WHO SAYS I CAN’T?
A Four-Year Plan to Erase the Reading Gap and Achieve Proficiency by Fourth Grade
Gwendolyn Battle Lavert
James A. Bellanca
Foreword by Eleanor Renee Rodriguez
WHO SAYS I CAN’T?
A Four-Year Plan to Erase the Reading Gap and Achieve Proficiency by Fourth Grade
Gwendolyn Battle Lavert
James A. Bellanca
Foreword by Eleanor Renee Rodriguez
Copyright © 2025 by Solution Tree Press
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Readers may reproduce only those pages marked “Reproducible.” Otherwise, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of the publisher.
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Solution Tree Press
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We dedicate this book first to Gwen’s two grandsons, Samuel and Jacob Green, whom she taught to read during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and second to all our colleagues at Skylight who worked with us to frame our cognitive approach to teaching and learning. We also express our deep gratitude to the staff at Solution Tree Press who assisted us in preparation of this manuscript, notably our production editor, Gabriella Jones-Monserrate; our content development specialist, Amy Rubenstein; our designer-in-chief, Rian Anderson; and other members of this book’s development team.
We especially want to give a humongous shout-out to retiring Solution Tree president and publisher Douglas Rife, a friend and colleague since the day he brought Skylight’s best professional development books and consulting team to Solution Tree Press. With Douglas’s mentorship support, Jim and ex-Skylighters collaborated with the Solution Tree staff for more than a quarter century. Together, they published what Douglas called “ideas that were always one step ahead.” This book celebrates Douglas’s foresight over the years encouraging Jim and his colleagues to continue leading the way using research on established and emerging best practices first within their own teacher development work, and second in the books they wrote. This book is the Mount Everest peak result of Douglas’s leadership mentoring of our work of applying research to create teacher and school success models that push the envelope in new and better ways. Thank you, Douglas. Travel well on the new path you have chosen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:
Lindsey Bingley
Literacy and Numeracy Lead
Foothills Academy
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Charity Helman
Instructional Design Lead, Literacy
Calgary Academy Calgary, Alberta
Lauren Smith
Instructional Coach
Noble Crossing Elementary School, Noblesville Schools
Noblesville, Indiana
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gwendolyn Battle Lavert, PhD, is an international literacy specialist. She has served as principal of several elementary schools and as a leadership and literacy expert of one middle school in the Middle East, where she led curricular improvement and professional development initiatives and aligned those efforts with the district’s progress as a professional learning community.
Dr. Lavert has been an educator since 1974 and has experience as a teacher, district literacy specialist, and district administrator in a variety of school settings. The schools she has worked in range from a predominantly low-income school serving minorities to some of the most affluent and high-performing schools, including Highland Park Elementary School in Texarkana, Texas. She has been an assistant professor at Indiana Wesleyan University’s College of Education, where she taught foundations of early literacy and literacy in the content area. She also taught graduate courses in leadership and led several master’s cohort groups.
Dr. Lavert is the Indiana Department of Education’s lead for literacy. Her strong belief in developing highly effective schools that are responsive to students’ cultural learning and cognitive styles has resulted in marked improvement in various schools. She has presented throughout the United States on topics ranging from developing a culture of high expectations to implementing support systems for students who are struggling academically and behaviorally, and she has worked with educational leaders to make curricula more relevant to minority students.
Dr. Lavert received a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a master’s degree in literacy from Texas A&M University. Her doctorate in education leadership is from Indiana State University.
James A. Bellanca is internationally recognized as a practical innovator who provides teachers and administrators with the how-to knowledge to make abstract ideas concrete and ready to go on the next school day. He is a senior fellow with the Partnership for 21st Century Learning and was founding editor of its innovative online publication, P21 Blogazine.
In 2013, Bellanca received the Malcolm Knowles Award for lifetime contributions to the field of self-directed learning from the International Society for SelfDirected Learning. With his extensive experience as a classroom English language arts teacher, alternative school director, professional developer, intermediate service center director, business owner, and not-for-profit executive, he has developed expertise for transforming mandates, such as the Common Core State Standards, into practical classroom tools that enrich instruction and engage students. He is past president of the Illinois Consortium for 21st Century Schools and lead trainer for MindQuest: Project-Based Learning in the 21st Century Classroom, which helps schools with large English learner populations and students of color and poverty adopt the project-based learning model of instruction.
Bellanca has worked with educational leaders in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Israel. His specialty is the application of group investigation and inquiry models of learning as the primary methods for helping school leaders and teachers adopt 21st century models of instruction. His aim is to help school districts design, implement, and assess programs that promote 21st century skills to increase academic performance among all students, including high-risk populations.
Bellanca works closely with Solution Tree Press to identify emerging authors who address the themes and practices that define and describe 21st century learning. He has authored or coauthored multiple Solution Tree Press how-to books about thinking in the Common Core, enriched learning projects, and leadership for the Common Core. He coedited 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn with Ron Brandt and edited Deeper Learning: Beyond 21st Century Skills and Connecting the Dots: Teacher Effectiveness and Deeper Professional Learning, all part of the Leading Edge series. In 2020, he added Personalized Deeper Learning: Blueprints for Teaching Complex Cognitive, Social-Emotional, and Digital Skills to his list of Solution Tree Press publications.
Bellanca earned his master’s degree in English from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
FOREWORD
In July 1990, Gwen Lavert and I, both experienced educators, became consultants at Skylight Professional Development. Soon thereafter, we headed to Reuven Feuerstein’s Institute in Israel, where we absorbed Reuven’s breakthrough cognitive theory centered on his Mediated Learning Experience insights. He showed us evidence that intelligence was never fixed at birth; with proper interventions, it could be changed for any child or adult to support a lifetime of learning. This theory, which many traditional behavior psychologists disbelieved and disdained, seeded our work and encouraged us to study work by U.S. researchers in the emerging field of cognitive psychology.
Back home, Jim Bellanca, IRI/Skylight Publishing’s founder, later urged us to integrate what we had learned into our work in schools whose students were predominantly children of color. With Jim, I took the step of integrating what we had learned into a book, What Is It about Me You Can’t Teach?, now it its third edition (Rodriguez, Bellanca, & Esparza, 2016). Now, after many decades , Gwen has partnered with Jim as well. In this book, they share not only how Gwen’s leadership transferred Reuven’s ideas to transform reading instruction in a whole-school approach, but also how to destroy the too-often espoused myths that poor children of color cannot learn to read by disseminating what K–3 school teams did when working together. As they progressed, it appeared that their own intuitive applications of cognitive methods jibe with what has become known as the science of reading.
Hopefully, ideas in this book will not take as many decades as Feuerstein’s pioneering theory and practice to persuade naysayers to accept the evidence that poor children of color, so long marginalized by low-expectation instruction, can learn to read by the end of grade 3. I also pray that doubting voices will not shout down the notion that this book is beneficial for all students, nor think mistakenly that the content is just another compilation of quick fixes for Monday.
Most emphatically, the science of reading, seen through the cognitive lens, does apply to all students, no matter what their race, ethnicity, or economic status. However, with that understood, the authors wisely focus on students of color whose parents or guardians happen to be financially strained and who, as evidence declares, are the most marginalized and at risk of joining the school-to-prison pipeline principally because they had not learned to read by the end of third grade. Certainly, all teachers and school leaders who may have only small numbers of students of color in their K–3 classrooms but who have White students not ready to read, can adopt this book’s ideas to their unique populations. With thoughtful adaptation, any child who arrives in the classroom not ready to meet early reading expectations will benefit.
From the inception of Skylight Professional Development in 1972, Jim’s mission was to produce practical professional development programs that translated emerging cognitive and collaborative theories and methods into “I can use that on Monday” responses. Collaborating from the earliest days with cognitive pioneers, a group composed of me, Gwen, Jim, and others on the Skylight team wrote materials needed to transform these theories into daily practices usable to produce long-term results. Our good fortune was to work with such great teachers as Jay McTighe, Howard Gardner, Linda Darling Hammond, John Goodlad, the Johnson Brothers, Asa Hilliard, Marva Collins, Augusta Mann, Carolyn Ann Tomlinson, and so many others to push emerging best cognitive practices into school communities even before many were evidenced in Bob Marzano’s groundbreaking research of the highesteffect practices (Marzano, 2001).
Gwen and Jim do not claim to be researchers; however, they bring a depth of knowledge, practical expertise, and valuable insights to the field of literacy. As a reading specialist with a PhD in leadership, Gwen offers perspectives drawn from both the literacy classroom and her experience as a school leader.
Like all of us on the Skylight team, our mission was to provide professional learning experiences grounded in solid research that would lead to significant student achievement for all students. This included supporting school leaders in embracing crucial responsibilities to create the climate and conditions necessary for teachers to implement effective cognitive practices across grades and curricula, making change inevitable.
In this book, Gwen and Jim take another important step forward. They understand what is required for teachers to effectively transform their daily reading instruction, particularly for the students whom research indicates are most at risk of arriving at school unprepared to learn. They outline specific K–3 teacher team collaboration best practices, including adopting an all-day, every-day reading-centric program to
ensure successful practices lead to the elimination of the third-grade gap. At the core of this program is a tightly designed daily schedule of research-based practices, ensuring that year-end testing confirms all students are reading at grade-level standards.
Gwen and the educators she has trained have validated the application of what she and Jim refer to as the cognitive science of teaching. The pages of this book demonstrate that their adapted, brain-based methods yield the expected results. Notably, schools led by Gwen have improved from D ratings on the Indiana Department of Education scale to Bs and As, verifying what other research quoted in the Science of Teaching canon has shown.
With this evidence as their support, they make no apologies when insisting that the continued refusal of schools rated C through F to adopt wholeheartedly this inclusive, cognitively grounded approach as their road map is not justifiable. For those leaders whose “yes, but” attitudes continue to coddle teachers who are likely to whine, “But I have been using my ways forever!”, Gwen and Jim refuse to give way. When asked why the teachers can’t just do what they have been doing, Gwen declares, “Been there, done that. In my first try at school change, I soft-stepped and let resistors cling to their low-expectation practices, saying ‘these kids will never…’. I learned that letting teachers continue methods that do not move kids out of danger and eliminate the gap was a mistake. I learned that my low expectations for these teachers would never close the gap. I also learned quickly that when a proven cognitive approach did enable students to read, I had to find ways to enable those who clung to their comfort zones to take the risks they feared. I learned to say, ‘It’s not about methods we like; it’s about methods that show the results for children.’”
