Willow Lane kindergarten team closes literacy gap with new approach to reading
The Willow Lane Elementary kindergarten team was doing everything right. They were using tried-andtrue instructional methods. They prioritized parent and family engagement to ensure that students were set up for success at home and school. In every subject, they were providing the very best instruction that they knew how to give.
Yet, the risk of reading failure was only increasing. This problem is not unique to Willow Lane—schools across the country struggle with this issue, particularly those like Willow Lane with a high number of students who receive free or reduced lunch. This rise in risk of reading failure is concerning because it can have serious and lifelong negative impacts, including lower income in adulthood, a higher likelihood of dropping out of school and an increased risk of incarceration, among others.
“Literacy is a social justice issue,” said Dr. Kelly Pylkas-Bock, instructional coach for the White Bear Lake school district. “Literacy is a right that should be afforded to all, and this team works so hard because they understand the life-changing value of literacy for their students.”
“No matter how hard we tried, we weren’t seeing the results we wanted, and we weren’t sure why it wasn’t all coming together,” kindergarten teacher Anna Morehead said.
Willow Lane educators had used a balanced approach to reading instruction. This instructional model taught students to read by using three metacognitive strategies, or cues: semantic (looking at words and pictures), syntactic (using knowledge of how a language is structured), and graphophonic (looking at individual chunks of letters). Phonics and phonemic awareness, both considered foundational to reading, were taught when opportunities arose out of text instead of systematically and explicitly teaching readers to decode the English language.
“We had been teaching reading using the strategies we were trained to use, but we found out those strategies were actually inhibiting success by limiting the formation of neural connections in the brain,” Pylkas-Bock said. Because these practices focused on reading words as whole shapes instead of looking at each letter or groups of letters to read words, students were more likely to struggle with reading once the words became more complex.
During the 2021-22 school year, the team began Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) training, which teaches literacy strategies that are grounded in cognitive science and evidence-based research. The goal is to teach reading in a way that works with the brain’s language development processes instead of against them.
While going through LETRS training, a group of dozens of White Bear Lake elementary educators—including Pylkas-Bock and Morehead—collaborated with district administration on a robust, two-year curriculum identification process. The committee chose a new curriculum called Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) because it met most of the committee’s criteria, especially in the areas of word recognition and oral language skills.
A radically different approach to what had been used in the past, CKLA starts by teaching students letter sounds, as opposed to traditional methods of teaching letter names first. Morehead said this helps students learn to read faster: “Beginning with sounds instead of letter names means they don’t have to think of the letter name and then the sound. This makes it easier for students to identify the letter sounds in words, which means they begin reading faster because we have removed that extra retrieval step.”
The CKLA curriculum starts with a heavy emphasis on word recognition and oral language skills. “We go slow to go fast,” Morehead said. The first two units focus on these building-block skills, such as listening for environmental sounds (which is a precursor for hearing letter sounds) and sound articulation. This focus provides ample time for students to learn the building-block skills they will use to learn to read, which allows students to begin learning faster when they do finally begin learning to read.
The CKLA curriculum also provides decodable texts— books that contain easy words that students can sound out. “[In previous years] we’d go to the library and the students would check out books, but they couldn’t read them. This past year, we went to the library and students gravitated towards the decodable books because they could actually read them. They were motivated and confident reading those books, which meant they wanted to spend more time reading,” Morehead said.
While this may sound like a return to traditional phonics instruction, Pylkas-Bock and Morehead caution against simply investing in more phonics-based materials. Success also depends on helping kindergarteners build oral language skills. “CKLA begins with nursery rhymes and songs that allow students to simply play with language. This is a fun and developmentally appropriate way to introduce kids to the ways that letters and words help us understand the world around us,” said Pylkas-Bock.
These two components yielded the outcomes the Willow Lane team was working toward.
The results
As White Bear Lake schools began using the new curriculum, literacy rates across the district improved from the 2022-23 school year to the 2023-24 school year. Willow Lane’s student outcomes were among the most successful in the district.
In a composite of early-reading benchmarks, the amount of Willow Lane students who were at or above standards went from 39% to 56%, and the number of students who were experiencing reading failure dropped from 23% to 14%.
Those increases are largely driven by students of color. On word segmenting, one of the benchmarks used to measure literacy, the number of Black students who were at or above standard jumped from 47% in the winter to 71% in spring. The number of students who could not successfully segment words fell from 24% to only 6%.
These students showed similar improvements with another literacy marker: nonsense words, which measure a student’s ability to decode words. In the winter of 2022-23, 47% of Black students were at or above standard. By spring, 71% of these students were at or above standard.
What made Willow Lane so successful?
The kindergarten team implemented several strategies that contributed to this success. One of those strategies was scheduling focused time where students were grouped according to instructional needs to work on skills they were struggling with.
Another component of their success was intense collaboration. Every person working with Willow Lane kindergarteners—both in and outside of the classroom—was fully committed to the new curriculum and approach. “We were the most collaborative we’ve ever been,” said Morehead. She described how the team would check in every two weeks to see how students were doing and adjust according to what they needed.
Their training and curriculum selections also contributed to their success. While CKLA is a very robust curriculum, the Willow Lane team finds ways to incorporate aspects of the curriculum into classroom play and make the curriculum work for their program. “This team makes it a point to ensure that kindergarten still feels like kindergarten,” Pylkas-Bock said. “A lot of the time, learning is built into play time, so kids don’t even realize they’re learning.”
Training programs like LETRS will soon become standard practice across Minnesota as school districts begin implementing provisions of the 2023 READ Act, which aims to increase literacy rates across the state by requiring LETRS and similar training for elementary and English and Language Arts teachers.
If you are interested in learning more, the Willow Lane team will be speaking at the MEA conference about their experience.
Anna Morehead and Dr. Kelly Pylkas-Bock contributed to this article.
