Student literacy progress through Science of Reading fuels momentum in Strauss Literacy Initiative

The term “dyslexia” was first used more than 130 years ago, by German ophthalmologist Rudolf Berlin. He first noticed something amiss when he began working with adult patients who had trouble reading—but had no discernible eye issues. Eventually, other British doctors noted the same phenomenon, recording dispatches of young patients who were “bright and in every respect intelligent” but seemingly unable to read. By the 1960s and 70s, analyses of dyslexic versus non-dyslexic children began. In one such work, Specific Dyslexia, educational psychologist Sandhya Naidoo emphasizes the importance of early detection and resolution.

“Preventive and supportive steps taken early are immeasurably more humane and fruitful than attempts to remedy a problem which becomes increasingly complex as the child grows older,” she wrote.

Yet, while research pointed in one direction, what was practiced at the school level typically went in another. When Community Foundation of Sarasota County leaders first began meeting with public school officials at the start of the Strauss Literacy Initiative, there was debate about the wisdom of introducing the principles of the science of reading. At the time, other strategies, like using context clues to make meaning of a text, were fully entrenched.

“People are finally starting to realize that there are systematic approaches that can help with students,” said Kirsten Russell, the Community Foundation’s vice president of community impact.

Russell’s own mental shift occurred when she stopped using grade-level reading metrics, or the percentage of third graders reading at grade level in Florida public schools, as the goal and instead as merely an indicator.

“All teachers do not have the training required to develop proficient readers,” Russell said. “Until the adoption of structured literacy approach, a teaching method that applies the science of reading to teaching literacy, popular literacy practices such as Guided Reading and Balance Literacy were pervasive. While they work for some students, they are not successful strategies for all students, leaving dyslexic students with little opportunity to be successful readers.”

In 2023, the Florida Legislature also opted to ban three-cueing or “strategies that employ visual memory as a basis for teaching word reading,” per the bill text. This left the primary way to teach reading as “phonics instruction for decoding and encoding,” otherwise known as the science of reading approach. Rather than a specific pedagogical method, science of reading works by combining five ideas:

• phonemic awareness, or the capacity to identify individual sounds in words,
• phonics, or letter-sound relationships
• fluency
• vocabulary
• comprehension

The science of reading is based on the idea that teaching students how to sound out or understand a word, they will be better equipped to then work with words they’ve never seen before.

Sarasota County Schools

Sarasota County Schools is now in the third year of the transition toward science of reading-based instruction. Program specialist Kari Johnson, who leads the initiative, has witnessed firsthand the cultural shift among teachers who were at first hesitant to have University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning coach them in small group teaching.

At first, Johnson noticed that the coaching was intimidating to teachers. They felt put on the spot and vulnerable in front of an audience. But by last year, teachers were actually requesting more coaching. They wanted feedback. They wanted to improve.

“What’s great about this particular style of professional learning is that it is continuous,” Johnson said. “It’s not like teachers are coming in to learn and then they’re done. It’s ongoing over multiple times and in different settings.”

This is perhaps bolstered by the fact that more than half of the teachers who took part in the pilot decided to continue with the program. Johnson says she has found teacher buy-in to be an important part of the training. Instead of asking principals to recommend teachers, last year she had teachers apply for the opportunity. In total, around 30 first- and second-grade teachers took part in the training in year two, from Lamarque, Taylor Ranch, Brentwood, Alta Vista, Lakeview, Fruitville, and Laurel Nokomis schools.

“We really wanted teachers to understand the opportunity and the commitment that was required,” Johnson said. “We saw a really big difference between year one and year two as far as teachers that were really ready for this learning.”

The training has proved truly transformative for some of the district’s teachers, like North Port’s Lamarque Elementary first-grade teacher Shannon Price. But it didn’t start that way—her first thought when she was placed in the program was “information overload.” Still, that very same feeling of overwhelm propelled her—this is necessary, she thought. This is an essential part of the teaching process.

Yet after the initial stress, she started to notice a change in her students. Where they had first said, “I have to go to small group with Mrs. Price,” they were now saying, “Why can’t I go to small group today?” Small group is a strategy in teaching where the teacher pulls aside a few students at a time to work with them with more immediacy. It can put students on the spot--they can't remain silent when asked a question like they might in a large group setting--but the obligation to participate, without the fear of an entire classroom of peers reacting, builds trust with the teacher that leads to self-confidence. It also allows for immediate feedback that is pivotal to learning.

“When I was approached to continue, it was a no-brainer, because I was very committed,” she said. “I had seen the fruits of my labor and I had also seen what the initiative was offering to teachers, and of course, I’m going to sign up again for that.”

First-grade is a pivotal time for students who ideally go from reading simple words, like cat, bat and dog, to multisyllabic words, like touchdown and subject, Price said. She calls it a “heavy load,” but she’s watched small group learning , where teachers work with a few students at time, have a real impact on students who enter first grade behind where they should be and leave with enough progress to keep them at grade level.

Outside of the classroom, Price’s brain was churning into gear. She was fascinated by literacy— at home, she listened to podcasts and watched documentaries about America’s reading wars. Wanting to make this newfound interest an official topic of mastery, she graduated last month with a Master’s in literacy from the American College of Education.