To me, what Gwen and Jim present is more than common sense. It is common sense backed by sound research and experience. Their intensive, inclusive, researchgrounded approach is one that I could have adopted as a school leader with teachers of students showing the highest need as they learned to read. If their scientific compilation of what works were available in my first years as an educator, I would have welcomed it with open arms. What wonders of research and common sense they’ve provided over the decades! What opportunities they have created!
In addition to what you will find on the printed pages, the methods are enriched with multiple, all-important reproducible documents on the book’s website (go.SolutionTree.com/literacy). To facilitate your daily applications, this book not only details what’s needed for the students it targets but it also says why it’s needed and describes how to provide it. It gives adaptable tools that any K–3 teacher can include in their reading instruction repertoire, especially when working in gradelevel communities that are collaborating to see every child leave for the fourth grade
ready to read proficiently and understand whatever text their grade provides. Most importantly, the team will be hearing from each child, “Yes, I can read. Watch me use my skills to succeed.”
–Eleanor
Renee Rodriguez
Eleanor Renee Rodriguez is an educational consultant and author of A Time for PEAC3E: Propensity in Education with an Academic Curriculum Centered on Culture and Equity (2024).
A Necessary Pathway
Why didn’t I learn this before?
—A second-grade teacher
Since the late 1900s, teaching students of color experiencing poverty how to read relied on shifting and often unsystematic practices, a plethora of mixed and mostly ineffective guesswork, misapplied approaches such as the three-cueing system, balanced reading, ability grouping, and “basal texts” (Oakes, 1985; Lexia, 2022; Vaites, 2019a; Kilpatrick, 2019; Research collectively organized under the umbrella of the “science of reading”—which is a shorthand term for a comprehensive body of research that includes studies from multiple disciplines—is shouting the importance of an integrated, systematic development of essential foundational reading skills in preparing these students for the ultimate outcome of their reading instruction, comprehension, due in place by the end of grade 3 (Gentry & Ouelette, 2019).
Studies of student achievement in the United States reported as early as 1969 that disproportionate numbers of impoverished, vulnerable students of color were behind in learning to read, and that problem has persisted into the 2020s (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2022). The United States’ failure to address its failure to prepare students of color living below the poverty line how to read has been a too-long unmet challenge (Wexler, 2020). The reasons are many and complex.
In the first data released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) since the COVID-19 pandemic began, NAEP 2022 findings revealed that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of U.S. fourth graders are not proficient in reading, up from 66 percent in 2019 (NAEP, 2019). Third-grade standardized reading scores are a crucial predictor of a student’s likelihood of graduating from high school. In his report for the Annie E. Casey Foundation titled Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation , Donald
Hernandez (2011) wrote that students who do not read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers. While those with the lowest reading scores account for only one-third of students, this group accounts for more than 63 percent of all students who do not graduate from high school.
Overcoming the many obstacles primary grade teachers face when preparing marginalized students to read for understanding by the end of grade 3 is the most critical unresolved challenge in K–3 instruction (Mader, 2021). The obstacles that can prevent success range from these students’ documented vocabulary deficiencies (Colker, 2014) to a shortfall of early reading opportunities prior to their first days at schools (Kopes, 2021), to environmental stressors, poor nutrition, low expectations, linguistic differences, and more (Brown et al., 2015; Gershenson & Papageorge, 2018; Hur et al., 2020; Phang, 2017). Such research not only delineates these obstacles but also outlines the best practices that enable teachers to face the challenge and their young charges to avoid falling into the gap.
Much of what the research on reading achievement shows is how, more than any socioeconomic group and through no fault of their own, students of color have been trapped in the third-grade reading gap for too many decades (Mader, 2021). Therein lies the central problem: the third-grade reading gap exists. In this book, we aim to describe what we have learned through years of practice about eliminating the thirdgrade reading gap.
The Achievement Gap Problem
The third-grade reading gap might be known to you as an achievement gap. Achievement gaps occur when students, grouped statistically by race, ethnicity, and gender, show different performance levels by group and the difference in average scores for the two groups is statistically significant (larger than the margin of error). Since 1969, the United States Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has explored the most significant gap, the achievement difference among Black, White, and Hispanic students, using NAEP data to illuminate patterns and changes in size over time and identify factors that might underlie such gaps. The resulting studies conducted every decade since have hoped to provide information to guide education reform organizations about closing the racial and class achievement gaps. Unfortunately, the noted gaps failed to narrow for more than five decades with achievement levels remaining mostly static, especially for the Black and Hispanic students. The widely read 2019 study by Eric A. Hanushek,
Paul E. Peterson, Laura M. Talpey, and Ludger Woessmann found that the “opportunity gap—the relationship between socioeconomic status and achievement—has not changed since 1974 (Barnett, Carolan, & Johns, 2013; Broussard, 2014; Bowman, Comer, & Johns, 2018). Sad but true, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 has highlighted how, after many decades, this gap yawns as wide as, if not wider than, ever before (Dorn, Hancock, & Sarakatsannis, et al., 2020).
Students from middle-class homes come to school more ready to read for understanding than their less privileged peers. Middle-class students often come to school more ready to read for understanding because they have a key advantage: consistent access to books, educational resources, and parental support for literacy activities at home. In classrooms with students living in poverty, privilege is less about money than it is about the informal and formal early childhood learning experiences that are more accessible to students from more educated and affluent families. Most importantly, more educated parents can talk with their students in ways that nurture their students’ ways of thinking and problem solving that have the biggest payoff in school (Jackson & Turner, 2017). Parents who lack the skill to communicate in ways that prepare students’ cognition for success in school inadvertently fail to ready their students to start school and succeed with early reading expectations. This is not a condemnation. It is a research-based description of what happens and how the outcomes of these preschool experiences create shortcomings that make it especially difficult for students living in poverty to meet common kindergarten entrance expectations.
Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are adding their voices to the educational research canon describing “what works” for teachers helping marginalized students learn to read. Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists such as Maryanne Wolf, Reid Lyon, and Sally Shaywitz have contributed extensively to educational research, particularly on effective reading instruction for marginalized students, emphasizing neurobiological foundations and evidence-based interventions. Marginalized students are historically, by virtue of their race or ethnicity, gender, geographical location, language, learning status, sexual orientation, religion, physical or cognitive abilities, pushed to the outer edges or margins of the educational system and are therefore underserved or disadvantaged. Because these “edge” students are underserved, any shortcomings they bring to the first years of school exacerbate the gap between their early learning-to-read performance in contrast to the performance of White, more affluent peers (Assari, 2021).
Reuven Feuerstein delineated twenty-seven cognitive functions and highlighted a dozen that are especially needed when students are learning to read (Feuerstein, Rand, Hoffman, & Miller, 1980; Feuerstein, Feuerstein, & Falik, 2010). When a
student does not have assistance in developing these functions at home before the start of school, Feuerstein’s studies showed the necessity of attending to their development in the first years of formal schooling—in preK when available, but certainly in K–3. In his documented experience, merely attending to sounds and symbols, fluency, and other reading processes, Feuerstein advocated for equal attention to the removal of any shortcomings in cognitive functioning that a student brought to school.
Research suggests that it’s now time to acknowledge the failure of isolated deadend practices and replace them with systemically applied methods grounded in the science of reading (Burkins & Yates, 2021; EAB, 2019; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001). By preparing those who teach marginalized students with new insights, primary school leaders can avoid losing the good practices along with the bad practices because they have chosen to reject them as a whole instead of just removing what is bad each time a new fad pops up. Instead, researchers are uncovering that if the lack of competence and confidence with which these students read continues to be ignored it will be at the economic peril of their country (Student Welfare Information Gateway, 2015; Citizens for Juvenile Justice, n.d.). Teachers bear the responsibility to see that this relevant research finds its way into their school’s primary classroom and that they act now to saturate every minute of K–3 instruction with strong learning-to-read instruction in an environment that builds the students’ confidence and competence as readers (Edmonds, 1992). The following NAEP (2019) reports show the inequalities that have led to unbalanced reading performance across races in elementary schools.
• Among all major races and ethnicities in U.S. elementary schools, students of Asian origin showed the best reading comprehension performance, averaging 239 points (out of 500) on NAEP’s scale in 2022.
• White students (227 points) and mixed-race students (223) are following behind.
• On the other hand, fourth-grade students of Hispanic origin, as well as Black and American Indian students, show a significant drop in reading performance compared to the aforementioned groups.
• Overall, since 2014, students of Asian origin are the only group that showed improvement in reading comprehension, a 1.7 percent jump, while all other groups declined. Since 2014, students of Asian origin have been the sole group to demonstrate improvement in reading
comprehension, with a notable increase of 1.7 percent, whereas all other groups have shown declines.
• Black fourth graders have a 3.4 percent drop compared to 2013, White students declined by 2.16 percent, while Hispanic students dropped by less than 1 percent.
Rather than allow additional false claims that poor students are born without the “genes” or “inborn ability” for complex cognition, the first change in perspective needed to close the too-long-accepted third-grade reading gap comes from systematic, daily application of scientifically strong, cognitive science that postulates that no student’s intelligence is fixed at birth. Researchers such as Carol Dweck (2006), Howard Gardner (1983/2011), Angela Duckworth (2016), and Grégoire & Weiss (2019) have challenged the notion of fixed intelligence and innate abilities through their influential work in educational psychology and cognitive science. Dweck’s (2006) theory of growth mindset posits that intelligence can be developed through effort and effective strategies. Gardner’s (1983/2011) theory of multiple intelligences suggests that there are diverse forms of intelligence beyond traditional measures. Duckworth’s (2016) research on grit underscores the importance of perseverance and resilience in achieving long-term goals. Flynn’s (1987) studies demonstrate that environmental factors play a significant role in cognitive development and IQ scores, including “the Flynn effect,” showing that both rise over time from generation to generation (Grégoire & Weiss, 2019). Together, their findings emphasize the potential for all individuals to grow and succeed academically with the right support and opportunities for learning and development. All intelligence remains malleable for a lifetime (Feuerstein et al., 1980; 2010). How students develop the cognitive functions that ready them to think about how to read becomes the first base to reach in any teaching-to-read instruction for any student, including poor students of color.
