says an art teacher noticed him doodling and told him she thought he could be a great artist. "You should take my class," Billy remembers her saying to him. "I won't give up on you."

Billy graduated from Jemicy in 2017. He's now studying 3D computer animation at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. His goal is to work in the film industry. "Hopefully someday you'll be in the movie theater and see my name on the credits of the big screen," he said.

More than $60,000 a year

Billy's mom Maggie noticed a difference at Jemicy right away. As the parent of kids with dyslexia in public school, she says you get used to being in fight mode. "You're fighting for it to be recognized that your kid needs X, Y and Z," she said. "And then you go into Jemicy and you have a teacher conference and the teachers sit down and say, 'You know, we think your child would benefit from this, this and this. And we notice that your child needs' - whatever it is. And you're like, 'Oh my gosh! We're speaking the same language. We're all noticing the same thing.'"

But to send two kids to Jemicy cost more than $60,000 a year. Maggie and Rob are fortunate: He's a physician and they got financial help from their children's grandparents. But five private school tuitions weren't in their budget. So, with their lawyer, the Gibsons kept fighting with the Baltimore County Public Schools to try to get their three other kids better help.

The Gibsons eventually got the school system to pay for two of their children to go to Baltimore Lab School, a private school for students with learning disabilities. The Gibsons don't think they would have gotten that if they hadn't hired an attorney. Getting what you need for a kid with dyslexia is a rich man's game, says Maggie. The Gibsons estimate their family has spent more than $350,000 - including legal fees, private tutoring and tuition - to get their five dyslexic kids what they needed to be successful in school.

Without help from grandparents, Maggie says she and Rob probably couldn't have made private school work. "What does a person do that doesn't have the luxury of other people to help them?" she said. "What do you do?"

Pam Guest, for example, did not have the financial means to send her son Dayne to private school. "I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and they're able to go to college," she said. "And we didn't have that opportunity."

Dayne went to the Baltimore County Public Schools, too. There's no evidence that Baltimore County has more of a problem than other public school systems when it comes to identifying and providing proper instruction to students with dyslexia. But officials with the Baltimore County Schools are now admitting they have a problem. "We need to do better," said Rebecca Rider, who's been director of special education for the Baltimore County Public Schools since 2014. Under her leadership, the school system has begun to train teachers in Orton-Gillingham. Before this effort began in 2016, the county schools did not have anyone trained to provide this instruction.

Stephen Cowles, a lawyer for BCPS, said the school system is making more of an effort to identify students with dyslexia. As a result, he says the county is paying for more students to go to private schools. In the 2016 fiscal year, the county paid nearly $40 million dollars for students with disabilities who could not be appropriately served in public schools to go to specialized private schools. BCPS couldn't say how much of that money is being spent on students with dyslexia.

But helping students with dyslexia is not just about expanding special education services. Research suggests that if students with dyslexia got effective early reading instruction in their regular classrooms, some of them may not need intensive, specialized instruction. The problem is that many teachers do not know how to teach reading effectively.

Thousands of teacher preparation programs

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five key components of effective reading instruction. Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Education decided to find out whether people coming out of teacher preparation programs had learned those five components.

New teachers could correctly answer only about half the questions on a multiple-choice test. They rated their own preparation in how to teach reading as below "moderate."

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank in Washington, D.C., analyzed syllabi from undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs and found that fewer than 40 percent covered all the components of effective reading instruction. And that was a big improvement from 2014 when NCTQ found just 17 percent of teacher preparation programs taught all five components.

What are teachers learning about how to teach children to read?

"We learned a lot about creating a literature-rich environment," said Rowson, the Ohio teacher. She got her initial training in the 1980s and says she learned nothing about phonics; in fact, she says her professors were against the idea of explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters. She learned the whole language approach.

Rowson says she didn't learn how to teach children to read until she was trained in Orton-Gillingham. She now trains teachers in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a school district that has significantly changed how it teaches reading in response to a formal complaint filed by a group of parents.

Amelia Smith, a teacher in Upper Arlington who got her degree in elementary and special education in 2012, says by then there was recognition that phonics was important. "We knew what it was but we weren't taught how to teach it," she said.

Upper Arlington

Read about an Ohio school district that changed the way all kids are taught to read.

One reason teachers are not being better prepared to teach reading is there's still an ideological fight going on about whole language versus phonics, according to Jule McCombes-Tolis, chief academic officer for educator training initiatives at the International Dyslexia Association. She spent more than two decades as a professor in teacher preparation programs. "The division in higher ed in reading is alive and well," she said.

McCombes-Tolis says in the wake of the National Reading Panel report, many teacher educators who believed in the whole language approach promoted the idea of "balanced literacy" instead.

But balanced literacy is basically whole language with some phonics mixed in, says Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert who served on the National Reading Panel. "Balanced literacy began as the notion of a different attempt to try to settle the reading wars. It's supposed to be the best of both worlds."

Shanahan says what's wrong with balanced literacy is that it combines a whole bunch of things that don't work with a little bit of what does work, and that's not good reading instruction. He thinks a big problem with teacher preparation programs is that many of the people who are teaching the reading instruction courses don't know the science of reading that well.

"The folks who teach these courses range in their knowledge dramatically," he said. Enroll in a teacher preparation program and your instructor might have a Ph.D. and be familiar with the latest research, says Shanahan. But "you could have somebody who - this person teaches four other things for us and we'll give them an extra course in reading instruction. They have last year's syllabus and they do their best," he said.

There are thousands of teacher preparation programs in the United States and there's very little oversight of them. In higher education, the faculty typically controls the curriculum. There is no one authority to hold accountable for how teachers in America are trained.

States do have some power and many are trying to exert more control over what gets taught in teacher preparation programs as well as what is happening in public schools when it comes to students with dyslexia.

As of this month, 41 states have some sort of dyslexia law, regulation or resolution. The laws and regulations vary widely. Some require graduates of teacher preparation programs to pass science of reading tests; others encourage public schools to provide teacher training on how to identify dyslexia.

33 states have passed dyslexia laws since 2012

An analysis by APM Reports shows that while most states have taken some kind of action to address the needs of kids with dyslexia, the laws often go unenforced and unfunded. Read more.

Sources: LegiScan, Decoding Dyslexia and staff research

Most of these laws have passed in the past few years partly due to parent advocacy groups pushing for change.

Pam Guest is a leader of one of these groups, Decoding Dyslexia-Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia has chapters in all 50 states. In Maryland, the group succeeded in getting a bill through the legislature to establish a task force that reviewed how students in the state are identified and treated for dyslexia. Now the group wants funding for a pilot program to demonstrate best practices when it comes to not only helping students with dyslexia, but to teaching all children how to read.

Even though it's too late for her son, Guest says she's determined to change things so what happened to Dayne won't happen to other kids.

"It's simple," she said. "Teachers must be able to teach children how to read."

Update: Oct. 24, 2017 The map and story have been updated to reflect new analysis of state laws pertaining to dyslexia.

"Hard to Read" is one of three audio documentaries this season from the Educate podcast - stories about education, opportunity, and how people learn.

CORRESPONDENT/PRODUCER
Emily Hanford

RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION FELLOWS
Jeffrey Bissoy-Mattis
Lila Cherneff
Josh Marcus

PRODUCTION HELP
Josie Fan
Liz Lyon
Chris Julin

Special thanks: Amare, Curtis, Forrest, Hadassah, Inez, Jordan, Norah, Oliver and Ryan.

Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

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How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

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There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place.

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Interesting discussion just for my own understanding ...

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Interesting discussion just for my own understanding ...

