Results of the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are in, and the picture is not pretty when it comes to fourth grade reading scores.

Studies that emphasize both classroom instruction and supplemental intervention programs have found that all but two percent to five percent of students can learn basic reading skills in first grade, even in populations where the incidence of poor reading is very high.

Social-Emotional Learning has become a hot topic for education audiences from practitioners to researchers, and even curriculum developers. However, while the social-emotional domain is certainly a critical component of human learning and development, I push the educational and scientific communities to remove the silos and begin to grapple with the inextricable ties between social-emotional learning and other aspects of learning and skill development, particularly in the language and literacy domain.

The Structured Literacy approach has been found to be particularly effective with learners with dyslexia because it focuses on decoding skills, which are critical components of finding success in reading. By emphasizing spelling patterns (instead of specific words), I can lead my students toward using decoding as a strategy, rather than them trying to memorize words by their appearance. It’s true—“Memorization is Not Understanding.”

Teaching reading in any classroom requires a complex set of skills and knowledge. A guided reading program is often used and a teacher must have a highly organized system of meeting with small groups, providing direct instruction when possible, and assessing and engaging in error correction. At the same time must also be working on comprehension skills while keeping students engaged and excited about reading and one can easily agree that while teachers do one of the hardest jobs on Earth, they are often lacking adequate training in how to effectively teach reading.

This blog was written to unpack the development of fluency, particularly among struggling readers and those with Rapid Automatized Naming weaknesses. I will highlight recent research that implies fluency results when students simultaneously activate multiple aspects of word knowledge. That means as fluent students encounter words, they initially retrieve information about letters and corresponding sounds, but nearly instantaneously also activate additional aspects of word knowledge like vocabulary, parts of speech, grammar, and morphological information.