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For more resources and information about implementing literacy instruction aligned with Ohio's Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement, access the resources for each age band.

Emergent Literacy Early and Conventional Literacy Adolescent Literacy

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Implementing Ohio's Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement: Resources for School Leaders

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For more resources and information about implementing literacy instruction aligned with Ohio's Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement, access the resources for each age band. Emergent Literacy Early and Conventional Literacy Adolescent Literacy

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The Department's seventh annual Literacy Academy is returning live and in-person on June 10-11, 2024 at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Columbus. Resources from this year's event will be available on the Department's website.

Resources

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The Department's seventh annual Literacy Academy is returning live and in-person on June 10-11, 2024 at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Columbus. Resources from this year's event will be available on the Department's website.

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The Science of Reading: Defining Guide provides a firm definition of what the science of reading is, what it is not, and how all stakeholders can understand its potential to transform reading instruction.

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The National Center on Improving Literacy is a partnership among literacy experts, university researchers, and technical assistance providers, with funding from the United States Department of Education.

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Your source for improving outcomes for students with literacy-related disabilities, including dyslexia.

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As states and districts overhaul the way their schools teach reading, many are banking on one specific professional-learning program to propel this transformation: Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, commonly known as LETRS.

A critical part of making large-scale changes to reading instruction is introducing teachers to research and new methods. That's where professional learning comes in.

LETRS instructs teachers in what literacy skills need to be taught, why, and how to plan to teach them. And it delves into the research base behind these recommendations.

The program is long, intensive, and expensive. It can take upwards of 160 hours to complete over the course of two years. But it's also become one of the most frequently used options for reading professional development.

Twenty-three states have contracted with Lexia, the company that houses LETRS, to provide some level of statewide training. About 200,000 teachers total are enrolled in the training this year, an 8-fold increase from 2019, the company says. "We call it wild, explosive growth," said Cassandra Wheeler, a senior manager of LETRS state success at Lexia.

How did this one training become so ubiquitous? Is it really that different from the other PD options? And most importantly: Does it work?

What is LETRS?

LETRS is a training course developed by Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman, both literacy experts and consultants. It's for teachers who work with beginning readers, though there are also companion trainings available for administrators and early childhood educators.

LETRS is divided into two volumes, aligned to this framework.

The first covers how to teach and assess students' knowledge of the sounds in the English language (phonemic awareness), how those sounds represent letters that can create words (phonics), and how and why to teach word parts (morphology). It also covers spelling and fluency instruction.

The second explains how to develop students' spoken language abilities, including vocabulary knowledge; how to create a "language-rich" classroom; comprehension instruction; and how teachers can build connections between reading and writing. The course also gives teachers information about how to diagnose reading problems and differentiate instruction.

LETRS is not a curriculum or a set of activities-that's not its goal. The goal is to "give people a knowledge base for doing the job," Moats said. "I want the teacher in front of a group of kids to feel like she or he understands what is going on in the minds of the kids as they are trying to learn."

Why is LETRS so popular?

The answer to that starts with what many in the reading field are calling the "Mississippi model."

In 2014, Mississippi started LETRS training with its K-3 teachers, part of a broader effort to align reading instruction in the state to evidence-based practices.

In the years since, about two dozen state departments of education have embraced similar changes, instating mandates that require schools to use materials, assessments, and methods aligned to the evidence base behind how children learn to read. Many have cited Mississippi as an example.

An evaluation of Mississippi's LETRS implementation from the Southeast Regional Education Laboratory, a federally funded implementation network, found that it increased teacher knowledge and improved teacher practice. Then, in 2019, Mississippi students made big gains in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Education officials thought that replicating Mississippi's LETRS training would lead to similar results, said Beth Anderson, the executive director of the Hill Center in Durham, N.C., which houses an independent school for students with reading difficulties and provides reading professional development. "As often happens in education, everyone jumped on the bandwagon of what looked like the silver bullet solution, and LETRS is what looked like that," she said.

"The focus on science of reading has driven a lot of the momentum that we're seeing," said Nick Gaehde, the president of Lexia and Voyager Sopris Learning. But also: "The funding environment has certainly been a factor."

Is LETRS aligned to the methods used in the science of reading?

Yes-and it differs from other kinds of reading professional learning.

Much of teacher professional development goes like this: Teachers will sit in a few days of sessions about a couple of new tools or approaches, apply the ones they think might be useful to their practice, and discard the rest. LETRS isn't like this.

"We have instead mapped out a course of study where one thing builds upon another in a sequence," Moats said.

The LETRS sequence takes a "speech to print" approach to teaching foundational skills, Moats said. "We're convinced from research that, for kids, the underpinning of being able to learn the alphabetic code for reading and spelling is phoneme awareness"-the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds within words. Once kids have that skill, they can connect those sounds to letters, and they can begin to read words.

But LETRS, like the science of reading, isn't just about word reading. The second year of LETRS is all about language comprehension, and its method differs from typical approaches.

Much reading comprehension instruction in schools today is focused on teaching comprehension skills-finding the main idea, comparing and contrasting-which students are supposed to learn how to do and then apply to other texts.

But studies show that practicing these skills doesn't actually lead to better comprehension, in part because understanding a text is heavily dependent on background knowledge. Understanding a passage about baseball means knowing a bit about the sport, its rules, and its equipment beforehand, as one famous study found.

LETRS teaches how and when to apply these evidence-based strategies. But it also takes what Moats calls a "text-based" approach to reading comprehension.

The program instructs teachers to develop their lessons and questions for students purposefully, based on the specific text they're reading: What knowledge should they take away? What new vocabulary can they learn? Teachers need to have read the text themselves to be able to facilitate this process-something that isn't always the case in classrooms where students are asked to practice comprehension skills in books of their choice.

"Instead of using any random passage to teach main idea, we want the teacher to first think about what the main idea is and what they want kids to learn," Moats said.

A lot of teachers didn't learn these approaches to teaching reading in preservice programs or in professional development, so they can feel "very foreign," she said.

Why wouldn't most of this information have been covered in teacher preparation?

These ideas are one hallmark of a balanced literacy approach to reading instruction, a philosophy that 68 percent of teacher educators in this survey said they adhere to.

A popular instructional technique in balanced literacy classrooms is guided reading, in which a teacher coaches a student through reading a book matched to their level. The goal is to facilitate students' comprehension of the text, prompting them when needed with suggestions and support. If a student struggles to read a word, a teacher might suggest looking at the letters, but the teacher might also suggest checking the picture or thinking about what word would make sense.

To understand how this is different than the approach that LETRS presents, imagine learning how to read is like learning how to play basketball. The LETRS system is to teach kids the rules, practice their skills through drills, and scrimmage a few times before they play their first game.

By contrast, a balanced literacy approach often puts kids on the court right away. Some kids are naturally gifted ballplayers, and they quickly get the hang of dribbling and shooting. But others will continue to struggle for the whole season, because they never learned the foundations of the sport.

Does LETRS lead to higher student achievement?

That's a complicated question.

The evaluation of LETRS in Mississippi found that teacher knowledge and quality of instruction increased in Mississippi schools after the training.

But teachers in Mississippi didn't just get the training. They also had a system of coaching to support them in applying it-figuring out how what they were learning should translate into practice.

And the Southeast Regional Education Laboratory evaluation only measured changes to teachers' knowledge and how teachers taught. The researchers note that the study can't say whether LETRS, specifically, improved student scores.

Mississippi also made changes to curriculum materials and intervention protocols. Was it teacher knowledge that made a difference for student achievement? Was it one of the other supports? Some combination of several factors? It's hard to know for sure.