Primary teachers have clear evidence that no student should ever hear messages suggesting they are doomed to a life of poverty by being born with a fixed intelligence that will never make sense of a printed text. Starting with Reuven Feuerstein’s theories on cognitive development and learning enhancement (Feuerstein et al., 2010), coupled with Kathy Greenberg’s insights into effective reading instruction for struggling young students (Greenberg, Lester, & Taylor, 2003), educators have access to compelling evidence that challenges the notion of fixed intelligence. Feuerstein’s work, particularly his theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability, emphasizes that cognitive abilities can be significantly altered through mediated learning experiences (Feuerstein et al., 2010). Greenberg’s application of these principles in teaching reading highlights how effective instructional strategies can support students who
face challenges in literacy acquisition (Greenberg, Lester, & Taylor, 2003). These approaches reject the idea that intelligence is predetermined and underscore the potential for all students to develop cognitive skills essential for reading comprehension. With this evidence available, it becomes essential that teachers of marginalized students abandon practices built on disproven theories of fixed intelligence that have long justified educational inequity in favor of modern, research-backed theories showing that any student is capable of growing smarter. Such evidence urges educators, especially those teaching marginalized students, to abandon outdated beliefs in fixed intelligence that have historically perpetuated educational inequities. Instead, embracing research-backed theories emphasizing growth mindset and cognitive development can empower educators to nurture every student’s ability to succeed academically (Dweck, 2006; Gardner, 1983/2011).
Despite persistent debate over many decades, the so-called reading wars about “the best way” to teach reading (Barshay, 2020), there is no question that failing to improve third-grade reading outcomes for students of color living under the poverty line has remained excessively problematic for districts, principals, and teachers. Reading on grade level by the end of third grade had been and remains the single most critical challenge in education (Barshay, 2022). This challenge is exacerbated when students enter fourth grade still struggling to read. Given that third grade marks the shift from learning to read to reading to learn, those who struggle to read are at greater risk of falling behind in their other subjects. Thus, the ability to read by the end of third grade is critical to a student’s success in school, lifelong earning potential, and ability to contribute to their nation’s economy and its security. Without this ability, central to all school learning, glaring, long-reported statistics show that too many of these students have fallen into the gap and spend the remainder of their lives in the school-to-prison pipeline (Camera, 2021). Data shows that all youth who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally low-literate (NCES, 2019). This stark statistic underscores the critical link between literacy levels and outcomes in the juvenile justice system, highlighting the urgent need for effective educational interventions that can prevent students from falling into this pipeline. Understanding these challenges and armed with insights from cognitive psychology and educational research, this book explores innovative strategies to empower educators and support marginalized students in overcoming barriers to literacy and academic success.
The Work We’ve Done Together
Although Gwen had heard educator after educator label many problems as “first in importance,” from her first years as a classroom teacher to her many later years as an instructional leader, she has focused her attention on learning how to teach marginalized students how to read. When she faced Brown and Black faces from poverty-stricken homes in her first classroom, it took her no time to recognize that most of these students were not ready to learn how to read. Versed in Feuerstein’s theory and practice, she refused to accept declarations by colleagues that these students were born “dumb” and condemned by their race or genes to die “dumb.” What she uncovered was data that showed many reasons contributing to her students’ failures in learning to read. In reflecting on her journey through doctoral studies and the barriers she faced as a Black student, the author recounts a pivotal realization.
I read the research, I critiqued as I’d learned to do in my doctoral studies, I tested the theory and drew conclusions . . . all things I’d been told as a Black student I couldn’t do. If I could, I knew I had disproven what so many tried to teach me. If I could, why not others who looked like me? With my mind opened, I was ready to see data showing the likelihood of poor children not provided the prerequisites for understanding the printed page that their barely educated parents had not provided them and how many of my teachers had recited the conventional wisdom that I would never learn to read.
Gwen’s father and mother worked long days in a local factory to raise their six children in a segregated community. When Gwen’s first-grade teacher informed her mother that Gwen would “amount to nothing because she cannot read,” Gwen’s mother, with fire in her eyes, told her daughter firmly, “Who is she to say you can’t read?” and went on to disprove this lowest of expectations by taking on the job of teaching Gwen herself.
Gwen’s parents turned to their church as a first resource to disprove their daughter’s doubtful teacher. After Sunday choir and Sunday school, Gwen’s mother spent the days helping her oldest child transfer the church’s memorized oral language experiences into written words. She believed that Gwen had all the necessary brain tools to transfer sounds heard into words said and sentences understood. Gwen quickly began making meaning from signs seen in the local drug store and stories read in the local library. Gwen says the following about the experience.
I loved to read. I devoured everything I could find. Only years later did I discover how lucky it was having a mother who was angered by
what that teacher said and called on her own love of language in the songs she sang and folk stories she read to change my life. Although many of my friends had a far more difficult time overcoming the odds which kept them marginalized in the classroom, I was convinced early on that I could read and do lots of the other things I heard I could not.
In her role as principal in several primary schools where students were marginalized like those in her own first-grade class, she faced the first opportunity to fully challenge the “they can’t read” myths she encountered among other teachers, principals, and parents of students who arrived at kindergarten not ready to read at the levels expected.
Years later, Jim asked Gwen to join the Skylight Professional Development team. “From very different backgrounds, we were sympatico in our goals,” Jim notes. Jim brought to this collaboration almost six decades of experience, passion for teaching and learning, and his unique way of bringing best practices into the classroom so that every student could have the opportunity to learn to capacity. His path from the classroom to the creator of alternative learning programs, an intermediate service center, Skylight Publishing, and the Illinois Center for Educational Improvement followed a pattern. Collaboration with colleagues in devising professional development programs that challenged accepted norms, often followed by the collaborative writing of professional development materials that led the way in providing best practice solutions working with major theorists such as scholars David Johnson and Roger Johnson (cooperative learning; n.d.), Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences), Art Costa (critical thinking), and others marked his intuitive, pioneering work in turning emerging theory into practice, often before researchers found the evidence to support the attention given to these new methods. The long list of his signature “how-to” interventions at Skylight Professional Development and through Solution Tree Press marks his legacy and highlights his commitment to providing all students equal access to the best possible instruction. When he agreed to bring his knowledge of research on best practices to support Gwen’s work first as founder and curriculum director of Dr. R. H. Faulkner Academy Charter, and later as principal of Frances Slocum Elementary School in Marion, Indiana, they embarked on a journey that laid the foundation for this book. Unlike the newly organized charter school, Frances Slocum Elementary had been grappling with educational challenges for over a decade. Together, they collaborated to implement effective strategies and interventions. This partnership not only transformed their approach to education but also inspired them to document their experiences and insights in their forthcoming book.
The Four-Year Study
On the assumption that no single “magic” method could close the significant achievement gap, Gwen and Jim assembled a range of evidence-supported practices. Drawing from their extensive practical experience and success in transforming challenging schools, they knew these methods were most effective when implemented systematically over a four-year period within a single school—the crucial environment for nurturing students’ intellectual growth (Goodlad, 2007). Identifying strategies that consistently produced competent readers and bridged educational disparities for students entering unprepared, they applied these practices at two schools: Dr. R. H. Faulkner Academy Charter (2003–2012) and Frances Slocum Elementary School (2016–2020), both integral parts of Marion, where Gwen had established her leadership.
Early on, well before joining in this book’s collaboration, the authors learned the importance of cognition from pioneering cognitive psychologist Reuven Feuerstein (Instrumental Enrichment: An Intervention Program for Cognitive Modifiability, 1980). They also drew insights from influential cognitive theorists such as Harold Gardner (Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 1983/2011), Barbara Presseisen (Teaching For Intelligence, 2007), and Robert Sternberg (Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence, 1985). These foundational studies underscored the significance of cognitive processes in learning and shaped the authors’ approach to developing effective educational strategies.
Over many years, each had strived to transfer cognitive theorists’ ideas in order to address the most difficult challenges to help teachers solve the most difficult problems faced in their classrooms. If they could resolve the most difficult, then the less difficult ones, they surmised, would fall away more easily. This would result not by wishing change to occur, but by applying systemic, whole-school approaches based on sound theory backed by solid research (Bertram, Blasé, & Fixsen, 2015; Hudon et al., 2020).
Developing this new approach provided momentum for the plan to revitalize Gwen’s school. To obtain maximum results, they relied on what they called the multiplication effect. If one research-supported strategy, such as reading aloud, was classified as especially effective, they combined it with another evidence-based method, such as reciprocal reading to drive other strong research approaches, such as cognitively powered phonics, thus multiplying the effects of both (Oczkus, 2018; Trelease, 2013).
Because researchers find that hearing stories read aloud is one of the most powerful tools for helping students learn to read, they scheduled the maximum number
Reading Success
of times each day that would supplement the absence of prior reading experiences in households with low socioeconomic status (Christ & Cho, 2021; Johnson, 2016).
For four years, each day’s instruction was supercharged by an all-aboard integration of effective strategies and the elimination of those that research had shown provided little or no effect. The flowchart for reading success in figure I.1 sums up the power of the multiplication effect.
The plan meant that learning-to-read time became an all-day, everyday process with the integration of mathematics, science, and social studies and the commitment of a K–3 teacher team to follow the same path to success. Other subjects in that four-year phonemics-phonicsvocabulary-meaning sequenced curriculum, powered by cognitive-collaborative active learning methods, were delivered primarily with culturally relevant literacy and informational texts. The four-year phonemics-phonics-vocabulary-meaning sequenced curriculum refers to a structured approach to teaching early literacy skills, focusing on phonemic awareness (understanding and manipulating individual sounds in words), phonics (connecting sounds to letters and letter combinations), vocabulary development, and comprehension of text meaning. This sequential curriculum is designed to systematically build foundational reading skills in young students, ensuring they progress from basic phonological awareness to proficient reading comprehension over time.
Figure I.1: The flow chart for reading success.
In addition, cognitive-collaborative active learning methods involve instructional strategies that encourage active engagement, critical thinking, and collaboration among students. These methods typically emphasize cognitive processes such as problem solving, analysis, evaluation, and reflection, while collaborative aspects involve group work, discussions, and shared learning experiences. In the context of delivering other subjects with culturally relevant literacy and informational texts, this approach ensures that students not only develop subject-specific knowledge but also engage with texts and materials that are culturally meaningful and reflective of diverse perspectives and experiences.
For instance, in second-grade botany, the lesson for students could begin with a read-aloud biography of Ynés Mexía and the plants she discovered, which students can see and touch on a field trip (National Park Service, 2021, 2023). In a thirdgrade social studies unit, students might learn about slavery by reading and singing “Go Down Moses,” and reading additional print or online articles about a song in plantation life.
Gwen and Jim prepared teachers to weave questions into culturally rich text that promoted complex thinking when the students were learning to read for meaning— with lots of time scheduled for metacognitive reflections Metacognition is the act of thinking about one’s thinking. It is a cognitive way to evaluate the processes used in specific types of thinking when reading to learn (such as comparing, analyzing, and problem solving). Reflection is the broader term applied to all types of cognition and metacognition. For example, students can distinguish between two sounds or analyze a character as well as think about how they performed that analysis. These are metacognitive actions.
