An Elementary School Teacher Shares Her Journey Into The Science of Reading
What you're about to read is my experience and perspective. I am just one voice, one experience. Now that I have met and talked to countless educators, I realize I am not alone. I was never alone, I just didn't know that my story was like so many others. Know you are not alone.
September 2020: My first year teaching
Twenty 6 foot tables. Four rows all facing forward. I was in the classroom that would have been the music room had it not been for Covid.
I inherited a wall of boxes from the previous teacher's curriculum that needed to be sorted through and organized. Twenty smiles covered in masks sat 6 feet apart.
At least we were in person, right?
Many of us recall that first school year back from Covid. For me, this was my first year teaching. This was not my dream of being a classroom teacher. Yet this was my reality.
I had been a Teacher Assistant at this school for a few years prior and an ABA therapist before that - this was my first time as a classroom teacher, and it was the wild wild west in education.
AND - this year would also turn out to be one of the best experiences of my life that would also shape the future of my entire teaching career. This would be the year that my eyes would open to the science of reading.
In this blog, I will show you two simple things I did to learn if my students could read.
Could my students read?
I noticed things about my students that felt off.
I noticed it took 10 minutes to read one paragraph because we had to stop and talk about so many words.
I noticed my students panicked and displayed behaviors when I asked them to write. Even just One. Single. Sentence.
I noticed my students didn’t read for fun on their own.
I noticed my students understood all text better, even math problems, when I read to them.
One of my first realizations as a teacher was that I knew nothing about literacy. I didn't know the cause of these behaviors. I didn’t know where to start to begin to figure out how to help my students.
How did one assess reading? Or teach it? What materials would one use? I. Knew. NOTHING.
And I didn't know where to start.
How did this happen?
There I was, a college graduate with a Master's degree in Elementary Education, and I didn't know how to effectively teach literacy - the key building block to unlocking students’ success, the key to unlocking the world around them - the key to everything.
I was never taught the science of reading. I wasn’t taught how the brain learns to read or how to assess and teach students in a way that aligns with that research.
I was struck by the sheer volume of information pertaining to literacy that I was unaware of. I didn’t know where to begin.
I knew that something wasn't right and something had to be done. I needed my students to be able to read and write. It sounded simple, yet navigating the nuances of being a first-year teacher during Covid were overwhelming to say the least.
I am proud to say that not a single student in my class got Covid that first year of teaching. Not having high absences definitely helped what came next.
January 2021: My journey into the science of reading
My school hired a literacy coach in 2020 under a CLSD (Comprehensive Literacy State Development) grant - Heather Ballantine. She offered to partner with any teacher interested in learning about literacy. Along with working at our school part-time, she had just started a company months earlier named Root Literacy Design. She knew her stuff and she was here to help. She was kind, supportive and patient with me.
I reached out to Heather asking for support. Remember, I had inherited about 10 years of curriculum boxes from previous teachers - and I didn't know where to start. Heather asked if she could observe me teaching, reviewed my students’ writing and work, asked me a ton of questions - then we began to meet weekly.
The first thing we decided to do was figure out my students’ literacy strengths and needs. I remember Heather asking me if I knew if my students could read. I was teaching 3rd and 4th grade, (we’re a multi-age school so my students were 8, 9, and 10 years old).
My training told me that of course they know how to read. The standards for third and fourth grade are not to teach students how to read - we read to learn.
We had even given a computer-based reading screener to all of my students and many were in the “yellow to green zone.” This data wasn't the kind of data that screamed “my kids can't read.” I look back at younger Amy and can’t help but think about how much I didn’t know about assessment.
We started by giving a one to two minute nonsense word screener to every student in my class to determine if my students were able to decode. It was fascinating to learn students can test well in elementary school but not be able to read - Heather calls them “memorizers.” I had each of my students read the list of nonsense words with Heather guiding me, sitting by my side, and coaching me on how to administer this.
Did you know students can compensate for weak reading skills by memorizing words and using cueing methods until about the sixth grade? It’s not uncommon for upper elementary struggling readers to “suddenly” emerge - due to such a high increase in words in middle school, memorizing and cueing don’t work anymore. There are just too many new words.
With the nonsense word screener, I was able to see in real time, in seconds, how many students could actually decode. How does this work? Every word presented to the brain is essentially a “nonsense” word the brain has to decode - the brain either has the knowledge to do it or not. A nonsense word list ensures students are simply saying words they know because they have memorized them.
Two profiles of struggling students
When administering the nonsense word assessment - there were two main profiles of students struggling to read that emerged:
The Visual Cuer: If your students can’t decode, they will say real words for nonsense words - this shows their using the visual cueing method. For example, if a student says place for plice, or steak for steck - they see letters that match a word they know - so they say the word they know.
The Emerging Decoder: Students who have some decoding skills, but are lacking automaticity and have gaps in their knowledge of syllable types, spelling rules, and morphology will try to apply the knowledge they have to read unknown words (for example, taib is read as /t/ /ă/ /ĭ/ /b/).
From our nonsense word screener we had data that showed all but two of my students COULD NOT DECODE (yup - you read that right).
Then, Heather asked me, “Do our students know the alphabet?”
We handed each student a blank piece of paper and asked the whole class to write the alphabet twice - once in lowercase then uppercase.
A few different things happened at this moment:
One student said, “What do you mean lowercase?”
Another didn't know the letters.
A few students started to cry.
Others began writing but forgot multiple letters in the middle of the alphabet.
One student wrote “LMNOPQURSTU”
One student wrote the letters “YNZ” (from the song - get it? …y AND z)
Others took about 10 entire minutes to write the alphabet.
I was in shock.
Now I finally understood all the behaviors I had been seeing.
No wonder my students put up such a fight when it was time to read anything or write anything. They didn't know how.
How can I ask them to write an essay, a paragraph, a sentence, or even a word if they didn’t even know the alphabet? I felt defeated and hopeless. And yet - this was my reality.
Emily Handford's reporting in Sold A Story wasn’t out in 2020 - I would have found it so helpful in this moment to understand why I was experiencing this, and that I was not alone.
Thankfully, Heather was by my side, coaching me out of hopelessness. She was not surprised by the results of my assessments - and she felt empowered to help me make a difference. She knew exactly what to do next and she was going to make sure that I did too.
If your story mirrors mine - you’re not alone. Take comfort in knowing you have the power to transform your teaching practice and the lives of your students.