Experimental studies of LETRS have shown similar results: The training increases teacher knowledge and can change practice given the right conditions-but these shifts don't always translate into higher student achievement.

Other studies validate the idea that strong coaching can help teachers translate LETRS into practice.

If LETRS doesn't always lead to increases in student scores, is it worth the investment?

Lexia declined to share per-participant costs for LETRS training. But the PD is a big-ticket item for several states.

North Carolina is spending $54 million on training and related supports. Alabama has spent $28 million. South Carolina has spent $24 million; Kansas, $15 million; Oklahoma, $13 million; Utah, almost $12 million.

LETRS advocates-including many teachers who have gone through the training-say that the comprehensive, sequenced knowledge base it provides is an essential springboard for delivering evidence-based instruction.

"It's a lot of work, it's like another college course. But it's so valuable," said Lisa Tidwell, a kindergarten teacher in Ogden, Utah, who started LETRS this past school year.

It's also helpful for teachers to all go through the same training, so they have a common language, said Kelly Butler, the CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, a Mississippi group that helped lead the state's reading overhaul.

But does that training have to be LETRS?

"This is a hard question, and it's something I think about a lot," said Emily Solari, a professor in the department of curriculum, instruction, and special education at the University of Virginia.

It's reasonable to expect that there's some threshold of knowledge that teachers need to reach in order to apply evidence-based practices in their classroom, said Solari, who is also a member of a council that advises Lexia on best practices. But it's not a given, she said, that teachers would need to go through a program as intensive as LETRS to reach it.

"Every district has a certain amount of resources," Solari said. "Where do we put those resources to get the biggest bang for your buck?"

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What Is LETRS? Why One Training Is Dominating 'Science of Reading' Efforts

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The intensive, expensive teacher training has boomed-but what does it include? And does it work?

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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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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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Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project that offers a wealth of research-based reading strategies, lessons, and activities designed to help young children learn how to read and read better. Our reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in helping struggling readers build fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.

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Features of Explicit Instruction: Training Modules | NCII

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Explore four in-depth training modules focused on key components of the features of explicit instruction and supporting practices for effective implementation.

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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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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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Throughout the past several years, a pattern has emerged that shows parents are not aware of what their student's reading or math levels are currently and where they are expected to be. This became obvious at the beginning of this year at sneak a peek night, where students get a chance to see their classroom and learn a little about their teachers and expectations for the year. The time spent in the classroom was only 20 minutes before they moved onto the school tour and the information from our principal. Out of the 12 parents that attended, seven stayed behind to ask about their students' data that was just given to them. Once I realized that the parents were unaware of what the data meant and the expectations for their children, it became clear that these parents needed more support and information.

After further discussion within the first grade team, we decided that sending home data and information without an in-person conversation would not be an effective way of communication. The parents needed more information in order to support their own children. That dialogue would need to start with the knowledge of where their child is, where they should be and then moving forward, what they need to work on. A data night will allow parents to get up to date information, have open communication, learn what their child is doing in class and take home tools to support their student and what they are learning in class. The initial data was given to the parents in August and we decided to wait until December to host the data night so that we would have more data. With the additional data, the games, websites and tools we would provide would be more personalized and applicable.

Below you can see an example of the data that was given to the parents at the beginning of the year (end of kindergarten scores as they started first grade) and what their data looked like on data night (beginning of year for math and reading as well as their goal sheets that were created after their first tests). This included reading data, attendance data and math data. On the left is the data that was given to families on data night to be compared to the beginning of the year.

Data night provided us, as an early learning team, to interact and connect with families about where their child is currently performing and what the expectation is for growth in both reading and math. As parents walked into data night, we provided them with a folder containing their student's information (as seen on the left above). Since the data night was an early learning data night, we planned to show the growth chart for reading and math scores from kindergarten to second grade. This allowed parents to see their child(ren)'s data and where they need to be over the next one to two years.

After presenting the data to the individual parents and sharing the overall growth charts to parents, it then turned into a night of conversation, with the opportunity to ask and answer questions and provide resources to the parents. Parents were able to walk through the cafeteria and classrooms to get personalized resources for their children. In order to give personalized resources to parents, there was preparation before on our own end. This then meant having these games or resources available and showing the parents how to use them. The goal is to give them as much information without it being overwhelming and to educate the parents so that they are best able to support the education of their student.

By exposing and encouraging our families to take advantage of the data night, parents were able to note similarities to the ways they learned math and provided resources for parents to support their children with homework to encourage fluency in both math and reading. ​Providing the opportunity for parents to come and learn about the level that their child is performing on and give them resources to use outside of school was a great success. There were a couple changes that I would make if we were to host data night again, but overall, parents were happy with the resources and the information they received. While the parents were learning, students were enjoying having popcorn and watching a movie with their friends and siblings.

Every single parent that attended walked out with personalized information and tools to use. That benefits the parent, the child and us, as teachers, now that they have ways to reinforce what is happening during the school day. Parents and family members that attended were very receptive to hearing about the data and the resources that we were sending home. One of the biggest pieces of feedback that we received was that they enjoyed being shown how to play the games and use them effectively inside their house. They also talked about being given the opportunity to learn about what the data means, where it needs to be in the future and how to best support the learning of their scholar. Giving parents access is just as important as giving the students access inside and outside of the classroom. If the parent is engaged, educated and involved in the learning, the child becomes more engaged and invested in their own learning. Overall, the data night was a success, especially considering it was the first data night that was held by the early learning team since the turn around process began. Hopefully we can build upon that for the future!

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Throughout the past several years, a pattern has emerged that shows parents are not aware of what their student's reading or math levels are currently and where they are expected to be. This became obvious at the beginning of this year at sneak a peek night, where students get a chance to see their classroom and learn a little about their teachers and expectations for the year.

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Family Data Night at Ford Road Elementary

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In my current role as eLearning Coordinator, instigating change is part of my job description. With the speed that technology is evolving, its use in the classroom is constantly changing and...

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There are several simple ways for teachers to introduce students to interpreting data visualizations.

I truly believe that data literacy is literacy in the Information Age. Increasingly, we are inundated with conflicting claims about products, medical treatments, the weather-you name it-and it's tough to make the right decision. To make a rational, optimal choice requires us to be data literate-to be able to understand the nature of how data is collected and visualized in a variety of different formats.

Unfortunately, most standards don't put an adequate emphasis on data literacy, given its importance in modern society. The good news is, there's a way to take a lesson on pretty much any topic and add an authentic data element, and there are ways to use these graphs to build student engagement.

Adding Data Elements

Step 1: Define the topic. For this example, let's say we have a lesson about climate change. From experience, students often want to know how they can make a positive impact. Ideally, we could find some data about how choices students make over their lifetime will affect greenhouse gas emissions.

Step 2: Find data. One of my go-to resources is OurWorldInData.org. I really like this site because it's legit (founded and run by scholars in the UK), and their data browser has tabs that show the graph, a table of the data, and the sources all in one place.

Here is a graph I found pretty easily that shows greenhouse emissions for different food products. Instead of telling students, "You can reduce your carbon footprint by eating less meat," we can guide them to an even deeper understanding by analyzing this graph for themselves.

Our World In Data makes things easy by giving us a nice graph. If you need to make your own, Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel have options for making charts from a CSV or XLSX file. You might also check out RAWGraphs for a free graph-building wizard.
Step 3: Make the graph mysterious (enigmatize it)!
We might just have students think-pair-share about which dietary changes would have the biggest impact on climate change. Alternatively, we could go another step to build some mystery and investment around the "reveal" of what the graph is telling us, while also deepening student understanding of how raw data gets represented through different visuals.