With metacognitive reflection during learning-to-read instruction, Gwen and Jim knew from experience that teachers must take time to prompt students’ metacognition. For example, a teacher might say, “First, I want you to stop and think how Marissa is like Joanna in this story.” After this cognitive reflection in which students compare the girls, the teacher prompts, “Now, I want you to think about how you made that comparison.” This is metacognitive reflection, thinking about how students made the comparison (Drew, 2023; Muijs & Bokhove, 2020). Teachers can scatter similar prompts through the read alouds or anywhere throughout the lesson.
Results
Supported by intensive professional learning experiences and team collaborations, the multiplication plan succeeded. Faulkner Academy, a Ball State University
charter school founded by Gwen and developed professionally by Jim, became a topperforming Indiana charter with reading assessment scores in the third grade at 100 percent. Under Gwen’s leadership—and using a similar professional development model guided by Jim—Slocum Elementary, a Marion, Indiana public school, moved from F and D ratings by the Indiana Department of Education to annual Bs and As from 2016–2019. When the students were promoted to the fourth grade, their test scores followed the faculty’s expectation from day one: Every student who had entered kindergarten “unready to read” learned to read for meaning, demonstrating their success at the end of the third grade with fourth-grade print materials. Of special note was the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) data showing how, each year, an increasing percentage of the most struggling readers moved into the pass category (NWEA, 2019).
Our Chapter Structure
The success achieved at Faulkner Academy and Slocum Elementary through intensive professional learning and collaborative efforts underscores the effectiveness of the multiplication plan outlined in this book. This journey has been adapted into an actionable four-year plan detailed throughout the following chapters. Each chapter corresponds to a critical phase of the plan, integrating insights from cognitive psychology and educational research with practical strategies proven to enhance literacy and academic achievement. The structured approach aims to replicate the transformative results witnessed at both schools, emphasizing the systematic implementation of evidence-based practices that support every student, particularly those initially deemed unready to read. This book serves as a road map for educators, providing comprehensive guidance on fostering reading success and improving outcomes for all students, regardless of background or initial skill level. The chapters are organized as follows.
• Chapter 1, “Engage With the Learning-to-Read Challenge”: No curriculum is more difficult to instruct or more important than the K–3 learning-to-read sequence. This chapter reviews current research on closing the reading gap and providing effective reading instruction to students who need it.
• Chapter 2, “Acknowledge That Yes, It Is About the Brain”: Twentyfirst century neuroscience changes the picture of what works best to produce successful readers by grade 4.
• Chapter 3, “Make Meaning Visible”: This chapter illustrates how finding meaning is the be-all and end-all of primary students’ time in the classroom.
• Chapter 4, “Use the Reciprocal Teacher’s Playbook”: A specific set of thinking skills is best able to transform early readers into readers who can understand print text. Explore the “how to” in order to enhance meaning for all students who are struggling to read.
• Chapter 5, “Hear It First With Phonemics”: To initiate kindergarten reading instruction, teachers are urged to start with precise, coherent, and systematic development of phonological competence guided by Dechant’s hear-it-first principle (Dechant, 1991).
• Chapter 6, “Make the Phonics Connection”: This chapter answers three questions: What is phonics?, Why phonics?, and How do I teach phonics?
• Chapter 7, “Use Patterns to Achieve Fluency”: Explore how the cognitive command of patterns powers vocabulary growth for students well short of the desired amounts.
• Chapter 8, “Learn to Read for Meaning”: This chapter highlights the importance of cognition and metacognition as the driving force for students who are making meaning from print with important “how-to” ideas.
• Chapter 9, “Prioritize Equity”: Classrooms make the case for marginalized students to have the equitable opportunity to read readily available texts featuring others who look like them.
• The epilogue is a summary response identifying what, why, and how students can declare their “You bet I can read” ability as they learn to read as well as any other students.
Every chapter ends with a reproducible called “It’s Your Turn,” in which you will receive guidance on how to make the chapter content actionable in your classroom. To take advantage of these ideas, we encourage you to build on your prior knowledge and see how you choose to advance the effectiveness of your learning-to-read instruction. The more time you take to saturate your students’ daily learning-to-read experiences with concepts and practices detailed on these pages in science, mathematics, social studies, the arts, and so on, the more you will be doing to advance the extra time and attention to your students’ development as competent and confident readers.
In each chapter, you’ll notice sections about playbooks . These are lesson plans based on the content in that chapter that you can implement in your classroom. You and your students may already be familiar with the term playbooks because athletic coaches often use them for designing plays during sporting events.
In addition to the core chapters, this book includes an appendix that provide supplementary resources and tools to support the implementation of the strategies discussed. These appendices offer sample lesson plans, assessment rubrics, and recommended reading lists tailored to different stages of the four-year plan. We encourage you to refer to these resources as you progress through the book, using them to deepen your understanding and effectively apply the strategies in your own educational setting. Whether you are new to teaching or a seasoned educator, the appendix serves as a practical guide to enhance your instructional practices and support your journey toward improving literacy outcomes for all students.
The Aim of This Book
This book aims to help students in grades K–3 become proficient readers by grade 4, thus opening new educational and occupational possibilities for their futures. It showcases what teachers can do, starting in kindergarten, as they employ a select collection of well-researched, readily available classroom materials and methods (see chapter 3, page 63), enhanced by the application of strong professional learning research.
Recognizing that research supported our personal experiences that disenfranchised students are the ones mostly likely to come to school not ready to read in the way their school curriculum demands, we followed the evidence that resulted in creating classrooms where teachers could exorcise any obstacle that prevented obliteration of the failure milestone (McNair, 2019; Lennert da Silva, 2021). Because the data and our experiences had pinpointed that Brown and Black children underwent longterm marginalization early, we elected to focus this book on the most often identified group of vulnerable students—those students who were not yet readers—as the priority target.
In selecting this target, we were well aware that the research on producing fourthgrade readers by the end of the third grade can apply to any student, regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, or socioeconomically alike peers. Although students from other races or culturally alike populations (such as Eastern or Western European) may fill a whole classroom of nonreaders or sit among others with a different socioeconomic status, all students deserve responses similar to those offered for Black and Brown
students in this book. However, these are situations for other books, where they will receive the full attention they deserve.
In this book, readers will find a thought-provoking, practical, and flexible blueprint with signposts to mark the way past the difficult cognitive challenges that K–3 teachers must overcome so they can guarantee that every student learning to read can do so before the start of the fourth grade. This blueprint includes a careful linking of the techniques that a plethora of evidence-strong strategies in the cognitive science of reading say do work.
Our Research Base
Our research base centered around a charter school (Dr. R. H. Faulkner Academy) set in a high-poverty community, and Frances Slocum Elementary, a low-performing public school set in a high-poverty community. In this context, a “high-poverty community” refers to areas where a significant portion of the population lives below the poverty line. For example, this might be defined as communities where the average household income is less than 60 percent of the median income for the region. In many cases, this translates to high rates of unemployment, reliance on public assistance, and limited access to resources such as quality education and health care. By providing this frame of reference, readers can better understand the challenges faced by schools like Dr. R. H. Faulkner Academy and Frances Slocum Elementary. Gwen served as one of the founders and the curriculum director of Faulkner Academy and the principal of Frances Slocum. Over eleven years, Faulkner was Ball State University’s highest-performing charter on the Indiana State test. From the conception of the IRead Foundational Test for third graders, Faulkner Academy had an overall rating of 100 percent mastery. Frances Slocum moved from a letter grade of D to a B on the Indiana State test for fourth grade. The book is based on a structured, cognitive comprehensive approach used in both schools and influenced by researchers of the following: from John Goodlad (1984) we gained insight into a place called school from Art Costa (1991) what it took to create a school as “a home for the mind.” From Ron Edmonds and Larry Lezotte (1991), we learned to focus on the seven correlates of effective schools; from Robin Fogarty, David Perkins, and John Barrel (1999), the challenges of near and far transfer; from Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers (2002), the power of coaching; and from Asa Hilliard and colleagues (2004), the need see students of color as gifted and talented. Later, the words of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2015) corroborated all that we had learned in moving research on best classroom and school practices so that measurable achievement resulted. Currently, the science of reading gives us the best chance to close the literacy gap. King and Davis (2022) state that the brain isn’t wired to read. Therefore,
most students need instruction in phonological competency, phonics, vocabulary, and background knowledge to grasp the written words. Since the human brain is wired to speak and absorb language and not to read, only 20 percent to 30 percent learn to read without explicitly being taught. The remaining 70 percent need a comprehensive curriculum and structured instruction to gain literacy skills to keep on track with the learning progression. Intensive tutoring should be given to any student at risk of not catching up by fourth grade, but that should be the exception. If students receive effective instruction to begin with, the need for tutoring declines, enabling schools to target limited resources to those who need it most. According to Narrowing the Third-Grade Reading Gap (EAB, 2019), 95 percent of students are cognitively capable of reading on grade level when exposed to effective curriculum and instruction, which is proof that it is entirely possible to reverse the current devastation trend.
None of the research mentioned should be unfamiliar to those who work in the field of reading literacy. The data has been collected over and over and expanded oftentimes since effective school researcher Ron Edmonds first asked his question about a school leader’s will to act on what is known about reforming schools in highpoverty communities (Edmonds, 1979). Edmonds’ key questions more than 50 years ago were, When will leaders and teachers take up the mantel to supply what has been missing in too many schools assigned to serve marginalized students? When would they start to consistently apply established findings, what we know works? These questions have not yet been answered. Many studies call for consistent, well-planned application of best learning-to-read practices matched to these students’ early learning needs (Ehri et al., 2001; Bingham, 2023; Hur et al., 2020). Schools serious about eliminating the gap and keeping all students’ reading achievement on track go beyond merely reading about best practice research or leaving it to one or two teachers to try out best practices at random. A principal who passively allows teachers to do their own thing, including ignoring research on what is most likely to replace long-term, failed learning-to-read practices, is not likely to see achievement results that assure all students of color at the school leap over the gap. Piecemeal and unsystematic efforts are as unethical and unprofessional as they are ineffective. A deep dive into what has and hasn’t worked for these students can illuminate what is destructive and what is productive when students of color living under the poverty line come to school from high-stress, toxic communities (Bowman et al., 2018).
Our Audience
Our audience is K–3 teacher teams and their school leaders in schools with students of color from impoverished homes. This age is the most crucial of all because
it is the age when students learn to read. When they don’t learn, it’s highly predictable that they will never emerge from the bottom of the gap that results, many times moving from in-school suspension to a lifetime of poverty, often ending up in prison (Gray, 2019; Gray & Winn, 2023). These likelihoods not only have a high personal cost on the lifetime nonreader but a higher cost on society. In our work with teachers of these students, it was clear that these students could escape any fall into the gap when given proper instruction, but often don’t.