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Advocating for Change New From NEA The Science of Learning

Psychology teachers understand how students' minds work. Find out how to use what they know to design more effective lessons and classroom practices.

Key Takeaways

1. It's not enough to push information into students' heads. Educators need to demand that students "retrieve" that information, over and again, to promote learning.

2. The teenage brain is not fully formed. In other words, there are real reasons they act the way they do!

3. "Learning styles" are a myth. But "dual coding" - that is embedding information in the brain through multiple avenues - is proven effective.

If you were coaching a new basketball team, would you ever have a single 45-minute practice on a Monday and then expect your rookies to win a game the following Friday? They'll shoot and miss, for sure.

And yet, some teachers teach a new skill or set of facts one week, test it the following week-and expect students to score big.

Those teachers are not psychology teachers. Psychology teachers know how memory works. They know how learning happens. They understand how children and adolescents develop socially, emotionally, and academically. And they use what they know-from their own curriculum-to design effective lessons and classroom practices.

Even better, they're willing to share their insights with their colleagues across grades and subject areas.

Here are 10 of their tried-and-true teaching strategies.

Your students are like squirrels, burying acorns of new knowledge in their brains. The most important thing a teacher can do is ask their students to dig out that information, every day, multiple times a day, says Kansas psychology teacher Jen Schlicht. Indeed, studies by cognitive psychologists show that this approach is a far better use of your time than repeatedly pushing information into their brains.
Keep in mind that retrieval practice is a learning tool, not an assessment tool. Although quick quizzes can be used as retrieval practice, these activities shouldn't be graded.

Suggested activity

Schlicht, who teaches at Olathe South High School, likes to use a "retrieval grid," which looks like a bingo card. "You put questions of varying difficulty on the grid and assign point values to each question. A question on today's content might be worth 1 point. Something from last week might be 3. Something harder might be 5," she explains. "Give them 5 minutes to get as many points as they can." Or try a brain dump: Ask students to write down everything they know on a topic, then have each student compare notes with a neighbor.

Cognitive psychologists have a million insights into memory and learning. Knowing about these learning patterns may help guide
your lesson planning.

The serial positioning effect: People generally remember the first and last things they hear or read, psychologists have found. With this in mind, Alabama psychology teacher Blake Harvard often starts class by saying, "Hey, this is what we're going to cover today." At the end, Harvard, who teaches at James Clemens High School, in Madison City, recaps: "Here are the three most important things we discussed."

The distributive effect: When students pull all-nighters, attempting to fill their heads with a semester's worth of content, they're unlikely to do well on the next day's test. Cramming also is bad teaching strategy! Research shows that a better approach is "spaced learning," which means spreading your content over a few days or weeks.

The interleaving effect: Psychologists also urge frequent retrieval practice. This technique can go hand-in-hand with spaced learning. Try "interleaving," or alternating between new and old content, Schlicht says. Researchers have found that interleaving is much more effective than teaching in big blocks of content.

When you connect your content to real life and make it more emotional for students, you're also making it easier to remember. The brain stores information in neural pathways, and it will make more interlocking pathways when the new stuff connects to previous knowledge and experience, Schlicht explains. These extra connections also make it easier to retrieve. "What's meaningful is memorable," Schlicht says.

Suggested activity

Don't be afraid to talk about yourself in the classroom. "I love to talk about my kids," Harvard says. "When we get to Piaget's stages of learning, I talk about my 7-year-old son. Not only does that give them a more concrete example, but it also gets them thinking about their own siblings, whatever it is their baby sister did, and it helps them practice where [the stages of learning] appear in real life. It definitely helps with remembering stuff."

"You want to use multiple modalities? Great. But the idea that you have to speak to Johnny because he's an auditory learner and show the visual to Sherry because she's a visual learner? No, no, no."

- Chuck Schallhorn, California Psychology Teacher and author of Advanced Placement Psychology

When you combine words and visuals-such as diagrams, maps, or graphic organizers-students have two ways to understand the information, and it also becomes more concrete to them. The cognitive psychologists at learningscientists.org caution that the visuals have to be meaningful and that educators should provide enough time for students to absorb the two representations.

You might be thinking, oh, this is because some students are "visual learners," right? Surveys have found that 93 percent of teachers believe in learning styles: auditory, kinesthetic, etc. But it's a myth, says California psychology teacher Chuck Schallhorn, author of the textbook Advanced Placement Psychology. "You want to use multiple modalities? Great. But the idea that you have to speak to Johnny because he's an auditory learner and show the visual to Sherry because she's a visual learner? No, no, no."

Suggested activity

Don't go over the top with this! It's math class, not crafting class, reminds Schlicht. Try asking students to create timelines, diagrams, storyboards, and illustrated notes.

"Where are the kids in teams of their cognitive development? Their social-emotional development?" asks Schallhorn, who teaches at Mountain House High School. Knowing these answers can be very helpful to educators.

In the teenage brain, for example, the frontal lobe, which controls impulses and provides organizational skills, isn't fully connected to the limbic system, the emotional seat of the brain.

"As adults, we can say, I'm feeling angry and I'm going to do my best to hide it," Schallhorn says. "But kids can't. They don't have the part of the brain that says stop doing this! ...Be aware of their developmental limitations. Be the adult with the fully formed brain."

Taking scheduled breaks is necessary and refreshing. But that Snapchat ping can derail learning for more time than you might imagine. It takes about 25 minutes, on average, to get back on task after a distraction, a 2015 University of California study found.

Suggested activity

Schallhorn tells students to stow their phones and spend 25 minutes focused on schoolwork. Then, they can reward themselves with a 5- to 10-minute break. Consider a similar system in your classrooms: Maybe you focus for 30 minutes and then ... dance party!

Cognitive biases are ways of thinking that are unconscious and wrong. For example, outcome bias is common among educators. This is when you focus so much on an outcome, say, Advanced Placement test scores, that you overlook the process. Maybe the class learned how to ask questions, solve problems, and study better.

"Do not get caught up with only looking at grades to determine the success of a class," cautions Harvard in a guest post for the learningscientists.org.

Stereotyping is another cognitive bias. It's when you ascribe certain qualities to a person or people without any real information about them. Maybe you think a student is "a jock" and assume they're uninterested in Shakespeare. Or maybe you are-without being aware of it-assuming racial and gender stereotypes around behavior, academic achievement, and more.

A completely bias-free mind is simply impossible, psychologists say. The best you can do is try to recognize them in yourself and your students and counter the possible negative effects.

"If a student is acting out, there's a reason-and most of the time, unless you're a jerk, it has nothing to do with you."

- Jen Schlicht, Kansas Psychology Teacher

"Behavior is purposeful," says Schlicht. "If a student is acting out, there's a reason-and most of the time, unless you're a jerk, it has nothing to do with you." Keep in mind the physical limitations of a child's brain. They are helpless against their knee-jerk reactions.

Suggested activity

Schlicht and Schallhorn both describe few discipline problems in their classrooms. Coincidence or not, they also describe themselves as good listeners, focused on relationships, and unreactive to "drama."

Schallhorn suggests focusing on processes and procedures. You can say to a student, that's not how we come into class, that's not how we do our papers. "The behavior becomes the focus, not the individual," he says.

The theory of cognitive load suggests that cognitive resources, such as attention and working memory, are limited in nature. In other words, there's only so much to go around.

"When we attempt to learn new things, these resources are spread among different demands. Some go to just figuring out the task," says Sarah Rose Cavanagh, a psychologist at Assumption University, in Worcester, Mass. Others go toward solving problems and learning, she adds.

As an educator, you want to protect those resources and make sure they don't get wasted on deciphering a poorly worded question or other causes for confusion.

