Education Week - August 17, 2022 - 17

Delano-Gemzik, the LETRS trainer.
Teacher knowledge and professional judgment
still play a big role in helping students advance in
a science of reading framework. But it rejects the
idea that teachers can use any tool in their toolbox.
It hands them a new toolbox.
Some district leaders decided they couldn't ask
their teachers to make this shift without understanding
it themselves, too. These school systems
paid for additional staff to go through LETRS, beyond
what the state funded.
That's the case in Beaufort County, where Raul
Olivares Jr., the kindergarten teacher who's trying
to figure out how to apply new methods, teaches.
District leaders used COVID relief funds to
train special education teachers, interventionists,
and some district-level staff. Otherwise, said Jennifer
Smith, the district's K-5 curriculum director,
" they're trying to lead that work really, truly
blindly. "
Before the training began in January, Beaufort
held a kickoff event with school leaders. Smith put
the data in front of them: two-thirds of their K-8 students
were below grade level in reading.
Smith tried to emphasize that it was systems-
of teacher preparation and training-that were to
blame for those results, not teachers individually.
" This is what we're going to do to move forward
together, " Smith said, recounting the presentation.
The messaging has hit home for Olivares. Others
are more skeptical.
Lauren Johnson, a 17-year veteran educator,
teaches in Beaufort County's Chocowinity Primary
School.
" When the law was written [in] 2021, I had mixed
feelings, because I was originally, as a classroom
teacher, balanced-literacy trained, " Johnson said. " I
started seeing a lot of people wanting to change the
language of what you deem the best way to teach
literacy to kids. ... It almost felt like the law was coming
in to say, 'What everybody was doing for the last
15 years was wrong. Now, you have to do this.' "
Johnson's time is split between delivering Reading
Recovery, a one-on-one intervention for 1st grade
struggling readers, and leading guided reading
groups with students in other grade levels.
Much of her practice is grounded in the balanced
literacy frameworks that districts in North Carolina-including
hers-have pledged to move away
from. But she sees the wholesale rejection of balanced
literacy tenets as misguided. " There are so
many ways to help children access literature and to
help kids become lifelong readers, " she said.
Johnson is not anti-LETRS. " For a lot of our beginning
teachers, this has been great, " she said, noting
that some of her less-seasoned colleagues are learning
about the structure of language for the first time.
" If you don't understand that as a teacher, you can't
teach the code to a kid, " Johnson said.
The content, so far, has been review for her,
Johnson said. But she's learned some new things,
too-like how to coach students on their mouth
placement to distinguish the different sounds that
different letters make.
" That has been a big shift for me, " Johnson said.
" We got so focused on the end of where [students]
needed to be, and the fast-paced curriculum, that
some of those critical foundational skills like the
phonemic awareness piece have been overlooked. "
But Johnson worries that her experience as a
Reading Recovery teacher is being discounted-that
in rejecting balanced literacy wholesale, the state
might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
" Reading Recovery teachers are highly trained,
and that training should not be disregarded just
because it doesn't fit with what someone else believes, "
Johnson said.
The curriculum that her district has adopted leads
students through a highly structured progression of
foundational skills, which they then apply in decodable
texts written to given them practice on the letter-sound
patterns they've learned. Eventually, they progress to
more complex texts that are less controlled.
Johnson supports phonics instruction, but such
a structured progression goes against her beliefs
" My ideal
situation would
be that our
curriculum
coach, or even
district literacy
coaches, would
come into our
school, sit all
of us down,
and say: 'This
is what a small
group lesson
is going to look
like using the
science of
reading.' "
RAUL OLIVARES JR.
Kindergarten teacher
at Eastern Elementary School
in Washington, N.C.
about what reading should feel like for young kids
as they're starting out. " I want them to be able to
open up any book and look at the pictures, and think
about the story, and try to read, " she said.
She believes there's no " perfect way " to teach
reading. There has to be a multitude of approaches.
Transferring knowledge
to practice
Lauren Johnson's mixed reception is probably a
fairly typical response to an attempt to change practice
at such a scale on such a compressed timeline: It
takes time to see the incentive for trying something
new, and to figure out what that would look like in a
classroom context.
What that means, said Sarah Woulfin, an associate
professor of educational leadership and policy
at the University of Texas at Austin, is that teachers
need a comprehensive system of support.
It means curriculum that's aligned to the training
teachers are receiving. It means time to draw
those connections in professional learning. It
means an ecosystem of educators-principals,
coaches, interventionists-all working toward
the same goals.
And it means knowing, with clear examples, what
should replace discarded practices. Mississippi,
which has come to be seen as a model for other
states seeking to improve reading instruction, hit on
a strategy for demonstrating this that North Carolina
is slowly adopting.