Although we recognize that other methods have worked here and there, our experience showed that the achievement-gap trap was not inevitable. The most assured way to end this term’s presence in the literacy and achievement literature was to develop a school-based plan involving all staff over four years with research-based instruction in comprehensive learning-to-read scope and sequence. Although our experience cannot definitively say that this approach could be modified for struggling readers in the upper grades, we believe many of its principles and practices are applicable.
The Four-Year Collaborative Commitment
The plan you will have learned after reading this entire book will provide insight into what it takes to ensure each student is ready to read across the curriculum at the start of grade 4. As you will learn, it is a collaborative, four-year team effort. The blueprint indicates that individual teachers must collaborate as a team, just as they each must target their teaching skills to combine individual best practices into a daily whole that combines the strong effects of a single practice into daily lessons that integrate one into many. This is urged to ensure that the outcome of learning-to-read instruction, not the coverage of topics or the completion of a worksheet, is the central focus. The four-year plan becomes a tool to help all students attain the outcome: reading with comprehension at grade level by the end of grade 4.
As we move into chapter 1, it’s essential to reflect on the journey that has shaped this research. Over the past four years, we’ve explored the complex landscape of education within high-poverty communities, focusing on both the challenges and the innovative practices that emerge. This foundation sets the stage for understanding the critical concepts discussed in the upcoming chapters.
In chapter 1, we will delve into the first key aspect of our findings: the multifaceted nature of educational experiences in these communities. By examining specific case studies, including Dr. R. H. Faulkner Academy and Frances Slocum Elementary, we aim to provide a nuanced perspective on how educational environments can foster resilience and learning despite systemic obstacles.
Teachers must have the institutional support to engage in weekly opportunities to collaborate in making the changes in practice. This collaborative practice will allow them to initiate evidence-based strategies that are specific to poor students’ unique learn-to-read needs. One teacher in one grade working alone to initiate the needed changes cannot hope to fill in the deep learning-to-read gaps; a multigrade team of teachers must agree on systematic, daily, well-planned application of evidence-strong best practices with outcomes, schedules, methods, curriculum, and assessments that replace the solo, episodic efforts that have been hallmarks of past professional learning experiences. Working together systematically, as was done in charter and public schools, showed that the third-grade reading gap can indeed be eliminated by a consistent, four-year team effort using the systematic practices described previously and expounded on throughout this book.
CHAPTER 1
Engage With the Learning-toRead Challenge
Take the first step in faith . You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step
—Martin Luther King Jr.
“How do I start?” This is the first question any primary school teacher who has taken a job in a high-poverty community must ask. “How soon?” is the second. Most practically, teachers in high-poverty, early-grade classrooms must first understand and empathize with students whose daily life experiences are impacted by toxic living conditions that impede and traumatize them. Without falling into a blamegame trap that sets up excuses and points fingers of fault, these teachers must fully recognize how poverty—reinforced by systemic racism—and living each day in a high-stress, potentially violent environment not only thwarts concerted academic performance but also facilitates reading failure for a lifetime (Potts, 2014). In this context, we heartily concur with Shanahan (2020b): Teachers must understand that the poorest reading performances often begin in homes where, through no fault of the student’s family, circumstances do not lend themselves to fostering a viable learning environment. From the first, these students’ early access to the lullabies and stories needed to develop language skills doesn’t happen at home. These students don’t know their letters,
and their working vocabulary is miniscule—well below the preK standard of 10,000 words (Karen, 2018). Thus, when these students arrive at age five on the schoolhouse steps with limited language skills and a withered readiness to read, the gap is already painfully visible. In many cases, this shortfall evolves into low adult expectations for the students’ success in school—which soon translates into the students’ own selfexpectations for failure (Johnston, Wildy, & Shand, 2019).
In this chapter, you will review the challenges that primary teachers who must help these students overcome the extra barriers face. You will also read what research says you and your peers can do to eliminate the gap. The chapter begins with an outline of those approaches that have failed to prepare these students to read for a lifetime. The chapter then reviews what steps you and your peers can take to select, plan, and implement strategies, and then assess the results, to enable your students to avoid the gap and become lifelong readers engaged in deeper understanding and love for what they read—not for passing a test, but for a lifetime.
Prepare to Close the Third-Grade Reading Gap
Any effort to eliminate the early reading gap must start the moment students sit down on their first school day. From the moment these students first enter through classroom doors until they graduate from high school, every teacher must share the responsibility to ensure that all will leave their classrooms competent in using the full array of reading skills necessary for the next grade. In grades K–3, teachers must ready students to read so they can learn across the curriculum at grade level. By the end of grade 3, every student must be ready to learn how to read so they can learn from that reading in any area of the curriculum.
This is a possible dream that does not negate any chance that students can learn to enjoy reading’s many other benefits. But learning to enjoy what they read will not happen if they do not know how to read in the first place. In the context of the United States’ catastrophic failure to prepare students of color living under the poverty line over so many decades of promises, primary-grade educators have a moral obligation to focus on the things that must come first.
To effectively implement grade-level teams or any of the other strategies and methods that we employ at our school, you and your school can follow the details provided in later chapters.
For instance, your teams can begin by establishing clear objectives that define the team’s goals, whether improving student outcomes or fostering collaboration.
Scheduling regular meetings—weekly or biweekly—ensures consistency and accountability among members. Encouraging open dialogue promotes a supportive environment where teachers can share ideas and challenges. Utilizing student performance data collaboratively helps identify trends and tailor interventions to meet specific needs. Additionally, providing ongoing professional development tailored to the team’s objectives enhances their skills and effectiveness. Finally, recognizing and celebrating the team’s achievements can boost morale and encourage continued collaboration. By following these steps, schools can create successful grade-level teams that enhance both teaching practices and student outcomes.
Form Grade-Level Teams
After reviewing the data from NWEA and providing intense teacher training, Frances Slocum Elementary School and Dr. Faulkner Academy changed their literacy practices to follow the characteristics that make for successful collaboration. Once grade-level teams were formed at each grade, they adopted an inquiry mindset and regularly assessed their meetings using the five characteristics as their criteria to reach their common goal: elimination of the gap. Abundant online articles and professional development workshops helped the teams build their repertoire of skills and activities. Each team reviewed the research and decided how that research could best help them structure their team.
Grade-level teams met weekly. They were reinforced by cross-grade teams that met once per month. Cross-grade teams sped up coordination when making scope and sequence decisions, minimized communication hiccups, and kept grade levels aligned around shared teaching goals, objectives, and outcomes. For this to happen, instructional leaders must do their best to join K–3 teachers at each grade. Principals must empower these K–3 teams to plan, implement, and assess the selective abandonment of any ineffective or less-than-scientific approaches by selecting new science-supported methods and materials shown to produce one necessary outcome (cognitive mediation): Every student struggling in the third-grade reading gap reading at grade level by the end of grade 3 (DeWitt, 2012). It is best, says reliable research, that all teachers and administrators in a school preparing these students to read are on the same page as they collaborate to fight the insidious effects of poverty ravaging the students’ futures as reading citizens (Watts, 2022). Since the early 2000s, collaborative educational teams have provided a valuable means for gradelevel teams to build the collaborative culture essential for ending teacher isolation and overcoming common challenges (Harrell, 2020). It has been proven to work in these two schools.
Create an Intentional Learning Community
For schools without teams, at a minimum, it is important to initiate a cadre by preparing grade-level representatives and the principal to gain the skills to set up a systematic approach for using teams. After studying the research, the faculties at Faulkner and Slocum agreed on the goals, tasks, assessment methods, roles, and schedules for the types of teams set up.
Research shows that such collaboration is difficult, if not impossible, in a loosely structured school lacking a shared vision or in one with leadership passively letting each K–3 teacher do their own thing with little regard to what the science of teaching shows to be necessary. Shared mission and strong leadership are essential for eliminating nonuniversal instruction (Edmonds, 1992). The Faulkner and Slocum schools applied this well-established research as it impacted the most important of the fundamental cognitive skills needed when their students were learning to read.
For eradication of the reading gap by the end of third grade, all teachers and administrators in schools in low-resource settings will have the most success in making “no gap here” a shared success by enacting a mission with day-to-day actions that bring this outcome to fruition for each student. Short of this collaboration, dedicated individual teachers who are forced to work alone can strive for truncated, but still possible small successes as they take action that will generate viable solutions. Unfortunately, even the most valiant Peter Pan–like (a free-spirited and mischievous young boy who would fly and never grow up) efforts are likely to be as futile as his attempt.
The literature on learning communities notes five characteristics of well-functioning professional learning communities: supportive, shared leadership, collective creativity, shared values and vision, supportive conditions, and shared practices (Hord, 1997). Successful grade-level teams can gather every week during one common class period to assess quickly their progress as a team with these characteristics and then continue to build their plans of action (Bellanca, 2020).
Enact a Four-Year Literacy Integration Plan
As faculty at Faulkner and Slocum made certain, an explicit, formal, outcomedirected “learning-to-read” skills curriculum must fill every school day for the first four years (Reading Plus, 2021). Learning-to-read skills are the content primary teachers will introduce so that each student’s K–3 school year ends with grade-level identified, observable learning-to-read competencies. The K–3 learning-to-read curriculum consists of four skill sets to be taught daily, systematically, and repeatedly until outcomes are attained via an explicit model of instruction to show each
student’s competence at each grade level: fluency with phonemics, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension (Burkins et al., 2021). In this model, reading fluency plays a dual role in moving along the “big five” continuum, setting the standard for proficiency with each of the other competencies (not just reading out loud). The “big five” refers to five key components that significantly impact student success and school performance: strong leadership, effective instruction, a positive school climate, datadriven decision making, and family and community engagement. When the two schools understood these elements, they were able to foster support for all students and provide an effective learning environment; for example, the faculties found that decoding must become automatic to allocate resources cognitive resources for fluency and reading comprehension (Torppa, Eklund, van Bergen, & Lyytinen, 2016; Cadime, Rodriguez, Santos, & Viana, 2017).
The teachers noted that fluency in traditional learning-to-read instruction is one element among five. The work at Slocum helped the staff to better understand fluency as a meta-element that applies to the other four. They noted that the students they were teaching to read needed fluency in each of the other four areas. It wasn’t enough that a student was “aware” or could stumble through sounding out a word or reading a sentence. They needed a fluency standard in each area so that they could apply the research. (You can apply in the same manner the research captured in the chapters that follow.)