Suggested activity

Think about the extraneous distractions in your classroom or assignments, Harvard suggests. While flexible classroom seating is trendy these days, your students will be more focused in traditional seating rows. This is good to keep in mind, especially when you introduce new topics. Along the same lines, your Google slides should be clean and simple.

Remember there are no secrets! What psychologists know about learning, memory, and child development is accessible to all teachers. To get started, explore the resources below.

Online: For clues to students' cognition and ways to use that insight in the classroom, check out learningscientists.org and Blake Harvard's blog at theeffortfuleducator.com.

Videos: Schallhorn recommends cognitive psychologist Stephen Chew's videos on study skills, effective mindsets for learning, and more.

Books: Psychology teachers put these five on their must-read lists!

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learningby Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey

Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide by Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki, and Oliver Caviglioli

Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learningby Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham

Stay Informed We'll come to you

We're here to help you succeed in your career, advocate for public school students, and stay up to date on the latest education news. Sign up to stay informed

Great public schools for every student

The National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest professional employee organization, is committed to advancing the cause of public education. NEA's 3 million members work at every level of education-from pre-school to university graduate programs. NEA has affiliate organizations in every state and in more than 14,000 communities across the United States.

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We use cookies to offer you a better browsing experience, provide ads, analyze site traffic, and personalize content. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies. Accept & Close Advocating for Change New From NEA The Science of Learning Psychology teachers understand how students' minds work.

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Incredible article I found in the Washington Post from 2015. I want to track this school down and find out what happened...

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Incredible article I found in the Washington Post from 2015. I want to track this school down and find out what happened...

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washingtonpost.com-In this high school reading and writing happens in every class even math and chemistry

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phonics and spelling through phoneme grapheme mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme MappingWritten by Kathryn E. S.

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Linda Gutlohn (Author), Frances Bessellieu (Author)

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Word ID: Assessment Across the Content Areas

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Amazon.com: Word ID: Assessment Across the Content Areas: 9781571288264: Gutlohn, Linda, Bessellieu, Frances: Books

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The PAST can be downloaded above. Please also download and carefully read the instructions before using. Information can also be found in the manual “Equipped for Reading Success” by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D in chapter 11 on how to effectively use the test. Make sure to also practice using the test before using it with […]

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Sonya Thomas knew something wasn't right with her son C.J. He was in first grade and he was struggling with reading. "Something was going on with him, but I could not figure it out," she said.

Teachers and school officials told her that C.J. was behind but would catch up. They told Sonya to read to him at home. But she did read to him. C.J. liked the Veggie Tales stories and "The Big Friendly Giant" by Roald Dahl. His older sister read the Goosebumps books to him.

C.J. went to Amqui Elementary, a public school in Nashville, Tennessee, where 80 percent of the students were Black or Hispanic and almost all of them were from low-income families. Test scores show most children in the school were struggling with reading. But Sonya didn't know that. She sent C.J. to Amqui because she liked the school and it's where her best friend's son went; her friend picked the kids up after school because Sonya worked late as a nurse.

C.J. is the youngest of Sonya's four kids. The three older ones had no trouble learning to read but something was different with C.J. "I started asking myself, does he have a learning disability?" She sent a handwritten note to the school, requesting that he be tested. Records show the school didn't do it.

Second grade came and went. Then third and fourth grade, and C.J. was still having trouble reading. Sonya didn't know what to do. Tutoring? Private school? Those weren't things she could afford. She was desperate.

And she knew something about how C.J. felt. She'd struggled to learn how to read, too.

As she grew older, she says it wasn't that she couldn't read the words; it's that she didn't know what a lot of the words meant. Not just when she was reading, but when people were talking, too. She noticed it with colleagues at work. "Sometimes when they would have conversations, I didn't know what they were talking about," she said. "I would find myself Googling words." It was embarrassing. She did not want this to happen to C.J.

But the schools kept telling her C.J. was doing fine. His grades were good. He was a well-behaved kid. Then, seventh grade, 2018. C.J. had moved to a new school that year, a public charter school in Nashville. C.J.'s adviser called Sonya in for a meeting. She told her that C.J. was reading on a second-grade level.

"I lost it," Sonya said. "I sobbed." Remembering the moment during an interview brought tears to her eyes.

The adviser said the school would help C.J., and Sonya wanted to believe it. But she'd put her faith in the school system for years, and now she had a seventh grader who was reading on the level of kids nearly half his age.

Sonya was determined to figure out what happened with C.J. - and to help other families in the same situation. "Nobody else should walk away feeling like that," she said.

The kids left behind

There are kids like C.J. all over the country. Learning to read does not come easily to them. Schools tell their parents: Read to them. They'll be OK. But many won't be.

Reading is essential - not just for school success, but for life. When children have trouble learning to read, it can kick off a devastating downward spiral. 1 Struggling readers are more likely to report feeling sad, lonely, angry, anxious and depressed. 2 Their poor reading skills make it hard for them to keep up in other subject areas. They're more likely to have behavior problems, to drop out of school and to end up in the criminal justice system. 3

Despite the high stakes, lots of kids in this country can't read very well. You can see it in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure the reading comprehension of American students. More than a third of fourth graders don't read on a basic level.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels over time
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress. *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

Why are so many children struggling with reading - the most basic, most fundamental academic skill?

It's a question I've been reporting on for several years. What I've found is that reading instruction in many schools is based on a belief that if children are read to a lot, reading should come pretty easily for them. Decades of scientific research on reading shows this isn't true. Some kids learn to read easily, but many children struggle. It doesn't matter how much they are read to or the number of books in their home. They will not become good readers unless they are taught how their written language works. 4

But prevailing approaches to early reading instruction in this country minimize direct instruction. 5 The teacher's role is mainly to guide students, to create an environment that is conducive to learning how to read: setting up reading groups, reading with kids, helping them find books on their reading level.

This approach creates a lot of struggling readers. Some of these struggling readers get the help they need but a lot can depend on their family income, their race and ethnicity, and what kind of school they go to. Family income matters, because if a school isn't teaching a child how to read, there are other options such as paying for tutors or private schools. Race matters, because white children are significantly more likely to go to public schools where more kids are successful with reading; that means when white kids struggle, their reading problems tend to stand out and get attention. 6 And if a child has a reading disability, a white child is much more likely to get special education services.

America's approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on Black, Hispanic and American Indian children.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels by race/ethnicity
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2019.

The downward spiral that can start with early reading problems is a source of profound inequality in our society. This could be prevented if more educators and policymakers understood what cognitive scientists have figured out over the past several decades about what's going on when kids struggle with reading.

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

Wes Hoover is a cognitive psychologist who first got interested in reading when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas in the 1970s. 7 At the time, a big debate was going on among academics about what children need to learn to become good readers. The fight was focused on phonics instruction.

One side said: If kids know how the sounds in words are represented by letters, reading comprehension will follow. Teach kids decoding.

The other side said: If kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say. Teach kids comprehension.

"Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension."
Wes Hoover

Hoover studied under a professor, Philip Gough, who was trying to figure out the relationship between decoding and comprehension. 8 Gough was particularly interested in why some people have a hard time understanding what they read. He was interested in reading difficulty.

What Gough knew was this: When children start school, the vast majority of them are already quite good at speakingtheir native language. "The average American 6-year-old," he wrote in a paper, "has a mastery of English [that] would be the envy of any college graduate learning English as a second language." 9

But young children don't know how to read most of the words they know how to say. If children can learn to decode, Gough thought, they should be able to comprehend text up to the level at which they can comprehend spoken language.

