The answer, as always, is complex. But many of us saw this coming.

Five years ago, when the Science of Reading movement gained traction after a popular podcast put Balanced Literacy on blast, a lot of us took a deep breath, closed our eyes, and braced ourselves. Fifteen years into my career, I had already been swung back and forth through four curriculum adoptions. One lasted barely three years before we threw out nearly every resource and replaced it with… well, more of the same, but this time with SoR stickers on it.

The thing about quality teaching is that it requires refinement. When a district holds on to a curriculum long enough, master teachers are able to refine and adapt it to exactly what students need. And even during what some refer to as the dark times of Balanced Literacy, I personally don’t know any teacher who hadn’t refined their practice, adapting whatever curriculum they were handed to include explicit instruction. (I know this wasn’t true everywhere.)

So when yet another curriculum adoption was announced promising to fix all the world’s problems, every teacher who has been doing this longer than a decade sat there and asked the same question.

But what if we don’t want to go back?

And we didn’t want to go back. Early SoR was hyper-focused on one thing and one thing only… phonics. Many of us could see the curriculum gaining traction was less than stellar and would decimate the existence of novels in classrooms in any district that demanded fidelity to the box. We didn’t want to go back because we already knew what that hyperfocus could do to kids, to learning, and ultimately to reading scores. To be clear, phonics is not the enemy and never was to the majority of those us voicing concerns.

But now here we are. A novel-less, short-passage, basal-heavy world where over testing is king and test scores remain dismal. Many worry that we now have a generation of kids who don’t read because they don’t want to. Because reading feels awful to them after a heavy dose of truly lackluster curriculum.

Education needs to learn from past mistakes.

Every discipline that improves does it the same way. You keep what works, you isolate the part that doesn’t, and you revise that part. NASA engineers do not throw out entire Mars rovers. They observe, they analyze, they figure out which component failed, and they fix that component.

For whatever reason, education does not work this way. Education throws the whole thing out and starts from scratch. Or rather, it pretends to start from scratch while actually grabbing onto the same thing that didn’t work eight years ago. Then, eight years later, when the “new” thing also fails, we throw that out too and reach back for a version of what we discarded last time. For some reason, the powers that be stubbornly refuse to look at the past to refine mistakes we already made. Instead we all just stumble through the same mistakes over and over again and then wonder why we aren’t seeing the improvement we desperately want.

That is the actual problem.

Even balanced literacy had good in it. (Pitchforks down… hear me out.)

Kids in those classrooms read a lot of real books. They had volume, and time, and a teacher sitting next to them talking about what they were reading. Those were not the broken parts.

Three cueing was wrong and the research on that is settled. But even three cueing didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It came from careful observation of what struggling readers actually do. The instructional conclusion drawn from it was wrong. We can acknowledge what a kid without solid decoding does while simultaneously understanding there are far better ways to fix it. But villainizing methods or people or curriculum isn’t how we fix things. Even my most hated curriculum (lookin’ at you, F&P) had a lot of good, solid practice in it. And even my second most loathed box (oh hey, Into Reading) has good in it. We need to stop and critically examine which pieces of a program are good, and why, before throwing everything out and starting over again.

To Ensure Success, We Must Look at the Past

Any time I have been asked to teach a boxed program with strict fidelity, it has failed spectacularly. That failure is predictable when we look at the past. Hyperfocusing on one area of reading instruction eventually creates the conditions for the next pendulum swing.

So let’s look at what happened the last time we swung toward explicit phonics. Programs like Open Court Reading prevailed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and there is a lot to learn from those successes and failures.

The Good of Any Bloated Basal

The phonics structure and explicit teaching in Open Court was truly excellent. No one ever had complaints about that piece.

Teachers in the Los Angeles area, where I taught at the time, went through rigorous professional development before the school year started and throughout the first two or three years of implementation. Those trainings taught the importance of explicit phonics instruction and how to actually deliver it, and they were robust enough to transfer into practice. Teachers walked out of those rooms able to teach phonics explicitly with any program.

That was a piece worth keeping, but when test scores stalled, it got thrown out with everything else in far too many places.

Areas of Refinement

Programs like Open Court are, in a word, boring. The weekly cadence is one short story read several times across five days. Why we keep coming back to this model is beyond my understanding, but twenty years later, here we are again.

Not every lesson needs to be YouTube worthy entertainment. In fact, no lesson should meet that bar. But kids are not stupid. They can tell the difference between boring in the sense of not entertaining but worth their time, and boring in the sense of a waste of their time. Reading the same story all week while grinding through endless reading skills lessons to over analyze it is the bad kind of boring. Kids reject it immediately. They may sit politely through each day’s lesson, begrudgingly finishing the task at the bare minimum required to keep their recess, but the program’s failures show up in their test scores.

The new basals dominating the field right now are no different. Despite heavy warnings from master teachers, no one bothered looking at what went wrong last time to make sure we didn’t repeat it.

For example, this 2007 study on teachers’ perceptions of the basal program Open Court could easily be swapped out for 2025 teacher rhetoric regarding popular basals of today, such as Into Reading and Wonders. What were the main complaints, you ask?

1. Teachers felt Open Court’s rapid instructional pace and lack of meaningful interaction led students to tune out. Teachers also noted that the program’s guidance for differentiating instruction for English learners was not helpful in practice.

2. Many teachers perceived the highly scripted nature of the program as restrictive. They felt it left little room for creativity, professional judgment, or responsiveness to the needs of individual students. When asked what they would change, teachers most frequently suggested adding flexibility into the curriculum and opportunities for creative teaching, and yes, the ability to include novels in their practice.

3. Teachers reported that the program did not provide enough materials or strategies that were appropriate for diverse learners or responsive to cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

In all, teachers complained that not every student fit the box this heavily scripted program came out of, and that it was just not meeting the needs of all students.

Test scores backed that.

This 2011 Los Angeles Times article highlights all that went wrong during these times, including the heavy swing to Balanced Literacy. Read it, but know that you will likely ask yourself if this was really from 2011 or if it’s actually just a description of exactly what’s happening now.

For districts that have adopted a basal, this is the point in the timeline we are currently living in. The point right before the pendulum begins to heavily swing.

Keep Foundational Skills, But Refine Where Needed

Foundational skills get copy-pasted from kindergarten through sixth grade, and we make this exact mistake every time the pendulum swings back toward phonics.

Kindergarten and first grade phonics we have mostly figured out. You could argue those grades still need more deliberate release from decodables into actual books, but overall I have few complaints about the pedagogy in those grades.

Second grade is where things get messy. By second grade students need a shift. Most programs still don’t have enough spelling and encoding, and there is a stark absence of enough physical writing practice. By third grade there should be a move into word study through morphology. By fourth and fifth, word study spanning spelling, encoding, morphology, and vocabulary should be the main event, not an afterthought in the form of a five minute worksheet.

Pendulum stoppers are found in programs that clearly took decades of expertise and refinement to build, like Sean Morrisey’s Word Mapping Project. Programs like this stop pendulums from swinging because they work, and they work because they truly honor what the research says needs to be done. This should be the standard instead of the exception. It’s clear he took years of classroom expertise and refined the good into what is, honestly, one of the strongest upper-grade programs I have seen.

Intervention Aimed Only at Remediation

The same swing happens inside intervention. We go all in on decoding-only intervention, then wonder why we have so many kids who can decode but cannot comprehend. So we swing hard to comprehension-heavy intervention without ever stopping to acknowledge that intervention should not be one dimensional in either direction.

Intervention should obviously contain remediation. But remediation cannot become isolation. Students also need adult-supported practice with grade-level text. Without that piece, everything else fails. A student can master every skill on the intervention scope and sequence and still never once be walked through the grade level book their classmates have the pleasure of reading.

This is how gold-standard interventions like Orton-Gillingham end up ebbing and flowing in and out of popularity. At 100 years old, a good but not yet perfect approach like OG should be something we continually refine to fit the needs of the current population. Otherwise we risk losing it every 8 years.

Why Can't We Get Off the Pendulum?

In a complex system with complex problems, it’s hard to name one exact cause. But some patterns repeat often enough to notice.

Refinement is a terrible business model for curriculum companies, and state legislators want quick fixes.

Meanwhile, a district that decides its core program is mostly sound but second grade needs more encoding, third grade needs morphology, and intervention needs grade level text has just described a year of teacher development and some adjustments to what it already owns. That might be bad for curriculum companies, but it’s excellent for balancing shaky district budgets. It’s also harder to track and leaves too much room for variation.

So putting the burden on curriculum companies trusted as the experts in the field feels like the safest bet. But even when their curriculum is the thing that needs adjusting, in the end any and all failure is placed on the shoulders of teachers. The very people given the impossible task of making a broken curriculum function in a classroom full of students who simply don’t fit inside the box’s narrow expectations.

So instead of refining the multimillion dollar investment, as test scores remain lower than desired, states and districts scramble to fix the problem by throwing everything out and spending millions on something “new.” Every eight years, money is spent on new materials, assessments, platforms, coaching, and professional development.

What students need instead is deep, multi-year teacher training that leaves teachers able to teach reading with any program, or with none. Scripted programs are great for teachers who are still learning on their path to mastery. But they are a crutch, and eventually every teacher should be able to run without them. Training that outlives the adoption is exactly what our students need and deserve. We should be leaning on teacher experts to refine what we have instead of throwing it all into a dumpster every eight years just to repurchase what was thrown out eight years prior. Curriculum should develop teachers, not replace them.

Fidelity to best practice will always win over fidelity to any box.

I was part of an exceptionally rare teacher preparation cohort (or so I have been told). My post-graduate teacher program was, on paper, exceptional.

We did it all. Language arts was the centerpiece, because California law required us to pass the RICA, a Science of Reading based teacher assessment that existed twenty years before the Science of Reading became cool. We covered all of the pillars of reading and the undeniable case for systematic phonics. I even had a professor laugh and announce, “Whole language is dead and gone,” and we all laughed along with her. We learned the many layers of teaching spelling, and I spent an entire quarter on morphology instruction in the upper grades. Writing instruction that works? Embedded in all of it. It was a textbook case of everything a teacher should know. In theory.

And the program didn’t stop at literacy. We took courses on how to thoroughly teach science and social studies methods as well. We learned to guide students through the scientific process with real experiments, while also treating reading, writing, and vocabulary development in the content areas as non-negotiable. We talked about cognitive neuroscience and why understanding how learners learn actually matters.

The foundation of my combined masters and credential program was solid enough that I was able to talk my way out of several BTSA courses and buy myself back some planning time I desperately needed. (And for anyone who had to sit through those new teacher induction courses, you know what a big deal talking your way out of ANY of them was.)

On paper, UC Irvine was perfection. Eighteen months in, theoretically, I should have walked out something close to a master teacher.

Except I wasn’t. Like, at all. I learned quickly in my first year that being book smart didn’t always translate to real world application. And I found out the hard way that even the best teacher prep programs still fall short.

Here is what I wish I had been taught, but wasn’t.

Nobody ever said the word dyslexia

Not once. Not in a single one of those genuinely science-based, best-practice reading courses. Mind you, this was 2004, during the “don’t say dyslexia” era of education.

I left that program certain that my own inability to spell and my struggle to read smoothly out loud were the fault of Whole Language. Not dyslexia. I am a product of the 80s, but I am also a product of Catholic school, and Catholic school is notoriously good at phonics. So despite knowing full well that I spent the majority of my day deep diving into spelling rules and drills, I still somehow thought I was a product of Dick and Jane books and not a product of genetics.

My sob story aside…. Schools of education should teach dyslexia. Period. It is a reading disability that affects as many as one in five students, which means there is no version of a teaching career where you don’t encounter it. Leaving future teachers uneducated about what dyslexia is and how to address it as a tier one practitioner is the equivalent of the medical field declining to train OBGYNs in perimenopause and menopause care. The population is not rare. The need to adequately equip even general education teachers is not optional.

Structurally, this was the only real gap in my coursework. But it was an enormous one. Over twenty years I have taught many children who were diagnosed dyslexic or clearly presenting as dyslexic. I had the instructional tools to help them. What I didn’t have was a real understanding of what was happening in front of me. I don’t think I understood dyslexia at the level a practitioner should, and we are all practitioners, until year ten. That is far too long.

It simply should have been in the syllabus. But hearing from other teachers far and wide, I am finding that having only one gripe against the knowledge part of my teacher prep program is a blessing.

The rest of it was truly phenomenal. Except...

Student teaching

This is my larger complaint, and it isn’t unique to my program. It is true of most of them.

I was placed in a 6th grade classroom with 38 students. My cooperating teacher was burnt out beyond belief, and her friend stated bluntly that I had been assigned to help her.

I wasn’t there to learn. I was there to be a second adult in the room.

Later that year, when she stopped coming to school because of stress, I was told she had asked the principal not to place a student teacher in a class that challenging. The principal’s response: “Well, she needs to know what this is really like.”

She wasn’t wrong.

I did need to know what a classroom feels like when children’s home lives have come apart. I needed to know what it is to be the adult in the room for a child processing having watched his uncle shot on his own lawn by a rival gang. I needed to learn how to stop a fight before it took over the room. I needed to know how to plan for a class that spans from a newcomer who cannot yet read to a gifted student working three grade levels above.

But I should not have had to do any of it alone, with a sub.

None of that would have been an impossible experience if a master teacher had been standing beside me, helping me make sense of it. Those were very real realities. I needed someone to walk me through them, not hand them to me and leave.

I remember, after one particularly hard day, crafting an email to my advisor with the subject line: “Today in 6th Grade…”

I was pulled out of that school the next day. I wasn’t the only student teacher with a hard year, but I was the only student teacher without a master teacher beside her at graduation. I don’t blame her for that. I do think back on it as a canary in the coal mine sort of situation. How did we let teacher prep get this confuzzled.

The system is not built to support student teachers. Not in the year they are student teaching, and not in the year they get hired.

A stronger path forward

The more years I teach, the more convinced I become that we've built teacher preparation programs all wrong. Not just in what is taught, which is the loudest complaint these days, but in how they're structured.

My master’s and credential program was an 18-month intensive. It should have been a full two years, with classroom observations embedded throughout the first year and, for candidates who pass the required content and credentialing assessments, a paid apprenticeship in year two.

Yes, paid. I said what I said.

Year one is everything I got at UCI. Just go ahead and copy and paste it. It was brilliant, in theory.

Year two is student teaching, and nothing else. No additional coursework beyond protected time to sit with a master teacher one on one (or in a small group if the budget demands it) and actually learn the job.

Learn to prep, and I mean truly prep. Teachers should be given stronger instruction on how to lesson plan, and I don’t mean the five page write up for one 60 minute lesson. I mean the careful plotting of a week. The long term plans that map out a year. The stuff real teachers do in real time. The stuff that makes your classroom run so you aren’t frantically figuring out what comes next during a 30 minute lunch break.

Learn to grade, and I mean truly grade. Teachers need to understand how to maximize their time. That means knowing which assignments deserve detailed feedback and which to simply check for understanding.

There also needs to be time to talk through the thousand and one small decisions every teacher makes. And there needs to be time to process what happened that day. The good, the bad, and the wild.

One year. One classroom. One master teacher who is there because she wants to be, not because her class was overloaded and the office needed another adult in the room.

The first three years demand intensive support

This is a reality few people talk about, probably because addressing it requires a separate line in the budget. I want to be clear about how hard the first three years of teaching are, because if districts neglect to genuinely support their new hires, those teachers will fail. Not might. Will.

My story is not unusual. Most of the times I have hosted a student teacher myself, that student teacher was assigned because my class was overloaded and the principal said out loud that another body was needed. I did everything I could to support the adult in my room. But knowing they were carrying a full teaching load on top of a full course load that demanded pages-long lesson plans in their spare time, plans that bear no resemblance to how anyone actually plans, I couldn’t shake the feeling that even the supported version of this was wrong. That is not how you grow a teacher.

Give them a year in one room with one master teacher. Then make the first year of employment an apprenticeship too. Use teachers approaching retirement as the scaffold, a slow release rather than a cliff. Pay them for it. Let them hand something forward on their way out the door.

Months after my student teaching ended, during my first year of real teaching, I remember the exact moment I understood how unprepared I was. I was standing in front of 38 fourth graders, by myself, with nothing.

And I remember thinking about my own favorite teacher, a brand new teacher straight out of student teaching who had been handed a 5/6 combo crammed into a room in the back of the library with no air conditioning in September in Southern California. I don’t remember her being anything other than calm and confident, except for the times she haphazardly instructed us to take out some paper and “draw what you feel from the music.” And we did, while she sat in the back of the room looking somewhat stunned.

I think about her often, and I understand those afternoons completely now.

To the districts hiring this fall

In one of my first interviews, as a mere 24 year old fresh out of college… the principal looked right at me, and told me, “These kids will eat you alive.” He wished me luck on my future interviews and sent me on to my way.

He wasn’t wrong. And I am thankful her didn’t hire me.

I look back at that day occasionally and cant help but laugh. But, underneath what he said was probably a reality most schools and districts face. There simply aren’t strong enough structures built to adequately support new teachers. He knew his building and he knew what a brand new teacher would need from it, and he knew it wasn’t there, so he passed. That was the right thing to do and it is a whole lot rarer than it should be.

My first principal took a chance on me, and am so thankful she did. But she also did a thing that ensured my success. She put me next to a master teacher who actually wanted help and support me.

That is the only reason I am still here.

The teacher next door taught me the ins and outs of real teaching, the parts you don’t learn in college. She sat with me through the good, the hard and genuinely awful days… including the one where a student tried to poison the entire class at recess. True story- while there is a DO NOT EAT warning label on silica packets… Turns out they aren’t actually poison, but he didn’t know that, and we didn’t either for a good long while that afternoon.

She didn’t just tell me what to do, she helped me process it all and ensured I had everything I needed to keep showing up. Even after the silica situation.

By year five I was nominated for Teacher of the Year and in large part because of her… I won it. I will say flat out- that award belonged to her, because every skill they were recognizing was a skill she made sure I built. College gave me the theory, which is important too. But she gave me all the skills I needed to truly survive, maybe even thrive, in my classroom.

Whether a new teacher survives has almost nothing to do with how good her program was, because mine was excellent and I was still standing in front of 38 fourth graders with nothing. It has to do with how the district sets up systems of support. It has a lot to do with who is on the team, and whether that person has anything left to give, and whether you have given her any reason to give it. There are not enough teachers next door right now with the strength and the time to carry someone else. Not because they don’t want to mentor but rather because the system simply isn’t set up for it. We burned through those people years ago and then turned around and asked them to mentor.

The best districts know this. They know how to make sure a new teacher isn’t just treading water, and they know that a strong mentor, maybe even the teacher next door, in a paid role to carry it all, is the entire mechanism. It is the only thing that gets someone past year five with anything left in the tank.

So if you are hiring new teachers into a building that cannot hold them, at least be as honest as that principal was with me, and if you don’t want to have that conversation, then build the thing that holds them first and hire second.

Theory prepares teachers to begin. Mentorship prepares them to stay.

For more on the importance of stellar colleagues and the supports they give, check out my post Find Your Marigolds

-Melinda Karshner

I’ll be the first to say that some of that means letting them face conflict.

I know how that sounds. But… we’ve all heard the stories of parents storming into a professor’s office to fight a battle their grown child should be fighting alone, and we’ve all quietly judged them a little. I get the urge, though. We want to spare our kids every hard thing. But some of the best lessons they’ll ever learn come from being allowed to struggle, and yes, sometimes from being allowed to fall. As the mom of an adrenaline-seeking little one, I have learned that lesson literally and often. Sometimes the best lessons learned come from falling. (physically or emotionally)

But there is a tug between two sides- when do you step back as a parent and when do you step up? It’s one of the harder balances of parenting, and it gets harder the moment it collides with school.

Most of what our kids go through is normal peer conflict. It’s painful to watch, and the gut instinct is to jump in and fix it. But as long as it hasn’t crossed into true bullying, this is where we stand by as supports. We offer advice and comfort, but ultimately we let them navigate it solo. This is where kids learn to reflect, to own their part, and to communicate better. This is where they learn to trust that when they stumble, we’re there to listen and support, but not to rush in and fix.

Kids won’t learn if we do everything for them. It reminds me of a pottery class I once took where I was just not able to hack it. Instead of coaching me through my failures, the instructor rushed over and created the vase for me. So now I have a pretty impressive pottery piece but it's not mine, and there's nothing in it for me to be proud of. I am still very far from being a potter.

Same applies to social growth. If we fight every battle for our kids, they won’t ever grow into a person that can navigate it all on their own. Normal conflict can be a powerful growth tool. The problem is knowing when it stops being that.

There is a point where conflict crosses a line into territory that is not the norm. Not every hard thing should be a lesson. Sometimes what we’re watching isn’t normal childhood conflict at all. Sometimes it’s just harm. When your child experiences true bullying, it crosses into something that can feel unbearable for the entire family.

If you’re reading this in the middle of it, I want to say this first as both a parent and a teacher. I know it can feel like something near impossible to survive, like the ground has come out from under your whole family and it’s never coming back. It will come back. I promise you it will. If I have learned anything as a teacher and as a mom of two, it’s that kids are more resilient than we realize. But I’m not going to pretend the middle of it feels like anything other than what it is, which is awful. The specifics of our own story don’t matter here, and they aren’t the point. What matters is what I wish someone had told me at the start, mom to mom, before I learned it on my own.

First, know what you’re actually looking at. Is it normal conflict or is it actually bullying? Even normal conflict will have a kid going home some days in tears, and that is not a five-alarm fire situation. Normal conflict happens between kids of roughly equal footing, it flares up and afterward both kids feel bad. That’s an uncomfortable part of growing up. That’s the falling-down we’re supposed to let happen and support through. Normal conflict has a clear resolution point. You can see when you step back as the adult, that its something kids can and should navigate mostly alone. Hurt feelings and all.

Bullying is a different animal. There’s a power imbalance, so she can’t make it stop on her own no matter what she tries. And it’s aimed at her and meant to wear her down or shut her out. With girls it often isn’t the kind of thing that leaves a visible bruise. It’s the exclusion, the whispering, and the shifting alliances. It’s the “you can’t sit with us” that reshuffles every single day and the words the crush her spirit. It flies under the radar precisely because there’s nothing to photograph. And it’s admittedly hard to differentiate between as the line can be blurry. But… normal conflict is a disagreement; bullying is a campaign. If she is losing, over and over, and can’t change it no matter what she does, don’t brush it aside as the type of thing that’s normal. It’s not anymore.

Watch for signs- both physically and emotionally. Emotionally it might look like complete shut downs, “I don’t want to talk, leave me alone.” might be a phrase you start to hear. Physically, it tends to manifest as symptoms. The stomachaches on school mornings. The trouble sleeping. The dread that gets a little heavier every day and every week. When a kid who used to bounce out the door full of light starts inventing reasons to stay home, believe what you’re seeing.

