Fort Worth schools nixed a longtime approach to teaching reading. Here’s what changed
Kathryn Cottrell was taught a specific and popular method of teaching students how to read when she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in multidisciplinary studies with a focus on literacy in 2020.
As soon as she started her professional career as a student teacher at a Fort Worth elementary school, however, she could see that the status quo wasn’t working for all students.
“It was relatively common that you would get fourth-graders who were not reading even on a second- or third-grade level,” she said. “So we were constantly trying to fill those gaps where they were missing … these foundational skills they were not getting, because the way that reading was taught previously was not aligned with cognitive science.”
That style of reading, which has since been scrapped by the school district, is called balanced literacy, and it has long been one of the leading methods for how to teach reading in schools across the U.S.
In a “Calkins classroom,” named for Lucy Calkins, the founder of a curriculum based on balanced literacy, lessons start with a teacher reading a book aloud while students follow along, stopping to make sure students understand along the way and highlighting a key “mini-lesson,” like how to predict words based on context clues.
Students would then cycle through small groups where they worked together to practice the concept, read independently and work with the teacher on reading texts specific to their skill level using books called leveled readers.
“There’s nothing terrible about the approach — it just was missing some key components,” said Cottrell, who now teaches fourth-grade literacy at Meadowbrook Elementary. “It was not an equitable approach.”
During the small group readings, students were given books on their skill level instead of their grade level, meaning if a student was reading below their grade level, they would continue learning behind their peers until they progressed.
A growing body of research on how the human brain learns to read has led states, school leaders and districts to adopt a different approach, where students are given texts that are on their grade level regardless of where they start, with support to help them understand those books. Along with that, in the earlier grades, research has pointed to the importance of focusing on the building blocks of words, and helping children to understand the connection between letters and sounds in order to start to “decode” text in learning to read.
How this shift away from the Calkins method impacts students in North Texas depends on which district they attend.
The Fort Worth school district, for example, which has struggled with chronically low reading scores, has embraced the new approach to reading over the last two years after working with literacy experts, including Timothy Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“We are immersing ourselves in the science of reading, (which) does really lift up a systematic and explicit approach to phonological and phonemic awareness,” Fort Worth Chief Academic Officer Marcey Sorensen said. “And it also lifts up writing, comprehension and fluency, and vocabulary instruction, as well as exposure to meaningful content and meaningful, grade-level-appropriate text for students.”
Other schools, like those in Denton, are holding onto aspects of balanced literacy, including Units of Study, Calkins’ curriculum, which itself is expanding to include a greater emphasis on phonics in a new iteration that will come out this summer. A growing chorus of advocates, researchers and educators have criticized Calkins’ curriculum and approach to teaching reading for not putting enough of a focus on phonics. The coming change, combined with the adoption of new resources, will potentially transform how kids learn to read in many schools.
All Texas school teachers in pre-K through third grade are learning more about the science behind learning to read as part of a state mandate, aimed at increasing reading scores that have sagged over time, compounded by years of learning loss related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall, experts say the shift in mainstream public education toward “the science of reading” is a positive step toward greater literacy, with a broader number of students being able to receive education the way they need it.
A seismic shift in Fort Worth schools
Sorensen, a Fort Worth schools administrator who first served as assistant superintendent for teaching and learning and now as chief academic officer, began searching for ways to disrupt the status quo as soon as she assumed her position in 2019, along with a slate of administrators tasked with turning around dismal reading scores.
Schools were operating on a wide variety of approaches to literacy instruction, Sorensen said, with Calkins’ balanced literacy approach as a sort of guiding principle for most teachers. But it wasn’t working.
“When I arrived in November of 2019, had you asked people across the district what our pedagogy and practice was, I think most folks probably would have said balanced literacy,” Sorensen said.
The Fort Worth school district has lagged behind Texas’ other major urban districts in reading for years. In the spring of 2019, only a third of the district’s third-graders were able to read on grade level, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Those scores dipped even lower amid the pandemic.
So in the last two years, Fort Worth has scrapped programs, trained teachers and adopted new curriculum and software to replace leveled readers and other curricula.