In 1986, Gough and a colleague, William Tunmer, came up with an equation to describe this idea. They called it the Simple View of Reading. 10

The equation says that a person's ability to comprehend what they read is the product of their decoding skills and their language comprehension ability.

Language comprehension is your ability to understand meaning when someone is talking or when text is read out loud to you.

Decoding is your ability to read printed words quickly and accurately. (Decoding is more commonly referred to now as "word recognition" in the Simple View equation, because scientists have discovered that readers become so skilled they don't have to sound out most of the words they see; they know the words instantly, on sight.) 11

The Simple View doesn't say that reading is simple. It says that reading comprehension can be divided into two parts.

"It's the big idea of reading," Hoover said. "Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension. That's the hypothesis."

The hypothesis was first tested and verified in a study Hoover published with Gough in 1990. 12 It's been confirmed in more than 150 studies since. 13 The studies show the only way to be a good reader is to have both good language comprehension ability and good word recognition skills, as this figure illustrates.

The Simple View doesn't say how word recognition or language comprehension skills develop. And it does not say how they should be taught. 14 But it makes clear that the first task of the beginning reader is to learn how to decode the words he or she knows how to say.

Children who don't learn to decode in the early grades can easily grow into adulthood without knowing how to read. I met some of these kids at a juvenile detention facility in Houston. They're being taught to read as part of an ongoing study by researchers at the University of Houston who are investigating the links between reading problems and involvement with the juvenile justice system. 15

Stumped by the words

I visited the Burnett-Bayland Rehabilitation Center in February 2018. It's a large, tan building surrounded by metal fencing. The lobby reminded me of an auto repair shop: worn-out stuffed chairs, old magazines, a chemical odor.

I was led through two large locked doors by a staff member, who took me on a tour. It was all boys, as young as 10. More than 90 percent of them were Black or Hispanic. They walked the halls in blue jumpsuits, their hands clasped behind their backs. We passed the units where they slept on thin plastic mattresses and the isolation room where they were sent when their behavior was out of control. And then we got to a windowless cinderblock room with heavy locked doors on each side. Inside were a table and two green chairs. This was where the boys visited with their families once a week. It was also where some of them were finally being taught how to read.

I sat in on a few of these tutoring sessions. They included short lessons on concepts as basic as how two letters can represent one sound. There were vocabulary building activities. Then the students did some reading. Some of the boys could barely read. 16

"B-l-ee ..." said one boy I'll call Mateo, struggling to read the word "bleak." I wasn't allowed to use the boys' real names or ask why they were here. Mateo was 15 at the time, short and skinny with a shadow of a mustache above his lip.

He was trying to read a story about a man taking a bus ride. Occasionally, he'd successfully sound out and there'd be a flash of recognition. "Woman!" he exclaimed after slowly decoding the word. But it was clear from earlier in the lesson that Mateo didn't know the meaning of a lot of the words he was trying to say: fleet, sneer, gloat. If someone had read the story out loud to him, he wouldn't have understood it all. Mateo had a reading comprehension problem because he was having a hard time with both word recognition and language comprehension.

But if Mateo had been taught how to sound out words earlier in his life, it's likely he would have known the meaning of a lot more words at the age of 15.

That's because of something reading researchers call "Matthew" effects, a term borrowed from the Bible. 17 It's the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Here's how it works in reading.

Let's say you start school, and you get off to a good start learning how to decode words. Now you can read the words you know how to say, and through reading you begin to learn the meaning of words you've never heard before. That's how the rich get richer.

But the opposite can happen. You have a hard time learning to decode. Maybe you have a learning disability. Or maybe no one teaches you how to decode. Or both. Now you're a struggling reader. You can't read very well, so you don't read much, and you miss out on the opportunity to learn the meaning of new words through reading. One study estimated that a fifth grader who reads at the 90th percentile encounters about 2 million words every year just in text she or he reads outside of school. 18 A reader at the 10th percentile encounters just 8,000 words. That's the poor getting poorer.

When a person reaches age 15 without knowing how to sound out the word "bleak," is that a learning disability or was the child never taught how to read?

The kids in the study at the juvenile detention facility in Houston all read at the third grade level or below when they started in the tutoring program. Latashia Crenshaw, who was director of Education Support Services for the juvenile probation department when I visited, estimated that close to half the kids who come through the system have disabilities that were never identified by their schools. When she talked to their parents, they would tell her: "I knew my son had a problem in first grade when I was coming up to the school every day, telling you that something was wrong, and no one listened."

The University of Houston researchers are betting that a lot of the struggling readers locked up in the juvenile detention system can be taught how to read. Students in the study each receive 24 reading lessons of 90 minutes each. The researchers are collecting data over time to see if the reading lessons translate into things like reduced criminal activity or better educational outcomes.

I asked some of the kids in the study what they remembered about being taught to read in school. "That it was hard," said a 17-year-old I'll call DeShawn. "I just didn't know none of the words." I asked what he was learning in his reading lessons. "Like, 'ph.' It's a 'f,'" he said. "Like physics. I never knew that."

DeShawn might have a learning disability. But that's not why he couldn't read the word "physics." Someone finally taught him what he needed to know, and now he can read that word.

'Surround him with books'

Paul Morgan is a professor at Penn State University who studies the risk factors for learning difficulties. 19 He had a case study in his own home about a decade ago.

His younger son was in first grade and reading was really hard for him. Morgan's other son had been fine. "Our oldest is a voracious reader and took to it readily," he said. "He seemed to benefit from what our local school did in terms of teaching reading."

"If you can't read well in the early grades it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."
Paul Morgan

When Morgan and his wife brought up their younger son's struggles with the school, they were told: "Read storybooks to him, surround him with books." But they'd been reading to him since he was a baby. They had tons of books in their home.

Morgan knew, from his own research, that his son needed something he wasn't getting enough of in school. He needed to be taught how to read words. So, Morgan and his wife started doing that.

"We were in a position to reorganize our work schedules," he said. They bought a book online and every morning, one of them would work with him before school. "And then he was OK. Things made sense to him. He was decoding and starting to read quickly and fluently."

They caught the problem and were able to fix it. That's not going to be the case with every child. Some kids will need lots of help. But intervening early is critical because when kids don't get off to a good start with word recognition, it can begin to affect their motivation and their mental health. 20

"If you can't read well in the early grades, your peers notice, your teacher notices, you notice," Morgan said. "And it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."

Children who are still struggling with reading at the end of first grade rarely catch up because the kids who get off to a good start reading words are catapulting ahead. It's the rich get richer phenomenon. Everyone else quickly gets left behind.

Yet a 2019 Education Week survey found that more than half of teachers and 56 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading said kids don't need a good grasp of phonics to read. 21 That doesn't necessarily mean they reject phonics instruction. The majority of teachers describe their approach to teaching reading as "balanced literacy" and that typically includes some phonics. But it also includes the idea that readers don't need to understand how the sounds in words are represented by letters. It's that idea from the 1970s that if kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say.

This idea has been repeatedly debunked by cognitive scientists, but it lingers in education because the idea that children need to be taught how to read words has long been resisted by many educators and literacy experts. 22 Even as some people who previously dismissed the importance of phonics instruction now embrace it, an assumption that continues to undergird reading instruction is that reading skill develops naturally, as long as kids are in an environment that supports and encourages lots of reading.

When this approach doesn't work for a child, there are typically two responses.

1. There must be a problem in the home. The child wasn't read to enough.

2. There must be a problem in the child. He or she has a disability.

But usually it's neither. Most of the time, when kids can't read, it's because they weren't taught how to do it.