Many kids minimize what is happening. They may insist everything is fine, ask you not to contact the school, or downplay incidents because they’re worried intervention will make things worse. Don’t assume any of this means the absence of real harm. This is important for educators to remember as well. Some kids are masters at masking. Look for the moments where the mask comes off and is impossible to maintain. This is usually after school, when the day is over and the exhaustion from pretending everything is okay all day is too much.

Once you’ve seen it has crossed the threshold from normal peer conflict to actual bullying… then what?

Start with the school

Expect the school to be your partner, and hold them to it. You have every right to expect real action, not just a sympathetic nod and a “we’ll keep an eye on it.” That means they document, they follow up, they investigate, and they take concrete steps. Sometimes this is as simple as talking to the kids involved, adjusting seating, and watching the hot spots. A good administrator might check in with everyone involved at lunch, visibly, for as long as it takes. Having the adult in charge be present like that is huge for every kid involved.

Put things in writing and email the school. Ensure there is strong written confirmation that the school knows what your child is reporting. Keep a dated log of what happened and when. When emotions are high, approach the school as a teammate, not an enemy. “I need your help with a pattern I’m seeing,” opens doors that accusations often slam shut. Also understand a hard truth, schools handle this unevenly. Some are wonderful and some wave it off. Sometimes labeling everything as normal becomes the default. (although it shouldn't be). Know that when it clearly lands in the category of bullying, it is not normal, and it is okay to push back on that categorization.

One last thing, that maybe deviates from the standard advice. Somewhere in all of it, advocate for the child doing the harm as well. Never make any child the villain, not to our kids and not to anyone else. Every child deserves an advocate. Period. And I can tell you from the teacher side of things, every child in these situations is hurting. And every one of them deserves care. The one being hurt, and the one doing the hurting… both are in pain and both deserve support. That belief costs nothing, and will keep our own hearts from going hard.

The best schools take this same approach. Support isn’t one sided and all children involved should be seen, heard, and given tools to move forward. Notably: The child who is being hurt should not be the one who loses her classes, her seat, or her activities to make the problem go away. The burden goes on the behavior, not on the victim. The best schools I have seen handle this part well.

Don’t expect the school to magically fix it. Even the absolutely best school with the best approach will launch a response that slowly eases the harm, but they won’t be able to immediately erase it. There will still be ebbs and flows and there will still be flare-ups. But a school with a strong action plan that supports both students will lead to positive change. It might be slow, but it will be noticeable. And a school that is taking real action will have open lines of communication. Don’t expect to hear anything about the other child involved, and honestly you won’t need to if true action is being taken. You will know the right steps are in place because you will see the light slowly return to your child.

With the right supports at school, as painful as this is, there will be growth and every kid will come out stronger. I applaud the schools out there doing this difficult work, I know there are so many wonderful ones out there. And our kids are so much better because of you all.

Supports at Home

The top thing I have found is simply being there. How you talk to her matters more than what you attempt to “fix”. This is the hardest part, because every cell in your body wants to march in and end it today. But listen first and sit with her in her grief. (I found being a victim to bullying does indeed involve grief.) Let her get the whole thing out before you react, because if she watches you erupt into panic or fury, she might quietly decide to stop telling you things. And you cannot help her if she stops telling you things. So you stay calm on the outside even when you’re screaming on the inside. Watching the light be drained out of your child day after day is beyond difficult. But when I was in this position, in front of her, I tried everything I could to be her rock. Sometimes that meant crying a bit with her, sure, but most of the time it was reassuring her that I was there for her no matter what.

Believe her. Say the simple thing first, “That sounds so painful, I get why you’re hurting.” You don’t have to solve it in that moment to make her feel less alone in it. Tell her how proud of her you are for being able to talk about it and even for being able to cry about it. There is power in letting the emotions out.

Be the safe space to talk about it. She needs to know that she has every right to voice her experiences in a safe space. Talking about others at school isn’t one.

There’s a version of this we worked hard to teach our daughter, and I’ll borrow Michelle Obama’s words for it: when they go low, we go high. I want to be clear about what that does and doesn’t mean. It does not mean turn the other cheek and absorb it. It means don’t sink to their level to get even, because that fight is one she can’t win and it costs her more than it costs them. Going high looks practical and a little boring: separate yourself from the whole group, find a safer place to be, and don’t feed it. Coach her to find other groups to hang out with. Help her to identify safe spaces away from the group entangled in the harm. And if others try to bring it all up… She’s allowed to simply say, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this, let’s talk about something else,” and walk toward something better.

Part of what makes that possible is having somewhere the pressure actually gets released. If she has no safe place to pour it all out, she’ll pour it out at school, to the wrong people, in the wrong moment, and especially when gossip is tangled up in the bullying, that’s how a kid gets pulled right back into the mud she’s trying to climb out of. So be that place. Make home the spot where she can say every unfiltered thing, name every name, and cry every tear, so that she doesn’t want or need to do it in the hallway. She has every right to voice her experience fully.

Then gently coach, but don’t take over. Ask her what she has already tried and what she wants to try next. This might be hearing she doesn’t want you to reach out to the school- and this is a good place to tell her you won’t right this second, but to gently point out that if it gets worse you will need to.

Practice the actual words at home, the flat “stop,” the walking away, the finding a specific adult, the other kid she can go stand near. When my daughter was confronted daily on the playground she eventually landed on something like: “I can see you are upset. This doesn’t feel like a good time to talk, I am going to go play soccer.” You’re handing her tools, not using the tools for her. It is a balancing act- one where you are both there to protect but also there to equip her with the tools she needs to know she can handle hard things.

Importantly, know there is a line where coaching ends and you need to step all the way in. Threats. Anything physical. Anything sexual. Or her lights going dim and the spark going out of her to a point it’s hard to recognize the child you know. That is not a “let her figure it out” moment. That’s a moment where the adults take over and you do not apologize for it.

As a teacher, I will never forget one day where a mom walked in at the end of the day and I could see on her face that this was where her family had landed. She wrote a short email after our conversation apologizing… and I told her to never ever apologize. She had the right conversation at the right time. Her job, in that moment, was to be a momma bear. And my job was to support her and her child (and every child involved, including the alleged bully). There was absolutely nothing to apologize about.

But I understand where that instinct comes from. So many parents carry a quiet fear that stepping in makes them the “difficult” parent, that advocating for their child will bother the teacher, overstep some invisible line, or sour the relationship with the school. I want to say this as clearly as I can: it won’t, and it shouldn’t. A good school wants to partner with you. As long as you come to the conversation respectfully (and that mom absolutely did) you have every right, and then some, to advocate for your child’s physical and emotional safety. That is not overstepping. That is your job, the same way supporting your child is ours.

Build her a world outside of it. If I could put one thing on a billboard for the mom in the thick of this, it’s this one. When a child’s entire sense of belonging lives inside one building with one group of kids, that group holds enormous power over her. The single most protective thing you can do is make sure that building is not her whole world.

Find the thing that is hers. A sport, a team, a stage, a club, a church group, whatever lights her up, ideally with a completely different set of kids who have never seen the scared version of her. Somewhere she gets to be good at something and known for it. Something, anything, that rebuilds the exact confidence this kind of thing eats away, and it reminds her that the cruelty is one isolated thing in an otherwise big, beautiful world.

Pull in the bigger supports sooner than you think you need to. We sometimes treat therapy like it’s the emergency option, the thing you turn to only once everything’s on fire. Given the long term impacts bullying can have, don’t wait. If this is affecting how she sleeps, how she eats, or how she sees herself, a good therapist can help. This will give her more tools and a safe neutral place to set it all down. It also gives you a partner in it because again, this is hard to navigate as a mom. Reaching out to a therapist is not an overreaction. It’s the same as taking her to the doctor for a stomach ache that won’t quit. You’d never feel dramatic about that. Many states have free resources to ensure therapy is accessible. Find those and utilize them.

Lean on your people, too. This is not a thing to carry in private out of some sense that you should be able to handle it alone. You’re not meant to. Let the people who love you and your kid show up. They did for us and I truly believe that is one reason we were able to navigate it all.

There will never be a conflict-free school. That is not the standard, and it never should be. Most schools, in my experience, have a good enough handle on the range of conflict from normal, to otherworldly. I would never advise anyone to expect a perfect approach, but you should have at the very least a good enough one.

But I also would never advise anyone to expect anything less than actual support. The question is never “did the principal handle this exactly the way I would have, or the way I wished they had?” Chances are the answer to that question will be no. And we have to be comfortable with that so long as the answer to this next question is correct. The question is much simpler: “was this handled in a way that lessened the harm?” If the answer is yes, even slowly, even imperfectly, you stay and you keep working with the school. Schools have an incredibly difficult job, but most are acting in good faith and the best ones will ensure the right structure is there to support everyone.

But there is still a fine balance here. A dear friend once looked at me and asked gently, “At what point is the harm so intense that it’s not worth pushing through? Is there really a lesson to be learned at this point?” If the harm was intensified instead of lessened, that is a different thing entirely. There’s a line where perseverance stops being a virtue and starts being endurance of harm. Unfortunately it is sometimes hard to see while you’re standing in it. But once you do… that’s when you consider leaving to find a safer environment for your child.

When you reach the point where you've tried everything in good faith and your child is still suffering under something that isn't being checked… getting her to safe ground becomes your whole job. Sometimes that means staying and navigating it alongside everyone else. But sometimes, when a place has stopped being safe, it means leaving. There is no medal for staying in a place that is breaking her. Leave if you can, and don't call it failure. Call it what it is. Love.

So if you’re in the middle of this tonight, lying awake, sure it will never lift: it will. Not because you found the perfect words or fixed the other kid or won some argument with the school. It lifts because you keep showing up for her, calm on the outside, fierce underneath, widening her world one small brave step at a time. You’re already doing the thing. Keep going.

This piece is informed by both my experiences as a teacher and as a parent navigating bullying. While every situation is unique, my hope is simply to offer support to families walking through a difficult season.

Our own journey was, at times, incredibly painful. Now that it is behind us, we can more clearly see the good that exists in the world. Along the way, there were caring educators, friends, and family members who stepped forward to support the children involved. I remain deeply grateful for each of them, and for the reminder that even in difficult moments, people can make an extraordinary difference in a child’s life.

More Resources

Raising kids through these years is hard, good work. If you're looking for more support, here's a curated list of books that have helped me navigate everything from the everyday growing-up stuff to the harder seasons like bullying, as both a parent and a teacher. https://amzn.to/3RiLN4Z (Affiliate links)

If you or your child needs support right now

Free and low-cost therapy: many states fund free youth counseling sessions. Search “[your state] free youth mental health services,” or ask your pediatrician or your child’s school counselor for a referral. Your insurer’s member line can also point you to covered in-network therapists, and community mental health centers offer sliding-scale care regardless of ability to pay.

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Free, confidential, 24/7. It isn’t only for suicidal crisis; people reach out for anxiety, loneliness, a struggling child, or just needing someone to talk to, and reaching out early, before things get serious, is encouraged. Spanish: press 2. ASL available by videophone.

Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741. Free, confidential, 24/7. Trained volunteer counselors support people through stress, anxiety, loneliness, bullying, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. There are no age minimums, and you can text on behalf of someone who can’t advocate for themselves — useful for a parent texting about a child. Spanish: text HOLA. Crisis Text Line

Edit to add: My husband spoke at a board meeting about our family’s experience. He was on a business trip and I had no idea he was planning on speaking. I also strongly believe no family should be put in a position to feel the need to break the stride of a work trip to speak at a school board meeting but here he was still advocating

School Board Meeting Student Safety

Education is not a profession for the weak of heart, and to be a principal? Looking back on two decades of teaching, I am in pure awe of so many of the principals I’ve worked with. I’ve had the privilege of working with the best of the best, and it is clear that a principal’s leadership sets the tone for a school. A strong principal doesn’t just help a school run. She changes outcomes for kids.

And for me, wonderful leaders made me a better teacher. I would not have grown into the person I am today without them.

So I want to take a minute to applaud all of the amazing women who have taken on such a challenging role, and with such grace. It feels important to honor their expertise and to share how their presence made the schools they led so wonderful.

Years 1–7: When Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Fresh out of grad school with a ton of knowledge and admittedly zero real-world experience, Dr. W took a chance on me. I remember at the end of the interview (one of my first, no less) she said something like, “Yup. We want you… you’re what we need.”

Okay, look, I have no idea what she saw in me that day, but I’m grateful she hired me. I had no idea what 38 to 45 fourth graders in a Title I school would mean, but there is absolutely no way I would have survived any of it without her leadership.

Respect, Responsibility, and Integrity.

Three characteristics she named daily, even on the school voicemail. But strong leaders don’t just say things to say them. They know actions speak louder than words, so they live them.

Respect. She respected us as professionals. When the district adopted Open Court Reading and some principals in the area mandated that every teacher stick to the script (as in, at this exact minute of the day everyone should be on this exact page), she gave us the flexibility to teach with integrity, not strict fidelity to the program. We absolutely used the program (I have yet to see a phonics program as strong), but we had wiggle room to add things like novels. Because she respected our expertise and knew our decisions were in the best interest of kids.

And she paired that respect with real, tangible support. She had a clear vision, clear expectations for what good teaching looked like, clear standards for what kids should be doing and learning. But, and this is the part so many leaders miss, she backed those expectations with the time, support and tools to meet them. Vision without time and tools is just pressure. She knew that.

Responsibility. I don’t know when she slept. She took her responsibility as leader seriously and it was clear her main priority was her school. From the stories she told of her family, she still maintained a healthy work life balance which is incredible.

This one might ruffle some feathers, and I have mixed feelings about it myself… but I do think my ability to plan weeks and units ahead all at once is because she made us do this… submit lesson plans.

Look, I cringed just typing that. But every two weeks, she made us do it. We didn’t just submit them as theater or as some micromanagement attempt at control. She didn’t require tedious detail, just an outline of what the next two weeks might look like. And… She actually read them. And left comments. Real comments that were hand written. As a veteran teacher this may have driven me insane (and I am not sure she made anyone but the newbies do it) but as a new teacher this did help me a ton. And knowing she was actually using it as a tool to help me grow made it worth my time. Her input was always constructive, positive, and encouraging.

She also read and helped edit our report card comments, and thank goodness for that. As a woman walking planet Earth with dyslexia, I almost sent out live, on a real child’s report card, “sometimes he shits down” instead of “shuts down.” We laughed about that one for years.

Integrity. This one is huge. She was incredibly honest and her integrity especially showed in how she always owned her mistakes. Real life is never perfect and a well run school is no exception to that truth. Great leaders don’t hide that and instead strive to implement best practices to make real life chaos… manageable.

Real life involves inevitable conflict. Even the best schools aren’t conflict-free, and even the best principals are prone to making poor decisions. So when she loaded my classroom with all of the behavior problems and all of the kids far below grade level… I pushed back on the decision.

She had promised to balance classrooms if I stayed in 4th instead of moving down to 3rd. At the time, K–3 had a class-size cap at 20, a dream indeed. But the new hire didn’t have gifted-and-talented certification. She was lamenting how inequitable the class composition would be because of that, and asked if I would give up the land of small class sizes to avoid the issue. So I did. And she loaded my classroom anyway.

After a brief conflict (friends, tread carefully when calling out wrongs, even when you’re right), she admitted that she was wrong. Looking back, I am in awe of even just that. She had the strength, courage, and true leadership to admit this decision was not right, so she apologized and then explained thoroughly why she made it. Not every leader is the type that can be approached about their decisions, but I knew she had the integrity and strength to be able to have hard conversations. I knew she would listen and own it. That honesty and ability to reflect is exactly the kind of security that made her school strong. I will always have the most respect for her because of that characteristic alone.

Years 8–12: Calm Resolve

Due to budget restraints, 70 teachers in that district were pink-slipped. My principal fought hard for the three of us let go from her school, but… I had secured another job in a neighboring district. So I left my class set of guitars and drum kit behind (that’s a story for another day) and ventured off to a new school and a new leader.

Mrs. K, the Warm Demander

Mrs. K reminded me of Dr. W in so many ways, but, most inspiring to me at this new school, she had the courage to be unpopular. Popularity wasn’t her main goal. Her main goal was supporting the students and teachers at that school, and sometimes that meant making a decision that wasn’t everyone’s favorite. She was the Warm Demander of principals.

Principals aren’t there to be liked, and she certainly wasn’t by some. Principals are there to run a school, and that means holding people accountable- even when it’s hard. Sometimes that looks unglamorous: making sure teachers actually show up to their morning duty (whether teachers should have morning duty in the first place is a separate conversation, but I digress), making sure people are working their contract hours, holding teachers to high standards in their evaluations and, just as importantly, coaching them to improve. She wasn’t cruel and she wasn’t punitive, but she also wasn’t going to soften the truth into mush so that no one’s feelings got hurt.

In observations, she’d sit in the back of the classroom with an absolutely unreadable face, and I’d spend the whole lesson spiraling. Am I bombing this? Am I doing well? Does she even like this?! But that was the thing: she actually watched, and she actually paid attention. And her feedback, when it came, was always worth the agony of that unreadable face.

Sitting in post-observation meetings, she would laugh and laugh when I’d inevitably answer “How do you think that lesson went?” with a list of my own critiques, because she thought it was brilliant and that I was far too hard on myself. And I knew she was serious, because I knew she wasn’t there to make friends. She was there to make us all better… for ourselves, for each other, and especially for our students.

I recall one afternoon finishing up in the copy room (probably actually fixing that darn copy machine that jammed constantly) and overhearing a parent absolutely unloading on a fellow teacher. Mrs. K stepped in with calm resolve and point-blank told the parent they could not speak to staff that way. She called the parent into the office, calmed them down, but stood firm on the decision in question. The parent left calm. Her concerns were heard and honored, but she didn’t leave getting her way either. I’m sure the easier thing to do in that moment would have been to just bend to the will of the parent. But that wasn’t in the best interest of anyone, so instead she did what was right, instead of what would have been easy.

This school was incredibly successful and rated top five elementary schools in the entire state year after year. She easily could have taken credit for it but never did. Any award or achievement given to the school she immediately attributed to the staff, insisting the credit didn’t belong to her. Under her leadership, she fostered an environment for success but always pointed to the strengths of others, the very strengths she worked so hard to support and foster.

I asked her once how she was able to do it all. Where the calm resolve came from, the strength to choose what’s right instead of the easy way out. All of it. She simply smiled and suggested I get my admin license too, because I could do just that.

No, friend. I loathe conflict. I avoid it like the plague, and if I’m honest, that single trait alone probably cancels out any other quality I have that might make me good in the role. But in her ever-reassuring way, she insisted I had the right skill set and spent the following two years encouraging me to move beyond the classroom.

Because that’s the woman she was. Always lifting others up. Always encouraging and empowering colleagues to be their best, and never intimidated or threatened by others’ strengths. Had I stayed in California, I likely would have followed her advice. But alas, my husband transferred to Colorado, and so it was time for yet another school.

Years 13–16: The Supporter

Leaving that school was absolutely devastating, and leaving a strong principal was… scary.

Enter Mrs. S.

She was strong in many ways, but the strength I’d like to point out here was her strength in support.

As life often does, it threw a giant curveball during my time here. My coworker and dear friend suddenly passed away. Mrs. S had the job of calling the entire staff into a stand-up meeting during lunch, while kids were at school, while I was left wondering why my friend hadn’t shown up that day, to explain that she had very tragically and suddenly passed. A freak health event no one could have predicted. As a staff, we were devastated.

I genuinely don’t know how she did it, but she spent the rest of that year showing up for us, and especially for our team. She did everything she could to ensure we were able to show up daily for our students, and she gave us the space we needed on the days we weren’t feeling strong enough. She covered classes so we could step out and breathe when we needed to. She checked in quietly, without making a production of it. She never once made us feel like our grief was an inconvenience. I think that’s how I was able to show up fully every day for my students. I knew that if the grief was overwhelming, I could ask her for help without question, but I also knew she was genuinely there, wanting to help. So I was able to stay strong.

The second curveball was the 2020 school closures and shift to online learning. This threw another wrench into best-laid plans, and once again I found myself in the position of being low man on the totem pole. Declining enrollment hit this school hard, and once again I had to leave a school and community I loved, despite my principal’s best attempts to advocate to keep me.

Year 20: All of the Above

Before landing here, I feared education had turned into something that wasn’t sustainable, and that the leaders of the past were just that. So when I landed at this school, I was so thankful to find I was wrong. Within weeks it was clear this principal was all of the above.

Her strength, which was a common theme in all the other administrators I so deeply admire, was also in how she approached the real-life circumstances of a school, including behavior. She showed up for teachers who asked for support when a student needed more than a classroom teacher alone can give. She held herself and her teachers accountable, and she gave room for people to hold her accountable too.

And watching her work, I finally understood the thread running through every leader on this list. It was never any one trait. It was all of the above.

The strongest leaders I’ve worked under understood something that gets lost in the loudest debates: it is not either/or. It is both/and.

They built warm, authentic relationships with staff, families, and students. With students they held firm, loving boundaries. They believed in the genuine good of restorative practices and PBIS. They taught expectations, they repaired harm, they understood that behavior is communication, and they understood that real accountability and real consequences are not the enemy of any of that. They are part of it. A consequence delivered with warmth, consistency, and dignity is not a betrayal of restorative values. It is restorative.

Children feel safest in buildings where the adults mean what they say. Where the rules are the same on a hard day as an easy one. Where someone is documenting what’s happening and acting on it, not to punish, but to protect. And where no one gaslights a child or an adult into believing their lived experience isn’t real.

The leaders I admired never made kids choose between being loved and being held accountable. They offered both, every single day. They made sure every child could say out loud, “I feel safe and seen here,” and mean it, not just say it because it was expected. That is the hardest thing a school leader does. It is the thing that separates the great ones from the rest.

And these women, who I am so lucky to have had in my life, were the great ones. A few are now retired, living their best lives, but the legacy they left behind is a beautiful one. Strong leaders leave a shape behind, a culture, a set of expectations, a way of doing things, and that shape doesn’t disappear overnight. That. That is what great looks like.

Why This Matters

Whatever success I’ve had as a teacher is inseparable from the leadership of the women in this piece. I am very often described by parents and former students as that teacher. The one that changed lives for the better. I’d be lying if I claimed to have been able to achieve that label on my own. I would never have grown into the teacher I am without these amazing women.

Looking back, none of this surprises me. The research tells us principals have one of the largest school-based impacts on student achievement, second only to classroom teachers. After twenty years in education, I believe it. Strong leadership isn’t just a nice-to-have.