When it began on its science-of-reading journey,
Mississippi funded coaches for each of the state's
lowest-performing schools to help teachers apply
what they were learning in LETRS training, as well
as professional development and online learning
for schools without coaches. It also asked coaches
to provide monthly reports on their work, keeping
school principals and the state officials informed.
" You won't see any of those things in statute, " said
Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd,
who led the implementation of Mississippi's law as
the state's literacy director. " Those things grew out
of a need, working with my assistant director and
our leadership team. "
Now, in Beaufort, each school designated a
LETRS " ambassador " who meets monthly with
ambassadors from other North Carolina schools
and district leaders to discuss implementation progress
and challenges. School-based reading coaches
meet with teachers during the middle of each unit
to digest the LETRS information together and talk
about how it applies in their school context.
Olivares, the kindergarten teacher at Eastern
Elementary, sat in one of these meetings in late
May. Denise Owens, the school's LETRS ambassador,
led the group of teachers in a discussion
about why understanding the structure of students'
home languages and dialects is important
to reading instruction.
They talked about African American Vernacular
English and Spanish, and how features of students'
spoken language shape their pronunciation
of words. Native Spanish speakers, Owens noted,
often confuse the " ch " and " sh " sounds when
speaking English.
It's important to know these features, she said,
so that when a student's pronunciation differs from
standard English, teachers can figure out whether
it's due to their language background or whether
it might be indicative of a phonological processing
problem.
" They may not need that extra intervention service, "
Owens continued. " We want to make sure
we're looking at that carefully, and not just the number
or score. "
This new information-and help translating it to
practice-has been valuable for Monica Littlefield,
one of Olivares' colleagues who teaches 1st grade at
Eastern. So far, LETRS has been most helpful for her
work with English-language learners, Littlefield said.
She learned that Spanish has fewer vowel sounds
than English does and that English learners can
struggle to identify two different sounds in English
that are pronounced the same way in Spanish. This
year, she had a boy in her class who had trouble
distinguishing vowel sounds for e and i. The training
helped her take a step back and understand
why this student, a native Spanish speaker, might
be confused. " To him, those vowels sounded very
similar, " she said.
Olivares, too, has started applying pieces of what
he's learned in LETRS training. But he still feels like
he can't see the entire picture yet.
Years ago, when he started teaching guided reading,
a representative from the curriculum his school
used came to show teachers how to use the framework
in a small group. Olivares wants something
like that for LETRS, too.
" My ideal situation would be that our curriculum
coach, or even district literacy coaches, would come
into our school, sit all of us down, and say: 'This is
what a small group lesson is going to look like using
the science of reading. These are the lesson plans
for a small group lesson. These are the resources
we're going to pull from. This is how we understand
the data,' " Olivares said.
Then, there's the need for classroom materials.
Over his dozen years in the classroom, he's bought
resources with his own money to support guided
reading, and it's unclear whether they can be modified
or used to support the new literacy approach.
" What happens with that now? " he asked.
A scramble to retrofit
curriculum
Olivares' predicament is one districts all over
North Carolina are now wrestling with: how the materials
used for teaching can support and deepen the
new training rather than subverting it. Curriculum
is critical-for the discrete word-identification part
of early reading, but also for the much lengthier,
yearslong work of building students' knowledge
and comprehension across a wide range of texts.
" We can train teachers up all day long, but if they
don't have the materials they need to then put that
training into action in the classroom, we've missed
that mark, " said Katharine Bonasera, a manager of
educational partnerships at the Center for the Collaborative
Classroom.
Districts must use core curriculum and intervention
materials that are aligned to the science of
reading, which they must phase in over the course
of the next three years. But unlike other states,
North Carolina has not put out a list of approved
materials, citing local control.
This leaves districts with a few decisions: Do they
buy new products, or try to work with what they
have? Do they wait to roll out new curricula until
they get formal approval from the state, or start
making changes now? Adding to those questions,
there's a new one, a product of last year's culture
wars: A science of reading framework calls for students
to engage deeply with a variety of texts. But
what happens when those texts become the target
of political backlash to curricula that teach about
equity, diversity, and inclusion?
Cabarrus County, a district in the Charlotte area,
is starting with a few homegrown solutions.
As it transitions away from Lucy Calkins' Units of
Study for Reading, a popular guided reading curriculum,
the district has created an evolving, shared
guidebook for small group instruction. As leaders
and coaches see strong examples of classroom activities
aligned to the science of reading, they include
them in the guidebook for other teachers to
reference.
Liz Schriver, an intervention coach in the district,
took pictures of a few of her students making different
vowel sounds with their mouths and posted
them on the wall in a " vowel valley " for other students
to reference. She gathered manipulatives
for students to use during phonemic awareness
practice-like magnetic chips that kids could use to
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