10 hours ago
A time-tested reading curriculum all Rhode Island schools should get behind
Kerry-Ann Edmondson, known as 'Miss Kerry' to her first-grade students at the Compass School, a charter school in North Kingstown, uses the University of Florida Learning Institute reading curriculum to help achieve reading fluency. (Photo by Julia Steiny for Rhode Island Current)
In a buzzy first-grade classroom at Compass School in North Kingstown, kids greet friends while leisurely working on the 'Do Now' tasks posted on the white board. Some practice typing with laptop software; others puzzle over books. One group pretends to look busy while chatting discreetly.
Soon, their teacher, Kerry-Ann Edmondson — 'Miss Kerry' to the kids — pulls the class together for a lesson with the lauded University of Florida Learning Institute or UFLI curriculum (pronounced You Fly). UFLI teaches teachers how to help kids learn and apply every skill necessary to acquire accurate, confident reading fluency, with dramatic results.
During the first part of these 30-minute sessions, the class reviews concepts they've already learned, constantly practicing before taking on a new one. Earlier that week, they'd learned about the suffix 'ed' that changes verbs into past tense.
Today will add to their understanding of suffixes with the 'es' that makes words plural. First, Edmondson has students write out sentences at their desks that make 'base' words plural, 'bosses,' 'dishes.' After using a few activities to teach the new concept, Edmondson shifts to helping the kids apply the new concept in a narrative context which naturally has all sorts of opportunities for her to quickly correct mistakes. On the board, Edmondson posts a roughly 100-word story about Alex and two foxes who live in a den near a lake.
'What is the first thing a reader does?' Edmonson asks.
'Find the words you don't know,' chimes a student chorus.
If a kid can adequately decode a word, getting all the sounds right, but has no idea what the word means, reading didn't happen. Imagine the English language learners who might be terrific at sounding out words, but need an increasingly broad language background to know what words mean. All kids have gaps in their backgrounds that need attention to get them to fluent reading comprehension.
The kids flag 'lake,' 'bush' and 'den' as unfamiliar. OK, do any of the kids know what these words mean? One student says a 'lake' is a really, really big puddle. They discuss that and the other words, teasing out meanings with Edmonson's encouragement.
The story is full of plurals as well as present tense verbs that end with 's,' which is confusing. More than once, Edmondson clarifies the distinction with explicit instruction.
If a kid can adequately decode a word, getting all the sounds right, but has no idea what the word means, reading didn't happen.
Finally, they read. They unpack, decode and then encode each word to practice automaticity. (That means during the nano-second it takes to read this sentence, you are not sounding out words because the sound/letter combinations have become automatic. You belong to the one-third of American readers who already have a full set of the building blocks of reading and writing.)
Nationally, about 31% of American 4th graders read at their grade level. In Rhode Island the percentage is 33%.
For 50 years, researchers insisted reading instruction hew to what's called the 'science of reading.' But during that time, most districts did not use science-based reading instruction but struggled with the failures of Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, and the guessing-dependent Caulkins' workshop model. As 40 states passed reading laws mandating science-based reading instruction, educators at every level scrambled to find appropriate curricula. Curriculum publishers slapped 'science of reading' on re-tooled or hastily created materials that everyone knew had holes and weaknesses.
UFLI was developed over the course of nearly 30 years, refined along the way as University of Florida developers piloted their work-in-progress with cooperating Florida districts. Teachers were invited to critique the curriculum as well as to share fun or effective tricks for how to put across each concept. Having classroom teachers field test curricula components is rare. As a result, when the program was published in 2023, it included a wealth of downloadable materials, detailed lesson plans, activities, and assessments. Compass adopted it in 2023.
The program gives students in K-2 all the reading building blocks they need to become proficient: the 20 vowel sounds, 44 phonemes (the smallest unit of spoken sound), and 250 graphemes (the sound of a letter or combination of letters that make up a sound). These tiny units combine to make tens of thousands of morphemes, the stand-alone words that might include single letters – 'I' – to base words with suffixes, to use today's example.
Teachers in later grades use the exact same UFLI scope and sequence to ramp up older struggling readers.
The scope and sequence is summarized here.
UFLI has its detractors, but from my reading of teacher Facebook groups, the objections largely have to do with teachers' fondness for other programs they're using.
But most teachers are thrilled to see their readers learning much more quickly and confidently than they had with other programs.
As research and teacher innovation evolve, UFLI might lose its go-to status. But for now, it is by far the most complete, best sequenced, most teacher- and kid-friendly set of reading skills assembled. Low-performing districts in particular should take note.
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