When I went looking at what the literature actually says, the same qualities kept surfacing. The Institute of Education Sciences, drawing on the Wallace Foundation’s research, names five behaviors that show up again and again in effective principals: shaping a vision of academic success for all students, creating a climate of collaboration and safety, cultivating leadership in others, improving instruction so teachers can teach at their best, and managing people and processes to drive the school forward.

Reading that list, I saw every woman in this piece. Respect. Responsibility. Integrity. The courage to be unpopular. The strength to support a grieving staff. The accountability to hold the line with both warmth and consequences. None of it was an accident, and all of it changed schools for the better.

If you want to read the research yourself, the Wallace Foundation’s The School Principal as Leader is the best place to start.

Never underestimate the profound impact of a strong leader in education. We are shaped by them. The good ones build us up. The great ones, the rare ones, change the trajectory of entire schools. I am not sure how I was so lucky to have worked for these four incredible women but I am forever grateful.

To all of the principals out there pouring their hearts into the schools they help run: thank you. Beyond words. I don’t think you hear that enough from anyone.

Every once in a while an article pops up that strikes a chord, hitting every swirling thought I’ve had in my head lately as I try to make sense of what’s happening with my students. Right now, those students are a group of rising 6th graders in my summer literacy boot camp who score low on fluency, high on comprehension, and… can’t spell well. Like, at all.

Despite this profile, these students were removed from intensive intervention and placed into Phrase Reading. Whether or not their previous intervention was the right fit, replacing it with a fluency strategy alone left significant gaps unaddressed.

Struggling readers need interventions, yes. But in the upper grades especially, those interventions have to be tied tactfully into grade-level text, so kids have ample, meaningful opportunities to apply what they’re learning. Remediation that lives alone, in a worksheet silo, disconnected from the books their peers are reading, shortchanges them twice: once on the skills, and once on the access.

Isolated fluency practice alone simply isn’t a strong enough approach for any upper grade student.

I do see why the school, using nothing but an oral reading measure to assess them, leaned too heavily on just fluency as their fix. And that is why this discussion is so important.

I woke up this morning to a article, Why Deal with Fluency Instruction in the Middle and High School (Or Ever)?, and boy is it a good one. It digs into the research and touches on something we don’t say out loud often enough: fluency is nonnegotiable in the lower grades, but as kids move up, it shifts into something far more negotiable. He writes that for upper grade students:

Growth is slow and not likely to be obvious to students or teachers, the gains often dissipate quickly, many of their students don’t need any or much fluency support, and the payoffs of that support are likely to have relatively less of an impact on reading comprehension.

And this played into the questions swirling in my head. Just how important is oral fluency practice for upper grade students and how can we best approach literacy in general to ensure success of all of our older kids?

Shanahan begins to argue that fluency has a place in middle and high school and I don’t fully disagree. It is importantish and does have a place but not in the way it’s implemented in lower grades. I do think the majority of instructional time is better spent elsewhere with fluency tactfully sprinkled throughout.

I’m sure I do not have all of the answers- none of us do. But I am sure that a lot of us are on the right track now. And this is the part of the conversation we as educators need more of. Prescribed timing of must do’s seems to be a hidden unicorn- in all of education but especially for our older students. Upper grade literacy conversations are just as important as lower grade ones, and I am glad to see more of them popping up.

Education’s Persistent Gray Areas

Literacy best practice in the upper grades is often set aside to focus on the lower grades. We know how crucial fluency is for our beginning readers. But with fluency specifically in the upper grades, we land in a gray area that can’t be ignored.

Yes, it’s important. Yes, it needs to be addressed. But no, it absolutely shouldn’t be the assessment we lean most heavily on when gauging success in older students, and it shouldn’t be the default focus of our instructional time and energy unless a student genuinely needs it there.

Which brings me to a story because I am sure some of you are thinking: Who on earth is using fluency as a key measure to assess upper grade students?

When my district shifted from iReady to mCLASS, the first round of scores wasn’t read with any kind of nuance. The combination of a one minute Oral Reading Fluency with a three minute sentence level comprehension test is an assessment that can and will catch kids who need more intensive decoding practice… that’s real, and it matters. But it shouldn’t be a one and done measure because without acknowledging the nuance, we risk casting the intervention net too wide.

One of my students approached the one-minute oral reading fluency test with slow, careful precision. She was nervous. The test was new and I was a brand-new adult in her life. So according to Oral Reading Fluency assessment, she “failed.” And she was swiftly placed into an Orton-Gillingham-based intervention she absolutely did not need. (And the deeper core phonics probe did not support) This left her, for the first 6 weeks of school, without time to join a book club which included time practicing oral fluency but also more so emphasized the deeper comprehension skills 4th graders need. But as happens so often in education with new initiatives, the choice wasn’t mine. The low ORF score overrode all else.

Education gets compared to medicine constantly, so let me lean into that. In my twenties I was very athletic and probably pure muscle, clocking in at a size 0/2. If anything, I was way too thin. But a doctor fresh out of med school looked at my chart, looked at the stringent BMI cutoff, saw 5’7” and 143 pounds, and confidently told me I should lose weight.

Friends. That was possibly the worst advice a doctor has ever given me, and I was wise enough to push back. Her inexperience as a new doctor made her lean too heavily on a tool that is useful but at the same time is widely known to have its own set of flaws.

We fall into this exact trap in education. We take a measure that’s good a lot of the time and then refuse to acknowledge that nearly everything in education lives in a gray area. We need to look at each student for who they actually are. A low fluency score should be treated as a red flag and a reason to look closer. But before we move on to an intervention, we have to actually look closer. A fluency score tells you how fast a student reads; BMI tells you the ratio of weight to height. Both are red flags when they fall outside the normal range, but on their own, each tells you remarkably little. The numbers only matter once you know what’s driving them.

None of this means older students never need a heavy prescription of fluency. Some absolutely do. But the question shifts from “How do we raise a fluency score?” to “What is preventing this student from interacting with and understanding increasingly complex text?” Those are not always the same problem.

What the research actually says about fluency, comprehension and age

Dr. Sarah Lupo made this point beautifully in a recent session. The correlation between fluency and comprehension declines as students move into adolescence. In the early grades it’s fairly clean: if a student reads fluently, they generally understand, and if they don’t, comprehension is compromised. By the upper grades, that relationship loosens. I highly recommend reading the article in full as answers a lot of pressing questions that research can answer. Foundational Skills for Older Readers

In it, Sarah points to a study called When Slower Is Faster (Wang and colleagues, 2020) that found something genuinely counterintuitive: strong readers tend to slow down on complex text, reading more disfluently, because they were stopping to work through hard syntax. The weaker readers sped through, skipping the hard parts and their comprehension was worse for it.

So slow reading in an older student is sometimes, but not always, a problem. Sometimes it’s exactly what a skilled reader does. And sometimes the student who races through and sounds polished may be understanding less, not more.

A fluency measure alone won’t give an accurate read in either situation.

This is a nuance in upper-grade readers we need to discuss more. But far too often in education, we try to apply good advice for younger kids to our older students. We need to move away from that.

It’s not fluent or struggling. That’s a false binary we need to let go of. We can take a low fluency score seriously and refuse to let it be the only story we tell about a reader.

So how do we approach literacy in the upper grades?

If fluency tells us less about older readers than we often assume, then what should we focus on instead?

In recent years, we’ve spent too much energy debating whether fluency and phonics matter in the upper grades, and we skip the more useful question entirely: once a kid is reading, what should we actually be doing with our limited time?

In my past two decades of teaching, I’ve had only a handful of kids in 4th through 6th grade who truly couldn’t read. For the majority of my struggling readers (those reading one to two grade levels below) fluency and phonics alone simply weren’t the key. They fall into that zone with a complex mix of circumstances holding them back from grade-level proficiency.

Somewhere around third grade (maybe even second) phonics and fluency need to stop being the main event. I’m not suggesting we abandon either, especially for the kids who genuinely need them. But they should become de-centered. For most readers by that point, the foundational gears are turning. Drilling phonics and/or fluency alone and harder is low-payout work. It’s running the engine in the driveway with the wheels spinning without moving forward. We need to let these kids out onto the open road, where they can apply their skills to grade-level text instead of sitting in neutral.

The road, in the upper grades, is built out of a handful of genuinely high-leverage moves. Our older students need more time in grade-level material. Here’s where the time should go.

Morphology. I’ve mentioned this many times in other posts, and it’s starting to become a louder part of the upper-grade literacy conversation. When approached mindfully (I like to point to Sean Morrisey’s Word Mapping Project here, since it integrates everything) it strengthens spelling and the decoding and fluency of longer words while building meaning at the same time. If I had to choose one foundational area to strengthen in Tier 1 for third grade and beyond, it would be morphology. In my experience, this is the foundational skill level area that gets kids to grow and can keep them out of intervention as words get longer and harder. This is the shift we need: moving from basic phonics to morphology, and engaging in explicit spelling instruction with ample time to practice.

The longer I teach, the more convinced I am that the more time we give kids to actually write words and build orthographic knowledge, the more improvement we’ll see in fluency, comprehension, and yes, even vocabulary. Research in this area remains limited. My classroom observations over two decades lead me to suspect we’re underestimating the role spelling and orthographic knowledge play in supporting older readers, and it’s an area I’d love to see explored further.

And for students in interventions, the goal shouldn’t be endless remediation disconnected from meaningful reading. Too often, intervention gets stuck on isolated skills practice while students have few opportunities to apply those skills to authentic text.

Yes, some targeted foundational work is necessary. But intervention should also include supported access to grade-level text, and connections to what’s happening in the classroom. I’d keep fluency practice in intervention, but it wouldn’t be the center of the work. It should be short, targeted, and embedded within a broader approach that helps students move toward grade-level proficiency.

Novel studies. Somehow this is controversial. Plenty of people will argue that spending weeks in one text is a waste of time, but I’ve never experienced it that way. A rich, engaging novel gives students the motivation to apply their skills to something they actually want to be doing. The rich vocabulary, figurative language, and complex themes that students have to grapple with and discuss together is the exact work that pulls it all together. And through novels, you can practice oral fluency. Students tend to be more engaged and more willing to read out loud when they’re excited about it. What stalls progress is handing kids the same short passage, disconnected from anything they care about, and asking them to read it over and over again all week long. Give kids a reason to read, and they will. (This isn’t to say everything in the literacy block should be a novel. Nuance is key: novels paired with short, content-connected texts is the goal.)

Poetry and readers theater. Integrating poetry and theater is a great, age-appropriate way to weave fluency practice into a unit. Again, it’s not the central task but through either, students get to engage with high-rigor, often complex text while also building fluency. I’m not sure I would integrated readers theater past 5th grade but poetry? Absolutely. Having students write, read and preform their own poetry or stories is a high impact activity that can and will increase the foundational skills many are focused on… like fluency.

Knowledge building with Cross-curricular units. The single most effective thing we can do for upper-grade comprehension is build deep, connected background knowledge. In elementary classrooms, there’s so much room to integrate content-knowledge reading into the literacy block. We have a single-classroom model and one teacher with the same kids all day. We’re not capitalizing on it nearly as well as we could. By pulling the reading of social studies and science into the reading block where we can, we free up time later in the day to do the real work of historians and scientists. And it all circles back to engagement: we’re giving kids a reason to apply the morphology, vocabulary, and fluency work they’ve done to something they actually want to apply it to.

This is where it all compounds. When the morphology you’re teaching comes from the science or social studies unit, the novel connects to the history you’re studying, and the writing pulls from all of it, knowledge stops being a pile of disconnected facts and starts becoming a web. That web is what lets a reader make inferences and hold dense text together. We need more flexibility to build such units and frankly curriculum publishers should be doing a lot of that heavy lifting for everyone.

None of this is a knock on foundational skills. It’s the opposite. It’s taking them seriously enough to know when they’ve done their job and it’s time to build on top of them instead of keeping a twelve-year-old in the same drills we’d give a six-year-old and calling it rigor.

A low fluency score may tell us something important. But for older readers, it’s rarely the whole story. The next time you’re staring at one, resist the reflex to reach for the intervention binder. Ask the harder question first: What is this score really telling me and… what, if anything, is missing from this student’s foundation, and how can I strengthen it with meaningful tasks? The answer for our upper-grade students isn’t just more drills. It’s complex and involves morphology, real books, deep knowledge, and time spent thinking hard about things worth thinking about. That’s what will build the path to success for our older students.

For upper grade story telling and poetry, A great starting point is The Moth’s - The Bad Haircut for showing how engaging personal writing and story telling can be or any of the abundance of spoken word poetry units out there. Somewhere in the depths of my resources I have lessons for both. I will dig in and link them if I find time.

This is a touchy topic. I found out quickly in our journey that suggesting Orton-Gillingham isn’t the cure-all for every student is not the safest thing to say to a large group of dyslexia advocates. The first time I suggested such a bold idea felt a little like….

I should have learned quickly not to critique such beloved programs but alas, when the goal is student success… I truly believe these are exactly the conversations we need to have more of.

A program can be great and the evidence, both anecdotal and actual scientific research, can still show it isn’t bulletproof. Both things are true at once. By refusing to hold that tension, we risk failing more kids. And worse, we risk another pendulum swing- the field lurching from one orthodoxy to the next instead of asking the harder, quieter question: is this working for this child and if not, what about it isn’t useful? How can we adjust that part?

For my daughter it was clear that her Orton-Gillingham program successfully taught her the rules. She was very successful at completing each lesson. But she was not able to apply this learning fully to authentic tasks such as reading a grade level novel or writing, well, anything really.

The honest reading of the research backs this up. When you look at OG programs as a whole rather than a bundle of good practices, the evidence is thinner than its reputation. The 2021 Stevens et al. meta-analysis found that Orton-Gillingham interventions showed positive but not statistically significant effects on foundational skills like phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and spelling. That doesn't make OG ineffective. It simply means the evidence does not support treating it as a guaranteed solution for every dyslexic child.

The fact is, many modern OG programs spend too much time on tasks that are heavy on cognitive load and low on payout. This is something I’ve had a close eye on for the last five years watching my daughter engage in a popular OG program fully, working as hard as any kid I know, and all the while never making real growth.

My Own Rose-Colored Glasses

She was diagnosed with dyslexia in second grade, after doing quite the incredible job masking it in kindergarten and half of first. (Kudos to her first-grade teacher for seeing through it — and to her kindergarten teacher, whom we still see often and absolutely adore. No one could have caught it then.)

Second grade is when she began her journey with Orton-Gillingham, and I- a fully trained and certified OG specialist myself- was stoked. I wrote a lot back then about how lucky we were as a family and how grateful I was for her school. In the era of whiplash away from balanced literacy and Lucy Calkins, why would I believe anything other than that we’d found the answer?

Watching my daughter closely, though, I began to question the methods her OG program leaned on, the very same ones I knew so well. IMSE spends a lot of time on nonsense words and syllable division. When she was younger, I thought this was amazing. We’d spend summers diving into the blending board and the three-part routine, and I would even create chalk obstacle course on the sidewalk in front of our house for extra fun and practice. I was convinced that together with her school, we’d save her from the hurdles of dyslexia.

I guess I didn’t see then what dyslexia had actually tied to her: a one-ton stack of bricks, and we were asking her to run a 5k with it on her back.

IMSE started to slowly lessen that load I absolutely have to give it credit for that. But then she stalled. You simply can’t run a 5k under those conditions without the right tools, and by third grade I could see that whittling away at the rope with just the plastic knife IMSE had given her was getting her nowhere.

Fake it Til You Make it - Hiding Behind the Scores

The tricky part of dyslexia is many kids get good at finding ways to mask and she was no stranger to masking. She quickly found ways to avoid writing tasks and was able to hide behind her i-Ready “growth.”

She recently told me that adults would sometimes help her read the questions on i-Ready. So that magic 90-point jump every spring, the one that landed her right below grade level and let everyone exhale, makes a lot more sense to me now.

I put zero blame on her teachers for that. Knowing the pressure they were under to raise those growth scores, the instinct to help a struggling kid in front of a screen is human and kind. I put 100% of the blame on a measure that was never meant to detect dyslexia in the first place and that is now under enormous scrutiny for failing kids in a million and one ways.

That's not just my opinion. Curriculum Associates explicitly states that i-Ready should not be used to evaluate dyslexia. Yet those growth scores repeatedly created the illusion that she was on track.

It wasn’t until fifth grade, when her district dropped i-Ready for mCLASS, that the truth had nowhere left to hide. When it comes to DIBELS and oral reading fluency, no dyslexic child can hide behind those scores. And suddenly what I’d been saying since third grade was crystal clear and undeniable: IMSE was not working.

When Solid Advice is Ignored

Here’s where it stops being just my story.

When the school decided to pull her from her intervention- to replace it with “phrase reading” and a sprinkle of an online program called Lexia- my heart sank. Looking at her interventionist’s notes, it was obvious this was the wrong move. The interventionist stated plainly that she needed more, not less.

And then she made the observation that finally made me think thank god, someone in this building actually sees her. It was something like: she works incredibly hard and is doing great in intervention. She knows all the rules and can successfully complete our lessons. But she cannot apply any of this learning to authentic tasks.

Bingo. There it is. The whole problem, named in two sentences by the one person paying close enough attention to name it. She was successful inside the small, 40-minute OG group with its rigid routines, but still could not carry enough of it into the real work of reading and writing.

So to move a child who couldn’t apply what she had learned after years of OG into authentic grade level tasks into something as basic as phrase reading and online Lexia seemed like…. an interesting choice. What struck me most was that the district had recently received guidance warning against exactly this kind of move. In 2023, they hired Timothy Odegard to advise on district best practice moving forward. His review emphasized more intensive intervention, not less, for kids with this exact profile. It warned that failing to build robust intervention creates an adversarial culture and leaves kids who fall well below grade level without the intensity they need.

So when the school pulled my daughter from intervention and handed her phrase reading, they didn’t just ignore my years of asking. They did the opposite of what was recommended and frankly, common sense, told them to do.

I knew she needed more and most likely something a bit different. So I reached out to some experts in the field and made the switch to speech-to-print.

At Last - Finding the Right Tool to Cut the Rope

What was it about speech-to-print that finally made it feel like someone had cut the rope?

First, let me be clear about what it did and didn’t do. It did not lift the weight of dyslexia. The bricks are still on her back and always will be. Dyslexia isn’t “cured,” and she still has an Everest to climb. But in a 5k race after four kilometers of dragging that one-ton load by a rope, fighting ten times as hard to move half as far… the switch was like someone finally walking up and cutting the majority of what the rope was tied to. Some of the weight stayed. But for the first time, in the last stretch of the race, she could actually run.

So what shifted? As always, friends… it’s complex. But if I had to pin it down: the program we used, Reading Simplified, spends far more time on high-payout, lower-cognitive-load tasks than her OG program did. And that practice was transferable to authentic tasks.

IMSE’s three-part drill was a good starting place for her. I’ll always give it credit for that. But in my opinion it over-emphasizes decoding, and it loads kids down with cognitively heavy, low-payout work: annotating words with a strict set of rules just to break them into syllables, and drilling nonsense words- as two examples. For my daughter, that overhead was the trap. She could perform all of it at the table and still not carry any of it into a real book or her writing.

What changed was the direction and the load. Instead of marking up a word and applying a procedure to it, we started from the sounds and connected them to print. Instead of the rigid annotate-then-divide routine, she learned to chunk words flexibly and in the way she’d actually need to when reading authentic text. She also had to spell them, by hand, while saying the sounds. There’s still real overlap with what she did before; she’s still learning spelling patterns and working through fluency passages that focus on the skill she’s practicing (but at grade level- no longer remedial only.) We let go of the low-payout drills, and that freed up the room she needed.

I can’t prove that’s the mechanism. I can only tell you what I watched happen: dropping the cognitive overhead and shifting to sounds-first, by-hand practice is what finally let her make the leap from practice to application.

That handwriting piece was bigger than I expected. There’s a growing body of neuroscience suggesting that writing by hand does something for the learning brain that typing (or sorting letter tiles and word cards) doesn’t. High-density EEG research from van der Weel and van der Meer found that compared to typing, handwriting produces widespread brain connectivity in regions tied to memory and learning. Other reviews link handwriting specifically to better spelling accuracy and letter recognition. For a dyslexic child who desperately needs that physical, written application to make the code connect, the pencil may be one of the best pathways that makes it all click. We spent far more time there than she ever had before.

And then there are those nonsense words (aka my forever pet peeve.) They have real value in assessment, where the point is to isolate decoding from memorization. But in instruction, for an older student with limited minutes? I’d rather spend those minutes on meaningful language, morphology, and authentic text. Reading is meaning-making, and once a child is past the earliest stages, meaning should be the whole point. We don’t have minutes to spare on meaningless strings of letters.

I only spent about six months in Reading Simplified. After four years of Orton-Gillingham, my daughter already had a strong knowledge base, she just couldn’t apply it. The speech-to-print approach finally gave her the tools to do exactly that. And by the end of the year, we saw solid growth on mCLASS. Real growth this time. The kind no one had to help her fake.

When discussing popular approaches like Orton-Gillingham, I feel like I always have to end with a clarification: I am not anti-OG. I am anti-certainty. I’m against the version of this conversation where a program’s reputation becomes a wall that parents and kids can’t get past.

What I want is for us to have more honest discussions about which pieces of programs work and which don’t. I want teachers and parents to be given the space to be brave enough to say it out loud when something isn’t working, even in a room full of people who love that something. For some like me, that bravery comes even when they love that thing too.

This summer I worked with a small group of kids using Sean Morrisey’s Word Mapping Project (some actually dyslexic, some who just can’t spell. ) And watching them, I stopped thinking my daughter’s struggle was really about IMSE, or about dyslexia, or about any one program at all. The thread running through all of them was the same: they could perform skills in isolation, and they almost never got to use them. The authentic practice, the real reading, the real writing, the by-hand spelling of words that mean something, is what was missing for everyone. My daughter’s dyslexia just made the gap impossible to hide. The Word Mapping Project is another amazing program that addresses all of the above and more.

So that’s where I’ve landed. For upper-grade students especially, the focus of reading intervention has to shift toward application into authentic tasks. We need to integrate novels and authentic hand written tasks. We need more time on high-payout work and less on the cognitively expensive, low-return drills. Once a kid hits third grade, we no longer have time to waste and the whole game becomes getting them to a place where transferring skills out of intervention and into real reading and writing becomes easier, not harder.

We need to cut the one-ton rope.

And we need to make sure the MTSS process isn’t just a formality… because for my daughter, it sure was. If an intervention isn’t working, and a kid isn’t showing true progress - and by true progress I mean both meeting all their goals and being able to transfer those skills to authentic tasks- then we adjust the approach. Period.

Every kid deserves at least that much.

