The Science of Reading for Educators

  Introduction You may have missed the news in North Carolina, but Senate Bill 387 , also known as the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021, was recently passed on April 9, 2021. There has been a great deal of debate and misunderstanding from various groups around the state regarding the passage of this bill. For the past two years, the North Carolina State Board of Education has taken up the issue of early literacy and teacher preparation programs in regards to literacy. The Prek-12 Literacy Instruction and Teacher Preparation Task Force, composed of educators and stakeholders around the state, examined current teacher preparation programs and the state of literacy in North Carolina, and the task force made recommendations to the NC State Board of Education based on their findings. You can read about the specifics in my previous blog posts What’s Happening in North Carolina Literacy and What is Read to Achieve . The current bill aims to align literacy instructional practices in the

For the past ten years, I have been fortunate enough to be a state certified trainer in North Carolina for the state’s Reading Research to Classroom Practice training. In this course, we teach our participants that there are three basic principles of literacy instruction that should be included when designing effective literacy instruction. These three principles are: explicit, multi-sensory, and systematic. Research has shown the effectiveness of each of these principles in any type of instruction, but I will focus on the impact on literacy here. While I have seen many well-intentioned literacy programs claim to have some combination of these principles, some tend to fall short. In today’s blog we will explore these principles in depth and compare what these principles look like in action compared to typical literacy practices. Explicit Have you ever purchased that perfect piece of furniture, only to find out when it arrives that you have to assemble it yourself? Someone has taken t