Reading, especially reading English, doesn’t aways come naturally for children. Mastering concepts like cracking the code of print – recognizing letters and understanding sounds – and the ability to connect those sounds and letters to meaning, will happen for children differently, and at different rates.
To better reflect the complexities of how children learn to read, North Carolina joined other states across the nation in 2021 by passing legislation that would change how teachers approach reading instruction. By the 2022-23 school year, elementary school teachers would base literacy lessons on an evidence-based body of research called the science of reading.
While a required professional development training called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) covered the ins-and-outs of the science of reading, it doesn’t quite capture the complexity of teaching the science of reading.
Enter Annemarie Hindman, Ph.D., a longtime literacy researcher and teacher educator who joined the UNC School of Education faculty in 2024 and has spent two decades studying how young children learn to read and what specific day-to-day guidance teachers need to get them there.
Her arrival in North Carolina happened to come at just the right time. How do teachers get access to the kinds of tools, letter games, print materials and activities they need? How will they work them into their lesson plans? What is the best way to support new and experienced teachers on implementation? These are all good questions, Hindman says. She has them, too.
“As teachers finish the LETRS training, they might think, ‘That was amazing. Now I know all these new things, but what exactly does that mean for me next week?’” says Hindman. “The whole empirical question of how we do these things well in classrooms, in ways that are sustainable, manageable and rewarding for teachers as well as for kids, is a really pressing question and an interesting one.”
And with the increased momentum around language and literacy in the state she now calls home, she thinks Carolina can help.
**
Literacy specialists, education researchers and teachers know a lot about the kinds of foundational skills in language, vocabulary and code- and meaning-focused strategies that kids need to build to learn to read. The measures and assessment tools to understand how well kids are doing are well-known, too.
“We know less about the nitty gritty of how teachers in a classroom of 25 or 30 children, who have very diverse background knowledge and interests, can really provide these experiences in feasible ways for kids,” says Hindman.
Hindman was raised by educators in rural Maryland, but the field didn’t interest her until college, when AmeriCorps placed her in a Head Start classroom. It was a surprising and delightful fit. Preschoolers – the things they had to stay, the observations they had about the world – fascinated her. Children learn, in large part, through conversations, by building vocabulary and contexts, and she loved talking to them. The more she discovered about how they learn, the more she wanted to know. She went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, earning master’s and doctoral degrees in education and developmental psychology to learn about how to design and evaluate the kinds of programs that support teachers, literacy coaches and families as they help children learn to read.
Hindman and her team have published extensively on their work to bring educational research into practice, and their observations have pointed out, and worked to resolve, an important missing piece in the conversations about teaching reading – much of the processes require very individualized instruction for children and few explicit directions on how a classroom teacher can make that work.
“If you’re a teacher standing in front of a first-grade classroom, you’re going to have a very wide collection of skill sets in front of you. We happen to have a particularly diverse populace in the United States, and kids with varying levels of learning approaches and challenges. So kids are going to learn things in different ways. That’s a really tall order for teachers.”
In North Carolina, the new legislation and training came right on the heels of the COVID pandemic and unfolded against the backdrop of high levels of teacher stress, anxiety, turnover and teacher shortages nationally. It presents a unique opportunity for targeted support to teachers that works – guidance about structuring and organizing classroom activities that build literacy and specific print materials they need. Teachers are often familiar with the science of reading, but they may have a wide range of complex circumstances that make it hard to implement this science the classroom. For example, new teachers may not have experience with smoothly managing activities, while experienced teachers may have other challenges, like burnout. And while a well-resourced school may have literacy specialists who can help teachers choose instructional materials, many schools do not have these resources.
“I’m very interested in where the rubber meets the road,” says Hindman. “What’s the science of teaching reading? What is working in classrooms? What can teachers actually do on the average day? Folks don’t have a lot of time, and early and elementary teachers are responsible for teaching all the content areas, unlike teachers in later grades. The more we can provide concrete supports that are grounded in research, but classroom friendly, the more successful we find teachers and kids are,” she says.
**
In her work, Hindman and her team have spent 20 years working alongside in-service preschool and kindergarten teachers who serve both native English speakers and English learners in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to provide this support and develop targeted coaching programs that improve their literacy instruction. They help teachers to organize and structure the chaos of a room full of eager young children, and to develop the kinds of routines that children need to learn to communicate with one another. The results show, in a variety of contexts, that the support tools they provide, when used all year, produce large increases in the quality of the teachers’ language and literacy instruction and in the children’s retained knowledge of vocabulary.
An essential part of the process is to work in partnership with teachers and get their feedback on what works and what doesn’t. It’s an iterative process of development, Hindman says. This approach not only improves literacy skills, but it also helps teachers feel valued and respected.
“We aim for something where we give teachers specific tools, like: here’s a lesson guide with a series of open-ended questions. Here are vocabulary cards that you can use. If the science of reading says kids need multiple meaningful opportunities to talk about words, here’s a package of tools where you can show kids the picture card, ask five open-ended questions over the course of the week about this word, and then do these activities where kids are using the word. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of trying to round up the tools that you need.”
As the science of reading is newly implemented in North Carolina classrooms, new complexities will present. The state has both urban and rural settings and an increasing number of English learners. There’s a lot of work that can be done to make sure teachers feel like researchers are in their corner – and, that’s an opportunity for universities like Carolina.
“My hope is that there might be interest in these kinds of endeavors in the state of North Carolina now that we have teachers who are trained in the LETRS training, using it, and this is where UNC can be really helpful,” she says. “We have opportunities to fill some of those gaps that teachers will identify. What do they need to know to implement this, and what questions do they have that we don’t have answers for yet? What research can we do with them now to develop the kinds of materials they need? I think that’s an essential role that we can play in this process now.”