KENNEWICK — Toni Cuello meets with a small group of her kindergarten students to study in her classroom one afternoon.
It’s the first full week of class at Desert Sky Elementary in West Richland, and these students are learning their ABCs.
With each letter, Cuello raises a laminated sheet showing an image reference and a mouth shape. She works with them to sound the letter out.
Students then take little sticks and form the shape of each letter. How might they write it on paper? How might they see it in a book or a sentence?
“We still have a lot of kids that aren’t reading on level in the upper grades, and I teach kindergarten because I know that the foundation for literacy is so important,” said Cuello, who is in her 20th year teaching. “That’s why I love kinder. It’s important to me that these kids leave prepared.”
This method of reading instruction isn’t just new to her students — it’s also new to Cuello.
For two years, she and more than 100 of her colleagues in the Richland School District have spent hundreds of hours in a new literacy training called LETRS, or Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, to relearn how to teach students reading.
The district is also field testing two new K-5 curricula — Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts, and HMH Into Reading — with nearly 600 students in all 11 elementary schools participating.
One will be chosen and implemented in time for the 2024-25 school year.
Both efforts are based in the “science of reading” — a broad term describing a comprehensive body of empirical research spanning several decades detailing what matters and what works in the field of literacy instruction.
Within that science, Richland teachers are shifting to a “structured literacy” model where students are explicitly taught word identification and decoding strategies to support reading instruction.
This isn’t something new — educators have been debating the best ways to increase literacy rates for decades, and the science of reading has been at the center of many of those discussions.
But it’s taken off in popularity since the COVID pandemic. And now the Richland School District is placing its bets on a nationwide trend that aims to back up early childhood literacy instruction with some science.
“We have too many students who aren’t reading,” said Derek O’Konek, the school district’s executive director of elementary teaching and learning. “If we can’t get them a solid foundation by third-grade, it’s very challenging to catch them back up.”
Richland Superintendent Shelly Redinger said her goal is to increase the percentage of K-3 students meeting grade-level reading standards by 3 points by the end of this school year.
Building reading confidence
Cuello began implementing Language Essentials and structured literacy methods last year in her lessons.
As summer approached, she saw more students gain confidence in reading, spelling and writing.
“I really felt like last year, the students that I had left much more confident and able to tackle something without prompting or asking for help right away, which is pretty common for that age group,” she said. “I think that there was a lot of, ‘Aha’s!’ and things that I saw over the years that were challenging for kids, and it really gave me the research to understand why and the understanding.”
Structured literacy focuses on five pillars of reading instruction:
- Phonics
- Phonemic awareness
- Vocabulary
- Fluency
- Comprehension
Writing and oral language development have also been recent additions to this model.
Students come into kindergarten knowing very little about reading and writing. Many may know just a few letters — perhaps their ABCs — while others have a basic foundation of how to string words together.
As those students leave for 1st grade, Cuello says, those students should have a solid foundation in the alphabet, and should begin reading and writing some. She said most do learn with those skills, but there are many who struggle.
Having that foundation is important because students begin to use reading and writing as a primary medium to learn other concepts by the time they’re in the third-grade, she said. This is also the time when students begin to foster a love and desire for learning.
“I really came into teaching during balanced literacy — a reader’s and writer’s workshop model, where kids were exposed to literacy in a variety of ways, and we hoped that they would kind of hook to one of the ways that we were teaching,” Cuello said.
But many students — especially those with reading disabilities, like dyslexia — never did catch on.
Under structured literacy, Cuello said she’s teaching students to decode language and break it down to its core basics. Gone are the days of “guessing” at a word.
“They’ll look at letters and come to a word that they don’t know, and instead of looking at the picture or guessing — which is really what they did often in reading in the past — they’re looking at sounds that they know and putting things together,” Cuello said.
April Mitchell teaches third-grade at Tapteal Elementary, where one in five students are English language learners. She’s also begun implementing Language Essentials and structured literacy into her classroom.
Before the pandemic, less than half of new students would come into her classroom at the beginning of the year reading at grade level.
That struggle was exacerbated after the pandemic.
Just one in four students in her third-grade class last year were meeting reading grade-level standards. These were the students who were in kindergarten when the pandemic forced schools to close for several months.
It was a Herculean task, but by the end of last year about 43% of students were reading on grade level — about what they would normally see at the beginning of the school year.
“LETRS (training) helped us tremendously to know how to help these kids who are not coming in to class at a third-grade reading level,” she said.