My daughter gave me permission to tell this story. When I asked her why she said yes, her answer was simple: so no other child ever has to go through what she did. I can’t think of a better reason to keep having these sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

Sources: The 2021 meta-analysis is Stevens et al., “Current State of the Evidence: Examining the Effects of Orton-Gillingham Reading Interventions,” Exceptional Children. The handwriting findings are from van der Weel & van der Meer (2024), Frontiers in Psychology. The i-Ready diagnostic limitation is stated in Curriculum Associates’ own i-Ready Diagnostic accessibility documentation. The district review referenced is an Odegard report which I was given full permission to “share widely” (Timothy Odegard, Ph.D., 11/16/2023).

South Pasadena schools have a reputation that is strongly backed with action. The school I worked at, Marengo Elementary, is what I can only describe now as “education eutopia.” South Pasadena School District is, in every sense of the word, a district any parent hopes and dreams for their child to attend. So when we moved to the Boulder area, we did so in search of that same dream and intentionally bought a house zoned for a district with a reputation that appeared, on the surface, to be as strong as the district we left behind. This is a place that takes kids seriously, we told ourselves. This is where she’ll be seen.

I walked into this district with all of that and one more thing: a daughter who is dyslexic and a mother’s certainty that I would be able to partner with the system to ensure it worked with her.

I was wrong about that last part. And I want to talk honestly about how it feels to be wrong about it.

The slow failure

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching a system fail your child while you are doing everything right. I want to name it plainly, because I think a lot of parents are carrying that exact thing silently.

I partnered with the school, I publically applauded the work I believed they were doing, I believed every word they told me despite a nagging feeling they might be wrong. “Your daughter is doing great!” was something we were told repeatedly. And given how hard she works and how tricky the twice exceptional profile can be, maybe they believed that too. I was, by every measure, the parent the system is supposedly designed to partner with.

And it still failed her.

On paper, every box was checked. Strong, explicit whole-class phonics and structured literacy? In place. Orton-Gillingham Tier 2 intervention when that wasn’t enough? That too. By every measure the system tracks, she was getting exactly what she was supposed to on paper. And yet she still struggled intensely.

That’s the part nobody prepares you for: watching your child do everything right, inside a program checking off all the boxes, and yet she still somehow slips through. She put in the work after school. We read with her every day. We provided summer tutoring… and yet… dyslexia being the beast that it is, demanded more and more.

The hardest moment came in her 5th grade year, in late December, when they pulled her out of her intervention. Not because she no longer needed it and certainly not because she had closed the gap. They pulled her out while everything in her record was screaming that she needed more not less. When we finally were given all of the data, I sat with those numbers and I could not square them with the decision in front of me. There is a special helplessness in being a person who understands exactly what is happening and being unable to stop it anyway.

If you have felt that, and I know far too many of us have… the meetings, the politeness, the slow erosion of your faith that anyone is going to catch your kid… I see you. You are not imagining it, and you are not being difficult. You are being a good parent.

At some point the math becomes simple, even if nothing about it is easy. If the system won’t do it, I will.

In conversations with brilliant minds in this space, including Marnie Ginsberg, whose thinking reshaped how I approached the whole problem, I made the decision to shift to a speech-to-print approach. Rather than starting with letters and asking kids to attach sounds, speech-to-print starts with the sounds children already own and maps them onto print. For a dyslexic learner, that reframe is not a small tweak and for my daughter, it felt like the missing piece to a puzzle we had longed to find.

I started seeing improvement almost immediately.

Wednesday Mornings - Coffee, Speech-to-Print, and a Novel

I didn’t want this for my daughter alone, so I started a free morning tutoring group. A small gathering of her and a handful of her friends, before the “late start” school day. We began with the speech-to-print foundation, the explicit, no-nonsense work that builds the underlying system. Then we dove into a novel study, because they needed to apply the heavy work of decoding into a meaningful and engaging text, and these kids deserved to read something worth reading.

It was working. But life, reality, and the impossible schedule of competitive sports life stepped in to make things just a little bit trickier. No parenting book I ever read warns you about the relentless schedule of being eleven. When did the sports world become so incredibly life consuming? And why?! (I digress… this feels like a different post for a different day…)

The in-person work we did together was research-backed and effective, but as a mom there is only so much you can make your own kid do when it comes to independent practice. I was working with her daily but only seeing my small group once a week. They all needed more reps and targeted practice that has to happen on their own time, in the cracks of a packed life.

There is a real gap in resources for upper grade students. The intervention world is built for early elementary. By the time a kid hits the upper grades, the tools dry up, and what’s left often feels babyish, repetitive, or disconnected from the actual reading they’re doing. Older struggling readers get handed materials that quietly tell them they’re behind.

I noticed with this group that what they were craving was real meaningful work. They also didn’t want their time to be wasted AND they wanted work that honored both their needs academically and their dignity.

So I built an app for that

I have strong feelings about screen time. But the reality we're all living is that screens are part of our kids' lives now, and pretending otherwise doesn't serve them. Nothing replaces written, in-person work- nothing- and Summit Spelling was never meant to. It's the supplement, not the substitute.

I built Summit Spelling to complement the work I was doing with my daughter and her friends. The daily, in-person, research-backed program I was running with my daughter, and the weekly sessions with our morning group needed an extra boost. I am a big fan of never wasting a child’s time so this app is, frankly, no-nonsense. It exists to give these kids the supplemental practice they need to actually close the gap, on their own time, without being talked down to.

It started as a solution for one girl at my kitchen table. It has turned into something I believe a lot of families and a lot of teachers have been waiting for.

The Path Less Traveled

If you are a parent in the thick of it: keep going. Document everything, trust your read on your own child, and know that advocating loudly is what your child needs and deserves. The exhaustion is real but… so is your instinct.

And if any of this sounds like your kid, the upper-grade reader who got left in the intervention desert, reach out. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. The tools are getting better, and some of us are done waiting for permission to build them.

We moved here, to this neighborhood and this district, for the reputation. What I learned is that no reputation, no district, (perhaps not even my beloved South Pasadena) and no system is going to love your kid the way you do. But you can learn the science. You can find the right people. And sometimes, when the door you were promised stays shut, you simply build your own.

The Perils of Summer Slide - And How to Prevent It.

As the school year wrapped up, I saw this group needed more. So I dug in to find a good fit program to bridge the end of 5th grade to the beginning of middle school. SpellBridge is a strong supplement, so we continue to use that and in addition to it, I set out to build a one hour a day summer program that once again incorporated word work, writing and reading.

The word study program I am using this summer (daily, for free, with a group of about 8 kids now) is none other than Sean Morrisey’s Word Mapping Project. This program is the real deal and should be a part of every upper grade classroom’s Tier 1 instruction. I am already seeing improvements in their spelling, vocabulary, and love for all things words and its only been a month.

There’s one more piece to our summer I can’t leave out. Alongside the word work, we’re reading By the Great Horn Spoon! together and (because I am who I am) I’ve built a companion website around it that pulls the Gold Rush off the page and into real social studies and science. Map work, the chemistry of panning for gold, the geography of a journey from Boston to California. I built it because I wanted to keep them excited about both the decoding and the world the decoding opens up. And here is the thing I wish more people understood: these kids light up. Every single time. They light up the moment they’re handed a structure that actually works and the support to climb inside it. Give them the tools, and they run.

That is exactly why I’m running a summer group for free. Not because my time is worth nothing, but because these kids are worth everything, and they have already waited long enough. They deserve this and so much more. And until the system catches up, some of us will keep building, keep opening doors, and keep handing kids the structures they were owed all along.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Timothy Shanahan on the Thought Stretchers podcast with Drew Perkins about the use of leveled readers in classrooms (Spoiler- just stop using them) We also briefly chatted about short passage basals and the inner conflict schools and districts grapple with as they try to implement them.

In the basic program… it’s shorter works… complete stories and things like that, but also excerpts and essays and all that kind of stuff. Schools can supplement it, you know, provide novels and so on, but the basic program is shorter works…

…but that isn’t the only reading kids should be doing. That’s instructional reading. that’s uh you know anyone who looks at a reading instruction book and says ah that’s what kids should be reading no that’s what we teach kids with. they should be reading a much wider range of books than that.

Integrity, Not Fidelity

When I approach any program, I approach it through the lens of integrity, not strict fidelity. That means honoring the scope and sequence, ensuring kids are taught the skills each day, and using the program materials in a way that best fits student needs.

I’m lucky to have the freedom and trust from my school to do that, and my kids show solid growth while also maintaining an actual love for both school and learning. But how do I do it?

First, when approaching a basal curriculum, I replace most, if not all, book excerpts. Kids get very little from a single chapter pulled out of a book. You cannot fully grasp character development or plot from a short chapter and yet the line of questioning in most basals assumes you can. I find short excerpts from books simply aren’t worth anyone’s time.

At the beginning of the year, Into Reading has kids reading a chapter out of Flora and Ulysses with the main objective being character change over time. (lol. What? There is no way students can see the full arc of a character in a book as rich as that from chapter 2.)

So I replace it with Frindle. Frindle is a short read that takes about 8 days… only 3 days longer than reading the same chapter from Flora and Ulysses every day that week.

The focus skills for the first two weeks of instruction include: Central Idea, Ask/Answer Questions, Author’s Purpose, Text Features, Figurative Language, Monitor & Clarify, Point of View, and Characters. These are taught using one short excerpt from a novel and one short story.

Frindle hits all of those skills thoroughly, so I swap out the single chapter excerpt in exchange for an entire novel.

The Power of the Whole Class Novel

Frindle is an especially powerful novel to use in 4th grade because it accomplishes a lot in one short book. You have a clear plot sequence, clear character development and change over time, multiple perspectives, chances to revise what we think we know about characters’ motives, and… a fun intro into the world of words.

Frindle is my jumping-off point to get students stoked about word study. For those who haven’t read it, the story follows Nick Allen, a creative fifth grader who loves pushing boundaries, especially with his language-obsessed teacher, Mrs. Granger. After a lesson about who decides what words mean, Nick has an idea: what if he invented one himself? As a joke, he renames a pen a frindle and slowly convinces the entire school to adopt it. The book hooks students immediately because it turns language into something alive and powerful. Suddenly words are not just memorized things in a dictionary… they are built, shaped, and changed by people. That idea becomes the perfect doorway into morphology, because students begin to see words differently: not as random strings of letters, but as meaningful parts connected to history, patterns, and human decisions.

This book accomplishes a lot in two short weeks. Students are excited about 4th grade, they’re excited about reading, they have buy-in to the boring stuff (hello, basal readers), and suddenly they’re excited about word study. Now that I’ve hooked them, we can bounce back into the basal to do exactly what Shanahan described the basal is for: instruction.

From here, I use the program’s short passage “Year of the Rat” to ensure skills are transferable and to continue scaffolded supports if needed. The program asks students to write a Response to Literature for, “Year of the Rat” so I use it as an opportunity to teach that skill, since the explicit teaching is not built into the program. I then give students an essay frame, so they can begin practicing the structure of that type of essay while taking some of the cognitive load and demands off of them.

I continue to adjust the program to better suit student needs and this means, honestly, I ditch Into Reading’s foundational skills. It simply doesn’t have the depth or rigor 4th graders need. I created my own program which is similar to what you might find in Morpheme Magic, but more aligned to my style. For anyone looking for a strong upper-grade word study program, my strongest recommendation remains The Word Mapping Project. It would absolutely be Mrs. Granger approved.

Most new reading curriculum out there is organized by module themes, and the themes are often aligned to at least grade-level NGSS standards. My district was told by an Into Reading representative that the order of the modules isn’t set in stone and can be moved around so I move Module 6 up to align with our Social Studies unit on the Geography of Colorado, along with our Science unit on landforms. This ensures I’m maximizing my day with cross-curricular study. We do instructional reading of these concepts during reading, then do the work of social scientists and scientists during our content area block. This deepens knowledge building, rigor, engagement, and all of the things students need. It also makes my life easier because I’m not crunched for time.

I weave these topics throughout the day. We read poetry about landforms, then dive into Colorado landforms and write our own poetry using sensory imagery. We read informational text about plate tectonics, then do hands-on learning about rock cycles, earthquakes, and volcanoes during science. In writing, we create our own classroom magazine as we hone our skills writing informational text based on all the learning we did in this module alone.

With research continuing to highlight how knowledge building drives student success (especially in reading comprehension) it would be detrimental to students not to make shifts like this.

I continue to look for these ties everywhere I can. I make sure the module tied to Life Science in Into Reading is taught alongside our Science unit on Life Science. I create opportunities in writing that weave these subjects together.

Giving teachers both the room and the supports to do this work is truly key to making any curriculum successful. These small tweaks don’t compromise the integrity of the program — you’re still using the core of it while ensuring students get a rigorous and engaging education. Allowing room for cross-curricular ties boosts knowledge building when it isn’t explicitly strong in the program, and allowing room to replace lower-quality excerpts with full novels is genuinely key to student success.

There are stretches where we’re not reading a whole-class novel because there isn’t a clear opportunity to incorporate one. This is where I believe teachers need flexibility with how and when to bring novels in. Sometimes I use them as a strong instructional tool (Frindle at the beginning of the year, or The Wild Robot alongside our Life Science unit), and sometimes I use them just as a chance to enjoy and connect with students. We read the story together, sometimes simply as a read-aloud, and fully bond over the love of a book.

I also incorporate novels into small-group book studies, and I make sure absolutely every student (maybe even especially my struggling students) has the chance to be part of a book group.

It’s never either/or and teachers shouldn’t have to feel like they are being pulled between just short passages or just whole novels. Students need a healthy mix of both. It’s this both/and that often gets left out of instructional decisions and it’s this space between that we need to explore more.

This is the supplementing Shanahan was describing. The basal does its job. We do ours. That’s how we get both- the science and the love of reading.

If you’re trying to support a reader who feels stuck, I’ve shared the tools I use, especially around morphology and supporting all learners, on my website. It’s all there if you need something practical to start with.

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator and literacy specialist focused on structured literacy, morphology, and supporting upper grade readers.

I wrote this post a few months ago and then abandoned it. This morning I woke up to an article about the San Francisco school district and a popular reading curriculum called Into Reading. The piece muses about how and why, after adopting Into Reading, scores actually dropped. This question was asked:

Is the third of teachers not using the curriculum the main issue, or does the data around classroom engagement and rigor play a larger role?

Both are true. It’s a red flag that a third of teachers haven’t used the materials at all — the question is why, and who is responsible for fixing that. But the deeper problem is in classrooms that are using the curriculum. Why haven’t we gotten to the change in student work we want to see? That’s where the rubber meets the road.

I need to flat-out say this: reading instruction is complex work. There is no single answer to what makes something succeed or flop. Quality curriculum is absolutely key, but teacher expertise is a bigger indicator of success. Changing curriculum alone isn’t the answer, and blind fidelity to any single program causes more problems than people imagine. Things become overly complicated when we pretend there is an easy fix. There isn’t. And that’s okay.

The two years after my district adopted Into Reading, I spent entire summers analyzing data and attempting to fix what was broken. My school was an “early adopter” and tasked with piloting the program to advise on smooth implementation the next year district wide. My team partnered with another school to fix the program’s student-facing slides, and after a year of work they still weren’t where they needed to be. It was the hardest year of my teaching career.

Below are my thoughts on that work, and what made it so hard.

Humor is my lifeline.

When things get heavy (and we all know teaching has been heavy for a while now) my mind drifts back to one show more than any other: Schitt’s Creek.

That show has gotten me through burnout, curriculum adoptions, and some truly ridiculous professional development sessions. There is something oddly comforting about watching chaos unfold on screen when you’re living it in real life.

Which brings me to 2023, the year my district adopted a brand-new, shiny, “Science of Reading aligned!” basal curriculum.

I walked into that first curriculum training genuinely hopeful. Perhaps, at long last, a publisher had created something truly useful. Maybe we were getting something deeply aligned to research. Maybe this was the year the curriculum actually made teaching easier instead of harder.

As the day went on, that hope slowly turned into confusion. To quote Moira Rose, I’m pretty sure the look on my face turned from bright and hopeful to that of a “disgruntled pelican.”

Red flag after red flag popped up while the presenter cheerfully insisted, “This is so much more than a basal!” and “All you have to do is follow the click path!” As if somewhere hidden behind fifteen tabs and seven PDFs lived the secret to high-quality instruction.

And that’s when it hit me.

If you’ve ever watched Schitt’s Creek, you probably remember the now-iconic cooking scene where Moira casually tells David to “fold in the cheese.” David- a man who has absolutely never cooked a meal in his life- stares into a bowl of half-mixed ingredients and finally panics, “What does that mean? How do you fold in the cheese?”

Moira’s response is pure Moira: “You just… fold it in.”

No demonstration. No clarification. No actual understanding of the recipe she herself wrote. Just vibes and the assertion that if you just, you know, fold it in… there is nothing else to explain. It just will be.

David gets so frustrated that he pulls off his apron and walks away, completely abandoning the recipe and the meal.

That scene played on a loop in my head as curriculum training stretched on for days.

Into Reading became the cheese no one could explain how to fold in. Somehow, despite the bulky teacher’s edition and endless click paths of resources, no one could explain how to ensure the dish would turn out right.

That scene perfectly captures what it feels like to teach with many “new” curriculum programs and I couldn’t help but think… if it’s this hard for me, a teacher described as an expert in the field, what does it feel like for a new teacher?'

They probably feel like David Rose.

Quality curriculum is an absolute must, especially for new teachers. Every teacher, new or seasoned, deserves a clear, coherent curriculum with real instructional support. When that’s absent, things fall apart and when the curriculum “recipe” is so confusing that even master teachers cannot follow it- that’s a bigger problem than most realize.

Master teachers know what good instruction looks like. They can spot shallow learning instantly because they understand how skills actually develop over time. And yet when a new curriculum is adopted, we’re told to follow the program with “fidelity,” even when it’s clearly not meeting high quality standards.

Just fold in the cheese, everyone.

Imagine handing a recipe that defies the laws of cooking to a master chef. We all know how Gordon Ramsay would react. And, quietly, so did master teachers.

What became clear almost immediately after adoption was that this curriculum wasn’t broken in one or two small places, it was structurally unrealistic from the start.

The pacing guide promised a clean, manageable five-day instructional cycle. In reality, each module contained far more content than could reasonably fit into a school week. Teachers were constantly forced to rush, skip, or triage lessons just to stay afloat. And while the program claimed skills would spiral and deepen over time, what actually happened was repetition without growth. Students brushed past concepts again and again, but rarely with increased complexity, application, or mastery. The depth that research tells us is necessary for learning simply never materialized.

Analyzing skills taught over the year in 4th grade, Text and Graphic features takes up 18 days while Literary Elements, Summarizing, Poetry and Plot take only 4 to 5 days each.

While I do, as a teacher, applaud the time spent on text and graphic features. True rigor in 4th grade demands much more time spent elsewhere. Almost anywhere else, in fact.

And when teachers raised concerns about pacing, content and rigor?

The answer was a mere… Don’t worry! It spirals. Re: “Just fold in the cheese.”

True high quality curriculum would not be leaving teachers scrambling to fix things with edits or additional resources. High quality curriculum wouldn’t require teachers needing to pay money out of pocket for modules and lessons to make the curriculum modules and lessons workable. And yet, Facebook curriculum support groups are flooded with comments like this one:

Major complaints about programs like Into Reading seem to have common themes. The program’s instructional slides are thin, incomplete, and often ineffective at explicitly teaching skills. Most of the usable content exists only for vocabulary and basic reading tasks and even those were lacking in clarity, depth, and explicit modeling. Essential components of literacy instruction are scattered in PDFs that required endless searching for by “Just follow the click path!” Whole strands like listening comprehension and communication simply need to be left out due to real world time constraints. There is too much all at once and the recipe is too hard to follow.

But again, teachers are told not to worry, the program will work so long as you just… you know… fold in the cheese.

There is a glaring absence of novels in this program. Novels need a consistent place in all classrooms 3rd grade and up. This design flaw is likely one of the main reasons teachers abandon some if not all of the program.

Aside from that, there are other pain points that cannot be ignored. Across grade levels, foundational skills sequences feel rushed, disorganized, and poorly aligned to how literacy development actually works. The scope and sequence looks impressive on paper, but the lessons themselves tell a very different story.

Here is a mid year spelling lesson for 4th grade. These words, however, are more appropriate for late 2nd grade leaving kids frustrated, annoyed, and completely disengaged.

The writing component exposes the cracks even further. In 4th grade, students are routinely expected to produce multi-paragraph essays, sometimes several per week, within the reading block alone- defying the laws of time management. Further, there is no clear instructional pathway showing how those skills are supposed to be built. Within each writing unit, (seperate from the writing demands above) kids don’t even write at all until day 5, and the weekly lesson plans often suggest skipping two to three writing lessons per week

Below is an example of the weekly editable plans for 4th grade writing. Note, the gray boxes are lessons a teacher can choose to skip.

So how do kids learn how to become proficient writers without daily direct, explicit instruction and practice?

“Just fold in the cheese”

To be clear, the problem isn’t that programs like Into Reading exists. The problem is the gap between the abundance of resources such programs contain and what realistically ensures success in a classroom.

Walking away and pivoting to yet another curriculum isn't necessarily the answer. There will never be a perfect curriculum. Every box will need supplementation and adjustments to fit the needs of the real life students in the classroom. And even in something that has received as much criticism and rejection as bloated basals, the potential is there.

In my 20 years of teaching, I have watched teachers do extraordinary things with less than ideal materials. My team spent a school year and I spent the subsequent two summers reworking and rebuilding slides not because we were told to, but because we understood what kids needed and we couldn’t watch them get less than that. When we finally shared those slides district-wide, teachers were grateful for something basic that should have been there from the start. That labor shouldn’t be invisible and it shouldn’t be volunteer work. It should be done by the publisher and if it isn’t, it needs to be a major part of the adoption and implementation process.

Even in the worst basal/short-passage programs, districts can find ways to make it all work. There are strong opportunities to integrate novels. There is potential for cross-curricular units. When teachers have the flexibility to adapt and move modules, to pair a science-connected text with actual science instruction, something clicks. That’s what the program could be. If the support to build on it isn’t there, that is when you see dips in test scores and that is when teacher abandon the program completely.

Until curriculum publishers fix the issues, if the goal is ensuring student success, we need to discuss the pressure points of such boxed curriculum and design solutions. This is how we ensure that all teachers use the program and implement high quality instruction in their classrooms.

Here is what my district did well during the adoption process. They listened to our needs, the biggest being the need for collaboration time throughout the year. Together we were able to identify the structural gaps before encountering them at 8am on a Monday. We were able to tweak the pacing guide and build it around real instructional minutes in our real classrooms, not a fantasy schedule. But we still needed explicit direction on: here is what to skip, here is what to supplement, here is why, and here is the support we’re providing while you learn this.