The importance of language comprehension

You can't be a good reader without good word recognition skills. Reading scientists refer to word recognition as a "sine qua non" of being a good reader. 23 But good word recognition skills are only half the equation. Research shows that once kids have mastered the basics of decoding, their ability to understand what they read is largely determined by the level of their language comprehension. 24

There's a lot to language comprehension. 25 It's all the words you know the meaning of, and your understanding of how language works - grammar, syntax. 26 It also includes the things you know. For example, if you don't know what "sine qua non" means, you may not have fully understood the paragraph above. "Sine qua non" is a Latin phrase that means "an essential condition; something that is absolutely necessary."

Knowledge is critical when it comes to understanding what you read. 27 Consider this passage:

Australia failed to fully capitalise on the second-wicket stand of 182 between Smith and Finch, as Michael Clarke's men were stunted by the off-breaks of Ravichandran Ashwin and a curious collective failure against back-of-a-length bowling. 28

You may be able to read all the words just fine but have absolutely no idea what this passage is about - unless you know something about cricket. This passage is from a BBC report on Australia's victory in the 2015 Cricket World Cup semi-final.

Your ability to comprehend what you read is linked to your knowledge. This is one reason there's an association between a child's reading comprehension and their family's income; more income often means more opportunity for experiences that build knowledge of the world.

But how well you do on a reading comprehension test is going to be partly a function of what's on the test. A 10-year-old in New Zealand, where there's lots of cricket, would probably fare much better on a test that included a passage about cricket than a 10-year-old in the United States would. The American kid would likely do better with a passage about baseball. But of course, some kids know much more about baseball than others. A famous study found that struggling readers who know a lot about baseball did better comprehending a passage about baseball than good readers who don't know much about baseball. 29

The challenge with reading comprehension tests is that, at the end of the day, they are tests of knowledge, and in the United States we don't have a canon of knowledge we've decided every child needs to master. We have common standards, which are essentially lists of things students should be able to do, such as "determine the main idea" and "describe characters in a story." 30 We don't have agreed upon curriculum. It's up to states, to schools - sometimes to individual teachers - to decide what to teach. They choose the books, the materials, the content.

One of the ironic consequences of nationwide concern about poor reading scores is that schools appear to be focusing more on reading instruction at the expense of other subjects. 31 Time spent on reading instruction in the early grades typically takes 90 minutes to three hours daily; science and social studies might be 30 to 45 minutes, a few times a week - at best. Add to this the fact that kids who are struggling with reading are often pulled out of class during science and social studies for extra reading help.

When schools don't put enough focus on general knowledge, it can be particularly harmful to the reading development of kids from low-income families. Consider two children.

One starts school with lots of knowledge and vocabulary. Her parents are college graduates who chat with her about lots of things. She attends summer camps, goes on vacations, takes trips to the science museum.

Another child hasn't had the same opportunities: he rarely leaves his neighborhood, his parents work late, there may be few bedtime stories.

You can teach both of these kids how to decode, but the girl will likely have an edge when it comes to reading comprehension because of the knowledge she is acquiring outside of school. If a goal of education is equity, schools have to pay attention to building knowledge and vocabulary, exposing kids to lots of content, helping them access a wide range of information and experiences. And schools need to encourage kids to read a lot. Because reading is one of the best ways to learn.

That's why teaching kids how to read words is so important. A child who comes to school weak on the language comprehension side of the equation will never catch up if he doesn't get good at decoding. But if a child is taught to decode in the early grades, he has just been given his best shot.

'I ain't none a yo' mama!'

Making sure that children get off to a good start with reading is critical because of the downward spiral that can begin as soon as kids begin to struggle. This means recognizing the factors that can make learning to read more challenging for some kids.

One of the big challenges for many children is when the language they speak at home is different from the language they use at school. English language learners, for example. Kids who speak Spanish or Korean or Arabic at home. But this can be native English speakers, too.

Julie Washington is a speech-language pathologist at Georgia State University who studies language and reading development in African American children. She's specifically interested in the role of African American English. 32

African American English is a dialect of English. Every language has dialects. They're rule-governed variations of a parent language that can affect not just the pronunciation of words but also vocabulary and grammar.

"An example of African American English is, 'One day, me and my mom was at home,'" Washington explained. "That is completely acceptable in African American English."

There was a moment early in her career when she realized that children who come to school speaking African American English might have a harder time learning how to read.

She was reading "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman with a 4-year-old girl. The book is about a baby bird who is looking for his mother. He approaches different animals and objects and asks, "Are you my mother?"

When Washington was done reading the book, she asked the girl to retell the story.

"Is you my mama?" the girl exclaimed. "I ain't none a yo' mama!"

"We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor. Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."
Julie Washington

When she went back to her office, Washington thought about how much work that girl had to do. She listened, recoded the story into her own language, and then retold it. "That takes a lot of working memory," Washington said. "It takes a pretty good vocabulary."

That little girl had to do a lot of work because there was a difference between the language she knew and the language of the book.

"The kid who comes to school whose language system mirrors the book doesn't have that work to do," she said. "He can go straight for decoding and not have to do all of those other steps in between."

Washington says schools need to understand that children who are heavy dialect users may need more time, and more help, to be successful with reading. 33 She says almost all low-income African American children speak African American English at home. Middle- and upper-income kids are more likely to either not use dialect at all, or to be able to code switch. "They've had more access outside of the community," Washington said. "They go to schools where there are more kids using mainstream English."

Who gets help?

Think of family income as a kind of buffer when it comes to the risk of being a struggling reader.

But it's not just your family's income that can tilt things in your favor when it comes to learning how to read; it's the income level of the school you attend too. Research shows that schools where the majority of kids are from poor families are less effective on average at promoting reading achievement. 34 Who goes to high-poverty schools? 35 According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly half of all Black and Hispanic students in the United States attend high-poverty schools but only 8 percent of white students do.

When children from low-income families are concentrated in the same schools, it can be difficult to identify the children with reading disabilities such as dyslexia because so many of the kids are struggling. "I go into poor schools - nobody has dyslexia in a poor school," Washington said. "In the face of a population where eight and a half out of ten are struggling with reading, who has a reading disability? The answer is, we have no idea."

She says part of the problem is the way federal law defines learning disabilities. The law says a child cannot qualify for a learning disability if that child's learning problems are primarily the result of economic disadvantage. 36 "We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor," she said. "Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."

The purpose of the policy was to prevent low-income children of color from being overidentified for special education. 37 But the policy has had unintended consequences, according to Paul Morgan.

"We hear from teachers that they have been told not to refer any more children of color," he said. "That they're already at their threshold."

Research by Morgan and his colleagues shows that white children in the United States who are struggling the most with reading are significantly more likely than children of color to get special education services. 38
Who gets special education?
Among children whose reading achievement placed them in the lowest 10 percent of all scores, white children were more likely to be receiving special education services.

This data suggests that more than half the children of color in this country who are struggling the most with reading are not getting the help they need and are entitled to by federal law. It also suggests that many white children are not getting help, either. Morgan says getting special education services for a student with a reading disability can be difficult no matter who you are or what kind of school your child goes to. "Too often parents have to fight for their children to be provided the services," he said. "And when the school says 'no,' there's not much of a recourse for the parent to engage in, short of legal action, which is very costly."

It's a system that favors people with money. I've interviewed parents who have spent thousands of dollars on attorneys to try to get their children into special ed, because in many schools, special education is the only way for struggling readers to get the kind of explicit instruction they need. 39

Kids who don't get into special ed, or don't have families that can pay for tutors or private school, may never get what they need to become good readers. Like the kids at the juvenile detention facility in Houston.

'Why isn't everybody in this country angry like me?'

When Sonya Thomas was told her seventh grade son was on a second-grade reading level, it changed her life.

