Best Practices

Teachers need to connect the teaching of skills with the joy of reading and writing, using read-alouds and motivating activities with a rich, knowledgebuilding curriculum.

3. Best Practices

A. Use of Validated Instructional Practices

Children—particularly those who are not strong readers—are routinely subjected to teaching practices that have not been shown to be effective for children like themselves. These include teaching students to rely on context, pictures, and guesswork to decipher new words, instead of decoding the sound-symbol relationships. In far too many classrooms, a great deal of time is allocated to practices— like drilling children on hundreds of “sight” words on flash cards and drawing outlines around words as if a word’s silhouette would help identify it—that are less effective than practices based on the latest research. There is now a large body of evidence indicating the content and the methods of instruction most likely to help the weaker students come up to par.

Experts agree that children who initially are at risk for failure are saved, in most cases, by instruction that directly teaches the specific foundational language skills on which proficient reading depends. 42 Effective teachers of reading raise awareness and proficiency through every layer of language organization, including sounds, syllables, meaningful parts (morphemes), phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and various genres of text. Their teaching strategies are explicit, systematic, and engaging. 43 They also balance language skill instruction with its application to purposeful daily writing and reading, no matter what the skill level of the learner. Middle- and upper-grade children who are weak readers can be brought up to grade level with appropriate instruction (although the time, effort, and emotional strain for children and teachers involved is considerably greater than that required to teach younger children, so offering research-based instruction in the early grades must remain a top priority).

Well-designed, controlled comparisons of instructional approaches have consistently supported these components and practices in reading instruction:

Direct teaching of decoding, comprehension, and literature appreciation is necessary from the beginning; as students develop, the emphasis, content, pacing, and complexity of lessons will change.

Phoneme awareness instruction, when linked to systematic decoding and spelling (encoding), is a key to preventing reading failure in children who come to school without the ability to identify, separate, and manipulate individual speech sounds.

It is better to teach the code system of written English systematically and explicitly than it is to teach it indirectly, incidentally, or with an as-needed, just-in-time approach. The focus for instruction (sound, syllable, morpheme, word) will be chosen on the basis of curriculum-based measurements showing where, in a scope and sequence, the student should be