So here’s what I want publishers, district leaders, and curriculum coordinators to actually hear:

Teachers are not the variable you get to ignore. When a third of teachers aren’t using your program, that is not a fidelity problem, it’s a design problem. When master teachers are rebuilding your slides at midnight in the summer, that is not dedication, that is a system failure dressed up as teacher grit.

The answer was never to fold in the cheese harder.

The answer is a recipe that works. One written for real classrooms with real constraints and real students at every skill level. One that comes with an actual explanation, not just vibes and a click path. One that treats teacher expertise as the asset it is instead of the problem to be managed.

David Rose didn’t need to become a master chef in that scene in that moment. He needed someone to explain a recipe that on the surface seemed to be nonsense but, when adjusted, probably could create a solid and delicious meal.

Students deserve curriculum that works the first time it’s opened. Teachers deserve materials that respect their time and their expertise. And curriculum publishers have an obligation to do more than hand teachers a faulty box and call it a solution.

But even when the recipe is faulty… the cheese can be folded in. Leaders in education need to step up with solutions. Someone has to care enough to make sure the dish actually turns out right.

Successful districts in states like Mississippi aren’t finding success by some “miracle.” Nope. These districts have acknowledged the complexities that go into instruction. Instead of looking for quick easy solutions, they zoomed out at the whole picture. Instead of brushing off concerns with “Just fold in the cheese!” they came up with real supports and real solutions for all of the parts of reading instruction. Not just one.

Be the district that helps David Rose. To quote him one last time, don’t leave teachers feeling “like I’m trapped in an Avril Lavigne lyric here.”

The work is complex, but it doesn’t have to be so complicated.

I wrote more about solutions to curriculum problems a while back here in this post My District Adopted Basal Curriculum. Now what?

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The other thing about foundational skills is… we tend to get them all wrong.

Somewhere along the line, someone got the idea that if we just copy-paste the same approach we used in primary grades into upper grades, we’ve done the work. And that’s where things get turned upside down in so many classrooms. That’s where kids sigh, roll their eyes, and begrudgingly take out their foundational skills workbooks crying, “This is sooooo boring.”

They aren’t wrong.

I had a conversation with a former student yesterday. We were chatting about her recent victory at Battle of the Books, and then somehow the conversation shifted to my inability to spell. She smiled and gently asked, “If you can’t spell, why did we spend so much time on morphology?”

Well, my friend- that’s why.

With dyslexia specifically, I explained, the problem isn’t that I don’t understand or know the rules. I know them expertly. The problem is my brain cannot accept the nuance within them, and unfortunately, English spellings (especially our Anglo-Saxon words) are very much layered and nuanced. When there is more than one way to spell a sound, my brain just isn’t wired in a way that allows it to easily access those variations when I am actively trying to spell them.

I know some will say, but Melinda… 98% of English spellings do follow rules. That’s true but/and not completely helpful when you’re dyslexic. My rocket scientist dad put it best when explaining his own dyslexia and frustration for spelling- these rules aren’t like math, where there’s one clear answer. 5 + 4 is always 9, but long a has an overwhelming number of spelling patterns, and don’t even get me started on schwa. (Ok he didn’t mention schwa sound spellings but they haunt me personally so I added it.)

Which is probably why I love teaching spelling and morphology. It helps make sense of what my brain equates to the nonsense.

I went to bed grappling with all of this last night, after telling my daughter there was no wiggle room for her, in 5th grade, to get out of our new at-home spelling intervention routine. It’s an absolute non-negotiable. She needs to strengthen her spelling muscles, but living with dyslexia makes that painfully hard. So I, as her mom and her tutor, have been balancing that need with her need for dignity.

Last month, I had a beautiful conversation with and on their podcast. One thing we touched on was honoring student dignity, specifically in the realm of language arts. I woke up this morning and listened Leah reflecting on that conversation on their latest episode which helped me put to words a concept I find hard to articulate alone: student dignity should be centered in the decisions we make as teachers.

This episode is a must listen and touches on a lot of important ideas- right now I am only focusing on one- foundational skills and how this episode helped put to words ideas spinning in my head last night.

Foundational Skills instruction gets especially tricky as kids enter upper grades. And solutions become even more complex when students need intervention because they are still carrying persistently weak foundational skills- even after intervention, even after years of Orton-Gillingham and yes, even after high quality instruction in the whole group classroom setting.

In this specific situation, How do we honor student dignity while addressing their needs?

I suggested part of the answer is allowing room for novels. My experience has been kids who are in intervention long to be a part of a novel group. They see the joy in their classmates faces as they dig into the latest book, discuss it, laugh about it, grapple with the complex ideas within it… and they want that too. Instead they walk, feet dragging, to their intervention to engage in more work with vowel teams and decodables. Because they need that too. But the contrast in activities feels heavy for them. I dive into this lived reality more in this post- Real Books Change Everything.

Leah appropriately pushed back with a parallel truth: but/and kids still need decodables, but/and some kids still like them.

And this is where everything spinning in my head as I went to bed finally connected.

It’s not that foundational skills are inherently boring. Neither are decodables. It’s that so often we do them wrong.

Kids stuck in Orton-Gillingham spinning on the schwa sound spellings aren’t stuck there for lack of effort- not at all. But/and digging in with the same program and the same lessons (in my daughter’s case, for years) does not honor their dignity, nor does it help them grow. In fact, it pushes them into a space we should be keeping them out of: Either I am too “dumb for this,” or my teacher can’t see I need something different.

Living in the gray areas of education demands acknowledging that there are best paths forward, but not every student needs the same path.

In her podcast, Leah also touches on the difference between speech-to-print and print-to-speech approaches to foundational skills. In print-to-speech, kids start with letters on the page and decode them into sounds. Speech-to-print flips it- kids start with what they already know and hear, then map those sounds onto print.

There is, I believe, space in education for both approaches. But there is a growing body of research pointing to the benefits of speech-to-print over other methods. Instead of asking kids to work backward from print, it builds the code outward from language they already have. Reading, spelling, and oral language stop living in separate spaces. Kids get more practice with phoneme-grapheme connections in ways that actually feel connected and meaningful. And when that work is paired with physically writing each sound as they go- not just saying it, not just thinking it, but writing it- something starts to stick in a different way.

I’ve seen this play out firsthand. Kids who have been stuck in print-to-speech interventions, often stall. I see this especially in the programs that demand a large amount of time marking VCCV patterns under words to determine where syllable breaks will happen, based on a growing list of rules that get more convoluted as the words grow longer. This is very disconnected from how reading in the real world feels and teachers and interventionists will often remark that students can’t apply these skills into authentic texts. No surprise to me.

These same kids often respond differently when I switch to speech-to-print. Suddenly it’s no longer boring. It’s helpful. Because sometimes (maybe even often) it’s what the kid actually needs, and they can feel the difference.

The same is true with decodables. Kids struggling to decode will more likely than not need decodables in addition to scaffolds that help them access grade-level texts. Both can be true. But sometimes those decodables feel babyish, and that matters.

It doesn’t mean we should throw that type of practice out. It means we should find a way to pivot to what the kid needs.

For my daughter, it means using AI to create passages about horses that function as decodables focusing on our skill of the week. She won’t touch a decodable from IMSE’s Orton-Gillingham program and has been hiding them at the bottom of her backpack since 2nd grade. But she will read horse decodables all night.

Why? Because it honors her dignity.

When I think about what we get right with foundational skills, I look toward K–3 programs like UFLI. UFLI honors developmental needs at each grade and follows research-backed structured literacy approaches, ensuring kids have the best shot at high-quality Tier 1 instruction. It has decodables to match, and what I’ve found in practice, it’s pretty engaging. Using it each summer with my daughter and her friends when they were younger, I yearned for something as grounded in research and as responsive to what kids need for upper grades. For anyone curious about a Tier 1 program that takes a speech-to-print approach, Sounds-Write is worth looking into.

I feel like we got a lot of K-2 instruction right. But… There is a shift around 3rd grade, and I think that’s where things get murky. Kids get bored with foundational skills when those skills stop meeting their developmental needs- when instruction is presented in a way, or at a level, that feels “babyish,” the instruction stops being as impactful as it is meant to be. That’s when we risk losing students’ engagement and their sense of dignity.

Enter morphology.

I spent years creating my own morphology program based on, well, a lot of things, but mostly based on a need I consistently saw in my classroom. I incorporate word matrices, get kids playing with suffixes, engage in building words with similar prefixes and then layer that all with meaning and spelling rules. I even built an app to help kids play with morphemes, because I am a little obsessed. Have I mentioned I also started a YouTube channel centering on morphology? Because I did that too… and will now admit it’s not a “little obsession,” it’s a major one. And I love it.

What I’ve found is that morphology gives upper grade students something foundational skills instruction often strips away: the feeling that they are doing something sophisticated. They’re cracking a code. They’re not circling vowel teams on a worksheet- they’re dissecting the Latin root rupt and discovering that interrupt, erupt, bankrupt, and disrupt are all built from the same meaning. That feels like real intellectual work. Because it is.

What I’ve found teaching spelling in upper grades through the lens of morphology is that the dreaded boredom and groans that often come with foundational skill lessons aren’t there… at least not always. Morphology offers something that another “here’s a list of words with long-a spellings” approach doesn’t: sophistication and more bang for your buck. Word lists and word sorts served their purpose in lower grades, but upper grade students need more. They need to understand why words are built the way they are. There is more buy-in with morphology because it targets what upper grade kids actually need. They feel a sense of accomplishment being presented with this new code of Greek and Latin roots and how they work. We still do the work of word sorts and spelling patterns, but in a more age appropriate way. And my lessons also honor the fact that sometimes, you’re right kids, the spelling doesn’t make sense at all.

Why is it spelled that way? Because it’s complicated.

I explain it to kids like this: English spelling feels messy because it is messy, and for good reason. Our language borrows from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, French, and more. Each set of word orgins bring their own set of spelling conventions that don’t always play nicely together. It kind of feels like watching a game of football on the same field as a game of soccer and kickball at recess. It gets messy.

Early English was transcribed by scribes (often monks trained in Latin) who had to develop a written system for a language that didn’t have one. They adapted spellings using the conventions they knew, making decisions based on what made sense to them. They based spellings on things as simple as what looked good, and what helped to clarify meaning. The result is a language built from competing systems layered on top of each other. So sometimes, on the surface, you’re right, guys, it doesn’t make sense. And that’s because we’re not working with one tidy set of rules. We’re working with many. Morphology helps kids make sense of that.

I’ve found with this approach and explanation... boredom is kept, mostly, at bay. Kids feel like you are trusting them with complex ideas and their dignity then is kept at center.

Now, with all things, this conversation is complex, so let me pause here with a few clarifications. I am not saying morphology will solve all of upper grades problems. I am not saying to ditch interventions if they don’t work immediatly and I am not saying speech-to-print is the cure. (Although for my daughter and others I know it seems far more effective than anything else.) I am also not saying that Orton-Gillingham or IMSE or print-to-speech are not a solid programs or approaches. Orton-Gillingham has a strong body of evidence supporting its use and is a great fit, for so many kids. I am not saying every child will reject their decodables. That’s not true either.

What I am saying is that there is a point where we need to acknowledge that the answers are complex and kids’ needs will vary. If the goal is ensuring the growth of every child, and maintaining their dignity, we need to pause and live in the gray space. We need to have difficult conversations that expand our own thinking. It means that sometimes we need to pause, look at the data, see there is no growth and consider that instead of pushing forward with the same intervention for years we need to stop and consider why the chosen intervention isn’t working.

This is what will help protect student dignity and our own, as professionals. And maybe this is part of what we keep getting wrong about foundational skills. We keep searching for simple answers but instead the work is complex. It's acknowledging and honoring the different needs of students at different grades. It's accepting that there is no silver bullet answer to, frankly, anything. We need to feel comfortable not choosing one and only one "right" intervention and sticking with it indefinitely. Instead, we need to be paying close enough attention to know when it's no longer the best fit.

Its complex work, there is no simple answer.

Thank you Leah and Angela for facilitating such beautiful and complex conversations.

Some helpful resources

For more on English Spellings, I highly recommend this book Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy (affiliate link)

Sean Morrisey, expert 5th grade teacher, created an incredibly strong upper grade foundational skills curriculum. Absolutely check that out. Learn more in this post

The Curriculum Insight Project

Meet the Word Mapping Project, the new cult favorite vocabulary supplement

Interest in the Word Mapping Project has been taking the literacy community (and our network) by storm…

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6 months ago · 67 likes · 8 comments · Curriculum Insight Project

This is the work I keep coming back to… helping kids see that spelling isn’t random, it’s just layered.

If you’re trying to support a reader who feels stuck, I’ve shared the tools I use, especially around morphology and supporting all learners, on my website. It’s all there if you need something practical to start with.

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator and literacy specialist focused on structured literacy, morphology, and supporting upper grade readers.

Because like all things in education, the answer is beyond complex. There is no single approach and I don’t think anyone should claim there is. I asked a former student yesterday what it was like to be in my class- where you guys well behaved? She laughed and said, “Yes. But….We talked A LOT.” And they did. Non-stop. There were days the talking felt near uncontrollable.

So let me be clear, I have never had a perfectly managed classroom. My classroom is perfectly imperfect. I am absolutely not saying my classroom is behavior free and that I have somehow unlocked the magic key to successfully managing classroom behavior without fail. No. We are all human, we all have behaviors, on no planet would I claim to have a perfectly well managed, behavior free classroom… but, in 20 years I have learned a lot about what not to do, and about how to get it mostly right.

There is something about how I manage my class that works incredibly well. And I’ve spent years trying to figure out what it is.

One day, a few years ago, I looked at my class, smiled, and asked a question I genuinely didn’t know the answer to. What makes me successful with classroom management? My principal had answered the question with, “You’re a textbook example of the warm demander.” That’s certainly part of it but I wanted the kid answer. So I asked.

“Why do you guys behave for me?”

They looked at me like I’d grown a second head. What are you even asking us?

“We behave because we like you.”

I laughed. “No, that’s not it. Do you behave because I’m strict?”

Now, to be clear, the answer is yes. I am very strict, and I have very high expectations.

But their answer was immediate and confident: “No, you aren’t strict. You’re just funny.”

“Okay,” they aren’t wrong… I am funny… but that’s not the answer so I pressed on. “But if you misbehaved, what would happen?”

“Well, we wouldn’t.” (also not completely true) “but if we did… we’d get in trouble.”

“What would that look like?”

A long pause. Then, matter-of-factly: “You would definitely call our parents.”

But beyond that? They couldn’t explain it. They couldn’t articulate why they behaved. They just… did. (for the most part)

So this conversation made me curious. Because this class, a class that by every descriptor on paper would be labeled “challenging,” by April was one of the most well-functioning communities I’d ever built. Why?

The answer is both simple and complex.

Let me start with the simplicity.

I hate that I am starting here because so many times teachers are gaslit looking for help with extreme behaviors with “Have you tried building relationships?" I cringe just thinking about being told this but the truth is… Relationships matter.

I set high expectations early and match them with a genuine care for each individual kid in my class. High expectations and deep care aren’t in tension with each other. They’re partners.

But it’s not just about relationships and we all know that.

I think we can all agree that the majority of teachers build relationships authentically. Not as a strategy. Not as a box I check during the first week of school so I can “get to the real work.” The relationships are the real work. We all know that.

I both demand respect and give it back. I do not see my students as something to control but rather as humans in a community that we are building together. My students know they are in a safe space to make mistakes. They know they will be held accountable for those mistakes. They know I will set firm, loving boundaries.

They also know that I am human.

They know that I make mistakes too and that when I do, I will hold myself to the same accountability I ask of them. They know I will forgive them for their mistakes. And they know I will ask for forgiveness when I, fully human as I am, make mistakes of my own.

In practice, this sounds like me standing in front of twenty-five nine-year-olds and saying: “You guys, I am so sorry. I realize the tone of my voice was a little harsher than it needed to be. I’m really tired today. I’m going to work on not responding like that, but just know… I am having a day.”

And they meet me with smiles. Because we all have days. I’m just an adult willing to admit it.

This is all true. And for a long time, I thought this was the whole answer. I thought it was the whole answer until one year when I asked for support for a student and an administrator asked with a smile “Have you tried a kindness challenge?”

My entire classroom is a kindness challenge. This is beyond just building relationships and asking kids to be kind.

That moment is when I came to understand there’s something underneath all of it- something I was doing without having the words for it that makes the rest of it work.

Here’s what I mean and this is the part that I have a hard time articulating. It’s not the shallow “have you tried building relationships” or “how about a kindness challenge?”

I think a lot of adults believe they lose power by owning their humanness. I think a lot of new teachers, especially, get advice that reinforces that belief.

“Don’t smile until after December” is the worst advice I have ever heard.

It should be: Establish firm and consistent routines from day one. Smile while you do it. Because by December, those routines will be so strong they’ll feel natural, and your kids will forget they’re anything other than just the way things are in your room.

No community will be without conflict. No classroom will be without ups and downs, without plans gone sideways. That’s not the measure of whether things are working. The measure is what happens next.

Here’s where I want to tell you a story about getting it wrong.

Ten years ago, I was working in a school that had a program for kids with affective needs. I would describe it as the most beautifully run program I have ever been a part of. These kids had experienced trauma that my heart still aches over. And the school responded with trauma-informed practices that held students and adults to the same level of accountability. We were all thoroughly trained in proactive measures in addition to reactive ones. We knew how to de-escalate before things exploded to the extremes that more and more classrooms are seeing today. We knew how to honor the whole child, and how to interpret behavior as communication. And we knew that we needed to reinforce expected behaviors while simultaneously holding students accountable with consequences when behaviors escalated.

This doesn’t mean everything was perfect and that we lived in perfect harmony. That isn’t what real life is, there were still big behaviors and there was still real conflict and yet… It was, in every way, a model of what schools can be.

And because real life is real life and humans are not perfect… one morning I walked into my classroom already on edge. I was tired and cranky. My two-year-old just would not sleep the night before, and so neither had I. I could feel the weight of the night pressing down on me, and my patience was absolutely shot.

And then it happened.

A student with a behavior plan that specifically stated to never publicly call out his behavior made a snarky comment. And instead of doing what I always did, responding calmly and quietly and privately, I snapped right back with an equally snarky demand. I told him to sit down and be quiet. Right in front of the entire class.

And that snapped me right out of my tired haze. Because instantly, I saw it.

The shift in his eyes to pure rage.

Everything that happened after was absolutely something I could have prevented. He clenched his fists and through clenched teeth yelled, “Don’t ever yell at me in front of the entire class.”

He was right.

Now here’s what matters. In that moment, I had a choice. I could double down and reassert my authority, insist that his behavior was the problem, remind him and every kid watching that I was in charge. And in doing so, I would have communicated something very specific: You are only valuable to me when are compliant and you make my job easy. The moment you don’t, I will humiliate you to regain control.

Or I could do the harder thing.

I immediately and very publicly apologized. I didn’t double down. I didn’t lean in. I didn’t pretend I was infallible as the authority in the room. I did not tell him this was all his fault and that he never should have interrupted the class with that comment — although that was also true. I admitted that I was human and had made a mistake.

Because that’s my job. My job isn’t to be perfect. None of us are. My job is to maintain a safe classroom environment and sometimes maintaining that safety means saying I’m sorry, I got that wrong. But more than that my job is to make sure that kid still knew he mattered. Not because he performed well that day. He didn’t. I didn’t either. He mattered because he was a person in my room, and I had made a commitment to see him as one.

The apology wasn’t just accountability. It was me saying: I moved on from what just happened. I did not move on from you.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after twenty-plus years in the classroom:

One of the most common failures in classroom management isn’t a lack of rules or consequences. It’s when teachers double down on their mistakes, insisting they are infallible. It’s when the adult in the room decides that admitting fault means losing authority.

The opposite is true.

When I shared a piece on behavior in classrooms, a reader named @ferrisuni640381 left a comment that gave language to something I had been circling for years but couldn’t quite name. They wrote that most classroom management systems, even the good ones, even the trauma-informed ones, are ultimately built on a transaction. Behave this way and you will be valued by the community. Stop behaving that way and you won’t be. Too many systems teach kids that their value is conditional, that it is earned through compliance and quietly revoked when they fall short. Students who learn to navigate the system perform well, and we reward them for it. Others never quite figure out how to “earn” their place.

This is the fatal flaw in many systems. I want my students to understand they are of value. Period.

I think this is what real relationship-building actually means. Not better systems for valuing students. Not finding better systems of sophisticated reward and consequence structures. But adults doing the deliberate, unglamorous work of teaching kids that they are worth being in the presence of.

A student who sees themselves as something of worth and value does their best to follow community expectations- even after mistakes. The rules aren’t about control. They’re about protecting the dignity of everyone in the room. Kids know and feel that in the right environment.

This, I think, is what I couldn’t articulate alone and what my students couldn’t articulate when I asked them why they behaved. They didn’t say “because you have clear expectations” or “because you’re consistent.” They said “because we like you.” And what I think they meant- what they couldn’t quite find the words for was: I feel like I matter in here. Not because I’m performing well. But because you actually want me here.

When a teacher doubles down on being wrong, kids don’t just lose respect for the teacher. They lose something more fundamental. They learn that their experience of what happened doesn’t matter. That the person with power gets to define reality. That their dignity is conditional and extended when they comply, revoked when they don’t. A kid who believes their dignity is conditional will either spend all their energy performing for approval or stop trying entirely. Neither of those is learning.

Being human with kids teaches them that mistakes happen but they aren’t the end of things. That they have room to grow because their teacher does too. That the human experience isn’t about being perfect it’s about striving to be our best selves. And when we show up one day unable to be at a hundred percent, when we stumble, a teacher will be there to safely catch them.

Sometimes that means a conversation to restore things. Sometimes, yes, that means consequences. But underneath all of it is the same message: You are worth being here. You were worth being here yesterday when you were your best self, and you are worth being here today when you are not.

I’ll be honest when I first became a teacher, I tried everything and some of those things failed spectacularly.

Marble jars to reward success. That dreaded behavior clip chart… You know the one. It was publicly displayed so every kid in the room could see exactly where they fell on the scale from red (BAD) to green (EXCELLENT). Ew. Who told me to do that? Class Dojo, which rewarded kids for good behavior and simultaneously alerted parents to the bad. I tried it all my friends.

Some of it worked for a while. Some of it never worked at all. Most of it worked for the kids who were going to behave anyway and completely failed the kids who needed something different. Some kids simply watched their clip slide to red and thought, Yeah. That sounds about right.

