'I didn't know how to spell': NC teachers take on renewed way to teach reading

She’s checking to make sure the students are reading the word and not just using context clues to guess. That’s critical to making sure students can begin to read fluently; they’ll always run into words they’ve never read before, even if they’ve heard them before, and she wants them to be prepared.

The students, sitting on the carpet, know that all of the words they’re going over at the moment rhyme, like cat and bat.

“What is this? A mouse?” Pritchard asks.

“No, rat!” sings the chorus of kindergartners.

“It can't be a mouse because it wouldn't live in this family that has ‘-at’ at the end,” Pritchard says. “We have to make sure that the word matches what we hear. So the letters and the sounds have to match.”

In today’s North Carolina kindergarten classrooms, every letter has a sound, and the students tap each one out, one finger at a time.

“C-a-t. Cat.”

When they get to second grade, and letter combinations become more complex, they just tap out the sounds.

“F-ear. Fear.”

“In the past, the way that literacy was taught had more of a cueing system, which is more of a guessing framework,” Pritchard said. Children would be asked to read a sentence, and when they came upon an unfamiliar word, they’d be told to guess what it is using a picture or other words in the sentence as clues. Now, Pritchard emphasizes that every letter has a sound or multiple sounds, and she wants children to know them.

Being able to read to learn can dictate a student’s ability to succeed for the majority of their time in school. So the stakes are high for children to learn to read proficiently when they’re younger.

For educators, that means finding the right techniques to help a child master reading is imperative. For parents, that means keeping up with those techniques at home is critical to helping their children practice what they’re learning.

When it comes to reading, there are right ways and there are wrong ways. North Carolina leaders now say that the way children were taught to read before wasn’t working. The test results were too dismal.

“Our scores indicated that we had some work to do with reading,” said Amy Rhyne, director of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Early Learning. State test scores before the COVID-19 pandemic showed that about 60% of students were reading proficiently. The more rigorous National Assessment for Educational Progress showed closer to just 40% were reading proficiently.

“So we knew that even then there was something, we need to do something different,” Rhyne said.

So state leaders are now putting their time, energy and big dollars into research-backed methods that emphasize mastery of letters, sounds and spelling. They hope the result will be a windfall of more proficient readers among North Carolina’s schoolchildren, though they caution against too high of expectations too soon.

For children — and for the parents who work on reading with their children — learning to read is looking a little different now.

In the past couple of years, states have been adding training on the “science of reading” and even banning certain curricula.

“For a while, mainly in the 1980s, and 90s, a lot of teachers were using what we call ‘whole language,’ which was less of a focus on word reading skills and things like that (and) more of a focus on immersing kids in literature and giving them language experiences,” said Jill Grifenhagen, an associate professor in literacy education at North Carolina State University’s College of Education. “And there are lots of benefits to parts of that. But also, it wasn't addressing all those core word reading skills that children need in order to be proficient readers.”

Research has for decades shown that people need to be taught to read and that they read new words by moving their eyes across each letter.

But the report didn’t transform reading instruction.

“One of the things that came out around that era was what we call balanced literacy,” Grifenhagen said. “Balanced literacy” has many definitions, and an early version of it was aligned with some of the National Reading Panel’s recommendations, attempting to balance them.

“But what happened in the interim years is there was some drift away from the true balance to kind of focus more on the language side and less on the word reading side,” Grifenhagen said.

That, coupled with practices in the decades before, resulted in differing approaches to teaching reading.

“There was less clarity around what's most important and how we're emphasizing all those skills that kids need,” Grifenhagen said. “And that becomes reflected in everything from the books that are in a teacher's classroom, to what appears in a published curriculum from some of our textbook publishers and so forth.”

Meanwhile, most North Carolina and U.S. fourth graders failed to read proficiently in national tests year after year.

For decades, students have often been taught to use pictures, like the picture of the rat in Pritchard’s class, to help them identify words. The “three-cueing” method of reading instruction asks students who don’t know a word to use pictures, other parts of the sentence and even letters within the word to identify it. The method can work sometimes, but it can also backfire, leading learners to misidentify a word and not realize it. Reading researchers say that’s not a risk worth taking.

Students can use phonics skills to establish an understanding of how letters work. Once they do that, they can build vocabulary, recognize new words more easily and use dictionaries to learn ones they’ve never even heard before. That in turn will help them read more quickly and smoothly, to the point where they can open a book and understand what’s going on in the story without having to stop and sound out every word.

