After time away from live classroom instruction and what middle schoolers knew as the “norm,” how can we make the transition back to school easier, to engage students in learning immediately, and to effectively create literacy success for all students?

Writing your own items is one way to gather evidence from students about their knowledge and skills. This evidence can support inferences you make about student learning to help with decisions about the next unit of instruction, placement in learning groups, needs for remediation, and other classroom choices. For writing TEIs, there are some special considerations. Here are five tips to writing your own TEIs.

Learning to read in a language you are simultaneously learning to speak and understand is more complicated than learning to read in a language you already know. This is the challenge faced by millions of English learners (ELs) whose English proficiency is low and school achievement generally poor. What do we know about teaching English learners to read and write and develop as English readers and writers?

Presentations, webinars, discussions, and blogs about the “Science of Reading” seem to be everywhere these days. These sessions, often with Emily Hanford’s work at the center, cover so much groundbreaking information and generate a lot of empowering conversations, making it all the more exciting to watch the momentum surrounding this topic build. However, these sessions often end with two questions still unanswered in our minds.

Sound walls are becoming more common in classrooms thanks to a clearer understanding of the science of reading. We need to understand why a sound wall is set up differently than an A–Z alphabetical word wall and how to use a sound wall effectively to elevate daily instruction during Tier 1 by reviewing the 44 speech sounds and the options for spelling each of the sounds.

In the years since the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) identified essential components for teaching reading and likely long before, the “PH” terms, phonemic awareness and phonics have often been confused, conflated, and used interchangeably. Yet it is essential to have a common language and a deep understanding of each of these terms to maximize instruction.