Literacy stands as the cornerstone of success across all academic areas, serving as the key to unlocking vast realms of knowledge and avenues for individual advancement. Nonetheless, the journey to teaching literacy is filled with challenges. It is the insightful leaders, those who grasp the intricacies of this task, who spearhead the enhancement of teaching methods within their institutions. As you plan for literacy professional learning for the 2024-2025 school year, consider providing learning opportunities to your educators (and paraeducators) that are aligned to evidence-based research in structured literacy. Principals who make a significant impact on supporting educators in the classroom are those who are constantly in pursuit of the newest literacy education research, eager to disseminate these findings among their staff and foster a school-wide culture devoted to literacy.
Outlined below are six research-backed strategies for literacy that teachers can implement daily in their classrooms to effect real improvements in their students' reading skills.
A data binder is a simple yet powerful tool that can improve your teachers’ instructional quality. It should include the instructional scope and sequence, student data, and lesson plans. By keeping a record of each students’ progress and assessment results, teachers can proactively spot at-risk students and start timely interventions. Equipped with this data, teachers can then determine the placement of each student within a structured literacy scope and sequence, adjusting their lesson plans as needed.
To increase efficiency and collaboration, consider using electronic ways to track data and house lesson plans. Online planning tools enable teachers to build, save, and share data and lesson plans electronically, facilitating easy collaboration and saving teachers time organizing their lessons. Learning Management Systems (LMS) and online spreadsheets can also help teachers track student data such as grades, attendance, and assessments, allowing teachers to view progress over time.
Learn more about using data binders in our blog, Tuesday Teaching Tips: Data Binders Can Simplify Your Implementation Process.
Background knowledge is key in literacy acquisition. First teachers need to have the requisite background knowledge to appropriately teach students how to read, and students need to have the necessary background knowledge to engage in the literacy learning. Ensuring teachers have access to a strong knowledge-building curriculum with appropriate training as well as the essential background knowledge in literacy acquisition, principals can set their students up for literacy success. Students should be deeply engaging with both narrative and expository texts to build background knowledge and make connections to prior knowledge and lived experiences. Teachers should facilitate engagement with a variety of activities focused at the word-, sentence-, and text-level.
Explicit teaching is often summarized as ‘I do, We do, You do.’ However, it’s more like, ‘I do, I do, we do, we do, we do, we do, you do, you do, you do, you do, you do, etc.’ That’s because an important part of teaching is providing enough opportunities for students to witness the skill being modeled and then practice it collaboratively and independently.
The goal is to essentially create a scaffolded learning experience that offers ongoing feedback. Scaffolding is an educational technique where teachers provide specific support to students as they grasp a new concept or skill. Within the framework of instructional scaffolding, a teacher typically introduces new information or demonstrates a method for solving a problem. As students become more familiar with the concept, the teacher gradually reduces their involvement, allowing students to practice individually. This approach can also encompass group practice, encouraging collaboration among students.
An example of this can be seen in lessons utilizing word matrices to teach students to infer word meaning:
I do: Teachers explicitly introduce a new morpheme with a word matrix (left matrix), stating the base element ‘sign’ means mark or indication, so adding the past tense suffix <-ed> makes the word ‘signed’ - meaning left a mark.
We do: Teachers work with their students to add a prefix and/or suffix and infer the new word meaning. As additional prefixes and suffixes are explicitly introduced, the word matrix becomes more complex (right matrix). Scaffold student responses as they work together to build words and infer the meaning.
You do: During independent practice, students read connected text and have to infer the meaning of the word using their acquired knowledge of morphemes.
The process modeled above would happen over the course of several lessons with support provided throughout. Students would be introduced to the concept of word matrices early in the year and then consistently go back to their matrices building on what they’ve already started, connecting to their prior knowledge, and building out their lexicon with the support of the teacher and peers.
4. Balance individual and collaborative practices
Speaking of support, the balancing act between individual practice and collaborative practice is a fine art that can yield significant benefits in literacy learning. Whether it's reading a short story together and then summarizing it individually or vice versa, switch it up between individual practice opportunities and collaborative ones. The interplay between individual and group work offers valuable opportunities for peer learning and keeps students engaged and motivated as well as building on students’ oral language and verbal reasoning skills.
5. Use embedded mnemonics to enhance recall
As an administrator for teachers working with emerging readers, facilitate the use embedded mnemonics over other popular methods to more effectively teach sound-letter correspondences. This method involves using a keyword and a related picture to facilitate the connection between graphemes and phonemes. For example, associating the letter ‘a’ with the image of an ‘apple’ aids in remembering the sound /a/.
Here are the three characteristics of effective picture-embedded mnemonics:
After initial exposure to a correspondence through an instructional script, it’s important for teachers to remove the picture mnemonic and present students with a bare letter, so they generalize the skill. The goal is for your students to see a bare letter and accurately produce the sound it represents. Remind your teachers that if students struggle to remember the letter sound, they can be prompted by the picture mnemonic to recall the initial sound of that picture, which again is the target letter sound.
AIM’s Animated Alphabet Cards, a sample of which is above, were created in direct partnership with researcher Dr. Linnea Ehri as part of AIM’s 4-hour course, Growing Proficient Readers: Dr. Ehris’ Phases of Development. This course is designed to introduce teachers to the literacy acquisition process and includes a full-set of printed Animated Alphabet Cards with explicit instructional scripts. Dr. Ehri is an esteemed American educational psychologist and expert on the development of reading. Her research has shown that embedded mnemonics can reduce the amount of repetition needed for kids to learn letters and sounds, with greater ability to transfer or apply this knowledge in reading and spelling. AIM is honored to partner with Dr. Ehri to help teachers of developing readers build the necessary background knowledge to help all learners achieve literacy acquisition.
6. Encourage formative assessments
Data should always be your teachers’ starting point for diagnostic, prescriptive instruction. By collecting and analyzing data daily through formative assessment, teachers can make steady improvements to their students’ literacy. Encourage teachers to track and analyze formative assessments to ensure students are meeting the objectives and determine next steps for those students who are responding to instruction.
Exit tickets are one of the most popular types of formative assessments that teachers can utilize. That’s because they’re an excellent way to assess student understanding of content on a daily or weekly basis. Exit tickets typically consist of a prompt on a sheet of paper or a post-it note for students to respond individually and hand in to their teacher. Here are a few example prompts:
Partner with AIM Institute
Interested in learning more about the resource and tools that AIM Pathways courses provide to educators for implementation in the classroom? Let’s start a conversation.
About AIM Institute: The AIM Institute for Learning & Research® is a non-profit center for educational excellence and professional development, providing educators with the latest research, technology, and best practices in the fields of literacy and language-based learning disabilities.