One of the programs being left behind is Leveled Literacy Intervention, which is targeted at struggling students and works by matching students with books based on their skill level, instead of their grade level.
The program identifies students’ reading levels through a series of assessments and provides intensive 30-minute learning sessions where teachers guide them through books with the goal of progressing to the next level. The levels in the program are separate from grade levels.
The program was used as recently as last summer to try to help struggling students, and United Community Centers, a nonprofit that partners with Fort Worth ISD, will continue using the program this summer.
“Not only did we invest a lot of money in the kits, but we also invested a lot of time in training our teachers,” said Frances Torres, the summer program director, explaining why UCC continues to use Leveled Literacy Intervention when the Fort Worth district has moved away from it. “It is also what our literacy specialists say is the best for our students at this time and we see progress.”
Sorensen said the removal of the leveled readers, and a shift away from balanced literacy came after an exploration of the current research on how children learn to read.
“We have actually collected those materials back from our campuses, as well as the other reading materials as we give them new materials,” Sorensen said. “We have collected those materials back because we don’t believe and … what the research shows is that leveling kids’ texts and not exposing them to grade-level text” is not beneficial.
“We’ve replaced it with more complex texts, more grade-level text and provided more text in Spanish, for students who are in our dual-language programs,” she said.
The district’s new reading framework, which was rolled out just months before the pandemic disrupted learning in 2020, allows more time for teachers to work directly with students on reading. The district asked principals to schedule more time during the day for reading instruction, officials said.
They also asked teachers to change the way they do reading to allow for more one-on-one time with each student. Before the change, as part of a balanced literacy approach, teachers often split their classes into smaller groups to work on reading.
Teachers would cycle through each of those groups, and students would work at learning stations or read on their own when their group wasn’t working with their teacher. Under the new framework, teachers spend more time working directly with their whole classes rather than smaller groups.
Teachers might still divide their classes into reading groups, but they float among those groups.
Sorensen said the new model can help teachers spot problems more quickly. Before, teachers spent so little one-on-one time with their students that they might not have noticed if one had learned a skill incorrectly. When a mistake like that goes unnoticed for a while, it can be harder to correct later on, Sorensen said.
But when teachers spend more time working with each student, they can catch those mistakes earlier, correct them and, if necessary, re-teach those skills to the entire class, she said.
Cottrell said one key difference is that under the new approach, teachers challenge students with texts above their reading level during lessons.
Science of reading takes lessons from students with dyslexia
Educators and researchers who work with students who have learning differences, like dyslexia, have long understood that mastering the relationship between letters and the sounds they correspond with is key to learning how to read.
But teachers in Fort Worth schools and other districts are increasingly incorporating these types of lessons, and texts designed to help students understand the concept, into everyday classrooms.
When interviewed by the Star-Telegram, Calkins, who has been a dominant voice in the field of teaching reading and writing for decades, scoffed at the notion that her approach doesn’t put enough emphasis on phonics.
“I literally have 22 books on phonics, something like 4,400 pages of a curriculum on phonics,” she said. “And I would never suggest not to teach phonics for a kindergarten, first- or second-grade teacher.”
But Calkins has warned that the current obsession with phonics could over-correct and exclude other important aspects of reading instruction. The education professor, who is the founder of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, wrote in a 2019 essay that the “overdue and important acknowledgment that some children need a structured multisensory approach to phonics is being used as a Trojan horse to bring back a Reading First-like emphasis on phonics at the expense of everything else.”
With a growing body of research, particularly in how phonics has helped children who have learning difficulties like dyslexia, however, Calkins is updating her curriculum this summer to include an entire section on phonics, and adding texts that are meant to help students “decode” language.
“The new thing is not that I’m teaching phonics. The new thing is the addition of these decodable texts, which we had already. We just have many more of them now,” she said. “It’s just a bigger part of the curriculum.”
Calkins said she also learned about the importance of decodable texts from parents of dyslexic children.
Decodable texts, according to the national public media literacy initiative Reading Rockets, are a type of beginning reading material in which the words have been controlled to contain letter-sounds and high-frequency words that the learner has been taught. The texts lend themselves to strengthening letter-sound association, which is a key step toward learning to read.