But that approach isn’t how North Carolina schools — and many schools across the nation — were teaching reading for the last few decades.

Guesswork didn’t work for all of Pritchard’s own sons. One was asked to memorize a word list and ended up being able to do it.

Another son struggled with reading and became frustrated when a word had some irregular patterns.

“There wasn't a whole lot of advice or guidance that as a parent that I could give him,” Pritchard said. “I’m not quite sure… how the instruction was being delivered, except for ‘just keep practicing.’ But ‘keep practicing’ a skill without having a tool became challenging for him.”

She knows now he needed to be able to break down the word.

“A struggling reader is just going to get overwhelmed, and they're going to stop,” Pritchard said. “So this strategy of, ‘Well, just cover up the word because it's big and you don't know it and just keep reading,’ doesn't really give you a chance to really decode the word on the paper.”

If people have the proper tools, she said, they can read any word without context, she said.

Two major things happened in 2018 and 2019 that pushed states, schools, universities and publishers to make changes.

In 2019, National Assessment of Education Progress data showed Mississippi was the only state that made reading score gains in 2019. The state had begun implementing, gradually, a reading program modeled on the “science of reading” in 2013 and hired literacy coaches to help schools implement it. Since then, the state has had a dramatic drop in the percentage of fourth-graders testing “below basic” on the federal reading exam, from nearly half of students to 37% in 2022. Nearly one in three Mississippi fourth graders reads proficiently now, up from about one in five in 2013.

The progress is there for Mississippi, Rhyne said, though it’s slow.

A common refrain among skeptics is that the “science of reading” has taken off like a fad. It’s something they’ve seen before in education; someone is always trying to sell the latest recipe for success. Tools promising solutions come and go. How can you tell the difference between a fad and the real deal? educators ask.

Staci Pollock became a second grade teacher, after being one of the lucky students who mastered word memorization rather than reading skills.

“I can remember my middle school teacher looking at us and saying, ‘What is wrong with y'all? Why can you not spell?’” Pollock recalled of her childhood in Eastern North Carolina. “Of course we're middle schoolers, we don't know. We don't know why we can't spell.”

Pollock said she got through grade school and college by learning to remember what the words she needed to know looked like. She could read enough words to get through books. But she couldn’t spell many of the words she knew, if they weren’t right in front of her.

But eventually, the Wake County Public School System asked Pollock and other teachers to begin training for the new program that would emphasize phonics instruction, LETRS. It would teach the sounds of each letter and how letters string together to make new words and sounds.

“I did not know phonics at all,” she said. “I sat in front of my class and said, ‘We're gonna do this together, we're gonna learn together and work through the manual.’”

She choked up.

“I get emotional, because I've spent so many years and didn't know why I didn't know how to spell,” Pollock said. “I taught myself phonics through teaching others and now it's like, it's been the key.”

Pollock felt like an ineffective teacher before, like many of her students were actually learning to read.

“I'm teaching the way they've taught me to teach. I'm reading, but I don't feel like I'm teaching kids to read. We're just practicing reading or memorizing,” Pollock recalled. But her former principal assured her she was doing what she was supposed to. She was separating kids into reading groups by ability levels. She was having the students read independently. She was teaching whole words and new definitions. “So I still felt like ‘OK, I'm doing what they're supposed to be doing, but it just still doesn't seem effective.’”

She was missing something foundational.

Teaching reading without phonics might be more like teaching someone to play tennis only during matches, without learning to hit first. A tennis swing, like many moves in sports, involves a series of specific motions and body positions nearly invisible to the observer but finely honed by a player. Each step is essential for consistency and accuracy.

Likewise, readers must learn every letter and sound and learn to string them together so that eventually they never have to think about it when they read.

When Pollock started LETRS training in the fall of 2021, she began to understand the finer motions underlying the act of reading. How to make sense of each letter, then letter combinations. How to put all of that together form words.

She started teaching it to the students, alongside her instructional assistant. They’d have the students tap, use chips for every sound they heard, put sounds together using play dough.

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On a recent spring morning, Pollock had her students mix and match sounds to form words. Everyone had a card with a letter or combination of letters on it, and if their card matched part of the word Pollock said, they rose and stood next to the other student who had the card matching the other part. It was smooth. Students stood up and arranged themselves right away. Most everyone seemed to know exactly what to look for and what not to look for.

“I've seen kids grow drastically, especially this year,” Pollock said.

About half of her students weren’t meeting their benchmarks to start the school year, Pollock said. Now, almost everyone is meeting them.