In this structured curriculum, explicit checkpoints will mark when students are expected to show competence with each skill in the grade level. Competency is shown by a student reading aloud to the teacher smoothly, precisely, and accurately, or what the Slocum teachers identified as “fluency.” The charts attainment of each expected competency as the expected “fluent” outcome (such as, “Student enunciates the letter l and its sound in three examples” or “Student deconstructs a new threesyllable word and identifies the patterns for reconstructions”). Expected completion dates for outcome, not coverage, are set in an annual schedule. To meet these deadlines, teachers will differentiate daily instruction with lessons outlined on a template consistent at all grade levels (see the appendix, page 193). These lesson templates as well as rubrics and other templates will ease your planning in a systematically differentiated classroom. Templates and playbooks will also signal to students a consistent approach across every learning-to-read lesson each year.
As teachers review the specific skill set for each grade’s students, it is essential that they can model, explain the why of the skill’s characteristics, and demonstrate its performance so that students know what you want to hear and see. They must be explicit in what the students are required to know and do. For students who have
come to a school limited by budget with a strong need to hear the first approach, any teacher in the four years who ignores the collaborative effort to eliminate the gap with explicit instruction, does so at the peril of the students who pass from one classroom to the next. Each teacher’s explicit daily instruction cannot be ignored (Reading League, 2021).
Follow the Playbook for Keeping a Four-Year Record
Set in place a cognitive reading record in kindergarten. Keep it in a folder to be passed on and expanded in each grade. At the start of each grade year, check progress with the prior year’s cognitive skill development and add additional skills appropriate to that year. Figure 1.1 (page 25) illustrates the how-to for a kindergarten guiding rubric. Upper grade teachers need only replicate the format and insert the skills appropriate for their grades while following these steps.
1. Each grade-level team selects the skills relevant to that year. As in the example in figure 1.1 (page 25), skills are a combination of cognitive functions (like impulse control) and thinking proficiency (prior knowledge). In each grade, the team will determine which skills are most necessary for the class. Each teacher can personalize the assessment tools by adding any specific skill determined necessary for each student.
2. Make a file to retain kindergarten rubrics. Pass student files to the next year. Each year, the next grade’s teacher can add to the file. These files will provide information that shows each student’s progress with these key cognitive skills.
If a school is organized into multigrade learning collectives, its teachers are in a position to establish “eliminating the gap” in the primary grades. This teaming will allow the placement of teachers into teams that stay together for four years, with one team able to keep a close watch on twenty to thirty students’ progress over time. Teams can more easily collaborate in “cleaning out the closets,” by selectively removing evidence-absent methods before systematically adopting evidence-strong practices as replacements for ineffective methods (Aleccia, 2011). Teams can easily promote the reading foundation skills detailed in ELA standards (go to your state’s ELA foundation skills) and the science of reading (NWEA, 2021). If a school is large enough to require two or three multigrade teams in any grade, a team leader from each can serve to coordinate the selective abandonment across that grade.
Name: Year K
Impulse control Not yet able to control emotions and behavior. Needs teacher intervention.
Developing control over emotions and behavior. Needs teacher intervention.
Attends to details Not yet able to focus on all areas of a project or task without teacher intervention.
Checks prior knowledge Not yet able to automatically go back and check information already learned before learning new information without teacher intervention.
Precise with Not yet accurate in decoding and comprehending information.
Figure 1.1: Four-year record.
Developing the ability to focus on all areas of a project or task with teacher intervention.
Developing the ability to go back and check information already learned before learning new information. Teacher intervention needed.
Developing accuracy in processing information.
Strong control over emotions and behavior and does not violate the rights of others or conflict with the rules and guidelines of the classroom/ school.
Strong ability to focus on all areas of a project or task, no matter how large or small without teacher intervention.
Strong ability to automatically check what is already known before learning new information.
Comment/
Strongly uses accuracy in decoding and comprehending information in/ out of text.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Use Selective Abandonment to Eliminate Failed Methods
and Materials
Selective abandonment became the first strategy adopted by the Slocum teams (Aleccia, 2011). After reviewing the research, the teams formed a clear “why” for the strategy. “We wanted to clear the decks and make room for what new research might
tell us,” noted Gwen Lavert. “This helped us target obsolete practices. We didn’t want to end up squeezing four students on a bus seat meant for two. This helped the staff relax and know that the new strategies would replace the old. No double-up stress.” From this start came a checklist of key practices to abandon key replacements and reasons for the change specific to preparing students of color in poverty who are learning to read. Table 1.1 offers a breakdown of teaching practices and their efficacy.
Table 1.1:
Efficacy of Instructional Practices
Instruction That Doesn’t Work
Random phonics instruction
Instruction That Works
Systematic and explicit phonics instruction
Episodic vocabulary from prepared lists
Isolated skills
White-only cultural content
Literature only
Planned vocabulary development with evidence-based instructional practices from authentic relevant sources
Basic and complex thinking skills in patterns
Paper printed materials only
Leveled instruction
Common-ground cultural content
Multiple academic contents
Multidimensional internet located, culturally rich authentic resources
Heterogeneous collaborative pairs and threes
Why It Works
Provides practice with letter-sound relationships in a predetermined sequence. Students learn to use these relationships to decode words that contain them.
Teacher reliance on effective evidence-based practices is vital for fostering student achievement and closing achievement gaps.
Pattern awareness leads to complex thinking and helps students make logical connections. When students become attuned to patterns, it allows them to predict what will come next and make sense of their world.
To have productive and respectful conversations, teachers have to observe certain foundations of discourse and behavior.
Students engage in interactions that explore their interests and develop competences that shapes their academic achievement.
When a number of our senses (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) are being engaged during learning, students who hear first understand and remember more from materials that connect to their lives.
Cooperative learning produces higher achievement results as well as social-emotional learning outcomes compared to homogeneous ability groups.
Figure 1.2 (page 27) illustrates the hierarchy of reading skills. This hierarchy will be a great companion as you learn to evaluate instructional efficacy.
Follow the Playbook for Selective Abandonment
The following playbook is meant for a team (vertical or grade-level) to initiate when implementing the selective abandonment of ineffective practices. To make their ideas actionable, each grade-level team is charged with reviewing existing lessons, crossing out the unhelpful practices, going online to find researched replacements, and redesigning the lesson plans. Such actions enable teams to identify and discard those practices that time has revealed are not viable for closing the gap to make room for evidencebased, teaching-to-read instruction.
Week by week, teams must determine what to abandon and what to insert as a replacement. As the first year unfolds, the teams assess what went smoothly and what needed polishing. Each year after, teams should commit to the following.
The Hierarchy of Reading Skills
Comprehension
• Design a plan to eliminate current lessthan-helpful practices and set a K–3 course for meeting the challenge to close the reading gap with productive, researchsupported practices. The teacher teams start by brainstorming the list of less-thanhelpful practices and determine which to abandon. For the nervous among them, teams determined that the first year would be “a try it and see” year. Once the first lists are done, the teams initiate discussion of the research-supported replacements and make lesson plans.
Vocabulary
Fluency
Phonics
Phonological Awareness
• Eliminate any unsystematic, hierarchical practices that have allowed the gap to exist in a school. Team leaders agreed the replacement practices must eliminate the practice of individual teachers choosing whatever instructional methods they find easiest to implement or deemed their “favorites that have always worked,” including reliance on “reading” activities found from unverified sources online that keep students busy but had no research to support their effectiveness (Wexler, 2020).
Figure 1.2: The hierarchy of reading skills.
• Highlight an emphasis on brain development by making complex cognition and metacognition fundamental in every learning-to-read task (Boulware-Goden, Carreker, Thornhill, & Joshi, 2007; Fogarty & Pete, 2020; Knight & Galletly, 2020). The easiest way to ensure that brainbased strategies are selected, the team need only ask one member to check online by googling the term’s research.
• Counter any pleas by individuals who rely on outdated or generic research that allows them to defend their own ways of not following a foundational skill path because they may believe that any strategy labeled “phonics” is not “reading” (Shanahan, 2016). Those relying on outdated or generic research have a lack of understanding of the teaching and learning context of reading at the root of the misbelief that phonics is not reading. The science of reading has evolved as an attempt to counter misleading or outdated research on how to teach reading. It is important to highlight Hattie’s (2009) Visible Learning, a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, and Visible Learning For Literacy (implementing the practices that work best to accelerate student learning), provides over fifteen years of research, sorting out the effectiveness of teaching strategies, identifying instructional routines that have the biggest impact on student learning, to literacy practices (Fisher, Frey, & Hattie, 2016). There is a framework that provides practices that are clear and can be implemented at the right moment in a marginalized student’s learning, and their effect is tangible.
• Counter those who may argue that they don’t have time for “phonics,” an umbrella term often misused to cover the full array of foundation skills that they are unlikely to have had sufficient (or even any) preprofessional preparation to deliver with students living in poverty (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2016).
For those who say they have “no time for phonics,” usually because they are “teaching reading”—the most common complaint we hear when leading our professional learning workshops—we have found it most helpful to have these teachers understand that literacy develops along a continuum that is a set of five crucial building blocks. These five blocks add up to the whole building—literate reading. As they will see when they work through the continuum, phonics is only one element, but it is an essential foundation block for the others that follow. In addition, we have found it helps for time-affected teachers to understand that the literacy developmental continuum is dependent on the integrity of several systems. Oral language
development and auditory processing have historically been cited as necessary prerequisites for learning to read and write a language; both are also necessary parts of adequate language assessment (Raising Children, n.d.). When teachers ignore these and offer excuses such as, “I do what the state or district says I have to do,” or “I have my favored methods” in order to keep on using methods that do not move nonreaders into full literacy, all their time spent on “teaching reading” is guaranteed to fail. Given the research-established continuum presented in the science of reading as a sequenced hierarchy, abandonment frees up time to embed literacy activities grounded in the “big five” (page 23). Yes, learning the methods will take time, but once they fill in the space created by selective abandonment of ineffective methods, any time spent will be the time that ensures increased reading proficiency outcomes for even the most challenged not-yet-readers.
In the hierarchy, it is easy to see the prephonics (phonological awareness) and phonics. It is important to understand that there is an end to both. However, the continuum continues until the students become proficient readers.
Decide How to Move Forward After Selective Abandonment
The willingness to abandon less productive past practices will leave a void. “What do we do now?” is a question that scares many educators. Fear need not overtake common sense. Aided by the internet, it is now possible for any teacher or principal to identify research-based practices that will produce superior, observable, and measurable outcomes each week, month, and semester. These practices enable students to advance from small triumphs to confidence-building big steps and, after four years, have the tools to read any material in any curriculum scheduled. More importantly, those same educators will have the evidence that working as a team will accomplish what a few dedicated individuals in one classroom cannot.