Strategy A: Blank out the labels. This strategy requires having a graph and its data as a table. Here I have simply blanked out the labels for a few of the bar plot categories. (I dragged little white boxes over the labels and added blanks using a photo editor). I would now ask students to fill in the blanks by looking at the data table (which I got from the same source under the table tab).

Students will need to carefully compare the graph and table to figure out what's missing, concreting the connection between the data and its visualization. As an added bonus, because of the mystery element, students will be more engaged in digesting the graph further!

To facilitate, I would ask some probing questions and reward student observations. Do we notice any general patterns in the data (is there something in common about the categories that have high emissions)? Are there any plant products with super-high carbon footprints? Why might that be?

Strategy B: Turn the graph into a puzzle (cipher). Another way to add a level of mystery to a graph is to encipher the labels. ( Encipher here means to change all the letters using a rule that the students need to crack.) In this example (with a New York Times graph), I used the 2,000-plus-year-old " Caesar cipher" and shifted each letter forward one place (e.g., CAT -> DBU). Enciphering labels is a good data literacy hook because many students are really into ciphers and puzzles, but it also works well to deepen student connection to a graph when the table of data is too big for Strategy A to work. Cryptii is a great resource for creating ciphers.

At the top of the graph it reads, "Percent of nutritionists saying a food is healthy." But after using the Caesar cipher, the word "nutritionists" becomes "ovusjujpojtut." At the bottom of the graph it reads, "Percent of all Americans saying a food is healthy." But after using the Caesar cipher to change a few key words, it becomes, "Percent of bmm Bnfsjdbot saying a food is healthy."

There are multiple ways for students to decipher the text. Many will use brute force and randomly try shifting letters forward or back a few spaces. Alternatively, some students might reason that the last word before "saying" in the x-axis label is a plural word (ending in s). Thus, if t should be an s, we need to go back -1. Shifting all letters back one changes "bmm Anfsjdbot" to "all Americans."

Once we've deciphered it, now we're curious about the next level of the enigma. What does it mean that granola is off the 1:1 line in this graph?

I hope these tips inspire you to weave data literacy into all sorts of lessons. I'm sure you'll come up with lots of clever ways of enigmatizing graphs that I haven't thought of!

Other Resources

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There are several simple ways for teachers to introduce students to interpreting data visualizations. I truly believe that data literacy is literacy in the Information Age. Increasingly, we are inundated with conflicting claims about products, medical treatments, the weather-you name it-and it's tough to make the right decision.

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For the past week, we've been focused on using student data professionally as a means of leading data-driven, student-centered conversations. As a conclusion to this series, let's discuss how to effectively share student data with parents. These strategies provide a great structure or framework for conferencing with parents.

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Reasons for Sharing Student Data

Visualize

Just as it is important to help students visualize meaning, it is also important to help parents visualize student growth. For this reason, I really value my classroom data wall. Seeing our classroom charts and graphs, which track class averages, helps parents understand where their student falls in the classroom. This can be important when helping parents visualize struggles or when confirming student skill mastery.

Another way I help parents visualize their student's personal growth is through student data sheets. Even at the high school level, data sheets can be powerful tools for students. During conferences, I often show parents their student's data sheet, which focuses on writing and grammar growth. This helps parents see where their student needs additional support and where their student truly succeeds. Additionally, parents often see trends I do not see: a dip the week of a family vacation or a spike during an elder sibling's visit home. These kinds of insights can be invaluable going forward during the year.

Emphasize growth

In addition to helping parents visualize their student's data, it is also important to help parents see their student's growth. This is where individual data sheets are especially important: data sheets show where students began and where they are now. Additionally, looking at formative assessment can be a good way of helping parents recognize student growth. Sometimes, I also bring student-made goal sheets so parents can read through their student's self-selected goals. This helps parents align their priorities with their student's priorities, and this activity can cast the rest of the discussion in a whole new light because it puts the student at the center of the discussion and lets the student's desires drive the conversation.

Choose data carefully

In my classes, the grade book usually has around 1000 points a semester, so I can offer parents a lot of data: pre-test scores, writing rubrics, benchmark assessments, etc. While each of these items is an important indicator of student performance, sharing too much information can be overwhelming for parents and can be too much for a brief parent-teacher conferences. For this reason, I suggest selecting data carefully. While I'd never advocate for hiding or intentionally withholding information from parents, I am suggesting that during a parent-teacher conference, not every piece of data needs to make an appearance.

Choosing Data to Share

So how do teachers determine which pieces of data to share? Choose three pieces of data to bring to a parent meeting: a celebration, a growth opportunity, and a student-selected brag.

To start any parent interaction off on the right foot, share data that celebrates student success. This can be a spike in the data binder, a powerful rubric, or a compelling benchmark assessment. Regardless of which data point you choose, celebrate student success with parents. If possible, give parents something tangible they can take home and put on the refrigerator.

Next, bring a piece of data that represents an opportunity for student growth. This is probably the document(s) that inspired a parent-teacher conference in the first place: a series of concerning formative assessments, a low-scoring diagnostic, a rough draft. I prefer to bring this item out second because you can point to the celebration piece and say, "I know your student is capable of great things-just look at this first item-but this second item does not match that same level of mastery." After introducing the growth opportunity, teachers can answer parent questions about the data-how was it collected? Under what circumstances? With what preparation? Then, teachers can ask parents "How can I help your student improve in this area?" This is usually a revealing question and can help parents and teachers design the best means of helping the student achieve success.

3. A student-selected brag.

After developing a plan of action, I like to end by sharing student-selected data: a promising test score, a reflective journal, a recently-met goal. This activity provides students with an opportunity to show off a little, which creates an empowering opportunity for students. Additionally, giving parents another tangible item can be a good place to end our discussion before standing up and shaking hands.

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3 Steps for Sharing Student Data with Parents / Moore English

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Collecting student data through formative and summative data is an important part of teaching. Sharing student data with parents can be a tricky part of open house, parent-teacher conferences, and student growth mindset. Using these tips will help teachers in elementary, middle, and high school communicate with parents and caregivers.

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Lives are busy and people are busy, so we have to make sure we plan in advance if we want parents and patrons to be engaged in our schools. Parent engagement can take on many different shapes and sizes-for all the different parents we encounter, we receive varying preferences for how they like to communicate.

For this article, I am writing specifically about "parent engagement nights." This is an event in the evening that all parents are invited to. The intent of the evening can vary, but these are generally informative sessions for parents to learn more about something that will help support their student.

Plan Ahead

Because of the challenges of limited time and resources, now is the time for schools to start planning these parent engagement opportunities for next year. Good events, like good classroom lessons, take quality planning. But unlike planning for daily lessons, planning for parent engagement nights should be done on a yearly basis.

Here is my process, which I use each summer to plan for parent education opportunities:

Create a team to help: As all principals know, good people make our jobs infinitely easier. Finding some good people-both teachers and parents-to help guide the process is step one. If an event is going be worth parents' time to attend, it will take more than just one person putting it all together.

Pick a focus: There are numerous places to start with this, and the focus will be narrowed down as the planning develops. To get started, the team will need to settle on a broad area of focus. At times, we have used the PTO National Parent Engagement standards as a starting point. Will the night be about curriculum, social issues, technology, the school's vision and mission, student work, or some other live issues that students are facing? Quite a list already! I usually have my parent group, site council, or PTO give me some feedback about which general topic they would like to focus on. Teachers also have some good ideas, so be sure to include them in the process. At times, we will have one session in the fall about one topic and another in the spring about something completely different-it just depends on what we feel we need at that time. We also try to rotate the areas we focus on to make sure we continue to engage all parents.