Most students struggle with phonics, which is the science of sound and pronunciation. That can be explained because English for some is not their primary language spoken at home.
She also sees students struggle to read and build a vocabulary, which can be a sign that some students just aren’t reading enough at home.
The wholesale instruction of all these skills are important because they’re intertwined, Mitchell says.
“Sometimes just getting a book in a child’s hand is incredibly powerful… but sometimes there are skills that need to be taught before you can put a book in a kid’s hand,” she said.
LETRS and the science of reading
There’s something of a reading revolution happening in America today as educators and academics discuss how best to crack the code of literacy instruction.
This revolution was sparked by setbacks seen after the pandemic-era remote learning, as well as decades of subpar national reading scores.
“There is a literacy crisis across our country,” Redinger said.
More than half — nearly 60% — of Tri-City third-grade students did not meet grade-level reading standards last year. In Richland, that number is at 43%.
While Pasco and Kennewick both provide structured literacy training for teachers to use in small groups and one-on-one intervention, Richland is the first school district in the Tri-Cities to go all-in on this reading science.
Nationwide, 37% of fourth-graders performed “below basic” on a reading assessment, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
LETRS has spread in popularity among teachers for many years, with many citing the “Mississippi model” as evidence of its effectiveness.
The Southern State saw big reading gains on the NAEP exam in 2019 after implementing training for K-3rd grade teachers in 2014, according to Education Week, although those gains haven’t been solely attributed to the training.
Regardless, that excitement has spread to the Richland School District, where more than 120 teachers, principals and educators have so far taken the course, which totals upwards of 160 hours of professional development time.
“It’s picking up speed. It’s like wildfire,” said Kristina Tucker, Richland’s English-Language Arts program coordinator. “Educators are very excited to get in.”
LETRS takes a “speech to print” approach to teaching foundational skills, beginning first with phoneme awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify, move or change sounds in spoken word.
Once kids have that skill, they can connect sounds to letters and letters to words (phonics), and then begin to read words, according to Education Week.
It also goes over how and why to teach word parts, also known as morphology.
In the second part, LETRS goes over how to develop student vocabulary knowledge, how to create a language-rich classroom, and how teachers can build connections between reading and writing.
It’s different from the balanced literacy approach of throwing kids head-first into reading and expecting them to understand key concepts by osmosis. The concept of LETRS is based on decades of research and is a core tenet of the science of reading approach.
Simply put, LETRS is popular because it equips teachers with more tools to holistically instruct their curriculum, evaluate student progress, diagnose deficiencies and make timely interventions.
Mitchell says the training has staying power and goes beyond the “trendy things” teachers see in education. It goes back to the basics of spelling, phonics and word comprehension.
“It just leads to students becoming better readers, better writers and, ultimately, better communicators,” she said. “It’s all interlinked.”
A silver bullet for reading?
Teaching early literacy is neither wholly a science or an art — it’s a little bit of both.
And as science of reading concepts continue their momentum into the mainstream, some researchers caution against searching for a “silver bullet” approach.
Margaret Vaughn, a tenured professor in Washington State University’s College of Education, argues there’s no “perfect recipe” for teaching kids how to read.
“What we need to have is an adaptive approach that’s really looking at student interests, motivations, their background knowledge and how that all fits together to meet the needs of students,” she said.
Vaughn’s perspective was informed by nine years of teaching elementary education in Philadelphia and the Raleigh-Durham area, as well as several years researching what drives student motives and engagement in the classroom.
Vaughn believes it’s important to use teaching methods based in the science of reading, but focusing on the instruction of discrete skills without awareness of a student’s interests, backgrounds and cultures can be detrimental to their education.
She argues building administrators should encourage teachers to feel free to be adaptive in the classroom and to help students find an “authentic purpose” for their education. It can also have a bottom-line benefit on state test scores, she argues.
“The important thing is that (teachers) see students as collaborators in the learning process and that they value student agency,” Vaughn said.
While 30 states in the U.S. have passed legislation supporting evidence-based reading and writing, Washington is not one of them.
Science of reading advocates, including Sara Buetow of Decoding Dyslexia Washington, feel that the state is falling behind on this front and is allowing its under-served students to fall through the cracks.
And only in recent years has Washington state begun mandating school districts to screen students in grades K-2 for dyslexia in order to provide evidenced-based multi-sensory structured literacy interventions.
