Structured Literacy Reading

Teaching is Explicit

Explicit instruction is instruction that is deliberate, unambiguous, clear cut and direct. For instruction to be explicit it must focus on critical and essential content (skills /strategies / knowledge). This content is made clear to students by:

•Beginning lessons with learning goals and outcomes – supported by formative assessment practices of feedback, self-assessment, self-reflection

•Clear, concise and consistent use of teacher language and terminology to support student learning

•Includes explicit teacher demonstration and think alouds, a high level of teacher-student interaction and provides multiple opportunities for guided and supported student practice

•Includes examples and non-examples to build student understanding

•Includes instruction that is multi-sensory strategies to involve the visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic senses in learning to improve memory

•Explicit instruction is viewed as the core of effective teaching and learning – and this involves embedding the following key learning strategies within instruction – spaced practice, retrieval practice, interleaving, elaboration, concrete examples, dual coding

Teaching is Systematic

Taking a systematic and sequential approach to teaching and learning enables our learners to understand and practice according to a scope and sequence. Teaching that is systematic and sequential follows a clear scope and sequence that moves students from skills already mastered to new more complex ones. With systematic instruction students practice each new learning to automaticity – eg Ready to Read phonics plus scope and sequence and the revised English in New Zealand Curriculum.

Systematic delivery of instruction connects students with what was learned – so that new learning becomes automatic and links to development of learner metacognition – before they learn the next skill/concept. Additionally, this approach to instruction builds strong student self-efficacy and motivation towards learning.

Teaching is Cumulative

Automaticity is also linked to cumulative practice and ongoing review. In cumulative teaching new knowledge is consolidated and leads to further learning, when each step is based on concepts previously learned. Cumulative teaching includes starting lessons with a review of past learning structure in such a way that this review provides “building blocks” for further learning and connects knowledge building from one step to the next. In practice, this means that daily review in preparation for next steps learning, and long-term review (weekly and monthly) are important components in building automaticity, makes learning “stick” (stickability) and develops long term memory.

Teaching is Diagnostic and Responsive

Diagnostic assessment helps teachers to know and understand the student’s strengths, needs and knowledge level in preparation for instruction. This assessment provides clarity of what needs to be taught and informs teaching approaches taken (dose and density of learning). Diagnostic assessment investigates student learning and understanding in order to provide explicit knowledge of what students know and don’t know - and the next steps for student learning - SEE, NOTICE, and practice. This assessment enables teachers to be best positioned to build a specific needs-based learning pathway for their students.

Examples of formal assessment tools to support structured literacy in New Zealand include DIBELS, Adaptive Bryant pseudo word tool, AsTTle reading and writing, along with specific tools such as record of oral language. Informal assessments – including the well-known practices of formative assessment - are also used regularly within a structured literacy approach to monitor progress and achievement towards learning goals.

When following a structured literacy approach teachers regularly build assessments of word recognition, decoding and spelling into regular instruction to make sure individual needs of students are being met.