Base it on data: Once the broad idea is decided on, the next step is to look closer at data to make a specific decision. There are really two sources of data that need to be strongly considered, and which comes first depends on the focus. The first piece of data to consider would be achievement data. If the plan is to have a "math night," there should be data to support the need for a focus in this area. The other data that is important is parent feedback, often in the form of a survey. Many times, this is where more of the social emotional learning or social issues will come out. Maybe the school needs to consider mental health awareness or social media use-parents will have a good pulse on what they need more information on.

Planning for "instruction": Once a topic is selected, you'll need to consider how you and your team will engage the parents-unless you have an amazing guest speaker lined up. This is an opportunity not to be wasted, so a 60-minute lecture on social media probably won't cut it. Parents, like students, need to be engaged: discussing, moving, thinking, reflecting, and sharing. How can all this take place while still getting the content covered?

Plan, plan, and plan some more: Because parents are busy, we should try to do everything we can to help them make it to the parent night. Some ideas for this are getting food or providing childcare services for those who need it. There are all sorts of great ways to get parents to an event, but many of them take a great deal of planning-especially if funds are tight. We have had volunteer day care at our events before, which is a huge factor for a lot of parents. In order to get volunteers lined up, it takes a decent amount of planning and organizing. Where will they do this? Who will do it? Is there an adult that is required to be there as well? What activities could you do? Again, planning is key.

I wouldn't claim that this is a fool-proof list to make sure you have 100% parent attendance, but these tips can help a school and principal get started now to have a good plan for next school year. Do you have any tips that you've found successful for planning a parent engagement night? Let us know in the comments below!

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Plan a Parent Engagement Night That Sets You Up for Success

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Lives are busy and people are busy, so we have to make sure we plan in advance if we want parents and patrons to be engaged in our schools. Parent engagement can take on many different shapes and sizes-for all the different parents we encounter, we receive varying preferences for how they like to communicate.

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What is DIRECT, SYSTEMATIC and EXPLICIT Instruction? - Keys to Literacy

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Direct, explicit, and systematic instruction has been recognized as an essential strategy for teaching reading and writing.

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For a downloadable PDF click here. Summer 2016
By Carolyn D. Cowen

IDA infographics help make complex information easy to digest, remember, and share and are made for a wide audience-those new to dyslexia and related literacy/learning issues as well as the experts. Please share our infographics as well as our Fact Sheets to raise awareness about dyslexia and to help support the policy and practice changes needed to bring effective instruction (particularly in reading) to every child with dyslexia in every classroom across the nation.
Author's Note: You may need to zoom in to read small text.
Carolyn D. Cowen, Ed.M., is the Social Media Editor/Strategist for the International Dyslexia Association's Examiner. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Newgrange School, Ann Robinowitz Education Center, and Laurel School and on the Board of Directors for the Research Institute for Learning and Development. Carolyn is especially interested in creative ways nonprofits and movements can "power the mission with the message." Follow her on Twitter .

More infographics!

Good News! Most Reading Difficulties Can Be Resolved or Greatly Diminished (April 2016)

How Widespread Is Dyslexia? (February 2016)
Copyright © 2016 International Dyslexia Association (IDA). We encourage sharing of Examiner articles. If portions are cited, please make appropriate reference. Articles may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. Permission to republish this article is available from info@interdys.org.

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What Is Structured Literacy? - International Dyslexia Association

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The Science of Reading - The Reading League

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The Reading League's mission is to advance the understanding and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction through the science of reading.

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THE READING LEAGUE NATIONAL

The Reading League is a national not for profit that promotes knowledge to reimagine the future of literacy education and accelerate the global movement toward reading instruction rooted in science.

THE READING LEAGUE'S MISSION IS TO ADVANCE:

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THE READING LEAGUE NATIONAL The Reading League is a national not for profit that promotes knowledge to reimagine the future of literacy education and accelerate the global movement toward reading instruction rooted in science. THE READING LEAGUE'S MISSION IS TO ADVANCE:

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The Sound Wall materials provided here align with the UFLI Foundations lessons. Included in the UFLI Sound Wall set are the following:

phoneme cards with mouth pictures to represent the articulatory gesture associated with each phoneme,

labels for the sound wall displays, including the place and manner of articulation for consonants, and

grapheme cards that can be added to the sound wall one at a time, as the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught.

We have also provided printable version of the Individual Sound wall charts. You may choose to glue them into a file folder for each student or print them front/back to laminate. These may also be enlarged and printed as posters if your classroom space does not allow for the full UFLI Sound Wall displays.
Individual Sound Wall: Consonants Individual Sound Wall: Vowels

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Printable Resources | UF Literacy Institute

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The Sound Wall materials provided here align with the UFLI Foundations lessons. Included in the UFLI Sound Wall set are the following: phoneme cards with mouth pictures to represent the articulatory gesture associated with each phoneme, labels for the sound wall displays, including the place and manner of articulation for consonants, and grapheme cards that can be added to the sound wall one at a time, as the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught.

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We're quickly approaching spring, a time of year where two distinct feelings tend to emerge in schools and districts around the country.

The first is the realization that you're in a sprint to the finish line called "The Last Day of School," and it's all you can do to buckle up and hang on. Simultaneously, there's the knowledge that even with the fast-paced schedule, the demands and the expectations of the year will continue.

As you work through what to prioritize over the next few months amid competing priorities, be sure to take the time to meet with your teachers and team members to get a pulse on their professional learning goals. Having quality conversations around professional growth gives you the opportunity to energize teachers for the remainder of the year-and can also provide critical clues about teacher well-being and retention.

Having quality conversations around professional learning gives you the opportunity to energize teachers for the remainder of the year-and can also provide critical clues about teacher well-being and retention.

Before you start: tips for a successful check-in

Prior to checking in with your teachers and staff, it'll help to do a bit of pre-work. Here are a few ways to prepare for that conversation:

Review your teachers' goals. What professional learning have they engaged in so far, and what results did they expect to see?

Review your own notes. Did you go on a series of learning walks earlier in the year, or sit in on specific classroom activities? Collect those observations to inform the discussion.

Take care in introducing the check-ins. Make it clear that these conversations are formative, and in service of helping them grow. Encourage them to take an active role in the conversation, and ask that they bring anecdotal or quantitative data to the conversations.

Now that the pre-work is out of the way, here are four best practices and questions to consider as you're preparing to have conversations with your teachers and staff about their professional learning goals:

What have you learned, and how have you implemented those learnings in your classroom?

This is an obvious question-and an important one. It's easy to get excited about professional development at the beginning of a school year, when there's plenty of time and no shortage of ideas. As the year progresses, those same goals move to the bottom of the to-do list.

It's easy to get excited about professional development at the beginning of a school year, when there's plenty of time and no shortage of ideas. As the year progresses, those same goals move to the bottom of the to-do list.

Like any good plan, professional learning needs strong implementation and accountability to truly be successful. For school leaders, it's an opportunity to help teachers refocus on why these particular goals were important to them, how they address student needs, and how they've been able to implement what they've learned. Here are a few other questions to deepen the conversation:

How did you come to make this change in your classroom? What was the process?

In what ways do you see this new strategy or initiative affecting your students and improving student engagement and learning outcomes?

In what ways do you see this new strategy or initiative affecting you? What are you able to do differently? How has your instruction changed?

With these questions, you-and your teachers-might realize their goals are actually about so much more than what they might have considered at the outset. For example, a teacher's goal might have been to learn how to use a digital tool with more proficiency, but through the process discovered that it also helped students take more ownership of their own learning. Uncovering and elevating these insights can help teachers truly connect their professional learning to the success of their students.