Ayako Kobayashi, a Denton elementary school teacher, has been using Calkins’ Units of Study since she started teaching at Denton schools seven years ago.
She said that while Units of Study didn’t provide any phonics supplements until 2018, training still recommended that teachers use other curricula to teach phonics and to incorporate phonics into their lessons.
“We’ve been doing this,” she said. “Maybe the amount of time we spent for phonics was different teacher by teacher, because students are different … but we’ve been doing this.”
Kobayashi said that with a greater focus on phonics, she has been able to help more students.
“For some students, balanced literacy framework just worked perfectly,” she said. “For some kids, it didn’t work so I’m not going to only focus on balanced literacy framework for everybody. It depends on the students.”
Calkins and Kobayashi both said there should be freedom for teachers to adjust lessons based on what students need.
“When they don’t respond to guided reading books, which is traditional whole-word comprehension, then we are going to use decodable texts using that assessment data from phonics that they can take and decode,” Kobayashi said.
Grapevine-Colleyville also uses Calkins’ Units of Study as one resource in a broader array of tools.
“While Units of Study is just one adopted resource our District uses, the (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) Resource System is our comprehensive curriculum management system that we use at our schools to meet the high standards on the STAAR assessment,” the district said in a statement. “But our curriculum is reviewed year-round, it is continuously evolving and we make changes accordingly to meet the needs of our learners.”
Science of reading based on 2000 study of how students read
Much of the research surrounding phonics being touted by the science of reading advocates hearkens back to a seminal analysis of research compiled in 2000 by the National Reading Panel, which Shanahan — the literacy expert who helped Fort Worth schools develop the current reading framework — was a part of.
The panel concluded that children need four key skills to become good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics awareness, the ability to read words in text in an accurate and fluent manner, and the ability to apply comprehension strategies consciously and deliberately as they read.
Melanie Royal, the executive director of the Key Center for Learning Differences in Fort Worth, said the findings from that study are just making their way into the mainstream, more than two decades later.
“It takes time to make that movement and some of the hard and fast beliefs about children learning to read are not easily overcome,” she said. “Over time that pendulum has moved significantly over to ... that initial research with the reading panel report.”
In essays and interviews, Calkins has said her curriculum does include phonics components, including a separate phonics supplement offered to teachers in 2018.
Calkins said in a response to previous reporting by American Public Media and EdWeek on the changes, before the most recent curriculum change, that the updates were minor.
“What stays the same in our work with K-1 readers? 98% of it,” she said in a statement in 2020.
“We still support the rich comprehension work that has always been a part of workshop teaching,” she continued. “We still support kids reading with agency. We still support choice and rereading and reading to learn and talking about books.”
But Royal said that years of poor test scores during the time when Calkins’ Units of Study was popular are a cause for concern.
“It’s one thing to say that a curriculum includes all of those things. That’s easy to say when you’re writing the literature about your curriculum, but the proof becomes when you implement the curriculum,” Royal said. “That becomes evident when literacy scores don’t increase. Students are still left behind. Students are still being referred for evaluations because of suspected learning disabilities.”
Shanahan said the Fort Worth district is on the right track.
“What the district was striving to do when I was there was really pretty terrific,” Shanahan said. ”They really were trying to help all the kids and make sure the whole program worked. Phonics is important. But, you know, it isn’t the whole thing. And here’s the district trying to do the whole thing, including phonics.”
Meradith Reese, a kindergarten teacher at Meadowbrook, said that while the shift could take a few years to improve reading scores, she has seen more progress in the last year than in her decades of using other approaches to teaching reading.
Cottrell, the fourth-grade literacy teacher, said that her fellow teachers are happy with the changes being made so far.
“Everyone at Meadowbrook has a positive view of the science of reading and how it’s impacted their classrooms,” she said. “There’s no one who’s still hanging on to Lucy Calkins in the hallway as we lay it outside the doors, there’s no one scratching for it, there’s no one wishing we still had it. I think everyone is in agreement that this is what’s best for the kids.”
“If you walk down our hallways what you’ll hear is our second-grade classrooms in conversation about the War of 1812, fifth-graders in conversation about Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and first-graders talking about Greek myths.”
