Nearly all states have passed “science of reading” laws, and most researchers and educators agree students need to learn letters and sounds explicitly and systematically to become proficient readers, according to an article in Education Next.
In classrooms another practice taking hold — over-teaching.
Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, says reading teachers don’t need to teach every single pattern that students will encounter in text; they need to teach enough that students can achieve the ability to start cracking the code on their own.
“You do teach them about words, about print. You teach them enough simple phonics patterns so they can start sounding out some words. And then there’s supposed to be a light bulb that goes on,” Seidenberg says.
“Some degree of explicit and systematic phonics instruction is beneficial for most children,” says Nathan Clemens, professor and chair of the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin College of Education.
But evidence is lacking for how much phonics instruction they should be taught per day, when it should stop, and across how many grade levels.
This is how over-teaching is happening: (1) spending too much time on less impactful skills; (2) teaching extraneous skills and patterns; and (3) teaching content that only the teacher needs to know.
Rhys Lamberg, an early literacy and advanced teaching roles coordinator for Dare County Schools in Nags Head, North Carolina, is aware of the potential for over-teaching rules. Her state passed legislation in 2021 mandating literacy instruction be based on evidence-based practices. As schools transition to teaching phonics, she says, it’s natural to “worry we’re not giving word recognition all the attention it needs” and subsequently to “overcorrect.”
The schools she works with focus on assessing students’ needs and providing repetition and practice at their level. “The program we are using doesn’t overemphasize—there are no songs, no extra bits,” she says. “Just, this is the information you need to know to apply the rule and practice, practice, practice with the rule.”
Researchers agree that the focus on process during phonics instruction has happened to the detriment of one skill above all: actual reading.
“Everyone knows that real, actual reading is getting squeezed out because there’s so much attention to the components,” says Seidenberg.
What does this mean for busy teachers? Whittling down instruction to the most essential skills means there is less material for teachers to get through. They make their jobs more manageable and get kids reading faster when they remove low-payoff patterns, skip the cutesy extras, and refrain from imparting technical knowledge.
Avoiding over-teaching also means speeding through skills students already know, which requires frequent assessment and a good understanding of what’s coming next in the scope and sequence. Teachers get better at this with time and experience.
Researchers don’t question the need for explicit teaching on how the code works. They do question the exact skills and dosage for instruction.
“I’ve been trying to calibrate how much is enough. And the answer is, you want to do enough explicit instruction to enable them to achieve this sort of breakthrough,” says Seidenberg. “The amount of explicit instruction you need is to get to the point where they don’t need so much explicit instruction.”
Explicit phonics instruction should end after 1st grade for typically developing students, Seidenberg contends. This runs counter to much of the recent state legislation focused on K–3 classrooms and with programs that teach advanced word-recognition skills through the 5th grade.
Still, the need to trim the fat on instruction—to focus on a skill’s ROI and churn out readers faster—is something many agree on. It requires scrutiny of practices claiming to align to research, assessment of what individual students know, and a willingness to trust that, in many situations and for most students, learning begets learning.
“I think that the science of reading movement can win if we’re scientific, if we’re willing to challenge our assumptions,” says Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University. He says look at the evidence on long-held instructional beliefs, such as those around syllable division, and change course as new evidence arises. “If we’re willing to go there, science can win.”
Education Next
