Every teacher should understand how reading actually works: pupils must decode sounds and spellings, build enough fluency to free up working memory, and grow the vocabulary that unlocks every subject. Make your classroom a reading-rich one.

It’s often not an outright rejection of phonics. It’s that many say they teach phonics while running a mixed-methods approach underneath. The evidence is clear: when phonics isn’t taught systematically and exclusively in the early stages, its impact is weakened. Saying “we do

If you haven't voted yet, now is a great time! My idea to improve reading outcomes is to pay attention to reading beyond grade 3 fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme… Vote FOR ME (📷)here: surveymonkey.com/r/DPSW363 Finally--please share widely in your networks! I REALLY want to win. :)

"Then, I asked all of my classes what they did when they hit a word they didn’t know, I got the same answer every time in every class: “Look for context clues.” I got this answer from my co-taught classes and my honors class.  All my students were on snipe hunts.  I asked

Elizabeth Brown And they had no answer for the follow up. Not knowing HOW to read seems sadly universal right now.

I will forever remember the thrill of the educators in the room when it was announced by our State Superintendent that in 10 years all K-3 teachers in Idaho would be trained in the SoR. 10 YEARS! K-3 only! We need it next year! The system doesn't work.

This is about wildest mischaracterization of the phonics debate that I could imagine. Eye-tracking studies show good readers process virtually every letter in every word as they read - they rely on letters to know what words say. Research shows that even skilled readers can

I fully support the idea that California should never give up on teaching any of its high school graduates anything. However the problem with the UCSD math thing is that the students were lied to by their high schools who told them for years that they had mastered a subject that

Elizabeth Brown I grew up in Ca back in the 60’s and I wasnt taught to read, reading was a complete mystery. We moved to Texas in 2nd grade, they put me back into first grade and taught me phonics. It was like the classic Wizard of Oz when it goes from black and white to color.

Indeed “Blue states like Oregon and Washington experienced significant drops in reading and math scores for both fourth- and eighth-graders between 2015 and 2024, worse than the national declines during the same period” city-journal.org/article/educat…

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Learning to speak is a natural process, while learning to read is not. This should be obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think about it, as almost nobody is unable to speak but many many people are unable to read. Schools believing that kids would "just naturally" learn to

We didn’t abandon what worked by accident. We let politics and ideology override evidence. Explicit phonics gave generations the tools to read with confidence. Balanced Literacy took that away. This is why I fight for structured literacy.

“Differences in prior academic preparation explain most or all of the raw score gaps between racial/ethnic groups; once we control for student and school characteristics, we find only small additional changes in exam performance gap”

Highly recommend UFLI Academy, which just started this year. Holly Lane Valentina Contesse Matthew Burns and whole UFLI team great at distilling complex ideas into digestible PD; all great communicators Sessions a mix of understanding relevant research + explicit modeling of

This is a very interesting summary of K-12 literacy teaching in the different Canadian provinces. Thank you Melanie Brethour for taking part in this and posting it for us. jtl.uwindsor.ca/index.php/jtl/…

Yes. We don't talk about this enough.

We need to investigate and imitate *old school* Finnish education—the stuff that led to its high scores before Saahlberg’s disastrous progressivist changes.

Year 4 pupils continue to improve England's times tables check. We really could use a mandatory times tables check here. tes.com/magazine/news/…

Here’s what teachers need to know and do to teach students to read and spell. Thanks to Linnea Ehri for this critically important and deeply informative research article and ‘roadmap’! Grateful to Mme Lockhart for bringing it to my attention! byramhills.org/uploaded/Curri…