To move these ideas into action, grade-level teams can become their own scientific researchers. Using a list of research-validated practices similar to the previous list from Robinson-Zanartu, Doerr, and Portman (2014), teams can select specific activities to promote learning for each of the big five (page 23). By using the lesson design template in the appendix of this book (page 193) teams embed the strategies that will most advance their students through each of the five elements necessary to produce successful readers. Afterward, as informal researchers, they contrast quiz and test scores as well as observation lists to determine what progress has happened.
Teachers at Dr. R. H. Faulkner Academy and Frances Slocum Elementary went beyond the classroom assessment. Every student took the NWEA Measures of
Academic Progress (MAP) test, which is aligned with the science of reading. The MAP test is a three-part test that measures and monitors oral reading fluency, literal comprehension, foundational reading skills, and mathematics annually. Through professional learning teams, the collaborative team developed the action plan with the administration. They used the NWEA learning continuum to support them in finding instructional areas and learning statement groups by standards. This information supported teachers in developing lesson plans and guiding instruction in the classroom. The MAP test was important to teachers, students, and parents because it helped them to develop goals and keep track of progress and growth in skills that would move them to proficiency. The test informed students of their strengths and let teachers know if help was needed in any specific areas. The parents and caregivers in the school study reported that student-led conferences were invaluable and that they contributed to a better understanding of their student’s learning. The following is a mediated lesson planning format.
• Agree not to skip any steps in the explicit instruction of phonemes, phonics, and vocabulary instruction on the way to meaning by contending that these skills are “unnecessary” for early readers of color. These readers deserve as much as any others not to be denied the pleasures of jumping right into reading whole stories and learning to enjoy what they read (Wexler, 2020).
• Interweave the five foundation skills in a systematic approach that designs every skill in an explicit lesson as a measurable outcome (Flannery, 2021). For students to learn to read at a rate where they are ready to move across and up the hierarchy from decoding to meaning, they need simultaneous engagement with a language-rich and print-rich environment. Every day, this translates to daily involvement in multiple literacy activities which link the five skills. As shown in the science of reading, such an environment will include the following.
{ All activities grounded with culturally and personally relevant questions or events
{ Assessments of prior knowledge and cultural grounding to bridge to new learning
{ Development of the thinking skills within content
{ Integration of mediating conversations to monitor and guide understanding
{ Scaffolded strategies and activities to support mastery
{ Formative assessment to select strategies and activities
{ Use of feedback to adjust instruction
{ Encouraged collaboration
{ Integrated summative assessments and transfer of learning
{ Determination of the next step for improvement
Look for end-of-the-year outcomes that align with the standards. Spotlight these outcomes with their cognitive components so that you and the students can more easily follow a step-by-step pattern from start to finish (Wiggins & McTighe, 2015). When you focus on making outcomes SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, results oriented, and time bound; Conzemius & O’Neill, 2014), the M should support another objective—making the lessons manageable for young students to master in a set schedule, which can be accomplished by using small steps in the lesson. After you have constructed your new lesson plans, use SMART criteria as a final assessment before you teach the lesson.
Act on the Eight Elements of Necessary Best Practices
By integrating eight elements solidly supported by research into each designed lesson in the four years, Faulkner Academy and Frances Slocum’s teacher teams organized a consistent, full-scale attack on students’ lost time learning to read. This, of course, begs the question: What are the elements? and What are their sources? Over our many years of teaching, we learned to depend on research to achieve the best results for our students. We learned early on that combining best practices was a way to increase the chance that students would develop their skills. Ultimately, at Faulkner Academy and Slocum, we decided to go all in with an easy-to-replicate lesson design in a template that all teachers would use. The template promoted a consistency that allowed students to feel more comfortable with a familiar lesson pattern. It also allowed teachers to follow a research-rich design in which all the elements were data driven. In this framework, the teachers felt more comfortable differentiating instruction. In a cognitively strong lesson, the “necessary” best practices always included those that had shown to ring true through many years of best practice research. This is the point at which selective abandonment was most useful.
Tan (2017) stated that teachers must know how they think in order to know how students think so that they can move to independent thinking. By focusing on the thinking, teachers can capture students’ attention; thus, focusing their minds on a
lesson’s priority outcomes and introducing the printed story or informational text “heard first” (Ausubel, 1968; B. Chen, 2014; B. Chen & Poquet, 2022). Based on the data, as students begin to move toward proficiency and independent reading, the teachers begin differentiating and providing reciprocal teaching, which engages students in reading and thinking. Each strategy is an important daily exercise, and the effectiveness increases when integrated with others. The eight necessary best practices for literacy instruction we selected include the following: read alouds, guided pairs, literacy circles, reciprocal reading, intervention labs, formative assessments, summative outcomes, and metalinguistic and metacognitive strategies.
Read Alouds
The teacher conducts a read aloud daily with interactive questions and answers to foster complex cognition as identified in state and national standards. This is supported by best practice research showing its preeminent importance as students who experience poverty learn to read (Ceyhan & Yıldız, 2021; Logan, Justice, Yumuş, & Chaparro-Moreno, 2019; Massaro, 2017). Teachers need to read grade-level text aloud so that students are accustomed to hearing the vocabulary they’ll encounter on state literacy tests. During the read aloud, the teacher models and holds discussions with the students using the four strategies of reciprocal teaching: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting. Reciprocal teaching helps students develop critical thinking skills by teaching them how to analyze and evaluate information. Students learn how to think critically about the text and develop their own perspectives and opinions.
Guided Pairs
Guided pairs are to initiate collaborative SEL social skills and to increase achievement as students learn to work together in reading pairs (Ceyhan & Yıldız, 2021; Helton, Schreiber, Wiley, & Schweitzer, 2017; Duran, 2021; Young Lim & Yon Lim, 2020). Guided pairs help students learn how to work together in a pair. They will learn such social skills as trust, conflict resolution, fairness, and personal responsibility through interactive learning experiences. In pairs, the students begin to use the four strategies of reciprocal teaching taught and modeled by the teacher in the read alouds. In guided pairs, students are intentionally paired together to collaborate on specific learning tasks under the guidance of the teacher. Typically, guided pairs involve students working together to apply and practice skills or strategies taught by the teacher. For instance, in the context of reciprocal teaching, students might take
turns leading discussions, summarizing key points, asking questions, and clarifying misunderstandings during read-aloud sessions. This cooperative learning format not only enhances academic skills but also fosters positive peer interactions and teamwork within the classroom environment.
Literacy Circles
After students become fluent in decoding and comprehension, teachers can move them to literacy circles where they can continue to use the reciprocal strategies used in the read aloud and guided pairs. The use of literacy circles is a structured approach in which small groups of students come together to discuss a shared piece of literature. Each group member is assigned a specific role, such as discussion leader, summarizer, connector, or vocabulary enricher, which fosters collaborative learning and develops reciprocal reading skills. The whole group participates by engaging in meaningful conversations about the text, sharing insights, and supporting each other’s understanding through guided discussions. This method encourages active participation and deeper comprehension as students take on different roles and responsibilities within their small groups.
Reciprocal Reading
Reciprocal reading is a well-researched method used to develop learners’ reading skills, promote higher-order thinking, develop listening and talking, and ensure access to the curriculum for all learners (Palinscar & Brown, 1984; McAllum, 2014; Kula, 2021; S. Jones, 2021). Reciprocal reading is a structured approach where students take on specific roles—predictor, clarifier, questioner, and summarizer—to collaboratively facilitate comprehension of a text. Initially developed by Palinscar and Brown (1984), reciprocal reading aims to enhance reading skills by engaging learners in active dialogue and shared responsibility for understanding. Unlike literacy circles, which involve small-group discussions centered around assigned roles related to specific tasks like summarizing or questioning, reciprocal reading focuses on a systematic rotation of these roles among participants during the reading process. This latter method not only promotes higher-order thinking and listening skills, but it also ensures equitable access to the curriculum by encouraging all students to actively participate in making meaning from the text. By integrating reciprocal reading skills with traditional learning-to-read skills and strategies, teachers add a powerful tool to ensure the necessary cognitive development as they apply both skills sets with a variety of authentic texts. Furthermore, by preparing students with reciprocal reading
protocols, teachers make it possible for students to assume responsibility for asking and answering questions, predicting, and other learning-oriented behaviors independent of teacher direction. Students in pairs learn to select materials they will read, talk about their reactions to these materials, ask questions, make predictions, summarize the content, or share their own opinions about the materials. Following the guidelines for reciprocal teaching, teachers model and give feedback to student pairs and fours, increase their responsibility to work together independently, and provide the students with confidence and skills to apply the reciprocal skills when reading alone. As students’ skills advance in their pairs and fours, the teacher’s focus changes. They become an observer and a coach, gathering evidence to answer these questions.
• Do I see or hear instances of students applying the strategy correctly? Which students are struggling to explain their thinking? (Or reticent?)
• What difficulties are one or more students experiencing as they apply the strategy?
• What specifically can I describe to help them? What can I model?
• What elements of the strategy are students doing well?
• What do I say to them to encourage and celebrate their work in progress, especially in their thinking out loud for each strategy?
Proficient readers who have learned reciprocal reading strategies know what, when, how, and why to apply them as they read in pairs for meaning. After teaching a strategy, such as making predictions, comparing sounds, or analyzing a character, teachers monitor peers practicing in reciprocal pairs. They carry a checklist chart and a scoring matrix to record what they see and hear from students practicing the skill. They analyze their data and make notes about any reteaching they need to do. Here comes the need-to-know lab that our eight-element lesson design includes. When determining what data they want to gather in order to provide formative feedback, they can call on this list as their “guide on the side” and inform what they have seen students doing well, what they need to do differently, and how they are to change their use of the skill (Bellanca, 2020).
Need-to-Know and Literacy Intervention Labs
This element of necessary instruction is comprised of two different reading labs: the need-to-know lab and the literacy intervention lab. One takes place in the classroom at both scheduled and unscheduled times. This twofold effort allowed teachers
to make the best use of time available to differentiate instruction with a minimum of pull-out disruption.
1. The need-to-know lab is a teacher-reserved time that pulls together groups of students who have a common need to know or know how to do better. They meet at a space with multiple seats around the teacher’s desk. They meet at scheduled times when other students are meeting with their teammates to complete independent tasks. Because teachers have prepared students with reciprocal reading team skills so they can collaborate with a minimum of teacher oversight, the teacher is free to concentrate on the students’ reinforcement and extra instruction.
2. The literacy intervention lab identifies one or more students to work with a reading specialist, usually at the same time as others are in a need-to-know lab with the teacher. The specialist may come to the classroom, but usually, the students are pulled out and go to the specialist’s office.