What is the PD goal you're going to set for the remainder of the school year, and how can I help you reach that goal?

In talking with your teachers, you might discover that there's a specific professional learning area or set of skills they want to focus on through the end of the year. This is a great opportunity to provide a bit of coaching. What do they hope to achieve with these efforts, and how will they know they're successful? And, perhaps the most important question: can you do anything to ensure that success?

One simple way to help more educators reach those reinforced learning goals is to encourage them to find a "professional development" buddy. This could mean finding a teacher with similar professional goals, or simply someone they can use as a resource to help them grow as an educator-a teacher they might have met at a conference, or someone they follow on social media.

And, remember to take a moment to ask your teachers about their accountability plan. If it's a series of webinars they'd like to watch, do they have a schedule for completion? If it's a new strategy in the classroom, might it make sense to have one of their colleagues observe them and give feedback?

Independent of professional learning work, how are you doing? And are you staying?

A professional learning check-in also allows you a moment to understand how your teachers are really doing. Even though the sun might be shining a bit more than it did in the months prior, spring comes with its own slump. It's also the time when educators begin deciding whether or not they're going to return to school next fall.

Even though the sun might be shining a bit more than it did in the months prior, spring comes with its own slump. It's also the time when teachers begin deciding whether or not they're going to return to school next fall.

When your team is unhappy or frustrated, it will take more than a conversation about teacher goals to make them feel heard and seen. Use this time to check in on the well-being of your teachers and staff by asking some simple, open-ended questions that allow them to share as much or little as they feel comfortable with:

Are you finding ways to take care of yourself during the day? What does that look like?

What's the most rewarding part of your day right now? The most stressful?

Is there anything I can do to make the situation better?

Is there anything else I should know?

These questions set the stage for "stay conversations," where you can gain valuable input from teachers and staff members you want to retain. In stay interviews, top-performing teachers and high-potential staff members are asked what factors would trigger a departure from the school, or why they might consider leaving their position. It's never too late to have these conversations and to act on their feedback. Best practice is to ask, rather than not asking at all.

What is your vision for future professional learning?

As your teachers are taking the steps to wrap up one portion of their professional learning journeys, it's never too early to start talking about goals for next year-especially if this year's work has laid a solid foundation for future efforts that advance school improvement or increase student achievement.

Here's where it's critical to encourage your teachers to think about what their own professional vision looks like -and help them anchor their future learning to that vision.

Here are additional questions to ignite this conversation:

When you think about your teaching practice or classroom over the next few years, what would you like to change or shift?

In the next year ahead, what would you like to continue, stop, or begin doing?

How would you like to grow as an educator, colleague, and person?

What professional development opportunities or goals will help you get closer to your vision?

These questions make it easier for educators to see their professional learning plans and goals as a true journey, and can help them better craft the different components and steps that need to happen in their long-range plans.

It's never too late for a check-in

Conversations about what your teachers are learning, how their teaching practices have changed, and where they might still need support are always right on time.

Not only do your teachers have an opportunity to talk candidly about their progress (and student progress too), they can recommit to their learning, if necessary. And you're able to use the discussion as a springboard for addressing related topics with your team, such as teacher burnout and teacher turnover. In the end, check-in conversations help propel your teachers closer to achieving their goals and the school to driving more student success.

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Checking In: 4 Questions to Ask Teachers About Professional Learning Goals | New Leaders Blog

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We're quickly approaching spring, a time of year where two distinct feelings tend to emerge in schools and districts around the country. The first is the realization that you're in a sprint to the finish line called "The Last Day of School," and it's all you can do to buckle up and hang on.

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For those who support teachers, it can feel like there are myriad urgent needs, especially when educators are stretched thin and students are struggling, as many are now. How do you prioritize your support, and where do you start?

The effort-to-impact matrix is a simple but valuable tool that can help instructional coaches, teacher teams, administrators, and other change agents prioritize their efforts and make strategic choices about which steps to take and when. It allows the user to map out potential strategies and identify how much effort each will take versus how much impact it is likely to make.

The matrix is divided into four quadrants. (See figure below.)

Quadrant 1 refers to low-effort, low-impact strategies. Strategies in this quadrant don't require much educator effort, but they also are likely to produce few improvements in student outcomes. These strategies often leave the learning leader wondering why he or she should bother. That doesn't mean that the strategies are useless, but they are unlikely to make meaningful changes in teacher practice and student outcomes. Examples might include redesigning bulletin boards or changing lesson planning templates for administrative purposes.

Quadrant 2 is for high-effort, low-impact strategies. They require much effort on the part of teachers and perhaps other staff but have little impact on student outcomes. Strategies in this quadrant often lead participants to wonder, "Whose idea was this anyway?" An often-cited example is filling out binders of professional learning community documentation that teachers perceive as being unrelated to the actual work of the team or their teaching efforts.

Quadrant 3 is for high-effort, high-impact strategies. Coaching cycles or change initiatives in this quadrant take cognitive heavy lifting. They take time to investigate, learn, practice, and implement with consistency and fidelity, but they make an obvious difference for most or all students.

Examples of Quadrant 3 activities include instructional changes such as ensuring that all members of teacher teams have a common planning period or moving a teacher whose comfort zone is whole-class direct teaching to a more interactive approach that incorporates student groups and independent practice.

While Quadrant 3 activities produce big wins for teachers and students, they require intensive efforts to produce results that unfold slowly over time, and they can leave teachers and coaches feeling overwhelmed and burned out.

Quadrant 4 strategies are low effort, high impact. They can be considered quick but effective wins. Strategies in this quadrant may result in small changes that add up quickly and make a noticeable difference in student outcomes. Examples include improving classroom management and implementing more effective student grouping strategies, both of which can help maximize instructional time while also decreasing teacher stress and improving teacher efficacy.

Different combinations of effort and impact make sense in different situations. For example, during especially challenging times, such as during post-pandemic recovery, focusing on small, quick wins (low effort, high impact) can make professional learning feel manageable and increase teacher buy-in. During more stable times - for example, when the district has stable leadership and an influx of grant funding - professional learning leaders might choose to focus more on high-effort, high-impact strategies.

An effort-to-impact matrix can also help professional learning leaders sequence their support over time. Consider, for example, the value of building momentum with several low-effort, high-impact cycles. This can build teachers' interest in and commitment to coaching. That might open the door to a single high-effort, high-impact cycle. Following that push, the district might choose to ease off, using a few more low-effort, high-impact cycles to keep the pace and load manageable for teachers.

Click here to use the tool to create your own effort-to-impact matrix.

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A Tool To Help When Everything Feels Urgent | Learning Forward

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For those who support teachers, it can feel like there are myriad urgent needs, especially when educators are stretched thin and students are struggling, as many are now. How do you prioritize your support, and where do you start?

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Teacher talent is at a premium, with school districts struggling to attract and keep good teachers. Developing career-advancement opportunities, such as teacher-leader programs, is one strategy aimed at retaining effective educators.

Principals, who have the most direct influence on teacher-leaders, are consequently best positioned to retain effective teachers by supporting effective teacher-leader programs. Despite the potential and promise of such programs, they are often mismanaged or not fully supported.

We have seen the value of empowering teacher-leaders firsthand in our work for a regional Comprehensive Center that supports state education agencies and school districts in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Virginia. The Comprehensive Centers program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's office of elementary and secondary education, helps state, regional, and local educational agencies improve their capacity. As the center's state co-leads for West Virginia, much of our work has focused on how teacher-leader programs can establish meaningful pathways that deepen teacher engagement, improve classroom conditions, and strengthen retention.

