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Following the science of reading By Marsha Harris, Director of Curriculum
Learning to read is the capacity to attend to the individual phonemes (sounds) of speech and then attach them to graphemes (letters) to spell, read words, and create meaning in a text.
Do you remember when you learned to read? Think back. Do you remember when you learned to read? Do you remember how you learned to read? Do you have any specific emotions attached to those experiences? For some, reading was a fairly simple process with good instruction. For others, it was daunting, exhausting, and challenging. At Trinity, our primary literacy goal is to develop proficient readers who love reading. However, the ultimate goal is for our students to become deep readers, connecting the text and transferring their understanding across content areas. Teaching a child to read is a complex system of foundational skills culminating in comprehension. The methods, programs, and resources required to teach reading are specific and involve a deep content study. No one is born with the innate ability to read. It isn’t a natural skill like crawling, talking, or walking. The human brain is not wired to read. Reading is something that must be developed
with explicit and direct instruction. Reading is a complex task, from visual identification of letters to the attachment of letters to sounds, meaning, and pronunciation.
What is the science of reading? This year, our faculty has been studying the science of reading. Louisa C. Moats, Ed.D, a nationally recognized authority on literacy education, says, “The body of work referred to as the ‘science of reading’ is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, nor a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of studies, supported by hundreds of millions of research dollars, conducted across the world in many languages. These studies have revealed a great deal about how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students.” 1 Over the decades, there have been shifts in reading practices in schools. Thanks to advances in brain research and the consensus of thousands of studies from reading experts, we now better understand how the brain learns to read. As a faculty, we are studying methods, routines, systems, and essential foundational skills that are proven best practices in reading instruction. The 2001 National Reading Panel report concluded that all students benefit from explicit and direct phonics instruction through a multisensory approach and a systematic program. They also determined that for students to become proficient readers, there are five critical pillars of instruction: Fourth Grade Associate Teacher Cathrine Halliburton, Fourth Grade Lead Teacher Hunter Branch, and Fifth Grade Associate Teacher Kelsey Strickland use picture books, story passages, and partner reading to demonstrate reading fluency and expression during the Science of Reading session on Fluency professional development in January.
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