In the end, my most successful days, the ones where the room hums and the kids are learning and nobody’s watching the clock, those days come down to a few pinterest lacking, unglamorous things:

Saying thank you to the kids who are on task and doing the right thing, out loud, by name, genuinely. Privately talking with the students who aren't aligned with expectations and when needed, following through with consequences. Setting clear routines and holding them with consistency. Holding myself to the same standards I hold my students. And underneath all of it, the thing I couldn't name for years: making sure every kid in that room knows they are worth being there. Not because they earned it. Because they are.

My students couldn’t explain why they behaved for me. They just said they liked me. But I think what they meant was: I feel safe here. I know what to expect. And I know you see me as a person.

That's what I've been trying to put into words for twenty years. Kids don't behave simply because they're managed well. They behave because they have room to fail, room to succeed, and perhaps especially- room to show up on your worst day and still be met with… you are worth being here.

In the end that’s what we all need. A space to feel safe enough be fully human and perfectly imperfect in every human way…

While contemplating these ideas this comment from @ferrisuni640381 helped me better name what I was reaching for:

The inputs you’ve described are real and necessary. Thank you. The intentional interventions, the restorative circles, the consequences and reparations define for students what the community values and gives them reliable parameters to operate within.

But I think they all are self-limiting structures.

These inputs teach a student what to do if they want to be valued by the community. And being valued is a temporary experience set entirely by the valuer. Do what I want, you are valuable. Stop, or let my needs change, and you aren’t. Students who learn to navigate the system perform well and we value them. But I worry that they too many miss out on the opportunity to learn that they are something OF value, which is independent of the evaluator.

I think that’s the missing structure. Not better systems for valuing students, but adults doing the deliberate work of teaching students they are something worth being in the presence of. This is, I think, what relationship building actually means and I think this is what the adult did in your daughter’s lunchroom.

In practice it is a genuine willingness to find value in a student, not as a strategy but out of authentic interest. A willingness to move on from failures of performance without moving on from the student. Curated but authentic opportunities to demonstrate aspects of themselves as things of value to their peers. And adults (educators) with enough security in their own sense of worth to offer this freely. I don’t think behavioral norms and consequences are contrary to this. A student who understands themselves as something of value adheres to those norms, even after mistakes, because they understand them as the conditions under which their peers can be something of value too.

It’s not about perfection. It was never about perfection.

Let me start with a story.

My daughter came home from school the other day with something I hadn’t seen on her face in a while: relief.

“The vice principal came in to check on all of us during lunch. She made sure we were ALL okay.”

But it was what she said next that peaked my interest- how are kids so insightful? She expressed genuine relief that the adult had also checked in on the student who’d been the aggressor in a situation earlier that week. That’s all she needed. Just… an adult who showed up, saw what was happening, and let every kid in that room know they mattered and… that yes there was follow through with the consequences that were discussed.

She wasn’t asking for a perfect school. She wasn’t expecting a conflict-free lunch period. She was simply hoping the adults would see the lived experience of her and her peers and step in to support. And when they did, she felt grateful, she felt relief, and she felt safe.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. She wasn’t looking for a conflict free school, just a supportive one.

And somehow, we as a nationwide system keep getting it wrong.

Let me be clear from the start: I’m not here to burn down any single program, framework, or philosophy. I’m here to say what thousands of teachers, parents, and kids already know but can’t seem to get anyone to hear- safety is not a slogan. It’s a felt experience. And right now, too many of our kids aren’t feeling it.

Everyone’s Nervous System Is Listening

Before we talk about behavior charts and consequences and restorative circles, we need to talk about biology. Because when a school environment feels unpredictable and when kids sense that nothing real will be done to address harm, every nervous system in that building goes on alert.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory describes this in terms our bodies already understand. Our autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger. When the environment signals safety, we access what’s called the ventral vagal state: the sweet spot for curiosity, problem-solving, creativity, and connection. But when the environment feels chaotic or when harm goes unaddressed, our nervous systems shift into sympathetic activation known as “fight or flight” or worse, into dorsal shutdown, where kids go numb, withdraw, and essentially leave the learning process entirely.

In context of classrooms, the educator’s nervous system also functions as a co-regulatory anchor. When teachers and administrators embody calm and presence, students experience implicit physiological safety through relational synchrony. But here’s the flip side that many educators across America understand too well, when educators themselves feel unsafe, unsupported, or gaslit about the reality of what’s happening in their classrooms, their nervous systems can’t co-regulate anyone. The whole building’s stress response escalates.

A school that punishes dysregulation without understanding it, or perhaps worse, a school that ignores dysregulation altogether in the name of “grace,” is a school misaligned with human neurobiology. Environments characterized by unpredictability feel awful and chronically activate defensive states in everyone. Schools that do not properly address student safety will see defensive states in students, teachers, support staff and even in parents. Parents picking up their kids in the carpool line can feel it the moment their child opens the car door.

What the Data Actually Says

Let’s ground this in the numbers, because the numbers are alarming.

A 2024–2025 RAND survey of nearly 1,000 teachers and principals found that almost 50 percent expressed concern about students being attacked or harmed at their schools- a 12-percentage-point increase since 2022 when the question was first asked. More than one in five teachers reported worrying about being attacked or harmed themselves.

The NEA reports that student behavior has nearly overtaken pay as the top concern among educators and it’s driving people out of the profession. A 2024 NEA Rhode Island survey found that 74 percent of members said students are acting out and misbehaving, and 40 percent reported that students are more violent toward staff and peers. In Delaware, public school teachers report losing an average of 7 hours per month managing student outbursts and behavioral health issues rather than teaching. Middle school teachers lose closer to 10.

An APA study published in 2024, surveying 15,000 teachers, found that 80 percent reported experiencing student violence or threatening behavior after COVID, up from 65 percent pre-pandemic.

And here’s the statistic that should give every administrator pause: nationally, large-scale surveys consistently show that a significant portion of educators report feeling unsupported in managing student behavior, with many saying they cannot rely on administrative follow-through when serious issues arise. In the words of one 4th-grade teacher in Delaware who sustained a concussion and bruises after a student slammed her into classroom furniture: she knows that for the rest of her career, the office and administration are not an option. She’ll have to handle it in-house, in her classroom, because administration will not be assisting her.

That’s not a school safety plan but seems far too common nationwide. Teachers get pushed to a point where they feel the only choice is to handle it all themselves. And that is a major factor in what has made teaching unsustainable.

The Both/And That Schools Keep Getting Wrong

Here’s where we all need to hold two truths at once. Because like most things in education, it is not an either/or. It’s a both/and.

Kids need something like PBIS AND they need firm boundaries and consequences.

Kids need restorative justice AND they need to know the person who harmed them will be supported and, if necessary, given a meaningful consequence.

Being a warm demander means authentically caring for students AND ensuring there are structures in place to hold them accountable, both academically and socially.

If you’ve spent any time in education Twitter, Instagram or professional development circles, you’ve probably heard someone complain about being told, “Have you tried building relationships?” as if relationships are a magic wand that makes aggression disappear. Relationship building is crucial but not talking about it in a superficial magic wand way. I’m talking about the kind of relationship-building that Zaretta Hammond describes in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain where knowing students well is coupled with what she calls “active demandingness.” Where the goal isn’t to give a pep talk or cheer kids on, but to earn the right to push, stretch, and hold students to high expectations because they know you see them as whole people who are capable of more. That combination is key. Warmth without accountability is not kindness. It’s neglect dressed up in soft language.

Don’t Throw Out What Works But Don’t Pretend It’s Enough

As pendulums continue to swing wildly in education I want to be clear- I am not suggesting we throw out things like PBIS. A 2023 systematic literature review from the Center on PBIS at the University of Oregon confirmed that Tier 1 PBIS can be designated an evidence-based practice for reducing exclusionary discipline and improving social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes. Multiple randomized controlled trials have found that schools implementing PBIS with fidelity see reductions in office discipline referrals, decreases in suspensions, and improvements in school climate and perceived safety.

Restorative justice works, too. A landmark study by the University of Chicago Education Lab evaluating restorative practices across Chicago Public Schools found a 35 percent reduction in student arrests in school, an 18 percent decrease in out-of-school suspensions, and significant improvements in students’ perceptions of school climate including large increases in students’ sense of belonging and their belief that their school was a safe place.

These are not programs we should be throwing away. These are evidence-based frameworks that, when implemented well, genuinely improve outcomes for kids.

But here’s the critical piece that keeps getting lost: the research also shows that these frameworks fall apart without consistent, meaningful follow-through. The Hechinger Report documented how restorative justice programs in multiple districts struggled precisely because schools couldn’t implement them fully. It wasn’t that the philosophy failed. It was that the implementation was incomplete.

And in too many schools, what I see happening is even more specific than incomplete implementation. It’s the selective application of only the comfortable parts of these frameworks. Schools adopt the rewards, the positive reinforcement and the restorative circles. All of which are good and necessary- kids should learn to talk about how they feel.

But many schools stop short of the other half, and in my opinion this part is equally if not more important. Kids need the boundaries, the consequences, and the part where an adult says: “What you did caused harm, and here is what happens now.”

When that accountability piece is missing, a few things tend to happen:

• Kids who cause harm don’t build responsibility

• Kids who are harmed stop trusting the system

• Teachers feel unsupported and start compensating on their own

• Families lose confidence, quietly at first… then all at once

And the irony is, that outcome is the opposite of what both PBIS and restorative models are trying to create.

The truth is… Boundaries are not the opposite of care, they’re a major part of it. A student can be understood and held accountable. A school can be restorative and clear about consequences.

A Pep Talk and a Lollipop Is Not a Boundary

Principal Jared Lamb known to many on social media has spoken openly about learning this lesson the hardest way possible. Early in his career as a school administrator, he failed to hold students accountable for their behavior. The campus became unsafe, many teachers left and then he was fired.

That experience transformed how he leads. Now, with over 15 years as a principal, Lamb operates from a rolling cart instead of an office, making himself visible and present throughout his building every single day. He’s said publicly that schools get the student behaviors they tolerate, and that when a student is escalated, violent toward others, or destroying learning for 25 classmates, there has to be a response. A real, meaningful response that protects everyone in that room including the student who’s struggling.

He isn’t perfect and his schools are not conflict free zones. But/and that’s the piece so many schools are missing. Beyond checking in, when a kid missteps, they need more than a pep talk and a lollipop. They need more than constant rewards for expected behavior. They need to understand the limits and boundaries of the community they live in. They need to feel that when their actions harm someone else, there will be a consequence, not as punishment for punishment’s sake, but because that’s how human communities work. That’s how trust is built and that’s how safety is maintained.

The most loving thing we can do for students with significant behavioral challenges is both: support them by acknowledging and rewarding expected behaviors, AND ensure consequences are in place to teach real boundaries. These aren’t competing goals. They’re the same goal.

The Danger of Gaslighting Children

There’s something else happening in schools that I believe is more damaging than any single disciplinary framework failure, and it’s this: we are gaslighting our children.

I don’t use that word lightly. But when an adult tells a child that what they experienced “wasn’t that bad,” or writes off repeated aggression as “normal kid stuff,” or assures a parent that “we’re handling it” while doing nothing observable to address the harm that is a form of reality denial that children internalize in devastating ways.

Our children are not stupid. They have exquisitely calibrated sensors for honesty. Research in developmental psychology consistently shows that children who are persistently told their perceptions and emotions are invalid experience higher levels of psychological distress, including depression, helplessness, and diminished self-worth. Psychologist Jennifer Fraser, author of The Gaslit Brain, has written extensively about how gaslighting impacts the brain’s core function of interpreting reality and that children are especially vulnerable because they haven’t yet formed a clear sense of identity and are dependent on adults to help them make sense of the world.

When adults at school deny a student’s lived experience when they tell a child “that’s not what happened” or “you’re being too sensitive” about something the child saw and felt with their own body, the child doesn’t stop believing what happened. The child stops believing the adults will help. And that is precisely when kids stop feeling safe at school.

Kids are not expecting perfection. They know there will be conflict. But when time and time again they see and feel physical or verbal aggression go unchecked by the adults at school and when they watch harm happen and then watch nothing meaningful change… this is when things unravel. Not because the school lacks a framework, but because the school lacks follow-through.

Children can feel the difference.

Seeing the Whole Child Means Seeing the Whole Picture

There’s a phrase educators love to use “see the whole child” and like most education buzzwords, it has been repeated so often that it’s lost some of its meaning.

Seeing a child as whole means understanding that the kid who threw a chair in third period might also be the kid who hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s school lunch. It means knowing that the student who just shoved a peer on the playground is also the student who read to her little brother every night while their mom worked the late shift. It means refusing to flatten any child into a single behavior and instead holding the full complexity of who they are. Behaviors are a form of communication- we must see the whole child and interpret what is trying to be told.

But/and this is crucial- seeing the whole child doesn’t mean excusing the behavior. It means understanding the behavior well enough to respond to it effectively. When adults in a building truly know their students they can get ahead of crises rather than constantly reacting to them. They can be proactive instead of reactive. This means understanding a child’s triggers, their home lives, their strengths, and their patterns.

I am not asserting building relationships and seeing the whole child will solve all of the worlds problems. It wont. Even the most attuned teacher or the most present administrator will sometimes be caught off guard. Kids are humans. Humans are unpredictable. The goal isn’t to prevent every conflict. It’s to build systems and relationships strong enough to respond to conflict when it inevitably comes—and to do so in ways that leave every child feeling seen, held, and safe.

Conflict Is Not the Enemy

Here’s something that gets lost in the panic around school safety: conflict itself is not the problem. Conflict is, in fact, a necessary part of growing up.

Kids need conflict. They need to move through conflict resolution. They need to fail. They need to experience the growing pains of friendships. They need to feel the pains of arguments, the hurt feelings, the awkward apologies, and the slow rebuilding of trust. Conflict is not symptoms of a broken school. These are signs that children are doing the developmental work of learning how to be human beings in community with other human beings.

Schools get a lot of this right, actually. Restorative circles, when done well, are profoundly powerful tools that help children learn, through adult mediation, how to both offer forgiveness as the person who was harmed and take responsibility as the person who caused harm. The research on restorative practices consistently shows that these processes can build empathy, strengthen school climate, and reduce the reliance on exclusionary discipline that we know disproportionately harms students of color and students with disabilities.

The problem isn’t the presence of conflict. The problem is the absence of meaningful adult response to conflict. No school will ever be conflict-free, and honestly? It shouldn’t be. A school without any conflict is a school where kids aren’t taking social risks, aren’t testing boundaries, and aren’t growing. What matters and what makes or breaks a child’s sense of safety is what happens after the conflict occurs. Does an adult show up? Does the adult see what actually happened? Does the adult respond in a way that protects the harmed and supports the one who caused harm? Does anything actually change?

What Kids Are Really Asking For

Let me return to my daughter’s face when she walked through the door that day. Relief. Not joy. Not excitement. Just relief. The bar was not high. An adult showed up. An adult saw what was happening. An adult checked on everyone including the student who was struggling.

That’s what our kids are asking for. Not perfection. Not a school where no one ever gets hurt. Just adults who will be honest about what’s happening, who will respond with both compassion and accountability, and who will build systems where every child, every single one, knows that the grown-ups in the room have their back.

And when the grown-ups make a mistake- because as humans of course we will… they need to model owning their mistake out loud. They need to model taking accountability.

The teachers in our nation’s schools know this. They feel it every day. They’re the ones losing 7 to 10 hours a month to behavioral crises instead of teaching. They’re the ones reporting that the office isn’t an option, that administration won’t assist, that they’re on their own. They’re the ones walking into buildings where every nervous system is on edge because the environment has become unpredictable and the follow-through has disappeared.

We owe them better. We owe our kids better.

PBIS and consequences. Restorative justice and accountability. Warm relationships and firm boundaries. Proactive systems and honest responses when things go wrong. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the complete picture.

Our kids have been telling us what they need. The question is whether the adults in charge are ready to listen… not just to the comfortable parts, but to all of it.

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator and literacy specialist focused on structured literacy, morphology, and supporting upper grade students.

Writing is therapy, but how do I explain today, or this year, or the last ten years for that matter? I don’t… For now, I’ll simply focus on the celebrations.

In my classroom, for as long as I can remember, I have had a wall- a thankful wall. (Or sometimes it was a tree- dependent on the year and the school and the space I had on my wall) The variations of the wall have morphed over time, but the concept stays the same. At the end of the week, I very dramatically recap everything we did, as if I am a sports announcer recapping the most epic of wins. We reviewed everything. The wins, the disasters, the moments that made us laugh so hard we couldn’t get back on track, the days that felt way too long, and the days that went too fast. We chat about the science experiences we did, the explorations in Social Studies and that not so fun response to literature essay we had to write but we know will make us stronger writers so we did it with all our focus (ok most of our focus)

And then we reflect. “What are you thankful for this week?” was the basic concept, and then T.G.I.F.: Thank GOODNESS It’s Friday… but more importantly… What did you Try, what are you Grateful for, what Inspired you. and what was Fun this week?

It’s my absolute favorite part of the week. Those last 10–15 minutes on a Friday where we sit, reflect, and remember the good of the week. And every week, everyone shares. From the most talkative to the kids labeled shy, we all have one thing to say to celebrate the end of another week.

No matter how hard the week was, no matter what was thrown at us, no matter the amount of good vs bad things that came our way… Not to ignore what was frustrating or unfair or exhausting. We simply reflect on the good there was too. Because there is always good.

*And don’t worry, I am a firm believer in acknowledging the challenges of life… this is not a practice of toxic positivity but rather a celebration of the community we have built.

I highly recommend this practice. Sitting in my classroom this Friday, looking at the walls, the desks, the mailbox and the empty space where the noise usually lives… these moments are what I remember most. As I am sitting here now, reflecting on the year, in the end my brightest, most clear memories… are those Fridays. Not the challenges or the lows or the unexpected endings… It’s the smiles, the joy, the celebrations big and small. And the fact that I could- and still can- say with all sincerity: I am most grateful and inspired and had the most fun with you. …And I saved T for last because I really tried to be funny...er than I was last week, which is hard when you’re as hilarious as me.

To all my students- I love and miss you. And I’m so thankful that you were in my life, however long or short that time was. You inspired me more than you will ever know.

.

What do Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Richard Branson have in common?

They were all told in some form that they weren’t smart enough. That they would never achieve in other worldly ways. That they just didn’t have the ability. That they weren’t enough and never would be… but/and they proved the world wrong.

They also all had dyslexia.

I keep a running list. Not because I think dyslexia is a superpower (it isn’t, ask my daughter how she feels any time someone says that. Dyslexia isn’t a superpower- it’s a real challenge, and pretending otherwise does struggling kids no favors). But because I think we have a very narrow model of what capable looks like- and because I do believe that every child has their own super power and our jobs as adults is to help unlock it …. I do keep a list. I keep this list to show kids their disability doesn’t define them, and it doesn’t define their future.

But since dyslexia has now been shoved into the mainstream along with words that don’t define dyslexia- like “dumb” and “low IQ”- it opens the need to truly discuss what dyslexia is and is not, and the super powers that are found along side it.

“The same neurology that makes decoding print harder may be doing something extraordinary somewhere else entirely.”

This list isn’t meant to be inspirational wallpaper. It’s meant to be a reckoning. If this many people (people who changed the world) didn’t fit the academic mold, maybe the mold needs examining. Maybe we need to ask what we’re measuring, and why, and who benefits from defining “intelligence” the way we do.

Here’s who I keep coming back to.

✦ SCIENTISTS & INVENTORS

Albert Einstein

PHYSICS

Didn’t speak fluently until age 7. Teachers described him as slow and dreamy. He went on to reshape our understanding of space, time, and light.

Thomas Edison

INVENTOR

Pulled from school after three months — his teacher called him “addled.” His mother taught him at home. He held over a thousand patents.

Michael Faraday

PHYSICS / CHEMISTRY

Almost entirely self-taught; struggled with formal academics. His experimental and visual approach to electromagnetism was transformative.

Jack Horner

PALEONTOLOGY

Openly dyslexic; flunked out of college multiple times. The paleontologist who inspired Jurassic Park and changed how we understand dinosaur behavior.

Maggie Aderin-Pocock

SPACE SCIENCE

British space scientist diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood. Now one of the UK’s most prominent science communicators and advocates for inclusion in STEM.

ENTREPRENEURS & VISIONARIES

Richard Branson

BUSINESS

Left school at 16. His headmaster told him he’d either end up in prison or become a millionaire. He chose the latter — several times over.

Charles Schwab

FINANCE

Couldn’t read effectively well into adulthood. Built one of the most recognizable financial services companies in the United States.

Henry Ford

MANUFACTURING

A poor reader who thought in systems and mechanisms. His visual-spatial intelligence transformed industrial production.

ARTISTS, WRITERS & THINKERS

Leonardo da Vinci

RENAISSANCE POLYMATH

Wrote in mirror script; inconsistent spelling across manuscripts. Researchers now widely believe he was dyslexic. His notebooks remain among the most remarkable documents in human history.

Agatha Christie

AUTHOR

Described her own reading and writing struggles at length. Went on to become the best-selling fiction writer of all time.

Pablo Picasso

VISUAL ART

Struggled enormously in school; reading was laborious his entire life. His spatial perception and pattern-making, however, were unparalleled.

LEADERS & ADVOCATES

Winston Churchill

STATESMAN

Held back repeatedly in school; placed in the lowest form. Became one of the most celebrated orators and writers of the 20th century.

George Patton

MILITARY

Couldn’t read until age 12. Eventually gained admission to West Point and became one of the most strategically gifted generals of World War II.

✦

This list is much shorter than it could be- if I truly sat her and listed every person with dyslexia that has gone on to be wildly successful (including Governor Newsom) Here’s what strikes me every time I add a name to this list:

None of these people succeeded despite their dyslexia in any simple, inspiring-movie way. They succeeded because somewhere along the line, someone or some thing… a parent, a mentor, or a circumstance… let them develop the strengths they had, instead of spending all available time shoring up deficits. At some point the super powers they had along side their disability was allowed to shine three despite the difficulties that had connecting sounds to letters.

That’s not an argument against teaching reading. We absolutely must teach every child to decode with explicit, systematic, evidence-based instruction. We must do this early and relentlessly and without apology.

And.

We need to see the whole child- we need to see every child for their whole being, we need to see all of their strengths above their weakness and we need to ensure we are doing everything in our power to see and honor those strengths.

This is an argument for both/and.

Teach decoding. And preserve access to ideas. Teach phonics. And give kids something worth reading. Measure accuracy. And keep asking: what else is this child doing that we haven’t figured out how to see yet? How can we help them unlock their super powers? Because despite what anyone says, even if it happens to be the president, those super powers exist

The list above is full of people whose schools had no idea what to do with them. We can and must do better. We have better tools and we have a stronger knowledge base. The only question is whether we’re willing to use them and whether we’re willing to expand our definition of what smart looks like while we do.