In an article for the Journal of Education Human Resources last year, we identified several core management components that district and school leaders must understand to promote effective teacher-leader programs. As part of this work, we developed the free, online resource Managing Teacher Leadership, a collection of self-paced modules designed to build district capacity to design and manage teacher-leadership programs effectively.

Several of those important components fall directly within the purview of principals. Here are the five strategies school leaders can draw from our work to promote better teacher leadership in their schools:

1. Develop a unified vision and realistic goals. Principals should engage teams of teachers to develop a theory of action to communicate a teacher-leadership program's purpose and goals, clarify and depict its strategies, and anchor work to a continuous improvement process.

2. Provide job descriptions. Principals should then provide detailed job descriptions for each teacher-leader role, including main duties and responsibilities. Those job descriptions can be used both during the selection or hiring process and to communicate expectations to existing teacher-leaders and other teachers. When these roles and responsibilities are vague, teacher-leaders rarely have adequate time to perform duties or collaborate with peers.

3. Use a fair selection process that focuses on teacher-leadership competencies. Principals should ensure multiple measures and perspectives, such as district-level or panel interviews, are included in the selection process for new teacher-leaders, rather than relying solely on their own recommendations. "Anointing and appointing" can create perceptions of favoritism and erode teacher-leaders' chances of successfully working with colleagues.

4. Offer job-aligned learning opportunities. Principals should ensure that professional-development opportunities align with teacher-leadership responsibilities to advance their role-specific knowledge, skills, and competencies. The National Network of State Teachers of the Year's Teacher Leadership Professional Learning Courses are a rich source of professional learning. Principals can also encourage teacher-leaders to identify relevant topics to guide professional learning for themselves, with tools from the American Institutes for Research's District and School Leader Readiness Tool.

5. Assess school culture. There are many free or affordable tools available to help principals assess how favorable their school culture is for implementing teacher leadership, including the aforementioned District and School Leader Readiness Tool, the " Teacher Leadership Program Readiness Surveys" guide authored by one of us (Matthew Finster), and the school audit laid out in Charlotte Danielson's Teacher Leadership That Strengthens Professional Practice. Surveys or audits can help principals gauge favorable conditions in their schools, such as the extent of mutual trust, open communication, participatory decisionmaking, and shared leadership.

Encouraging teacher-leaders does not happen by chance. Principals can intentionally promote them effectively by taking steps to establish common expectations that are aligned to the school vision and goals and are shared among teacher-leaders, the principal, and other teachers. Further, principals can incorporate these expectations into the selection process and help guide teacher-leaders' learning opportunities.

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5 Strategies to Empower Teachers to Be Leaders (Opinion)

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Teacher talent is at a premium, with school districts struggling to attract and keep good teachers. Developing career-advancement opportunities, such as teacher-leader programs, is one strategy aimed at retaining effective educators. Principals, who have the most direct influence on teacher-leaders, are consequently best positioned to retain effective teachers by supporting effective teacher-leader programs. Despite the potential and promise of such programs, they are often mismanaged or not fully supported.

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Key points

When it comes to improving how we teach teachers, there is growing evidence that professional learning may be more productive when it is focused.

Professional learning can evolve from dry instruction to real-life, applicable advice and support that fosters educational innovation.

Relationships can help improve professional learning by changing it from a burden to a boon.

Scroll through Netflix's library of films or Amazon Video's exhaustive trove of movies and you would be hard-pressed not to find one that features an uplifting film about a teacher inspiring a student to greater heights: "To Sir, With Love," "Freedom Writers," "Dead Poets Society," "Stand and Deliver," "Mr. Holland's Opus," "Akeelah and the Bee," and "Lean on Me." The movies reflect what the research has long told us-teachers are one of the most important drivers for academic success among students.

And yet the majority of these films quietly showcase another theme-inadequate resources and support for the very teachers who transform students' lives. The films mentioned above do not capture the evolving challenges of post-pandemic teaching, the ambiguous adoption of ed tech, and so much more.

Yet even in 2023 some things still remain the same. The investment in support and resources needed to provide effective professional learning for teachers is still less than adequate for educators working to prepare students of all backgrounds to reach their full potential.

As a parent, I want my children-I want all children-to have access to the best education and resources possible. Their teachers are their best resource. And teaching their teachers through robust, efficient, and equitable professional learning is something that is not a nice-to-have; it is a necessity. So how can this be done?

The Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL), a partnership of nonprofits that deliver teacher professional learning (PL) and researchers who study teacher learning and identify what works best, reports both good and bad news around PL.

According to RPPL's latest research brief: "The evidence base around teacher professional learning has advanced significantly over the past decade. Robust research efforts and recent literature reviews offer new insights into how-and how not-to design PL programs in ways that maximize their potential for improving teacher practice and student experiences. Yet many PL design features are not yet standard across the field."

For too long, some commonly held myths around professional learning stymied the excitement for it. Among these were the ideas that PL was a waste of resources or, if implemented, PL was more effective for early career teachers and less effective for veteran teachers.

Another misconception was that PL programs must be job-embedded and time-intensive to be effective. Some believed that improving teachers' content knowledge was key to improving their instructional practice or that research-based PL programs were unlikely to work at scale or in new contexts. Lastly, the idea that districts could simply implement research-based PL programs with no modifications led to PL that wasn't differentiated based on the student populations teachers were educating.

Some myths are made to be busted, however. These ideas are outdated and there are steps that can be taken to chart a better path forward.

Since founding The Learning Agency, an organization dedicated to the science of learning, I've had the opportunity to work with a diverse network of organizations committed to improving K-12 education. RPPL is one of those groups. And in the work we do both with and for them, I've been able to see firsthand the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in improving the teacher PL that will benefit so many students.

One of these opportunities lies in the connections educators make-and the feelings of support that can help them commit to PL. After all, how we feel matters. It matters to students who may feel overlooked and under pressure. It matters to parents and administrators who are juggling plates everywhere, every day. And it especially matters to teachers, who may feel undervalued and overwhelmed by the number of students in their charge, the evolving challenges in K-12, and the limited resources with which they are equipped.

New research shows, however, that building better relationships is one of the ways these feelings can be addressed. Relationships can help improve professional learning by changing it from a burden to a boon.

RPPL's brief, written by researchers at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and Harvard University, delves into how to strengthen teacher learning. It found that certain methods that promote collaborative relationships spur improved teacher practice.

As the authors note: "PL formats can be particularly effective at producing changes in instructional effectiveness. Among them:

1. Built-in time for teacher-to-teacher collaboration around instructional improvement;

2. One-to-one coaching, where coaches work to observe and offer feedback on teachers' practice;

3. Follow-up meetings to address teachers' questions and fine-tune implementation."

In essence, when teachers connect with each other, collaborate together, and hold each other accountable-their teaching improves. And their students benefit from this improvement. Professional learning can evolve from dry instruction to real-life, applicable advice and support that inspires and fosters educational innovation.

How teachers feel is important, but so is how they teach.

And when it comes to improving how we teach teachers, there is growing evidence that PL may be more productive when it is focused. Effective and equitable education cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach if it is to benefit the millions of diverse students out there-each one with their own unique skills, supports, potential, and challenges. So it makes little sense to expect the professional learning tools and techniques that guide how teachers instruct and engage students to follow a generic model.

Research underscores this point, and it suggests that focusing on building subject-specific instructional practices rather than building content knowledge alone can help craft better professional learning. Also beneficial is "supporting teachers' instruction with concrete instructional materials like curricula or formative assessment items rather than focusing only on general principles," the authors note. So is "explicitly attending to teachers' relationships with students."

There is power to create positive change when like-minded groups come together. With this in mind, RPPL has built-and continues to unite-a diverse network of professional organizations, researchers, innovators, and supporters who are dedicated to improving knowledge around better PL practices for teachers.

