At Partnership Schools, we are excited that so many Ohioans are excited about the “science of reading.” In 2023 legislation that took effect this school year, Governor DeWine and the General Assembly have mandated that all reading curricula follow this approach—one we know well, since Partnership Schools have implemented it for over a decade.
The science of reading is a body of research that points to several key ingredients for effective reading instruction, particularly systematic phonics instruction and building background knowledge, of which vocabulary is perhaps the most important form. Veteran Cleveland Partnership teacher Lisa Marynowski and members of our academic team explained those elements in a Partnership Post back when the legislation passed.
But as the Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill astutely points out in a comprehensive road-map to effective rollout of the policy, curriculum mandates won’t advance students’ reading without effective implementation. Aaron notes that twelve of fifty-five urban districts in Ohio were already using strong science of reading curricula before the mandate went into effect, including the curriculum our schools use: Core Knowledge Language Arts.
The right materials and sequencing are essential. Yet as Aaron notes, teachers and schools must use these tools effectively to help students read well.
Since the Partnership network of schools began over a decade ago, we’ve been working to level up our implementation of curricula based on the science of reading. We are still learning how best to support teachers as they undertake the incredibly complex, vital work of teaching young people to read fluently, with deep understanding and engagement in the texts they are reading.
So what have we learned so far about effectively implementing research-backed reading curricula in our classrooms?
1. Even best-in-class curricula—based on the science of reading—don’t teach students to read. Teachers do.
We see a real difference in students’ progress depending on how teachers implement the curricula. When a teacher implements the curriculum with fidelity—holding a high bar both for their lesson preparation and the learning they expect students to demonstrate—then young readers learn avidly and are hungry for more. But when teachers implement a curriculum out of compliance alone and without a spirit of curiosity and rigor, students progress far more slowly.
2. Most elementary educators are not trained to teach phonics, so we owe them effective, efficient training to develop that skill. But to build the skill, we also have to—and can—build the will.
Anyone who thinks teaching phonics is simple can get a taste of how complex it is from this analysis of just two minutes of effective phonics practice from Teach Like a Champion’s Doug Lemov and Jen Rugani.
Jen has a growing fan base among our teachers in Cleveland, whom she has trained. She packs a lot into a day’s workshop. But even when the list of skills to teach and practice is long, she takes the time to start with cognitive science and reading research. Teacher buy-in increases as they reflect on how that science shows up in their own experiences as readers. As a result, Jen builds teachers’ will to implement curricula effectively by exploring the why behind the work with them first. We find that when teachers are more familiar with the research behind what they’re doing, their will to do it well often increases.
3. Teaching phonics well requires a high degree of precision, expert modeling, and real-time feedback to students.
In baseball, the difference between a home run and a foul ball is often a matter of millimeters—a shoulder just a smidge too high or weight distribution that’s just a little off. The same is true of teaching phonics well: The little things matter a lot.
For a deeper dive into the fine points of what we see great early elementary reading teachers doing, an overview of how a few of our colleagues adapted to do it during Covid still resonates with us.
4. The work doesn’t end at third grade.
The complex texts students should encounter as they get older will challenge the limits of their fluency. Sometimes described as “meaning made audible,” fluency spans the ability to read with automaticity, appropriate intonation, and expressiveness. It is the job of teachers at every level to build fluency through instruction, in both explicit and implicit ways. They can do that in part with lots of shared reading aloud, in which teachers carefully prepare to maximize fluency development and comprehension at the same time.
Note that we say students should encounter complex texts. Too many students don’t read rigorous, grade-level texts as they get older, and that is deeply problematic for their success in high school and beyond. For so many reasons, it is crucial for us to center ambitious books in our reading classes, as Doug Lemov and Emily Badillo, another expert who has trained our upper elementary and middle school teachers in cultivating fluency, elaborated in Education Next recently.
5. Urgency matters.
We must teach every day like the future of our students hangs on the next few minutes of instruction—because it does.
That urgency calls on us to do many things well—including lesson pacing. Our team has developed year-long pacing guides that go beyond slotting in one lesson a day, and we try to guide our teachers in how to judge when some skills may need an extra day of instruction.
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These are not easy decisions with high-quality reading materials, though. These curricula are dense, involve spiraled practice and repetition over time, and students come to us with varying degrees of readiness for the work. Yet their cumulative growth depends on teachers teaching deeply the entire scope and sequence by the end of the year, one year after another.
A few years back, our colleague Fiona Palladino coined the phrase “patient urgency” to describe how we needed to make progress as educators. It is an ethos that Ohio legislators, educational pundits, and parents might adopt now, as we all seek to improve students’ reading. Like all deep investments in children’s learning, the shift to implementing curricula based on the science of reading must be done well and urgently—and it will require years of sustained resolve, knowledge-building, and responsive implementation to produce the gains we seek.
But in our experience—one in which we get to go into middle school classrooms and hear students reading complex texts like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass fluently or gasping out loud at details in the works of John Steinbeck and C.S. Lewis—that effort is worth every minute.