To quote Gavin Newsom

To every kid with a learning disability: don’t let anyone — not even the President of the United States — bully you.

Dyslexia isn’t a weakness.

It’s your strength.

Melinda Karshner is a veteran literacy educator, structured literacy advocate, and the parent of a twice-exceptional child. She writes about reading, learning differences, and educational equity at Teach-Eduventuring. Find her on Substack at substack.com/@mrsk04.

And…

She also couldn’t rhyme. She couldn’t tell me what sound the letter b made. Singing rhyming songs led to an interesting disconnect between how smart she was and how hard this activity could be… when it was her turn to fill in the rhyme, she’d look at me blankly, or offer something completely unrelated with total confidence, as if the task itself was the strange thing.

But ask her for directions to a restaurant we’d visited once, eight months ago? She’d narrate every turn. Ask her to retell a picture book after hearing it twice? She’d recite it nearly word for word. She was rattling off facts about planets and black holes before kindergarten, and she was speaking with the kind of verbal precision that made adults do a double-take.

As a teacher who had spent years studying gifted learners, earning certifications and developing lessons to meet their complex needs I knew then we were in for a wild ride- but had no clue how wild a ride it would be.

In 2020, parents had to make hard decisions about school. We were no exception and ultimately chose to give up her spot at the gifted school. I cried for two solid days torn by the decision but in the end, the neighborhood school offered something the gifted program couldn’t: community. The strength and stability of our neighborhood was our biggest need at the time and we knew it outweighed everything else. We made that trade consciously, eyes open, knowing our daughter was already showing early signs of dyslexia. We thought we knew what was coming. We thought we knew enough to easily advocate. We thought we would catch it early. We were sure we’d be able get ahead of it.

I was a veteran teacher. I knew what to look for. I was certain I had all the knowledge and skills to navigate this easily. I was Orton Gillingham certified! What could possibly go wrong?

But as life continuously teaches me… I had no idea how hard it would be.

The Student I Almost Missed

In twenty-plus years of teaching, I’ve worked with a handful of students who were identified as both dyslexic and gifted. And every single time, I’ve marveled at their brilliance but even more so at their keen coping skills.

In fact if I hadn’t known better, they would have fooled me completely.

By every upper-grade measure that matters in most classrooms, these kids look like strong readers. They can discuss a text with nuance and insight. They make inferences, draw connections, ask questions that stop a discussion cold in the best possible way. They comprehend thoroughly in ways tests like iready celebrate. And in a classroom where comprehension is the primary currency, they look just fine.

But there are signs, all be it hidden signs, if you know where to look.

Spelling is the first tell. As a horrible speller myself, I’m not talking about just weak spelling (but it can look like that too.) My dyslexic brain can’t spot those type of mistakes reliably. I am talking more about spectacularly bad spelling that sometimes makes little phonetic sense and is inconsistent across the same word used twice in a single paragraph, as if the student is building each word from scratch every time.

Then there’s the writing that doesn’t match the brilliance of the student’s spoken word. I’m talking about students with profoundly advanced vocabulary who can talk circles around any peer but then turn around and produce written sentences that are bare-bones and stripped of the sophistication you know lives in their head.

Then there are the more obvious signs. The resistance to reading aloud- they know as well as you might, reading out loud will give away their secret.

I remember a particular afternoon where I was running a small-group session and decided on a whim to play a vocabulary morphology game. Any student of mine over the last 20 years will attest to my love of morphology but this game was new and I wanted to try it out. It included reading words in isolation with no context, just the words themselves on cards. This seemed like a normal enough task for upper grade kids. No problem right? Wrong. I will never forget one student’s face. Eyes wide open and frozen. A specific kind of fear that I recognized immediately as the fear of being found out.

According to every upper grade reading measure, this child was just fine. But he was not. He wasn’t a strong decoder. At all.

And in that moment, it all clicked into place: the spelling, the resistance to write, the gap between his sophisticated oral vocabulary and the simplicity of every sentence he committed to paper, the way he’d mastered every strategy for getting through a classroom day without ever having to read a word out loud cold. He had built an elaborate, exhausting facade of being at grade level in every sense of the word- and it had worked, right up until that moment.

And this is stealth dyslexia. This brilliant wonderful child was spending every cognitive dollar he had just keeping this very big secret.

The Secret Costs Everything

That’s what stealth dyslexia does. It doesn’t eliminate the struggle it hides it. And hiding it is brutally expensive.

I cannot even begin to fathom how exhausting that must be for a child. Compensating all day, every day to a degree that no one knows how hard reading is for you is remarkable.

And it turns out that compensation is both a cognitive superpower and a slow drain. Studies show that gifted children with dyslexia tend to draw on strong verbal memory, vocabulary, contextual reasoning, and working memory to prop up reading accuracy that their phonological processing alone couldn’t produce. From the outside, they look like readers. On the inside, every page costs more than it should.

The clinical term stealth dyslexia was coined by neurologists Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, who saw this pattern so consistently in their practice that it required its own name. Their observation: gifted children are able to use strong higher-order language skills to compensate for the low-level deficits in auditory and visual processing that cause reading problems in dyslexia. This results in reading skills that appear to fall within the normal or even superior range, at least on silent reading comprehension measures (iReady infamously misses flagging specifically dyslexic kids)

In other words, in some kids on some measures (like iReady) reading looks fine. However, the child is not fine.

What the Research Actually Says

This isn’t just clinical observation. There’s a growing peer-reviewed literature on what happens inside the brains and test scores of gifted children with dyslexia and it confirms what parents and teachers who work closely with these kids already know.

The basic reading skills deficit is real and it doesn’t go away. And the gap doesn’t close with just Tier 1 or Tier 2 instruction alone. It requires a deeply targeted Tier 3 level of support, and more and more research confirms that this level of support needs to be in place as soon as possible. This is why early screening and identification is so crucial for severely dyslexic kids. And these kids should be given Tier 3 supports as soon as they are identified. Period.

A 2014 study by VanViersen and colleagues examined 121 Dutch primary school children across four groups: typically developing, dyslexic, gifted, and gifted-with-dyslexia. Gifted children with dyslexia performed on all literacy tests somewhere between children with dyslexia and typically developing children. Their cognitive profile showed clear weaknesses in phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, alongside strengths in verbal short-term memory, working memory, and language skills.  The neurological hallmarks of dyslexia were present. They were just partially buffered by verbal strength.

This compensation for many students allows them to either fully mask or partially mask their diagnosis.

As more and more research in areas of both dyslexia and giftedness emerge, it’s clear that these students navigate the system without ever getting the level of supports they need as either a dyslexic student, or a gifted student, or something’s as both. 

Unfortunately, the standard tools we use to find both giftedness and dyslexia are designed for kids who present one condition at a time. The twice-exceptional child breaks both screens simultaneously.

The consequences of missing either identification are significant.

The IDA’s fact sheet on twice-exceptional students puts it directly: twice-exceptional students are often lost in the school or IEP system, have their talents neglected in favor of remediation, or confuse diagnosticians so they do not qualify for the differentiated, specialized instruction they need for both their giftedness and their dyslexia. 

A doctoral dissertation from the University of Northern Colorado that examined clinical profiles of gifted students with dyslexia found something that will be familiar to any parent who has sat in an IEP meeting: parents whose children had superior or very superior verbal reasoning frequently heard from teachers that the student was bright, that the student is doing “fine” or worse… that the problem was just a matter of motivation and poor work ethic. 

What It Feels Like From the Parent Side

I want to be bluntly honest. I knew all of this in theory. I had the professional knowledge of both knowing about and working with twice exceptional kids of all kinds. I had watched other people’s children navigate this exact terrain and I understood, intellectually, what was happening and what was needed.

It didn’t matter. As parenting so often does, the reality of living this knocked me off my feet.

Watching a school see your child primarily through her deficits, the things she can’t do, the goals she isn’t meeting, the benchmarks that mark her as behind… while simultaneously insisting she is doing fine creates a cognitive dissonance that is hard to mend. This is all while you can see her full dimensionality- it’s a specific kind of grief. You know she’s brilliant. You know her brain is building elaborate workarounds in real time. You know the compensation is there and you know what it costs. The stomach aches, the headaches, the crying before school…. And you watch educators look at the data and not see the child.

It’s terrifying and it’s sad and it makes you desperately want to fix it quickly, even though you know, from your own professional experience, that this is a long process. There’s something particularly disorienting about being a teacher who knows the system from the inside and discovering that the system still fails your child anyway. The knowledge doesn’t protect you. It just means you can name, precisely, every place where things are going wrong.

Twice-exceptional children make up an estimated 2–5% of the school-age population and that number is almost certainly an undercount, given how systematically the profile evades identification. Their intelligence masks their disability, and their language processing deficits mask their intelligence and so often, both are missed.  They don’t fit neatly into either the gifted program or the special education system. They fall into the gap between the two and, without active advocacy, they stay there.

The research is clear that these children have a distinct profile requiring a distinct approach. They need a combination of enrichment, accommodations, and intervention with alternative access to content and demonstration of knowledge on one hand, and systematic, direct reading intervention on the other.  Not one or the other. Both. At the same time. Because the child is both at the same time.

Both/ands are hard in eduction and in parenting but we shouldn’t have to give up one for the other

Seeing the Whole Child

What I know now, more than I knew before any of this started, is that the child who fools everyone is also the child who most needs someone to refuse to be fooled.

The student in my small group, terrified I’d discover his secret, I wish I had seen it sooner. I wish I had known to look at the gap between his words and his writing the way I know to look now. I wish someone had told me that a child can be the most sophisticated thinker in the room and still not be able to fluently decode the words on the page.

Both things are true. Both things matter. The school system, as currently designed, tends to see one or the other. This is not placing blame on any one teacher or school system but rather the way we look at students in general. There is a better way there are better interventions. And there are ways to honor the whole child in ways that support all of their needs

Our job as teachers, as parents, as advocates is to hold both.

If your child is a big-picture thinker, a storyteller, a question-asker, a fact-collector and also a reluctant writer, an inconsistent speller, a child who seems to go to great lengths to avoid reading aloud… trust what you’re seeing. The research supports you. So do the teachers and parents who’ve been here before.

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator and literacy specialist focused on structured literacy, morphology, and supporting upper grade students.

Tea? Check. Pizza? Check. Twenty-something wide-eyed third graders? …Check.

If you had told me that a single tea party would snowball into a neighborhood-wide book club phenomenon, I would have laughed. But here we are and I wouldn’t change a single chaotic, crumb-covered, page folding, marble-voting moment of it.

This is the story of how I turned my living room into a café, my dining table into a book tasting menu, and over twenty 3rd grade girls into full-blown novel enthusiasts. And if you’re thinking, “I could never pull that off,” stick with me. You absolutely can. I’ll show you how.

Why Novels? Why Now? Why Me Standing in My Kitchen at Midnight Setting up a Tea Party for Twenty Kids?

A little backstory (I promise I’ll keep it brief, and then we’ll get to the fun stuff).

My daughter was heading into third grade, and I knew something was about to shift at school. A new reading adoption was coming, a basal reader, and if you’ve spent any time around education, you know what that means. When a new program rolls in, fidelity is the name of the game. Teachers are expected to follow it closely, and the beautiful, rich, full-length novels that make kids fall head-over-heels in love with reading? They tend to quietly disappear from the daily schedule.

I wrote about my daughter’s dyslexia journey in a previous post, and that experience shaped everything about what came next. Here’s the short version: despite years of incredible instruction, expert intervention, and more phonics drills than any kid should have to endure, my daughter still found reading hard. What she didn’t find hard? Getting swept up in a story, deeply caring about characters and wanting to know what happens next.

That’s what novels do. They make reading feel like it matters. It gives kids a reason to want to apply the heavy work they learned in their decoding intervention. Its not a boring worksheet, it’s not like homework, not like a test, and it’s not something merely to survive through. Novels are what foster a love of reading and I was determined to make sure she, and as many kids as I could wrangle, had that experience outside of school.

So I did what any slightly unhinged teacher-mom would do: I threw a party. A book party.

The Dragon in the Library Café: Our Very First Book Club

Let me be honest. This first book club was a bit over the top. But I had a vision, and that vision involved a themed café menu, a marble voting system, and enough food to feed a small army.

Despite the rational part of my brain screaming at me to tone it down a notch or 500… Here’s what went down.

The Book Tasting Menu

I designed an actual café menu (because why not?), and every food item on it was connected to one of the books the girls could vote on for our next read. The menu looked like something you’d find at a quirky little brunch spot, except instead of avocado toast, you were choosing between dragons and robot wilderness survival.

Here’s what was on the table:

Faith’s Tea and Coconut Treat→ The Dragon in the Library by Louie Stowell (Faith is the magical librarian in the book we were reading this one first!) This book is about a girl with dyslexia who didn’t love reading at all… until….

It felt like the perfect place to start.

Cricket in Time Square’s New York Style Pizza → The Cricket in Times Square*by George Selden (because what’s more New York than pizza?)

Bunnicula’s Drained Veggies → Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe (if you know, you know. That bunny drains vegetables. The veggies turn white. It’s horrifying and hilarious.)

The One and Only Ivan’s Bananas → The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (Ivan is a gorilla. Gorillas love bananas. Science.)

The Wild Robot’s Wild Popcorn → The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (wild popcorn for a wild robot surviving in the wilderness. Some how some way this just works, trust me)

Lemonade War’s Lemonade Refresher → The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies (this one practically named itself)

I set out each book on display alongside its matching snack, gave each girl a little intro to the story, and then let them wander. They browsed, they nibbled, they debated and then they dropped a marble into the jar next to the book they wanted to read next.

The buzz in that room? Electric. These girls were campaigning for their favorites. Alliances were formed. Lobbying happened. It was democracy at its finest fueled by popcorn and lemonade.

What We Actually Did That Day

Our first book together was The Dragon in the Library, and I chose it on purpose. It’s the story of Kit Spencer, a kid who absolutely cannot stand reading, she’d rather be outside getting muddy than stuck in a library. (This is my own daughter in a nutshell and I know so many kids can relate) But when she discovers she’s actually a wizard and that books are the source of her magic, everything changes. I mean, come on. A book about a reluctant reader who discovers that stories are literally magical? For a book club full of kids I was trying to get hooked on novels? Chef’s kiss.

Here’s how the day flowed:

We ate. The girls piled their plates high and settled into little clusters around the room. Food is the great equalizer. Even the shyest kid in the room will open up over pizza.

We talked about the book. I kept it light. No hand-raising, no “what is the theme of this passage.” Just real conversation. What part made you laugh? Was there a character you didn’t like? Would YOU want to be a wizard-librarian? The girls who had strong feelings talked. The quiet ones listened, nodded and also voiced their opinions. Everyone was engaged.

We made bookmarks. A simple craft decorated bookmarks they could use for whatever they read next. Nothing Pinterest-perfect, just markers, cardstock, stickers, and washi tape. The point was to give them something tangible to take home that said: I’m a reader. I’m in a book club. This is my thing now.

They voted on the next book. Marble. Jar. Done.

That was it. Eat, talk, create, vote. And every girl left that day buzzing.

“But Wait — You Said Twenty Kids?”

Yeah. About that.

When I started planning this book club, I envisioned maybe eight girls. A cozy little group. Manageable. Cute.

But I started making the list, and I just kept going. I knew so many girls that would probably want to join. From advanced readers, to on grade level, to dyslexic and still trying to find that hook into wanting to read… my initial list far exceeded 8. Then word got out. And one mom asked if her daughter could join. And then another. And another. And I’m saying yes to literally everyone because I teach at the school in the neighborhood and I know these kids, and how on earth do you look at a child who wants to come to a book club and say no?

You don’t. You just buy more pizza.

Here’s the truth: managing twenty-plus kids in a book club would intimidate most people, and it should. I’m a teacher, this is quite literally my job, and even I had moments of what have I done? But watching those girls light up over stories? Worth every bit of chaos.

My honest recommendation: keep it at 10 kids or under. It’s more intimate, everyone gets a chance to talk, and you won’t need to rent folding chairs from the church down the street. If your group grows (and it might — ours exploded), consider joining forces with more than one mom when you host, or split it into smaller groups that mingle and change as the book choices change… Just make sure every smaller group has the same 2 or 3 book choices to choose from next time.

What Book Club Looked Like After the First Meeting

That first meeting was, admittedly, extra. I went full café-theme because I wanted to set the tone and to show these girls that book club isn’t school. It’s a fun time. It’s special. (Which as a teacher from the school did include insisting I had no clue who Mrs. K was? What are you guys talking about I am just a mom… call me Melinda.)

After that? We kept it simple. Beautifully, sustainably simple.

Parents rotated hosting. This is key. You do not need to host every single meeting. Share the love (and the snack budget).

There was always food. Always. It doesn’t have to be themed. Goldfish crackers and juice boxes? Perfect. A fruit platter someone grabbed at Costco? Ideal. The food is there to make it feel like a gathering, not a lesson.

We always talked about the book. Sometimes it was a full conversation. Sometimes it was five minutes of chatting before the girls dissolved into giggles and ran outside. Both versions are fine. The point is that they read the book and they showed up to talk about it even if “talking about it” looked more like squealing over their favorite scene and then doing cartwheels in the backyard.

Crafts happened sometimes. Not every time. When a host felt inspired, there was a craft. When nobody had the bandwidth, there wasn’t. No pressure.

There was always play time. This is non-negotiable in my opinion. These are kids. They need to run around, be silly, and just be *kids* who happen to also love books.

I always offered to help facilitate the book conversations, not because the host parents couldn’t, but because I created a monster of a book club with essentially a class size full of kids… and I know talking about books with that many kids is its own little art form, and it brought me so much joy to see these girls thinking deeply about stories.

Questions Any Parent Can Ask About Any Book

You don’t need to be a teacher to lead a great book conversation. You just need some good questions and a willingness to let the kids do the talking. Here are go-to questions that work for literally any novel:

• To get the conversation started: What was your favorite part of the book? What about your least favorite?

• To dig into characters: Which character did you relate to the most, and why? Did any character surprise you by the end of the story?

• To explore the story: Was there a moment that made you gasp, laugh, or feel sad? If you could change one thing about how the story ended, what would it be?

• To spark opinions: Would you recommend this book to a friend? What would you tell them about it without giving away spoilers? If this book were a movie, who would you cast as the main character?

• To make it personal: Did this book remind you of anything in your own life? If you could step into the world of this book for a day, would you want to? Why or why not?

• To build excitement for reading: What kind of book do you want to read next — something funny, scary, adventurous, or something totally different? Has this book made you want to read anything else by the same author?

That’s it. You don’t need a discussion guide or a literature degree. Just ask, listen, and let the kids surprise you with how much they have to say.

Book-Specific Discussion Questions

Want to go deeper? Here are five questions tailored to each of the books from our book club lineup. These are perfect for the hosting parent to have in their back pocket.

The Dragon in the Library by Louie Stowell

• Kit doesn’t like reading at the beginning of the story. Has there ever been something you thought you didn’t like, but then it turned out to be amazing?

• If you discovered you were a wizard and that books were the source of your powers, which book would you open first?

• Why do you think the author chose a *library* as the most magical place in the story? Do you think libraries are special? Why?

• Kit’s friends Josh and Alita stick by her through some really scary moments. What makes them such good friends?

• Mr. Salt wants to tear the library down. Why do you think some people don’t see the value in libraries and books? How would you convince someone that libraries matter?

The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden

• Chester the cricket ends up in New York City completely by accident. Have you ever ended up somewhere unexpected and had it turn into something great?

• Chester, Tucker Mouse, and Harry Cat are an unlikely group of friends. What makes their friendship work even though they’re so different?

• Chester’s musical talent brings people together. Is there something *you’re* good at that makes other people happy?

• If you were Chester, would you want to stay in the excitement of Times Square or go back home to Connecticut? Why?

• This book was written a long time ago. What do you think Times Square was like back then compared to now? Would Chester still fit in?

Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe

• Harold the dog is the one telling the whole story. How do you think the story would be different if Chester the cat were telling it instead?

• Chester is absolutely *convinced* that Bunnicula is dangerous. Have you ever been really sure about something that turned out to be wrong?

• Do you think Bunnicula is actually scary, or is the humor what makes this book work? What was the funniest moment?

• The vegetables turning white is a big mystery in the book. Were you able to figure out what was happening before the characters did?

• If you found a mysterious bunny at a movie theater, would you take it home? What would you name it?

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

• Ivan lives in a mall and has been there for a very long time. How do you think that affected the way he sees the world?

• Ivan makes a promise to protect Ruby. Why do you think that promise is so important to him? Have you ever made a promise that really mattered?

• Ivan expresses himself through art. What’s a way that *you* express your feelings when words aren’t enough?

• This book is inspired by a real gorilla. Does knowing that change the way you feel about the story?

• If Ivan could talk to the humans in the story, what do you think he’d say to them?

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

• Roz is a robot who learns to survive in the wilderness by watching the animals. What’s something *you’ve* learned by watching someone else?

• The animals are afraid of Roz at first. Why do you think it’s hard to accept someone (or something) that’s different from you?

• Roz becomes a mother to Brightbill even though she’s a robot. What does this book say about what it means to be a family?

• There are some really emotional moments in this story. Which part hit you the hardest, and why?

• Do you think Roz is more “robot” or more “alive” by the end of the book? What makes someone — or something — truly alive?

The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies

• Evan and Jessie handle their competition very differently. Which sibling did you relate to more, and why?

• Was the lemonade war a good way to solve their problem, or did it make things worse before it got better?

• Jessie is really smart but sometimes struggles with understanding people’s feelings. Have you ever been really good at something but found another thing really hard?

• If you had to start a business to make money in one week, what would you sell and how would you do it?

• By the end of the book, what do you think Evan and Jessie learned about each other — and about themselves?

Book Lists: Start Your Own Book Club

Looking for the right books for your group? Here are recommendations organized by grade level. These are all kid-tested, book-club-approved titles that spark great conversations. For quick idea lists, check out my amazon store front (affiliate links)

Notably, these lists are just suggestions. The grade level suggestions are not firm, choose books based on your child’s needs and interests. Some of the books on the 4th grade list, I read with 3rd graders and vice versa!

Grade 3 (Ages 8–9)

• - The Dragon in the Library by Louie Stowell

• - Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe

• - The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

• - Ivy + Bean series by Annie Barrows

• - The Bad Guys series by Aaron Blabey

• - Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

• - Dog Man series by Dav Pilkey (for your graphic novel lovers)

• - The Magical Yet by Angela DiTerlizzi (great read-aloud to kick off a club)

• - Catwad series by Jim Benton

• - Pax by Sara Pennypacker

Grade 4 (Ages 9–10)

• - The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

• - The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies

• - The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden

• - Front Desk by Kelly Yang

• - Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

• - The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

• - Restart by Gordon Korman

• - Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper

• - Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland

• - The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser

Grade 5 (Ages 10–11)

• - Wonder by R.J. Palacio

• - The Crossover by Kwame Alexander

• - Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan

• - Holes by Louis Sachar

• - Ghost by Jason Reynolds

• - Refugee by Alan Gratz

• - Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina

• - Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson

• - The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson

• - Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

Craft Ideas to Pair with Book Club

Crafts are totally optional — but when you *do* include them, they add a special layer of magic. Here are ideas that work with virtually any book and don’t require a crafting degree. (I’m an Amazon affiliate, so I’ll link supplies where I can- here is a great idea list!)