The result: A more equitable system of schooling for all students-one that deliberately tests multiple design options for PL programs and works to understand their effects on teacher and student learning.

This work to help teachers learn better and thereby teach better is not easy and cannot be wrapped up as quickly and neatly as it is in an educator-themed film. It is important and arduous.

But as a parent, I am encouraged that it is now happening and that new tools and findings are already emerging. Poet Maya Angelou once said: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better." The work to "know better" has begun, and the benefits to teacher professional learning and student achievement are limitless.

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When Teachers Learn Better, Students Do Better

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When it comes to improving how we teach teachers, there is growing evidence that professional learning may be more productive when it is focused. Professional learning can evolve from dry instruction to real-life, applicable advice and support that fosters educational innovation. Relationships can help improve professional learning by changing it from a burden to a boon.

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5 Adult Learning Principles to Help Design Better Professional Development

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Professional development is too often designed using pedagogy that works well for children. Adult learning theory can help design better PD for teachers, centering agency and genuine collaboration.

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What do you remember about your favorite principal? I, for one, have vivid memories of the fearless leader of Cossitt Elementary in La Grange, Illnois, Principal Tavegia - a permanent fixture of my grade school experience - greeting me in the hallways with a warm smile, always ready to talk about my day. One morning, after noticing I didn't greet her back, she asked me what was wrong. I proceeded to launch into an long-winded complaint about my older brother, and while I don't remember the specifics, I can safely assume he was hiding my favorite Legos again. Principal Tavegia patiently listened, offered some advice suitable for a second grader, and ushered me to my homeroom. Later that evening, I approached my brother and said, "Mrs. Tavegia said that now it's my turn to tell my side of the story," and to the shock of my parents, we started having a relatively formal debate.

Little did I know back then about the tremendous influence that high-quality principals have over their schools: A good principal raises student outcomes, cultivates accepting communities, closes academic gaps that separate students of color from their peers, and ensures classrooms are staffed with strong teachers from diverse backgrounds. Amid this confusing pandemic recovery and the influx of historic federal funding, it is more important than ever that schools have exceptional leaders at the helm. That's why state policymakers must focus on expanding and improving principal preparation programs.

In recent years, the Wallace Foundation has invested heavy resources into programs that sharpen local and state policies and practices to better support school leaders. In 2016, they created the ESSA Leadership Learning Community (ELLC), followed by the University Principal Preparation Initiative (UPPI). Both initiatives varied considerably in scope and aim: ELLC brought districts, community groups, and state agencies together to discuss effective school leadership, while UPPI focused on redesigning university-led principal preparation programs.

Both programs successfully brought together relevant stakeholders and strengthened supports for school leaders. A report by Policy Studies Associates found that ELLC teams consistently built and maintained working coalitions with state, district, and community partners that advised state agencies on ESSA, designed new and altered existing programs for principals, and created new resources for the field. Additionally, a RAND Corporation analysis concluded that UPPI teams aligned university principal preparation program curricula to frameworks and standards, made clinical experiences more authentic and personalized, and ultimately facilitated a more collaborative and targeted process for principal recruitment.

To summarize the impact of their two principal preparation programs, the Wallace Foundation published " States as Leaders, Followers, and Partners: Lessons from the ESSA Leadership Learning Community and the University Principal Preparation Initiative." In it, Paul Manna points out that the success of these initiatives illustrates a simple but foundational fact: No matter what form a principal preparation program takes, state-level policymakers and education agencies have powerful influence over shaping and advancing the principalship.

Manna explains that state policymakers yield potent levers that can ensure current and future principal preparations programs develop a high-quality, diverse cohort of school leaders. This is key. School leaders of color, in particular, provide strong instructional leadership while creating an equity-oriented and welcoming school environment. Attracting, hiring, and retaining teachers of color benefit all students - especially students of color. And when school leaders of color lead teachers and students of color, these positive effects are magnified. Many of the levers Manna includes match those highlighted in two Ed Trust briefs, Increasing School Leadership in Georgia, and 5 Things State and District Leaders Can Do to Advance Strong and Diverse School Leadership, such as:

Adopting principal leadership standards into law

State standards serve as crucial guidance for schools and districts as they build new leadership programs. When grounded in research with input from current principals, standards outline the foundational elements of school leadership that principal preparation programs should follow to produce exceptional leaders. By setting high standards for accrediting school leader preparation programs, state leaders can also ensure that they are preparing leaders from diverse backgrounds who are ready to meet the needs of underserved students.

Implementing policies to recruit, license, and develop principals

In a national survey of over 100 district leaders, only half of them indicated that there is a defined pathway to the principalship. State leaders can address this issue by offering training to local hiring teams, connecting school districts with high-quality preparation programs, emphasizing best practices, funding high-quality programs, and establishing communities of practice and technical assistance for districts looking to audit their recruitment practices. For example, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has funded principal residency programs at four universities to provide financial support to principal candidates as they undergo clinical training.

After being recruited and licensed, principals must receive continued professional development. State leaders can form partnerships with universities, especially HBCUs or nonprofits, to offer opportunities for additional learning, training, and mentoring. Not only is continuous professional development associated with positive student outcomes, but programs intentionally designed with an equity lens can help principals deepen their understanding of the structural racism that students of color face.

Approving and monitoring principal preparation programs

Through approval, states can ensure that active principal preparation programs operate in accordance with state standards and offer affordable and equitable pathways to licensure. To effectively monitor principal preparation programs, states must require the public reporting of candidate demographic data, disaggregated by race and ethnicity, every year. Relevant data opens the floodgates for policy change-without it, district and state policymakers cannot make the evidence-based decisions required for the growth and development of successful principal preparation programs.

While my grade school days are long behind me, I now understand just how remarkable Principal Tavegia was. She forged partnerships with the local Science Center to give students early exposure to STEM, fostered an in-school environment where teachers and school staff felt protected, and made it her utmost priority to involve the community in her decision making. Principals do so much good for their schools yet are so often denied the training and supports necessary to develop into profound leaders. With concerted effort from policymakers to build and monitor principal pipelines and development opportunities, state leaders can ensure all schools have excellent leaders who elevate and address the needs of their teachers and students.

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Developing a High-Quality and Diverse Principal Pipeline - The Education Trust

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What do you remember about your favorite principal? I, for one, have vivid memories of the fearless leader of Cossitt Elementary in La Grange, Illnois, Principal Tavegia - a permanent fixture of my grade school experience - greeting me in the hallways with a warm smile, always ready to talk about my day.

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In his best-selling book, A Sense of Urgency, John Kotter argued that without that crucial element, all transformation efforts are doomed to fail. That should get any IT or business leader's attention given today's ambitious digital transformation goals.

What is a sense of urgency?

However, Kotter has always been quick to point out that productive urgency is vastly different than anxiety or stress. "People think they are urgent," he told The Enterprisers Project, "when in fact they are simply anxious."

"If urgency signals panic, good people look for other jobs."

In fact, when an attempt to increase urgency results in a rise in concern, you can create a deleterious effect. "This is a huge challenge because if urgency signals panic, good people look for other jobs," says Rajiv Kohli , John N. Dalton Memorial Professor of Business at William & Mary's Raymond A. Mason School of Business. "Those are the people you need in conditions that require urgency."