The next month, in October 2018, she helped found a parent advocacy group called Nashville PROPEL. 40 The name stands for "parents requiring our public education system to lead." It's a group of mostly Black parents whose children are zoned to some of the lowest-performing schools in the entire state.

Sonya says many parents don't know how far behind their kids are. "They don't know until it costs them." Like it cost her and her son C.J.

Sonya wanted to figure out what happened to C.J. Why has he had such a hard time learning to read? Does he have a learning disability the school system missed?

She requested all of C.J.'s school records, and APM Reports hired Zack Barnes, an assistant professor of special education at Austin Peay State University, to review them. 41 Barnes used to teach in the Nashville schools, so he was familiar with the forms and records in C.J.'s file. He went over them with Sonya and me.

The records show C.J. started off behind. A reading assessment in kindergarten shows he was "below benchmark." But it doesn't say what he was behind in.

At the beginning of first grade, C.J. took a reading test that placed him at the 24th percentile nationally. That means more than three quarters of first graders in the country were doing better than he was. There's a form in the file that says C.J. had no problem understanding and using vocabulary but that he spoke slowly and sometimes had a hard time asking and answering questions.

"I do remember having some concerns about his speech," Sonya said. "Like not talking a lot, being really shy." She says she sometimes had a hard time understanding what he was saying.

There's no indication in the records that C.J. was evaluated for a speech issue or a reading problem. There is the handwritten note from Sonya when C.J. was in first grade, asking the school to test him for a learning disability.

"I am very concerned," the note says. "Please assist me." But he wasn't tested.

At the end of first grade, C.J. scored at the 12th percentile on the same test he had taken at the beginning of the year. The gap between C.J. and his peers had grown even wider. Sonya teared up when Barnes pointed this out. "This tears me all to pieces," she said.

We spent nearly two hours going over C.J.'s entire school file, grade by grade. There are nearly 200 pages of records, and Barnes noticed a pattern. Some years C.J. got pulled out of the classroom for extra help with reading. His test scores went up. Then the help stopped. Barnes likened it to a lifeguard saving someone and then allowing them to drown a few minutes later. "I don't think what we are seeing is uncommon, across the country," he wrote me later in an email.

Barnes says things might have been different if C.J. had been in special education. He would have had an Individualized Education Program and rights to services protected by federal law. But to get into special ed, you need to be identified with a disability. To determine if C.J. has a disability, he'd need a full evaluation from a school psychologist. C.J. never got one of those. Barnes says he should have. "He's this kind of student that we really need to dig deep on to figure out, how can we help C.J.?"

Barnes offered to help Sonya get C.J. an evaluation. She was grateful, but angry. C.J. just finished eighth grade. She had asked for him to be tested for a learning disability in first grade. She wonders how many other kids needed help and didn't get it. "There is this heavy feeling that I have," she said, pausing for a long sigh. "I don't know how to fix it. Except to keep telling parents to question everything and everybody, so they don't have to go all of these years like I did, to try to get down to the bottom of it."

I contacted the Nashville Public Schools to see if someone could answer questions about what happened with C.J. A spokesperson declined to comment.

When reading instruction is based on the flawed assumption that reading will come pretty easily to most kids as long as they're in the right environment, reading instruction is tilted in favor of the few. The few who don't need much instruction. The few from families who can pay to get their kids what they need.

The bottom line is that learning to read is not easy for many kids. Reading difficulty is natural. 42

Cognitive scientists have known this for a long time. In 1980, Phil Gough wrote this: "The statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally." 43

Sonya Thomas wants everyone to know about what she and C.J. have gone through. And she wants to help other parents get what they need for their kids. She's now executive director of PROPEL, the parent group she helped to found. It's her full-time job. She wants to see a movement of parents across the country demanding better reading instruction.

"Why isn't everyone in this country angry like me? Why are they not losing sleep?" she said. "It's unacceptable for children to not have a chance right off the bat. And we are not going to let anybody sleep until we have changed for the better for all children."

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Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

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A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life.

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.

"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.

That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.

As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.

A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.

Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers - and educators may not even know it.

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by - memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know - are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. 2

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders below basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. 3 A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system. 4

The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper, 5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)

syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)

semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

Goodman concluded that:

Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.

Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.

Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.

One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.

The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.

These two ideas - whole word and phonics - had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system."

In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right? Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.

Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.e., the letters in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s. 6

Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.

Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Clay wrote. 7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. 8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.

These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America. 9 Clay built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling first-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. 10

But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. 11

Scientists take on three cueing

It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.

Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. 12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition." 13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. 14

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.

Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.

Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. 16

The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Eagle Eye), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).

There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."

The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word.

The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.

In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.

"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the word. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the sentence together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.

This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop." 18 According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words." 19

But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns - hallmarks of the three-cueing system.

The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work. 20 She uses the term MSV - the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.

Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s. 21

Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment system that uses what are called "leveled books." 22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books - butterfly, caterpillar - are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.

When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.

'That is not reading'

Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach. 23

Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS. 24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.

Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."

Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.

One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.

She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. 25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.

The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. 26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because - according to the three-cueing theory - readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say. 27

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. 28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences. 29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school.

Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'm missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"

A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an expert on reading and not know about this?"

The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:

Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.

But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.

"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."

She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.

In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. 30

By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report. 31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion. 32

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it."-Stacey Cherny

Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.

And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

Mapping the words

To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.

Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words. 33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair. 34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." 35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters. 36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."

That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. 37 In other words, you need phonics skills.

Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.

By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory. 38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it as a visual image. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.

The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading. 39

But when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.

"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties. 40 "And they use context."

In other words, when people don't have good phonics skills, they use the cueing system.

"The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.

And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. 41

"The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.

In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers - until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind. 42

These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

'So what if they use the picture?'

Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too.

Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools. 43

They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read.

They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.

"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."

Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, which includes the "picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began about 10 years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.

The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words? 44

"I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got."

But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.

Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."

Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing.

To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy. 45

One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction. 46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.

There were also vocabulary lessons. 47 The entire class gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."

"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?"

The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."

Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.

This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things. 48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught.

After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.

"Ellen /m/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context - including a picture if there is one - helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.

Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education. 49

Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started teaching," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.

I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.

Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids - perhaps about 40 percent - who will learn to read no matter how they're taught. 50 According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.

When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.

Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.

"It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken."

'My science is different'

If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools?

One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports. 51

I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.

I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.

I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

He dismissed my question.

"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist - despite lots of evidence that it does. 52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

"My science is different," Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence.

Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.

"We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing," she said. "And if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."

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How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

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For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

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Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don’t know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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Equipped for Reading Success A Comprehensive, Step-By-Step Program for Developing Phonemic Awareness and Fluent Word Recognition

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In recent years, scientists have made great strides in understanding how children learn to read, as well as how to prevent and correct most reading difficulties. However, the American Federation for Teachers, the Journal of Learning Disabilities, and School Psychology Review have all highlighted ...

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We've been excited to share some thoughts from our UnboundEd facilitator family on the science of reading and how it is an equity issue (see our posts here and here). We want to explore this issue a little more through the lens of secondary teaching and hope you enjoy reading!

Here are some thoughts from four of our Virtual Summit facilitators: Leandrea Taylor, Mariama Sesay-St. Paul, Andrea Robinson, and Cheryl Dobbertin.

1. How does what you know about the science of reading influence how you plan and deliver instruction at the secondary level?

