Establishing a whole-school culture of data use helps all stakeholders make thoughtful, consistent, and appropriate data-based decisions. Schools can develop a data plan and team to guide the use of data and to support a culture of data use. The data team can develop a shared vocabulary for critical concepts of data use and learning.

Assessment for learning plays a critical role in informing and driving literacy instruction. A comprehensive assessment system allows educators to adjust instruction to meet the specific needs of students, which is critical for students in terms of both the prevention of reading difficulties and intervention to remediate skill gaps. Use the infographic to help understand how and when to use universal screeners, diagnostic assessments, progress monitoring, and outcome evaluation to guide the literacy instruction and intervention.

Research provides insight into specific instructional strategies that should be used in every classroom to support elementary English learner students in developing both English language skills and academic content. This infographic is a quick reference to these evidence-based practices that can be used daily by elementary classroom teachers to support effective instruction for their English learner students

Teacher understanding of effective evidence-based practices is vital for supporting student achievement and closing achievement gaps. While many alternative pathway teachers know what content they must teach, many have never had classes on how to teach the content using evidence-based practices. This infographic is a quick reference guide containing evidence-based practices that can impact learning that teachers can use daily to support effective instruction.

The literacy brief from the International Literacy Association summarizes key points from research that will help teachers explain phonics to noneducators. The brief includes information about phonics for emerging
readers, phonological awareness, the layers of writing, word study instruction, approaches to teaching phonics, and teaching English learners. The references include research that supports the ideas presented and phonics resources that you can use and share with others.

The science of reading has established that explicit instruction is associated with beneficial outcomes for students and may be the secret sauce of instructional success. In this article, Vaughn and Fletcher examine and explain the five key components of effective explicit instruction. They include: segmenting complex skills into manageable tasks; modeling or thinking aloud to address the important features of the content; promoting successful engagement using faded supports and prompts; providing feedback, and creating purposeful practice opportunities.

The Science of Reading has identified features of effective instruction that work in combination and are the basis of high-quality reading instruction for all students. This PDF provides an overview and characteristics of each feature of effective reading instruction, including a scope and sequence, systematic instruction, explicit, scaffolded, and differentiated instruction. These evidence-based features work together to form the essentials of reading success.

This resource from the Institute for Education Sciences helps teachers and parents build children's phonemic awareness by having children identifying the sound and its' position within the word that is the same in two pictures (ex: dog and duck have the same sound in the initial position of the word). This resources provides directions on how to engage in this phonemic awareness activity with children.

This one-pager provides a way for your child to monitor his or her reading accuracy, rate, expression, and punctuation.

Formative assessment can be a powerful day-to-day tool for teachers and students. This article discusses formative assessment as an approach to teaching and learning that uses feedback as its centerpiece in a supportive classroom context. Formative assessment is a practice that empowers teachers and students to give their best to enable learning.

A teacher discusses the importance of giving students a choice over what to write about, what to write with, and where to sit when they are writing. When given these choices, students are able to write more, they enjoy it more, and the quality of their writing improves.

This Educator’s Toolbox, developed in Partnership with The Reading League Journal, provides practical ways to incorporate fluency instruction within your classroom.

This educator's Science of Reading toolbox provides strategies for teaching systematic phonics instruction within the classroom, including letter-sound correspondence, regular word reading, and word building.

The article by Vaughn and Fletcher discusses how a supportive, integrated general and special education system can be implemented within a multi-tiered system of support. Six steps that teachers can implement in their classrooms to support students with reading difficulties or with mild to moderate disabilities or dyslexia are provided.

The National Reading Panel (2000) identified phonemic awareness as one of the pivotal pillars in teaching students to read. Over two decades have passed, and children still experience difficulty with learning to read. This is especially true for many African American students who are more likely not to reach proficiency on literacy measures. This article details key phonological features of African-American English and provides teachers with practical classroom applications for phonemic awareness instruction so all students can demonstrate success.

This video features an extended interview with Tim Shanahan, Ph.D., and includes descriptions of research-based recommendations from the What Works Clearinghouse about how to teach literacy to young students.

This video shows how to implement research-based literacy practices from the What Works Clearinghouse through play-based learning.

The purpose of this document is to increase the capacity of practitioners and educational leaders to support a broad range of learners who need more literacy supports to become skilled readers and writers by identifying a set of essential practices that are research-supported and should be the focus of professional development throughout the state. These practices for intensifying literacy instruction apply to those learners with significant and persistent reading and writing challenges who have not responded when provided with instruction aligned with state academic standards, regardless of disability status.

This video shows kindergarten students during an introductory lesson utilizing word sums and matrices. He models adding suffixes including <-s>, <-ed>, and <-ing> to base words from a text.