So how can IT leaders cultivate a true and effective sense of urgency while not stressing their team members out or raising anxiety? Consider these seven techniques:

7 ways to create a sense of urgency

1. Build a culture of urgency before its required

"The time to create urgency is prior to a situation or problem reaching a critical stage," says Dr. Deb Kirby, founder of Imaginal Wisdom, a leadership development and culture-building consultancy. "This seems counterintuitive, yet creating an organizational culture to continually spot how people, policies, procedures, and/or technology are responding, regardless of the original intent or design, develops an awareness and sensitivity for finding potential problems before they have time to become critical and urgent."

Developing an environment with a healthy level of urgency means team members will be more likely to anticipate and find issues in the earliest stages of transformation efforts, Kirby says.

2. Educate everyone on the rationale for urgency

One of the most important steps in fostering a sense of urgency in the IT organization also can serve to keep potential disquiet at bay. "Ensure executives and teams understand why urgency is so important for the initiative," advises Rob Llewellyn, founder of CXO Transform, which offers a digital transformation framework.

People need to know that you're not just asking them to run faster for the sake of running faster.

People need to know that you're not just asking them to run faster for the sake of running faster, but what the outcomes are that urgency is designed to achieve. Just as importantly, IT leaders should make it clear what the business consequences of delay are, Llewellyn says.

"Talk about the vision and benefits of making forward progress," says Mindy Bostick, global people and change lead at North Highland Worldwide Consulting, who works closely with CIOs and other C-suite executives. "Excitement and possibility will unleash energy in your workforce."

3. Make it personal

"Paint a picture for the employees of how the conditions may impact their work and jobs negatively if not done," says Kohli, "and how it can enrich their jobs when the situation is dealt with successfully."

4. Model unruffled but urgent behaviors openly and often

Bostick says CIOs should make a point to "prioritize, plan, and take action in a rapid and public way," which demonstrates decisive movement for their organizations.

5. Leaders, calm thyselves

"Keep it light, and make sure people can still laugh."

While forward motion is key, so is maintaining a steady, calm, and upbeat demeanor, Bostick says. Not sure how to convey a sense of peaceful progression? "Keep it light, and make sure people can still laugh," says Martin Henley, senior vice president of Globality's technology services sector group, who previously had to create a sense of urgency as a health system IT executive during the onslaught of managed care requirements. "Ensure employees understand the criticality of deadlines, [but] be clear that the team will succeed because everyone is working together to succeed." Mindfulness exercises can also help.

6. Empower employees to deliver

Creating a culture of urgency, says Kirby, "asks leaders to release their sense of top-down control and send accountability out into the organization - vertically and horizontally, wherever the expertise lies to correct a situation early."

"Constantly asking for updates when people are working hard toward a tight deadline adds frustration."

Giving folks the autonomy to make decisions and feel accountable and responsible for success eases anxiety, adds Llewellyn. IT leaders must avoid riding direct reports or micromanaging. "Let people get on with the job. Constantly asking for updates when people are working hard toward a tight deadline adds frustration and is generally unhelpful to the people doing the work," Henley says. "Let them focus on their work and trust them." Instead, IT leaders should show confidence in their team's ability to handle the challenge, says Kohli.

7. Stay with your team

"You may find that your team is busy with deliverables when you are not. It is always worth staying late with your team or joining them when they work during the weekend, even if your actual input to the process is minimal," Henley says. "By being visible, you can stay involved and keep things moving forward in a collected way while maintaining a sense of urgency."
[ Want more ideas on how to model urgency for your team? Read also: 20 ways to create a sense of urgency. ]

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How to create a sense of urgency without stressing out your team: 7 tips

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In his best-selling book, A Sense of Urgency, John Kotter argued that without that crucial element, all transformation efforts are doomed to fail. That should get any IT or business leader's attention given today's ambitious digital transformation goals. However, Kotter has always been quick to point out that productive urgency is vastly different than anxiety or stress.

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APS Principal’s Primer for Raising Reading Achievement 

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Why Printed Books Are Better Than Screens for Learning to Read: Q&A

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UCLA professor Maryann Wolf outlines the best ways to teach reading to kids who have grown up using digital devices.

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Ohio believes that all students deserve to be engaged with high-quality, standards-aligned instruction which includes access to high-quality instructional materials (HQIM).

High-quality instructional materials (HQIM) support educators with:

Standards-aligned instructional content.

A coherent scope and sequence for grade-level lessons and unit plans.

Evidence-based instructional strategies and embedded formative assessments that support data-driven instruction.

Educative materials that provide implementation support for educators to ensure all students' learning needs are met.

The time a child spends in school is precious and should ensure all aspects of a child's well-being are addressed, including the physical, social, emotional and intellectual aspects. As part of a focus on increasing student learning, the Ohio Department of Education & Workforce believes in providing support for building leaders and teachers to locally review, select and implement high-quality instructional materials. The Office of Learning and Instructional Strategies is committed to leading this work.

Teachers are among one of the most powerful advocates for our children. The instructional materials teachers choose to expose their students to matters. Now more than ever, teachers deserve great instructional materials, so they can focus on doing what they do best: getting students excited to learn. There is mounting evidence that shows when teachers have high-quality instructional materials, they can focus their time and energy on addressing the individual needs of each student.

District Spotlight

Materials Matter in Mt. Healthy City Schools

"The Curriculum Support Guide has forever changed how Mt. Healthy will do curriculum and adopt and implement materials." - Jana Wolfe, Executive Director of Teaching and Learning, Mt. Healthy City Schools.

Ohio Curriculum Support Guide

The Department partnered with Instruction Partners to develop the Ohio Curriculum Support Guide. Research shows that providing teachers with high-quality instructional materials is an effective strategy for increasing student learning. However, teachers need much more than a box of new materials to ensure great teaching and learning take place. They need support from a team of leaders who know how to select, prepare for and support the use of great materials.

Through this partnership, a five-part webinar series was created to support district leaders and members of school-based teams with curriculum adoption and implementation using the Ohio Curriculum Support Guide.

Additional Resources

As a local control state, districts and schools in Ohio make important decisions regarding instructional materials. There are growing efforts to support this decision-making process.

Ohio Materials Matter:

Provides expert curriculum reviews through EdReports, which consists of K-12 English Language Arts, Math and Science instructional materials.

Assists with determining whether instructional materials are aligned to Ohio's Learning Standards in English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science.

Developed in partnership with INFOhio and EdReports.

The Ohio Improvement Process (OIP) is a system framework of collaborative team protocols to analyze data, research aligned improvement strategies, implement and monitor strategies, provide feedback to teams and determine effectiveness based on performance and implementation data. Educators will find resources within the Continuous Improvement Toolkit.

The Learning Management System provides free courses and professional development on important state education initiatives for educators who have active or pending, Ohio, prekindergarten-12, Department-issued licenses or permits and who have fully set-up their OH|ID account.

Frequently Asked Questions

Read the Frequently Asked Questions about High-Quality Instructional Materials for more information. Please contact OHMaterialsMatter@education.Ohio.gov with additional questions or comments.

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Ohio believes that all students deserve to be engaged with high-quality, standards-aligned instruction which includes access to high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). High-quality instructional materials (HQIM) support educators with:  Standards-aligned instructional content.  A coherent scope and sequence for grade-level lessons and unit plans.   Evidence-based instructional strategies and embedded formative assessments that support data-driven instruction.  Educative materials that provide implementation support for educators to ensure all students' learning needs are met.

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Principal’s Primer for Raising Reading Achievement May 10 & 11, 2023

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Principal’s Primer for Raising Reading Achievement Pati Montgomery, Melody Ilk, Louisa Moats Principal’s Primer Padlet

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Ohio Principal Leadership Supports | Ohio Department of Education

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Principal's Primer for Raising Reading Achievement June 14 & 15, 2023

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Principal's Primer for Raising Reading Achievement June 14 & 15, 2023