“Before, it was, ‘OK, well, let's just practice reading. Let's just read, read, read, read, read,’” Pollock said. “And you didn't see the growth. And some kids just got it from ‘Read, read, read, read, read.’ But most kids need that structure and that systematic approach.”

The Wake County Public School System started doing LETRS training in 2019 — before the state requirement — primarily for special education teachers. The system also used some phonics-focused programs before that.

“What we struggled with is when teachers were coming out of college, and they had learned a different way to teach reading,” said Sherri Miller, the district’s long-time literacy director and now the principal of Lacy Elementary School in Raleigh. “And now we're saying, ‘No, you need to include phonics, and you need to include phonemic awareness, and you need to teach things explicitly and systematically.’ It wasn't aligning at all to what their professors had just told them to do.”

Miller herself didn’t learn in college what she was asking more teachers to do.

On a recent spring school day, Miller pulled out a copy of the National Reading Panel’s 60-page guidebook from 2001, “Put Reading First.” She has extras from a recent cleaning and has been giving some away.

More than 20 years has passed since its publication, and its lessons are news to some teachers, Miller said.

Effective reading instruction calls for five major things, according to the National Reading Panel and today’s experts:

Essentially, if children can sound out words easily but can’t understand what a sentence is trying to say, the work helping them to read isn’t complete.

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Fluency is gained over time by practicing the fundamentals of reading, though fluent students can still struggle if they attempt to read higher-level materials. A reader who isn’t fluent will still spend most of their time trying to “decode” words into their individual letters and sounds and struggle more to make sense of a sentence or book.

Shifting to the “science of reading” has the initial feel of a long-awaited solution to a long-nagging problem; if the “science” behind a skill is now known, maybe soon the skill itself will be mastered.

But experts caution North Carolina won’t suddenly have all fluent readers overnight, or perhaps ever.

A certain percentage of students will always need more intensive instruction, Miller said. Some researchers, she said, have estimated that percentage at about 5%. Others interviewed by WRAL News offered estimates of 10% or 15%.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction says the real payoff won’t be seen for a few years after every school has completed the training.

“Just completing the professional development does not mean we're finished,” Rhyne said. “That's just the beginning. So now we have this knowledge — what do we do with it?”

No state has come close to having all students test proficiently in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. No state has had even a majority of fourth graders testing proficient in reading at any point this century. Only about two-thirds of fourth-graders read at a basic level in North Carolina or nationally in any given year. In short, near-universal achievement is a steep hill to climb with no precedent for doing it in the United States.

The change in reading instruction will also require an adjustment period. It’s a swift rewriting of the way many teachers have understood their work for their entire careers. They’re being told they can’t teach what they thought for years they should be teaching and felt had merit. They’re being told not to use books they’d been marketed for years and that made sense to them.

The final cohorts will finish their LETRS training in 2024. Everyone has begun their training by now and some are finishing it this spring.

It’s been a slog.

Pollock finds it extremely valuable but, with a 4-year-old and a toddler at home, she’s struggled to complete it. She’s doing it before bed, when she’s groggy and beginning to nod off. Over spring break, she did it in the car, on the way to Florida. She’s not sure she’s gotten as much out of it as she should have, struggling to schedule it all.

The state and its schools have more work to do, as well.

In August, the state agreed to find 124 new literacy coaches across the state to implement the new reading program. More than one quarter of the positions still need to be filled.

By the new state law, schools will soon need to align their curricula with the “science of reading.” They’ll submit a report to lawmakers for review. Already, the state’s textbook commission has aligned its recommended — not required — resources with the new reading instruction.

Many schools still have classroom book collections reflecting old ways of teaching reading.

Early readers are often assigned books based on their skill levels. “Leveled” readers are books that intend to introduce students to new vocabulary based on illustrations and context clues in the story — something that the new reading instruction doesn’t support. “Decodable” books are designed to help students practice reading using the phonics skills they’ve learned so far.

If a school still has leveled readers, Rhyne said teachers can still make do.

“One thing we've tried to reiterate is you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Rhyne said. “The resources that you have, just determine where they fit” in the new reading framework.

Lacy Elementary School is being thoughtful in how it makes changes, Pritchard said.

“It's intentional and it's systematic,” she said.

What does she want parents to know?

“That we aren't just throwing stuff at the wind, that we have a plan and that we stick to the plan and that we put all the pieces together and it builds. And I think that it's working.”