For Any Book

• Bookmark Making Station — Cardstock, markers, washi tape, stickers, and a laminator if you’re feeling fancy. The easiest, most universally loved craft. Every. Single. Time.

• Character Portraits — Give kids watercolor sets or colored pencils and have them draw their favorite character. Display them all together for a mini gallery wall.

• Story Jar — Decorate a mason jar and fill it with slips of paper where each kid writes their favorite quote or moment from the book. Read them aloud together.

• Mini Book Craft — Fold and staple mini blank books. Kids write and illustrate their own short “sequel” or alternate ending.

• Friendship Bracelet Making — String beads or embroider thread bracelets with the initials of their favorite character. Great for chatting while crafting.

Book-Specific Craft Ideas

• Dragon in the Library — Make dragon bookmarks using origami or paper bag puppets. Bonus: create a “wizard library card” for each kid.

• Cricket in Times Square — Build tiny dioramas of a Times Square newsstand using shoeboxes and craft supplies.

• Bunnicula — Decorate mini pumpkins or make “drained vegetable” art (paint vegetables white — the kids think this is hilarious).

• The One and Only Ivan — Finger painting like Ivan! Set up easels or tape paper to the wall and let kids paint with their fingers.

• The Wild Robot — Build a “robot” using recyclables — cardboard boxes, bottle caps, aluminum foil, pipe cleaners.

• Lemonade War — Make and decorate lemonade stand signs, then actually make lemonade together.

Supplies Worth Having on Hand

A small stash of craft basics will carry you through many book clubs: a pack of cardstock in assorted colors, washable markers, glue sticks, safety scissors, a roll of washi tape, a bag of assorted stickers, and a few sheets of sticker paper for making custom stickers. If you want to level up, a small laminator is a game-changer for bookmarks and keeps everything feeling “official.”

Your Book Club, Your Way

Here’s the thing I want you to walk away knowing: there is no wrong way to do this. Our first book club was a themed café with twenty kids, a marble voting system, and enough food to cater a wedding. And it was magical. But book club number two? Somebody’s living room, Goldfish crackers, a fifteen-minute chat, and an hour of the kids playing outside. Also magical.

The magic isn’t in the theme or the menu or the craft. The magic is in a kid holding a novel they chose, sitting in a room full of other kids who read the same one, and realizing: *Oh. This is what books can feel like.*

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

So grab a book. Invite some kids over. Put out some snacks. Ask them what they thought. And watch what happens.

I promise you — it’s worth every crumb on your carpet.

Have you hosted a kids’ book club? I’d love to hear about it in the comments! And if this post inspired you to start one, let me know — I’m always happy to help brainstorm books, themes, and ways to make it work for your crew.

And if you haven’t already, check out my post on my daughter’s dyslexia journey — it’s the reason this whole beautiful, noisy, popcorn-fueled adventure began.

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator and literacy specialist focused on structured literacy, morphology, and supporting upper grade students.

Not every kid loves small group time. Sometimes I have found it is a student’s least favorite part of the day. You can feel it in the slow walk across the room. In the way chairs scrape just a little louder than necessary. In the deep sigh that escapes before anyone has even started the lesson.

Which brings me to one of my favorite moments as a teacher. That time I remembered what I do best- I see the students in front of me, honor what they truly need, and do whatever it is that I need to do to ensure their success.

Enter one of my favorite small groups.

This group came to me after intensive Orton-Gillingham instruction for additional fluency work. Their brains had already worked hard that morning. They had stretched sounds, mapped phonemes, traced graphemes, and wrestled language into order. They arrived carrying the invisible weight of effort. And they were exhausted from the heavy work they had already done before stepping foot back into my classroom.

What were they stepping back here to do? Well, we were using the leveled readers that accompanied our program Into Reading. These readers were short passages, skill aligned and technically appropriate in every way. (So says EdReports, at least)

And yet.

Every day they dragged their feet and if I’m being perfectly honest, so did I.

No one was misbehaving. No one was refusing. But nothing about the routine felt alive. The passages were thin. The language forgettable. We were practicing reading without experiencing it.

One day, after we all let out our collective sigh before marching forward with leveled readers, I looked at them and said, “Hey guys… do you want to just… read a novel instead?”

The moment felt both impulsive and strangely inevitable. Their faces changed instantly.

Now, reader, this was not a small decision.

One student in the group was scoring around late kindergarten to early first grade on iReady. He lit up the most, without a single hint of hesitation- he fully lit up. Because in that moment, I wasn’t offering him a different worksheet or an easier passage. I was offering him entry into something he knew other children were given without question.

A real book.

I threw the leveled readers aside and pulled out copies of The Wild Robot. And we began.

That day we started slowly. We took turns reading out loud; just a paragraph at a time. The chapters are short, which meant that even on the days when decoding came slowly, when sounds had to be worked out and retried, we still reached the end of a chapter together. We felt the accomplishment of finishing something real.

We felt like readers.

Often, I would read the next chapter aloud while they followed along, their fingers tracing the lines, their bodies leaning in. And sometimes, when the inevitable pleading began, “Can we read just one more?” I couldn’t say no.

Of course.

Within days, something had shifted. They arrived at the table with anticipation instead of dread. They leaned forward instead of slumping back. They argued over who would read next. They laughed. They gasped. They worried about Roz.

They belonged inside the story.

After the first week, I began adding small scaffolds. If students were doing intensive phonics work every day, why wouldn’t we apply those skills to a real book. Why keep grinding away endlessly on long vowel teams when we can of course first grind away and then apply that to language that mattered?

Before each session, I quickly scanned the chapter for words that might cause trouble. Together we previewed them.

We chunked the words.
We mapped the sounds.
We spelled them.
We talked about what they meant.

And then we met them again inside the story. The joy was immediate. They lit up when they recognized a word. They decoded with confidence. They whispered the word again just to feel the success.

This was no longer an exercise in endurance. This was purpose.

But more than that, this was connection. The way we laughed over the book, and cheered on rose, and felt sad with her (if robots felt emotions, of course) We loved that book so deeply together that we often forgot about all the hard work we were putting into it.

This was the quiet pride of doing something that once felt out of reach.

It is easy, in systems built around intervention and remediation, to unintentionally narrow the world for the children who need the most support. We give them controlled text instead of literature. Excerpts instead of stories. Practice instead of experience.

We tell ourselves we are building the ladder before allowing them to climb, but too often, they are left waiting at the bottom…

And children know.

They know when something real is being withheld. They know when other students are trusted with rich stories while they are handed fragments. They know when they are practicing reading rather than living inside it.

Access matters.

Equity is not only about providing support. It is about ensuring that support does not become a gate.

Every child deserves entry into story. Every child deserves getting lost in wonder. And every child needs the shared cultural language of books that classmates discuss at recess and reference in writing and carry home in backpacks.

There is something deeply human preserved when a child who struggles to decode is still invited fully into the world of literature. We often lose sight of this fact: reading is not only a skill to be mastered. It is a way of belonging. It is a way of participating in the shared imagination of a community. It is a way of seeing oneself as part of the human story.

That small group was still a place where we continued to build fluency and strengthen decoding. And the growth they made was something more than just a huge jump on an iReady measure. It was growth beyond that.

They experienced themselves as readers. Not someday readers. Not almost readers. Readers.

And once a child begins to see themselves that way, something powerful and lasting takes root. In that small circle of chairs, turning pages together, you could feel it: they were no longer working toward reading. They were living inside it

This one came in a bright, shiny package with big promises. “Phonics will fix it!” people cried. “If we simply pushed out the Balanced Literacy plaguing our schools and pushed in Structured Literacy (and all of the phonics,) then all children would be saved. And don’t worry!! There is no such thing as too much of a good thing. ALL children will benefit from a healthy overdose of phonics.”

To no surprise to many of us, we now find ourselves at a fork in the road; the point where it’s becoming clear that advice was wrong, and yes, we were sold another story.

Let me pause for a second to be clear. Structured literacy and instruction aligned to the Science of Reading is absolutely non-negotiable. In no way have I ever argued against that, and I never would. That’s not what this is about. This is about the false promises that were made, and the story we were all sold. We were sold the story that the solution to the reading problem in this country is a simple fix: phonics.

I know some might snap back, “The science never said phonics would fix everything!” Of course it didn’t. And that’s exactly the problem. Because in practice, that is how it was sold and implemented in far too many places. And once again, our kids paid the price.

Let’s rewind to 2020. My daughter was about to enter kindergarten and I was hesitantly optimistic. I already knew what we now have the official diagnosis for- she is dyslexic. I also knew change was sweeping the nation, and her school had already embraced explicit, direct phonics instruction. So she would be fine… right?

Right?

I even wrote about her experience and the hope that if Tier 1 included strong phonics instruction, things would finally be different. I was sold a story. I was sold the promise that it could be fixed, as long as phonics lived in general education.

Last year, her 4th grade year, I agreed to do a podcast about dyslexia, literacy, and what truly needed to change. The other guest was a parent whose child had experienced the opposite of my daughter- no phonics, no structure, just vibe-based reading instruction. She described the anxiety, the head aches, the stomach aches, the dread of school, and how incredibly difficult reading was without instruction that actually honors the full body of science that has existed for decades.

I was heartbroken listening to her.

And then I was baffled.

I sat there trying to understand how it was possible that my daughter had the same lived experience. The same shutdown, the same fear, and the same struggle despite having all of the phonics. (And I mean ALL the phonics. At one point, three times a day. I am not exaggerating.)

How could both things be true?

My child theoretically had all the right things in place. But like those infamous EdReports green checkmarks, she only had the right things on paper. In practice, the program implemented in her school failed her completely.

From the start, my daughter had “Science of Reading” stamped curriculum. Fundations was explicit and direct, 30–40 minutes a day. Add to that the state-approved program, Into Reading, and on every rubric imaginable it all looked perfect. Science aligned scope and sequence? Check. Scarborough’s Rope? Check. Science-aligned foundational skills? Check. Explicit instruction? Check, check and check.

And yet, she still struggled.

Dyslexia isn’t curable… we all know that. But the promises were loud and confident. Strong Tier 1 phonics would ensure all children reached proficiency.

Except when those promises are nothing more than theoretical boxes being checked, everything falls apart.

Myth 1 - Strong Tier 1 Will Fix All

Into Reading lacks several key components needed for true success. One glaring issue is the lack of authentic, rich, knowledge-building texts and novels. But beyond that, so much of the program is surface-level. Skim and check. Do the task. Move on. There’s no depth, no real learning, and very little that ensures students, especially struggling readers, actually leave with the skills they need.

The program is bulky. The teacher edition is overwhelming. There isn’t enough time in the day, let alone the reading block, to accomplish everything it demands. And even if there were, much of it simply isn’t worth the time. It lacks engagement, it lacks depth, and it lacks many of the pillars of science-based learning students desperately need.

When it didn’t work, the answer wasn’t to fix the instruction- it was to add more.

Teachers were told to teach foundational skills through Fundations and then turn around and teach foundational skills again through Into Reading. The concepts weren’t aligned. The pacing didn’t match. It felt like throwing darts at a wall with no target in sight.

And for dyslexic students, many then received a third round in Tier 2 Orton-Gillingham because, after all, “there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.” Learning the code was supposed to unlock everything. **I believe my teacher’s daughter opted to have her just miss Fundations- so she had but two rounds of phonics. Thank goodness.

Except learning just the code doesn’t unlock everything else.

Kids need chances to apply those skills… yes, in decodables, but more importantly in authentic texts that pull them in, engage them, and make them want to read.

And as we’re finally starting to admit, strong foundational skills instruction is more than just “more phonics.” Students need encoding. They need speech-to-print, not just print-to-speech. They need intentional practice that actually connects sounds and letters in the brain- something many widely adopted programs still fail to do.

This won’t cure dyslexia. Nothing will. But it can ease the pain, the frustration, the stomach aches, and the dread that so many children experience under poor practice.

Myth 2 - Tier 2 Orton-Gillingham is a Magic Fix.

I am a huge fan of OG methods. I loved my certification program and I use those tools every day. But OG is over 100 years old. If it were a true fix-all, we would know by now.

It’s powerful. It’s necessary for many students. But it is not a cure.

And selling it as one, just like selling phonics as the single solution, is part of what got us here.

Many programs rebranded old methods as something “new” and marketed them as guaranteed solutions. That story, the promise of an easy fix, keeps repeating. And each time, we end up right back where we started.

Here’s the hard truth: Balanced Literacy harmed many dyslexic children. And the way Structured Literacy has been implemented in many places recently has also done little to no good.

We need to speak loudly and honestly about what needs to be fixed. We are standing at the edge of another pendulum swing and we need to stop it. What we implemented failed children. We went to far, we got to extreme, and all of the things grounded in solid high quality instruction were lost. We have to find a way to correct it immediately.

We are in the same spot we were when this swing to Structure Literacy begam. Stagnant scores. Frustrated teachers. Struggling kids. People scratching their heads wondering why phonics didn’t fix it.

It’s not fixed because we did it all wrong. We went to extremes and failed to implement the true science in its totality. We chased programs instead of quality instruction. We checked boxes instead of building depth. We forgot that good teaching is nuanced, layered, and responsive.

There is no silver bullet.

And every time we pretend there is, we sell another story.

So here we stand in a very familiar and yet totally different spot.

We were sold another story.

It’s time to have honest and hard conversations. Its time to make appropriate pivots. Our students simply deserve better.

Writing in the age of ChatGPT might be something that is becoming a lost art, but we must preserve its humanity and its importance, especially in the classroom setting.

Somewhere along the way, writing became something we try to fit in when there’s time. Especially in the era of scripted Language Arts curriculm, writing lessons feel like an after thought. They present as something that doesn’t really matter…. Something for maybe after the content is covered. After the other standards are checked off. After the engagement of the class has drained away…. In many classrooms, writing has been separated from the very subjects where it belongs most, turned into a block on the schedule instead of the vehicle through which real understanding is built.

A truth I have always held near- learning doesn’t truly take root without writing.

Writing is how students make sense of what they are reading, exploring, questioning, and/or discovering. It is how ideas are organized, challenged, deepened, and ultimately owned. When students write about science, history, literature, and the world around them, they are not just repeating information they are processing it, and learning how to communicate their thinking with purpose.

This is where instruction moves from surface level to transformational.

And this is where teachers matter more than any scripted curriculum or program ever could.

Authentic writing embedded within subject content changes the way students engage with learning. A science lesson becomes more than facts when students explain phenomena, argue claims with evidence, and reflect on discoveries. A history unit becomes more than dates when students write from perspectives, analyze causes, and wrestle with impact. Reading becomes more than decoding when students respond, question, and craft their own interpretations.

Through writing, students learn not only what to think, but how to think. They learn to clarify ideas, defend reasoning, and communicate with intention. They begin to understand that writing is not just something done for school — it is a tool for understanding the world and for shaping it.

And when teachers are given the freedom and support to design meaningful, authentic writing experiences connected to real content, incredible growth happens.

When students first enter my classroom I tell them immediately, my goal is to make you love reading, writing and math. “You will leave her loving those things…. no really!” Some (maybe many) kids look at me like I am crazy but by the end they understand what I mean.

This is where we as teachers become makers of change.

When students see writing as purposeful, not performative, their confidence grows. Their voice strengthens. Their engagement deepens.

And sometimes, it alters the trajectory of their lives.

When Writing Becomes a Catalyst for the Future

The letter below is one of the greatest reminders of why authentic writing instruction matters so deeply. It speaks not just to the role of a teacher, but to the lasting impact of integrating writing into meaningful content — of showing a student that writing is not separate from science, or history, or advocacy, but essential to all of it.

It is shared in full here, with personal information removed, because it captures something data never can: the human ripple effect of thoughtful teaching and the absolute crucial role writing instruction plays in classrooms.

Ms. Karshner turned things around for me. Fourth grade felt like a new lease on life with her as my teacher. Through her genuine love of teaching that seeps into every one of her lessons to her infectious exuberance, evident in every aspect of her classroom, I began to come out of my shell. For the first time, I was met where I was at as a student and given proper accommodations to be able to succeed. I began to become invested in reading and science. We found a mutual love for marine science that she fostered throughout the year. I spoke up more in class. I felt safe to go to her knowing I would not be ridiculed for “stupid questions” or my painful worriedness. It is a year I look back on with incredible fondness for the close bond we formed as mentor and student. Even while accommodating my anxious nature, she challenged me.

A moment that sticks out to me in particular is my parent teacher conference with her and my mother. She inquired as to whether I had any inclination towards one career or another. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity to go on a tirade about how badly I wanted to become a marine scientist that studied dolphins and fish like the cut outs on her walls. Her response was, “So you’d like to be a writer.” I thought she was pulling my leg and again reiterated that my passion was science. What followed was a conversation that I can genuinely say changed my life. For the first time a teacher challenged me and conversed with me as an equal. In that meeting she explained to me how deeply intertwined science and writing are, something I know now by experience. She impressed upon me that if I truly wanted to pursue science, I should first work on my writing skills. Essays, reports, even creative writing would help because in order to work in any scientific field I'd need to know how to write papers, reports, analyses, grants, proposals, and more. I began focusing more on my essay skills both in elementary school and beyond.

Today I am in my last semester at college getting a degree in Environmental Science with a focus on policy. After earning my bachelors, I intend to continue on to law school and pursue a career in environmental policy. While remaining a full time student and holding a job as the manager of my university's Student Union Building, I continue being fiercely passionate about reading and writing. I have taken numerous extra courses throughout my college years solely because I have developed such a love for writing and wanted more experience with it, something that likely would not have happened had Ms. Karshner not recommended it so highly. I consider my writing skills to be one of my strongest attributes.

I have used them to be a fierce advocate for other disabled and underrepresented students like how Ms. Karshner was an advocate for me. Ms. Karshner and I remain in contact to this day and I consider her one of my best teachers. To find a teacher of her caliber is exceedingly rare. Teachers are meant to foster positive development, encourage further learning, and support students so that they are best set up for success. Melinda Karshner stands out to me as a formative teacher that did all of these and more every day I was in her class. I do believe that without exaggeration, she was an integral part of my success both as a student and as a person

Melinda Karshner is a veteran educator and literacy specialist focused on structured literacy, morphology, and supporting upper grade students.

There is a particular kind of magic that lives in August.

It’s the magic of freshly sharpened pencils, blank notebooks, and a freshly decorated room. A room that hasn’t yet learned the weight of the year. August is full of possibilities. It’s the deep breath before we begin. It’s a group of children walking into a classroom as individuals and slowly, intentionally, becoming something more.

In August, we build.

We build trust before content. We build safety before expectations. We build a community where every single one of our differences are honored. We build a place where every child learns that who they are matters here. We practice how to work together toward shared goals, how to listen, how to disagree respectfully, how to make mistakes out loud and survive them. We learn that mistakes don’t make us less, they make us learners. And we learn how to let others stumble without judgment, without rushing in to shame or fix.

August is where we decide who we’re going to be together, and it is where we begin to build our beautiful community. Its admittedly exhausting as a teacher, but it might just be my favorite month. A month of new beginnings, new friends, and a brand new beautiful start to the year.

September

By September, something settles.

The routines soften into rhythm. The classroom starts to shine. This is when we begin to feel like a family instead of a collection of desks. We learn each other’s stories, the bluegrass festivals your family never misses, the joy you feel when the music starts, the way your face lights up when you talk about it. The soccer tournaments that you won together because half of you are somehow all on the same team. The day you played soccer and scored a goal against a professional player (Go Rapids!) and the pride that still lives in that story. The victories in math classes and the excitement over new challenges. We share our personal narratives proudly and out loud, learning deeply about the most special moments in our lives. Those trips to Europe, the camping trips, that time you caught the biggest fish ever at the same time as your dad (and the same fish no less- how does that happen?) Even the trips to the ER which honestly sounded like they must have been scary at the time but you somehow write humor in retrospect. The angst of being the new kid is gone and you slip into being part of a wonderful community.

September is when passions peek through.

From my view as a teacher: It’s the writer who resisted putting pencil to paper until one quiet moment- when a magazine was finished and I caught a smile you didn’t know I saw. The reader who finds their book soulmate. The book clubs that sit and discuss and even guide each other into the best conversations. The friendships that wobble and repair. The conflicts that teach us how to speak up, how to listen, how to make things right. It’s singing K-pop Demon Hunters at the top of our lungs at recess and laughing as your teacher tries again and again to make a basket on that absurdly high hoop. (And then laughs and retreats to the kid size ones she’s more pro with) Its gardening together, sharing together, and learning how to move as a whole community.

September is connection.

October

By October, we’re in it.

Morning meetings buzz with weekend stories and thoughtful responses to the prompt of the day. Every voice matters now. We’ve learned how to take turns holding the space. We’ve learned that even the parts of the day that aren’t our favorites (yes, Into Reading, I’m looking at you) can become brighter with music, conversation, and a little joy layered in. We begin to trust the teacher when she says “Guys I promise! I will make this fun.” So we lean into it all, the discussions, the prompts, the deep dives into English lessons with her beloved morphology lessons.

We experiment concepts once foreign to us in science. We create slide decks and projects showing what we’ve learned in Social Studies. We investigate and deepen our knowledge of things we are passionate about. We respectfully debate our opinions and cheer for each other’s ideas. We dig into everything that makes fourth grade the best grade.

We are solid. We are us. We are the beautiful community that we built together.

And from there… the year marches on. One big classroom community solidly bound together.

If the 2020 sudden school closures taught me anything, it’s that there is no pain quite like the abrupt end of a beautiful thing.

I think about that often.

The last day I was with my class, I didn’t know it would be the last. I didn’t know there wouldn’t be time for a proper goodbye, for the kind that honors what we built together. A community doesn’t disappear just because a day ends. And yet, sometimes, it’s taken from us without warning or explanation.

That kind of loss that so many of us experienced six years ago lingers in ways that are hard to mend.

I hope deeply that no teacher ever has to experience that again. That no classroom family is ever interrupted by forces beyond understanding or control. That the communities we build with such care are allowed to grow, to evolve, and to close gently when the time comes.

Because these classrooms, these children, these stories, these ordinary extraordinary moments… are sacred.

And once you’ve been part of something like that, it stays with you. Always.