This series is coordinated by Meghann Bierly, a mother of a struggling reader and a school psychologist who advocates for children, families, and educators, who is leading an effort to amplify these voices through publication of personal stories Some of the articles are written anonymously, although NJER verifies the accounts and the author’s credentials, including this one. The writer has been a NJ teacher for 25 years, has a Masters in elementary education, and is working towards her Orton-GIllingham certification.

Change is afoot in classrooms across New Jersey, and indeed the entire nation.  School districts are taking a long-overdue look at their balanced literacy language arts curriculums and reluctantly admitting they are completely out of step with the Science of Reading.  

The Science of Reading refers to an enormous body of incontrovertible research conducted over the span of 50 years that shows how the human brain learns to read and how that scientific evidence is used to inform the best teaching methods to teach the largest number of children to read.  Effective school districts are making plans to pivot to structured literacy curricula aligned with the Science of Reading. This is excellent news for all parents and children, whether a child has a learning disability or not.  It is also great news for the educators who have been aware of the immense amount of research and dismayed by the sluggish pace of school districts to react.  Yet, while every child and adult will ultimately benefit from structured literacy, there is one group that I fear will be unfairly burdened: elementary school teachers.

Let’s take an honest look at the basic responsibilities of a typical elementary school teacher because they are on the front lines of the K-3 “learning to read” years and will be most affected by a change in instructional methods. Before any academics come into play these teachers must create a warm and welcoming classroom environment where children will learn how to exist as productive people in a group setting.  The tasks embedded in that effort are, frankly, superhuman.  Teachers fill, at any given moment, the following roles: substitute parents, positive reinforcement behavior specialists, social workers, crowd control specialists, motivational speakers, safety officers, mental health advocates, conflict resolution specialists, coaches, technology repair technicians, multicultural experts, translators, on-air personalities, public relations executives, and, of course, experts in elementary academics and researchers/developers/planners. This all must be in place, and prioritized before one iota of content is actually taught.  

Next, let’s look at why reading above all is so very vital to a child’s future success.  As Barack Obama said in his Presidential Proclamation in 2015, “Literacy is the gateway to all other learning, and it is the most basic building block of opportunity in an economy increasingly built on knowledge and innovation.” For children to reach that “gateway” they first must learn to really read, to know how to tackle an unfamiliar word grapheme by grapheme, phoneme by phoneme.  (By the way, in English we have 44 phonemes and 250 ways to spell those sounds!) Students must have a solid and ever-growing vocabulary, know the spelling rules of the English language, know how to navigate grammatical structure and syntax, all for the purpose of ultimately understanding what they are reading. And that is the point: reading comprehension.  Furthermore, that gateway is the key to a treasure chest: Books, stories, the pure magic of losing oneself in a book, and experiencing the joy of “I can’t wait to find out what happens next!”  

To get there the skills must be learned. To be learned they must be explicitly taught, step by step, layer by layer, in an integrated, systematic, structured way, by people who know how to do that.   

Most teachers (myself included) received their credentials from colleges and universities that taught them to “teach” children to read using balanced literacy curricula, which do not include direct instruction in decoding and encoding.  As Professor Stanislas DeHaene, a cognitive neuroscientist and French author says in his 2018 book How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine…For Now,  “Amazingly, most teachers receive little or no professional training in the science of learning.  My feeling is that we should urgently change this state of affairs, because we now possess considerable scientific knowledge about the brain’s learning algorithms and the pedagogies that are most efficient.” 

Perfectly stated, and I have no doubt that higher learning institutions will soon be churning out fully trained-in-the-science teachers.  Until that time, however, state and local school boards must provide the support structure.

Hopefully, structured literacy training would come from organizations recommended by the Reading Science Academy, the International Multisensory Structured Language Council, or the International Dyslexia Association, institutions that have a long history of  research-based training.  Here in New Jersey we have the best possible resource for training and curriculum options: the Reading League, a group whose mission it is to guide implementation of structured literacy.  Ideally, each school should have dedicated reading specialists for all children, and post-training literacy specialists in each building.  Luckily we have an abundance of teacher talent in our schools and. thanks to them, I am confident New Jersey can be a leader in the implementation of structured literacy.  

I implore school districts to take the greatest of care as steps are finally taken to update our literacy programs.  If we want to produce literate students, we must support our teachers on the front lines, at least until undergraduate and graduate coursework reflect the scientific underpinnings of learning.  Our children deserve nothing less.  As Victor Hugo once said, “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”  It all begins with our invaluable classroom teachers!