Leandrea Taylor, Director of Literacy, Compass Community Schools, Tennessee: Most of the work I do with teachers involves attending to the language associated with Hollis Scarborough's "Reading Rope" work. This theoretical framework asserts that students become skilled readers by becoming increasingly automatic with word recognition and increasingly strategic. Because students in middle schools need support with analyzing and interpreting complex texts, intentional planning with the language strand of the theoretical frameworks provides teachers with valuable insight to plan for high impact instruction. Before teaching complex text, teachers plan for "just right" scaffolds that support students to access complex text. During weekly planning sessions, teachers engage in collaborative text-talks. This time is designed for supporting teachers with anticipating ways to give students windows and/or mirrors to access meaning in complex texts or determine places where students may struggle with complex text and plan how to respond. Teachers walk into lessons knowing the hotspots and are prepared to engage students in the thinking work of unlocking complex texts. Planning this way trains teachers to welcome student misconceptions as an opportunity to provide instruction.

Mariama Sesay-St. Paul, Vice Principal of Curriculum and Instruction, Newark Public Schools, New Jersey: I know that reading fluency is about accuracy, prosody, and speed. I also know that many high school teachers cringe at the idea of having to teach reading. I help high school teachers understand the importance of developing their knowledge and vocabulary around the science of reading so when they recognize that a high school student isn't demonstrating proficiency of the high school standards, they're able to use their vocabulary to ask for help. Instead of saying "she can't read," teachers are able to say things like "she can pronounce words properly but needs to be able to summarize what she read" or "she needs to pay attention to punctuation." I also help teachers understand the text complexity triangle so they come face to face with all the nuances of the English language that they take for granted as thriving readers. PD centered on qualitative measures helps teachers identify where students struggle and then discuss strategies to help the striving students become thriving students.

Andrea Robinson, @MsRobinson_ESOL, ESOL Teacher/Team Leader, Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland: My planning process begins with an analysis of the text I will be teaching. I use explicit vocabulary instruction tied to complex texts to support academic language acquisition. I also incorporate word study to develop knowledge of affixes. To ensure students have the fluency necessary to support reading comprehension, I put routines in place for choral and partnered reading of text. While at first students felt self-conscious about reading aloud, their reluctance quickly dissipated. Within a short time, I observed notable results. This practice also helped foster a sense of community among my students. I further scaffold comprehension of complex text by grouping students heterogeneously in triads to promote oral discourse of text-dependent questions. These practices ensure that my students can access grade-level text.

Cheryl Dobbertin, @CherylDobbertin, Director of Secondary Education, East Irondequoit Central School District, New York: I really like the visual of Hollis Scarborough's "Reading Rope." It shows how the strands of word recognition (like phonological awareness and decoding) intertwine with the strands of language comprehension (like knowledge of the world, syntax and vocabulary) to result in proficient reading. Secondary teachers who want to strengthen their students' reading ropes have to ensure that they are reading texts that offer opportunities to learn new syntactic structures, acquire vocabulary, unpack subtle inferences, and build knowledge of the world-in short, they need increasingly complex texts and they need instruction that helps them learn to tackle those texts. If we were really tuned in to the science of reading, we could give up the long-standing secondary argument, particularly amongst ELA teachers, that knowing what happens in certain books (i.e. "the canon") matters as much as ensuring that students climb an interesting, worthy, staircase of complexity. Understanding the science of reading, particularly in relation to what it takes to help students build their language comprehension, helps content area teachers shift their stance away from assigners of reading who expect full comprehension to teachers of reading who look for opportunities to strengthen their students' reading ropes.

2. How is applying the science of reading at the secondary level an equity issue?

Taylor: Oftentimes, students living in marginalized communities face blame for achievement disparities. Fortunately, the body of research around the science of reading has called attention to systemic inequities that can be traced back to institutions like schools and colleges of education ignoring the research around the science of reading. Refusing to acknowledge and act on current research around how students learn to read sets students up for failure. For far too long, Black students and students from other marginalized communities have languished in school environments that have accepted failure as an option. Schools have an ethical responsibility to understand the science of reading research and to demand educators develop the knowledge, skills, and expertise to apply it in the classroom.

Sesay-St. Paul:There are many students at the high school level who are striving to become thriving readers. If secondary teachers don't understand the science of reading, they won't understand the purpose of small group instruction and differentiation. They won't understand the need to pre-read a text with their teacher lens on and plan purposeful questions for students to answer. They won't understand the necessity for focusing on academic vocabulary or chunking texts. If the teachers don't truly understand these things then how can they create and facilitate standards-aligned lessons that help striving students succeed? A wise woman once said, "Literacy is freedom!" If one truly believes that, which I do, then how can applying the science of reading at the secondary level not be an equity issue?

Robinson: When I made the transition from elementary to middle school, I brought with me some misguided practices. This included using leveled texts with students and modifying grade-level text to reduce the level of rigor. I did this with the best of intentions, however, it should come as no surprise that my students' growth directly correlated to the level of instruction I provided. I quickly came to realize that using below grade-level text only further exacerbated disparities among my Black and Brown students. When you know better, you do better. I committed to using grade-level complex text from a standards-aligned curriculum, but then wrestled with the temptation to modify or overly scaffold the content. The truth is that as much as I wanted to help my students reach their full potential, my "helping" was actually hindering their growth. Only by applying the science of reading could I equip students with the necessary tools to access grade-level content, thus closing the opportunity gap. I am convinced this is the best way to support students, particularly those with unfinished learning.

Dobbertin: There is little research that shows that adolescent readers make gains, whether they enter the middle grades reading at grade level or if they are still developing. I would argue that this phenomenon is the result of adolescent reading programs and approaches that are not grounded in the science of reading. Students who are not skillful readers have unfinished learning in either the word recognition side of their reading ropes, the language comprehension side, or both - their ropes have broken or frayed strands. Over time, I hope we will shift the conversation from "this student can't read" to something along the lines of "this student has unfinished learning in the decoding and word knowledge strands, and that has prevented the student from learning enough grade level vocabulary and building enough background knowledge to be independently successful with grade level text. So, what's our plan?" Every student deserves us to relentlessly pursue an understanding of what each reader needs to continuously develop.

We also asked our facilitators to recommend freely available resources to support understanding and planning with the science of reading at the secondary level. Here's what they shared:

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The Science of Reading: An Equity Issue, Part III

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We've been excited to share some thoughts from our UnboundEd facilitator family on the science of reading and how it is an equity issue (see our posts here and here). We want to explore this issue a little more through the lens of secondary teaching and hope you enjoy reading!

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An Accelerated Word Study Program to Develop Proficient Readers and Spellers

This highly explicit, multisensory decoding and spelling program is for students in grades 4-12 and adults who have mild to moderate gaps in their decoding and spelling proficiency but do not require intensive intervention.

For Students with Below-Average Decoding and Spelling Skills

Just Words is a Tier 2 intervention that is a sophisticated study of word structure with explicit teaching of "how English works" for decoding and spelling automaticity.

Just Wordssupports those who have not mastered the foundational skills of language structure typically learned in grades K-3 with strategies that will allow them to independently read and spell words and build the skills necessary to access and master grade-level standards. Emphasizing phonemic awareness, phonics, word study, and spelling, Just Words is the word study component of the Wilson Reading System® curriculum at an accelerated pace so the instructional principles mirror each other. Combine Just Words with your literature-rich core English language arts (ELA) program.

Student focus

All students in grades 4-12 and adults who are decoding and encoding below grade level

Professional learning & support

● Wilson Academy ®/Just Words Learning Community (online)

● Program Workshops

● Virtual Implementation Support

● Facilitator and Presenter Certifications

● Sustainability Plans

● Demonstration Sites with On-Site Coaching

Just Words Curriculum

Familiarize yourself with the skills and concepts taught in Just Words.