In the longitudinal study (see page 9), Frances Slocum Elementary and Dr. Faulkner Academy adapted traditional literacy labs as a strong intervention to reinforce or reteach skills to students with the most extraordinary needs for learning to read an adaptation. Students in the literacy labs met with master’s-degree-holding literacy specialists for specific subject matter learning.
These literacy labs were an extraordinary intervention, a limited pull-out program for those students who needed the most intense and focused interventions by a reading specialist. The literacy lab teachers meet each week with classroom teachers to share data and observations. They relied on the continuum from the NWEA testing to identify the challenges that the selected students were facing. They also met with grade-level teams to identify effective strategies to reach these students.
Formative Assessments
Crucial to all work with students was each school’s faculty’s use of formative assessments (Martens, 2014; Schildkamp, van der Kleij, Heitink, Kippers, & Veldkamp, 2020, CERI, 2020). Formative assessments provide teachers with information they can use to modify their instruction and help students modify how they are performing a cognitive task or developing a skill. The data for formative assessments may come from observations made as the teacher walks among pairs who are practicing a sound or interpreting a story. Teachers also may provide formative assessments with a brief all-class quiz to see how well the entire class is learning.
For instance, when checking how well students are using a set of vocabulary words from a social studies text, teachers do so in a quick vocabulary quiz at the end of each week, much as they always have. The difference? They are not looking to grade each student; they intend to analyze the data to determine class progress so they can firm up future lessons, eliminate gaps that have appeared, and provide constructive feedback so each student gets it right. Teachers do not have to create paperwork with more quizzes and tests to grade and record. Instead, they can use their eyes and ears as they walk among students, especially when they are looking to identify progress made by students in their reliance on reading strategies to improve key learning-toread skills such as those that mark proficient reciprocal readers: predicting, asking questions, summarizing (Palinscar & Brown, 1984).
Summative Outcomes
Summative outcomes report on grade-level outcomes (Stolar, 2019; Lahrichi, 2019; Fallon & Emanuel, 2019). Teachers use their tests, writing samples, and interview checklists to determine the degree of accomplishment students have reached at the end of a lesson, unit, or semester. (This can look like the following exchange: “What evidence,” the teacher asks, “shows me that this student can restrain impulsivity?” Their answer: “I see him stop and think. He tells me he looked at two examples before he gave me an answer. He told me in his words how he predicted the end of the story .”) This hard evidence from what the student shows or says he does, is the evidence often used to report progress to final outcomes to the district and perhaps to parents on a report card backed by a note log.
Instruction of Metacognitive and Metalinguistic Strategies
Metacognitive (thinking about thinking) and metalinguistic (thinking about language) strategies during and after lessons promote vocabulary development and reading comprehension (Boulware-Goodenet al., n.d.; Nalliveettil, 2012; Osturk, 2022). These practices involve students reflecting on their thinking processes and language use, which enhances their understanding of both content and cultural perspectives. Metacognition helps students become aware of their learning strategies and adjust them as needed, while metalinguistic awareness fosters a deeper appreciation and analysis of language in various contexts.
Early-grade teachers attuned to these strategies rely heavily on think-pair-share with a prompt for students to explain their thinking to complete a task, apply a skill such as decoding, or make a judgment about a character or a whole story. When
employing reciprocal pairs (see chapter 4, page 79), teachers activate students’ metacognition by asking students questions such as how or why they made a prediction or how they might do similar thinking about other texts.
Metalinguistic awareness is a set of skills each individual possesses to learn a language. It is a strategy that raises the awareness of the student from language to cultural factors in our society. While understanding this skill, students will acquire the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of spoken language. All students can be given a learning styles test that focuses on activities that develop specific language skills. Metalinguistic skills can be tested through tasks such as ambiguity tasks (such as, “Which word sounds right or sounds like a word you know?”), and linguistic judgment tasks (such as, “Which sentence sounds better or is grammatically correct?”).
By calling on a common design with strong research components, teachers at each grade level present lessons with a formal look, common vocabulary, and consistent structure to all lessons every day for four years. Repetition makes the language of learning familiar to each student. Aided by professional learning which highlights team collaborations in planning those lessons, teachers rely on age-appropriate, culturally relevant literary texts (Washington, 2021) as well as the needed “catch-up” minutes every day, all day, so that students who are not yet ready to read can regain lost ground and be as ready to read for deeper understanding of science, mathematics, social studies, and art as skillfully as any peers who arrived prepared to do so at much earlier ages.
Within the four-year plan, teacher teams select those strategies that advance each of the elements. There is no magic solution that will tell a team which strategy fits best in each element. To this choice, they must bring their best judgment, try out their selections, and evaluate what worked and didn’t produce the intended result. Teams should not launch into any activity without careful consideration of the ideas.
Follow the Playbook for Introducing New Methods
What are the steps teachers can take to introduce new methods, one at a time, into their tool kits so that, together with their peers, they can close the gap? Playbooks with scripted steps to introduce new lessons with new methods will benefit those who are nervous about wandering astray, losing the students making a mistake, or violating state requirements. Playbook scripts—“what I do first, second, third”—will help novices unfamiliar with the structured team approach recommended on these
pages take the first small steps needed to build student confidence in their literacy instruction. As confidence builds through interaction with more experienced peers, students will feel more confident and rely less on the developed scripts. As recommended from our experience throughout this book, if teams work closely with the principal to make the plan, there should be little fear that they will “get in trouble” with the administration or move into a violation of a state requirement.
The common team effort begins with a common team vocabulary, which distinguishes three key tools the teams will use. All should use these terms for a common approach. Teams will also use these terms and teach the upper-grade students the same.
1. You will use playbooks to outline the procedures in task activities. Have students retain their playbooks of procedures and instructions to use over and over. Encourage them to rely on the playbook rather than ask you for instructions they have forgotten. For example, see the playbooks used in this book as instructions for you or in samples to give to students.
2. Distinguish playbooks from playlists. This is a term originating from the music industry that makes a sequenced list of songs. It may be a list of one artist’s songs or a list of one genre. These are mere lists of items such as book titles, songs, activity titles, names, places, events, and so on. In the classroom, they are usually started with a brainstorm and kept as a memory aid. For instance, after you and your team brainstorm a playlist of instructional strategies that promote thinking while reading, you can add to it as you learn new ones and use the list as a quick reference when you are planning a new lesson. Students can keep playlists of “my good read” book ideas for future independent free reading time and refer to them after they finish a book or a list of metacognitive strategies when they are reading for understanding.
3. You can also provide scripts for students’ reciprocal interactions and play reading. As with the other two instructional aides, these scripts are similar to those read by actors. Each script details the words to say. After modeling a script (like presenting prediction questions), you prepare students to read the script during the first meeting with a partner. Pairs retain the script and keep relying on it until the script becomes second nature in their short-term memory and they can ask the questions without the script.
Figure 1.3 is a checklist of ideas for you and your colleagues to remind you of what research is specifically applicable to the challenge of closing the reading gap.
Review all content for the year. Be familiar with the prior years’ content.
Identify the outcome for the grade/year. Segment the outcome to reveal the various sub-skill outcomes by units. Further segment outcomes for each lesson and set monthly schedules.
Prepare your first month’s playbook with completed templates for lesson design, student playbooks, rubrics, and more.
Select the lesson’s read-aloud material. When students are ready, add reciprocal reading materials to centers (see page 79).
Identify at least one new activity per lesson (for example, games or songs), make playbooks, and introduce how to use the playbooks to the students.
Set up month’s reciprocal pairs.
Teach students how to follow playbooks.
Write scripts for reciprocal interactions. Provide these for inclusion in playbooks.
Assess the success of all activities and plans. How well did each work? What did you do differently?
Add one new lesson or activity to your tool kit each week.
Assess results. What evidence shows student improvement and that they are reaching benchmarks and outcomes?
Figure 1.3: Checklist for introducing new teaching-to-read methods. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
This checklist captures what effective teachers of early reading can do in their classrooms. However, for the gap to disappear, it will take a commitment over four years by each teacher at each grade to collaborate so that every student can shout, “Who says I can’t?”
Conclusion
This chapter shows common challenges teachers face when preparing students to read for meaning before the end of grade 3. It shows how these teachers can collaborate to ensure that every student exits third grade walking across the gap on a new bridge to the future. With new knowledge about how to judiciously abandon unhelpful practices and adopt more helpful ones, you may use the reproducible at the end of this chapter (page 40) to organize your lesson planning notes. Now that you have accepted the learning-to-read challenge and have reviewed the breadth of research that is out there, the next chapter will show you what exactly happens in a student’s brain when they are learning to read.
It’s Your Turn: Chart of Ideas to Abandon and Adopt
In the following chart, list the ideas in each column that tell what you want to abandon and adopt. These will organize your notes as you proceed through the chapter, allowing you to deepen your understanding of each.
Abandon
Adopt Notes
Note: After you have made your review, sit with your K–3 colleagues, discuss your ideas, and set goals to abandon the ineffective practices and adopt new ideas backed by research that are more likely to make the gap disappear in your school.
Who Says I Can’t? © 2025 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download this free reproducible.
WHO SAYS I CAN’T?
IF you’ve been looking for a dynamic guide for teachers committed to making reading accessible for all students, look no further. In Who Says I Can’t?
A Four-Year Plan to Erase the Reading Gap and Achieve Proficiency by Fourth Grade, authors Gwendolyn Battle Lavert and James A. Bellanca combine the latest in science of reading research with practical strategies to build foundational reading skills while emphasizing inclusivity across social and economic lines. With this book, educators will learn how to empower every young reader to understand phonemics and master vocabulary and comprehension through interactive lessons. Each chapter presents actionable insights for helping students of diverse backgrounds not only read proficiently but find their own stories within the pages. This essential road map gives teachers everything they need to close reading gaps by fourth grade, setting students on a path to lifelong literacy success.
READERS WILL:
• Learn current research on the third-grade reading gap and why it matters
• Understand the importance of teaching phonics and phonemics in the early grades
• Explore how to expand vocabulary for students below target levels
• Guide students on forming meaning in cognitive and metacognitive ways
• Provide reading material with diverse characters to encourage investment and belonging
“I think that this book could fill a necessary gap for schools in low-income areas that serve primarily students of color, although I think that the strategies outlined could work for most students.”
—LINDSEY BINGLEY
Literacy and Numeracy
Strategist, Foothills Academy Society, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
“As you dive into the reading and the content, it becomes clear that this is a heavily researched methodology. This research combined with the ability to say that it works by referencing a school that has implemented this process creates a strong case for using this in the classroom.”
—CHARITY HELMAN
Instructional Design Lead, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in this book. SolutionTree.com
ISBN 978-1-958590-59-1