I was recently listening to an old episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, which is hosted by Susan Lambert. The episode was titled “Leading with the head and the heart” and the guest was Mitchell Brookins. You can find this episode here. Brookins began his career as a teacher on the south side of Chicago, became a school administrator in both New Orleans and Chicago, and now is a consultant working with teachers and educators on the Science of Reading. Much like many of you, he was trained as an educator who believed in a Balanced Literacy format for instruction, but he was seeing students in his classroom who were not learning how to read and not growing despite doing everything that he had learned was supposed to be helping kids learn to read.
Around 2015, Brookins was working on his doctorate, researching instructional leadership, and realized that he needed to research how to teach students to read. This work led him to the National Reading Panel Report, which was published in 2000 (you can find it here). He later came to realize that this research was the beginning of his journey of learning about the Science of Reading.
What I found myself reflecting on as I listened to Brookins was that I was in much the same boat as him. I had students who came to me in 5th and 6th grade, and while most could read, there were always a handful that struggled. Even though I tried the strategies that the literacy coach suggested, and the things that Guiding Readers and Writers by Foutas & Pinnell told me were good practice, I never seemed to make headway with those students. What strikes me now is that the ideas that could have helped me shift my practices, that could have helped me reach more of the children who walked into my class without reading proficiency were sitting there in a report that had been published while I was still in college. The problem is, I didn’t even know about the National Reading Panel Report until sometime around 2020 or 2021.
Brookins and his team of 3rd to 5th grade teachers took the information from the research and first began implementing fluency reads. They spent 10 minutes a day with a short passage. The teacher would read it aloud first, then the class would choral read, then students would re-read and annotate for a purpose. Annotation allows you to closely monitor what is happening in a text – you might notice main points, shifts in perspectives, key areas of focus, and your thoughts as a reader. After seeing some quick gains in student comprehension of reading, the team decided to go deep with fluency reads. Each week they would select a couple of passages and devote 10 minutes a day to reading, re-reading, annotating, and discussing the text. After 20 weeks the teachers had seen major growth in their reading comprehension scores. That year, the school saw a 10% increase in state assessment scores on student reading. Even with all this work though, and seeing kids grow, they noticed that there were still a few students, about 10-12 across the grades, who were not growing.
At this point, Brookins went back to the research and found a section in the National Reading Report that suggested students who were not growing with phonics support might need instruction that falls earlier on the reading progression. This led him to dig into phonics instruction. He found that for his students that were not achieving based on fluency reads, the team needed to look at foundational skills that might be lacking. By adding those skills for intervention work with the 10-12 students who weren’t growing, the team began to see a shift in the data. Students were growing.
But then, Brookins said something that he came to realize, and that shook me to the core:
You see, what I have noticed is that each year, we have students who show growth – in their NWEA data, in screeners, and in formative assessments. Because they grow, they seem to slip through the cracks. But when we start looking at our bubble students – the ones who didn’t pass the IREAD-3 (Indiana’s Assessment of Reading Proficiency) in third grade, we notice that while some students have been growing consistently, their data always puts them in the yellow, on the edge of being at risk. These children have slipped through the cracks because they aren’t waving a big red flag. They are growing. But that growth is not at a rate that will get them to our goal of reading proficiency by the end of grade 3.
So now, that has me reflecting on my own instructional leadership. I know that my eyes often get drawn to the big red flags that pull in our attention. These red flags come from the students who consistently are being flagged by our screeners, who have NWEA scores in the 40th percentile or lower, and who are identified for our RTI support. But when our eyes get drawn to the big red flag, we miss the student who is consistently cruising on the bubble. They are making growth, they may even be meeting their growth goals every year, but they aren’t closing gaps between where they are and where they need to be to reach proficiency.
So here’s what I’m thinking about for next year (as there is less than 2 weeks remaining in this school year here in central Indiana) – I want to make it clear that my vision moving forward is to work towards mastery of literacy. You see, students cannot be strong mathematicians without reading skills. They will struggle with problem or project based learning if they are not masters of literacy. My expectation is 95%.
To get there, I’m going to engage in the work. We’ll be studying the needs of our students. We’re going to learn, and then implement the practices that will meet those needs. We’re going to utilize a system of universal screeners and diagnostics to help us understand where our students are and how to move them forward. And then, we’re going to analyze the growth. Where there are wins, we will celebrate them. Where we still are finding gaps, we’re going back to the drawing board. You see, if growth is not attainment, then as Brookins said a bit later in the episode:
You see, I believe that in order to be successful in our world, children need access to literacy. The best way we can help with that is to provide them with foundational skills and language comprehension skills to support their literacy. The children in our school will become proficient.
Based on what you have learned, either from this post or from your own learning on the Science of Reading, what commitments can you make about your instructional practices for next year? What’s something you are going to implement? What’s something that you are going to let go of? To be truly successful, we cannot let our plate get too full. Make sure you’re thinking about what you’ll let go of as you move into a new mindset where mastery is the mandate. Share your thoughts in the comments below!