Just Words Implementation

Learn how to identify students appropriate for Just Words and how to implement the program successfully in your classroom.

Just Words Materials

Comprehensive materials allow teachers to confidently present a carefully structured word-study program using engaging, multisensory techniques.

Implemented Across the Country

Just Words instruction has been shown to improve students' word recognition, nonsense word fluency, oral reading fluency, and comprehension among students in grades 4 and higher.

See what states have recognized Just Words

Just Words® Learning Community

With Just Words, you gain access to this membership-based companion site, which supports individuals teaching Wilson's programs. Gain access to reference and instructional materials, expert tips, and more.

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Just Words - Wilson Language Training Corporation

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For Students with Below-Average Decoding and Spelling Skills Just Words is a Tier 2 intervention that is a sophisticated study of word structure with explicit teaching of "how English works" for decoding and spelling automaticity.

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Implementaion Research A Synthesis of the Literature.pdf

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The Right to Read has received fiscal sponsorship from the Utah Film Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
All donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

Copyright © 2023 Ready or Not. All Rights Reserved.

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The Right to Read has received fiscal sponsorship from the Utah Film Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. All donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Copyright © 2023 Ready or Not. All Rights Reserved.

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HE Summit Copy of Linguistics for Educators Optional Zoom.pdf

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Key points

New findings from neuroscience provide new insights and perspectives on classroom practices for literacy.

There is growing theoretical and practical support for more emphasis on the dyslexic person's strengths.

Paradoxically, dyslexia may be a gift with a cluster of unique assets.

In a just-released article entitled "The 'Reading Brain' is Taught, Not Born" cognitive neuroscientists Rebecca Gotlieb, Laura Rhinehart, and Maryanne Wolf are unambiguous in reporting "...the study of the brain-basis of reading begins with the fact that, unlike oral language, there is no ready-made genetic program for learning to read." They point out that it's teachers-sometimes with the help of parents-who are largely responsible for helping students build reading circuitry-a gift to a child for a lifetime. This may not be a new revelation, but Gotlieb, Rhinehart, and Wolf cast the teacher's role in building the child's reading, writing, and spelling architecture in a deeper, wider, and weighty context:

"The herculean job of educators is no less than to help the brain develop a skill it could not otherwise [develop], which requires creating an entirely new circuit in the brain."

"Herculean" because building new reading circuitry is immensely complex and multi-dimensional and according to these neuroscientists, it normally takes over two decades! It requires, they report, something most teachers through no fault of their own have not been well trained or given the tools to do-that is to provide "explicit, systematic, phonics-forward, language-based, multicomponent instruction that supports and connects to the development of the many other cognitive skills that make up fluent reading." The need for change, they explain, is not just for the first two years of instruction in kindergarten and first grade effectively jumpstarting independent reading and writing for both decoding and encoding with automatic word reading and automatic spelling of brain words, but it is indeed a 20 year process! For example, readers at each grade level build "brain words," words with meanings and pronunciations that can be recognized automatically without conscious effort and should be taught explicitly at each grade level in elementary school and beyond (Gentry & Ouellette, 2019).

These neuroscientists contend all teachers must be reading teachers from the time the child learns to write and read her or his name continuing beyond post high school education. All teachers should be well versed in how to build reading circuitry in the brain. This is a revolutionary, ambitious, and possibly transformative call for change. For example, if you are a sixth-grade teacher and you aren't teaching spelling and vocabulary explicitly or a high school teacher who divorces your content from the child's reality, change is needed.

In their overview of three decades of neuroscience and research in cognition that can inform classroom practices, the neuroscientists report that most teachers remain uninformed. There's a call to set up instructional environments that enable each developing reader to demonstrate individual strengths and needs. They report lessons from COVID and the effects of school environments in privileged versus unprivileged communities where some kids, especially in unprivileged communities, lost two years of education. There are also lessons from the fact that even though we now know all struggling readers including those with developmental dyslexia need early intervention-and we have known this for 30 years-most diagnoses continue to happen after second grade which is a travesty. Beyond that, currently diagnoses failing to address the student's strengths and needs too often submit students to inadequate reading instruction and leave them feeling stupid, or labeled as lazy. These strong emotional feelings and the role of affect can in and of itself cripple the individual's development of reading fluency and self-esteem.

A second unrelated article by neuroscientists highlighted in Psychology Today by Justin Garson (December, 2022) poses an interesting question: Is developmental dyslexia really a deficit or could it be a gift? In "Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration?" ( Frontiers in Psychology, 2022) Helen Taylor and Martin Vestergaard posit that rather than having a deficit disorder, people with developmental dyslexia may in fact have inherited a gift. And it may not be just a gift inherent in the individual, but the dyslexic brain may be a genetic gift built to enhance mankind's chances of survival on the planet. They explore cognitive realms like discovery, invention, and creativity among dyslexics unexplained by deficits deficient theories and challenge the long-held view that developmental dyslexia is a disorder. Rather, they posit the dyslexic brain as a unique cognitive style evolved over millennia to spread genes for divergent thinking, cognitive exploration, and holistic visual processing-processes that many dyslexics report experiencing as "gifts." These strengths so say the researchers are unexplained by deficit-centered theories.

Being dyslexic myself with daily deficit experiences such as a slow reading rate, poor spelling, challenges with word retrieval when I'm under the gun, and embarrassing mispronunciations, I revel in the prospect of a theory that puts dyslexic individuals on a pedestal and gives them hope for lifelong impact and fulfillment. "There are indeed differences in the brains of people who have dyslexia" in contrast to the brains of those who do not have dyslexia (Ozernov-Palchik & Gaab, 2016, p.14). Maybe these differences aren't all bad.

As I have written previously, some experts present evidence that dyslexics are gifted beyond what is found in non-dyslexic individuals and often have special talents such as thinking outside of the box, visualization in three dimensions, and being creative, entrepreneurial, artistic, and athletic ( Ehrlichman, 2015; Gentry, 2019).

In a previous post, I wrote, "People with dyslexia make the world a better place." Does my familial genetic line connect to the likes of George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Henry Ford? Or in today's world to the likes of Cher, Anderson Cooper, Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Branson, and a host of architects, athletes, and entrepreneurs. Taylor and Vestergaard think perhaps it does.

One thing both articles have in common is spotlighting both strengths and weaknesses in dyslexic people. When a fourth-grade teacher works with a fourth grader who is excellent with composition but struggling with spelling-we encounter them a lot-volunteer to be that student's editor in fourth grade and teach them the habit of getting help before going public with an important piece of writing. Be sure to provide all students integrated word study through explicit spelling and vocabulary study for about 20 minutes per day in weekly grade-by-grade spelling lessons throughout elementary school. And even though you might hold all fourth graders accountable for editing for spelling, teach the child with symptoms of dyslexia the habit of always getting help.

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New Riveting Reports on Neuroscience, Dyslexia, and Reading

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New findings from neuroscience provide new insights and perspectives on classroom practices for literacy. There is growing theoretical and practical support for more emphasis on the dyslexic person's strengths. Paradoxically, dyslexia may be a gift with a cluster of unique assets.

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Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text

Part 3A. Build students' world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text

Part 3B. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read

Part 3C. Teach students a routine for determining the gist of a short section of text

Part 3D. Teach students to monitor their comprehension as they read

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reading intervention; reading instruction; literacy; reading difficulties; reading disabilities; comprehension; fluency; decoding; comprehension monitoring; world knowledge; word knowledge; vocabulary; stretch text; grade 4; grade 5; grade 6; grade 7; grade 8; grade 9

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WWC | Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9

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Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text Part 3A. Build students' world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text Part 3B. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read Part 3C.