Manatee County Schools

At Manatee County Schools, a shift is also underway, this one progressing from focusing on identifying early literacy issues to offering professional development in small group instruction. That effort began last year, when principals and assistant principals at the elementary school level, as well as school-based literacy coaches, underwent training with the Lastinger Center. The emphasis, throughout everything, was on science of reading-based instruction. The decision to work with administrators first, as opposed to teachers, was intentional, said Alison Nichols, the district’s director of elementary curriculum.

“We’ve learned over lots of different initiatives that if your administrators aren’t in support or if they don’t have the understanding, then when you try to roll it out to teachers, it doesn’t always go well,” she said.

While science of reading is a research-backed instructional strategy, it still remains a transition from the Reading Recovery and three-cueing efforts that many school districts in Florida primarily used. The Lastinger Center made sure to combat any uncertainty with surveys for administrators and coaches—the feedback, Nichols said, “was all very positive.”

“There were things that maybe they didn’t know, so new knowledge definitely came out of it for everybody, myself included,” she said.

That small group work is now being repeated this year with second-grade teachers at nine Title I schools in Manatee County, a move that will involve around 40 to 45 teachers, Nichols said. The aim is thoughtful expansion rather than rapid growth. Kindergarten and first-grade teachers already have a small group instruction tool rooted in the science of reading, which made targeting second-grade teachers even more important.

Instead, this year, Nichols and her team have created a plan for K-3 teachers to administer certain screeners that they think will more reliably help identify students with dyslexia characteristics.

As proof of progress, Nichols is hoping for certain numerical results in the future, like decreased third-grade retention numbers and more third-graders scoring at grade level for the state’s reading tests.

State College of Florida

State College of Florida’s Strauss-funded initiative at the Disability Resource Center is, at this point, a well-oiled machine. In its fourth year, center coordinator Patricia Lakey continues to work with students who know they have some kind of learning disability but often don’t know its nature or nuances. Eighteen of last year’s 20 participating students were formally diagnosed in their evaluations with a reading impairment, but a sit-down consultation with a psychologist helps each of them to better work within the realm of their disability. One student had been evaluated as having a learning disability in second-grade but never had any update since then.

“You should know what your disability is, because if you understand it, you can better deal with it,” Lakey said. “Now that they’re adults, I want them to say, ‘I have dyslexia or I have a reading impairment, and this is what I do to combat it.’”

Each year, participating students fill out a survey about their experience in the program. All of the respondents said they learned something valuable about themselves and reported ways that their reading disability affected them both personally and academically. These anecdotal responses are valuable for Lakey, who is less concerned with conventional metrics like the GPA—in fact, she said, they haven’t seen significant changes on that front. Instead, a data point she finds more compelling is the number of students persevering through their degrees.

“I don’t think you get diagnosed and start using a screen reader and become a 4.0 student,” she said. “These students might have dropped out because they struggled in reading, and now we’re retaining them and getting them through.”

Russell sees Lakey’s group as an important case study. These are the students who perhaps weren’t diagnosed early with dyslexia and now have to understand the disability at a later age. They are important evidence that starting early makes a difference. It’s far more beneficial than waiting until the end of the educational ride.

Early Learning Coalition of Sarasota County

At the beginning of the learning journey is the Early Learning Coalition of Sarasota County, which helps families access child care and voluntary pre-Kindergarten programs. The Sarasota branch serves roughly 4,000 families, according to executive director Janet Kahn. But leaders also work to train and coach teachers, making sure that there are “high quality programs for those children to enter.”

The earliest building blocks to literacy are speaking and listening, which is a focus of the ELC’s efforts. For more than 10 years, in order to partner with both teachers and students, ELC has facilitated the LENA Grow program, which is designed to encourage students to engage actively in conversation. Engagement is quantified through “conversational turns.” Participating students wear vests embedded with devices that record the exchange of language, which can then be analyzed. The results are clear. In 2021, almost 80% of all children saw an increase in conversational turns, per ELC data. Six of the 14 students who started the program with below-expected assessment scores ended it meeting or above expectations.

“When we started this years ago, we were not sure that the teachers would like it. We thought they might feel put on the spot or called out,” Kahn said. “But right away, they loved it. It established a baseline and they could see their growth from there.”

ELC Sarasota also last year introduced a new program, MarcoPolo Learning, that provides early childhood education materials in digital form for teachers and students. These function as both learning activities and professional development for instructors. It even offers the opportunity to send videos home for both parent and child to do together. To encourage parents and teachers to participate, Kahn developed an incentive in which teachers and parents get rewarded the more they participate.

In both of these initiatives, the goal is not to diagnose dyslexia. The students are, after all, too young to be identified.

“It was never intended to predict dyslexia,” Kahn said. “We all know that you can’t diagnose dyslexia in young children, but it could predict literacy struggles. There might be something that needs to get tested.”

As Russell looks back on the last three years of the Strauss Literacy Initiative, it’s clear the thinking has changed. It’s not necessarily only about making sure all students who might be dyslexic get the right diagnosis. Instead, it’s about maximizing the impact—training teachers so that they can help the highest number of students, including those who may struggle with reading but don’t necessarily have a diagnosable reading disability.

What gratifies Russell is seeing the philosophical change within local school districts. Administrators not only understand that teachers often come to them without this innate understanding of literacy, but they now have an opportunity to offer teacher training. They need to get the training somewhere, and that generally has to happen at the school level.

“We want to set students on the trajectory to become proficient readers and empower them to speak up when they don’t understand Russell said. “If we wait to offer support until the reach middle school and high school, the solutions are more complex and expensive . reading unlocks access to learning all subjects. Our students deserve our support.”