This idea-that explicitly and systematically teaching young children how sounds represent letters is the most effective way to teach them how to read words-is based on decades of research evidence. Once kids have that skill, they can connect those sounds to letters, and they can begin to read words. “We’re convinced from research that, for kids, the underpinning of being able to learn the alphabetic code for reading and spelling is phoneme awareness”-the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds within words. The LETRS sequence takes a “speech to print” approach to teaching foundational skills, Moats said. “We have instead mapped out a course of study where one thing builds upon another in a sequence,” Moats said. Much of teacher professional development goes like this: Teachers will sit in a few days of sessions about a couple of new tools or approaches, apply the ones they think might be useful to their practice, and discard the rest. Yes-and it differs from other kinds of reading professional learning. But also: “The funding environment has certainly been a factor.” Is LETRS aligned to the methods used in the science of reading? “The focus on science of reading has driven a lot of the momentum that we’re seeing,” said Nick Gaehde, the president of Lexia and Voyager Sopris Learning. COVID-relief funds have given school systems an influx of money for one-time purchases. Wheeler, the Lexia manager, also attributes some growth to the pandemic, as states and districts are now looking for ways to support students after massive disruptions to education. “As often happens in education, everyone jumped on the bandwagon of what looked like the silver bullet solution, and LETRS is what looked like that,” she said. Įducation officials thought that replicating Mississippi’s LETRS training would lead to similar results, said Beth Anderson, the executive director of the Hill Center in Durham, N.C., which houses an independent school for students with reading difficulties and provides reading professional development. Interest in LETRS exploded after the 2019 NAEP data were released, and North Carolina lawmakers were among those influenced by Mississippi’s gains. But, LETRS soon became a core component of literacy plans in states that were looking to replicate Mississippi’s success. It’s almost impossible to know exactly what moved the needle on student achievement-the state simultaneously made sweeping changes to coaching, curriculum, and intervention. Then, in 2019, Mississippi students made big gains in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Many have cited Mississippi as an example.Īn evaluation of Mississippi’s LETRS implementation from the Southeast Regional Education Laboratory, a federally funded implementation network, found that it increased teacher knowledge and improved teacher practice. In the years since, about two dozen state departments of education have embraced similar changes, instating mandates that require schools to use materials, assessments, and methods aligned to the evidence base behind how children learn to read. In 2014, Mississippi started LETRS training with its K-3 teachers, part of a broader effort to align reading instruction in the state to evidence-based practices. The answer to that starts with what many in the reading field are calling the “Mississippi model.” “I want the teacher in front of a group of kids to feel like she or he understands what is going on in the minds of the kids as they are trying to learn.” Why is LETRS so popular? The goal is to “give people a knowledge base for doing the job,” Moats said. LETRS is not a curriculum or a set of activities-that’s not its goal. The course also gives teachers information about how to diagnose reading problems and differentiate instruction. The second explains how to develop students’ spoken language abilities, including vocabulary knowledge how to create a “language-rich” classroom comprehension instruction and how teachers can build connections between reading and writing. It also covers spelling and fluency instruction. The first covers how to teach and assess students’ knowledge of the sounds in the English language (phonemic awareness), how those sounds represent letters that can create words (phonics), and how and why to teach word parts (morphology). LETRS is divided into two volumes, aligned to this framework. It also introduces the “simple view of reading,” a research-tested model that holds that skilled reading is the product of two factors: word recognition-decoding the letters on the page-and language comprehension, which allows students to make meaning from the words they read. The first part of the course explains why learning to read can be difficult and how the “reading brain” works.
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