My Views Are My Own
By Lisa Schonhoff, Ed.S.
3/4/2025
Teaching kids to read isn’t rocket science. That being said, there are a lot of factors that play into student success, most importantly, the teacher in the classroom. With a great deal of dogmatic assertion about what effective literacy instruction looks like, teachers become overwhelmed with this most important responsibility. As a matter of fact, there are cohorts of people in education who are training our educators that have never been tasked with actually teaching kids to read. A current debate that is causing confusion in the education field is whether to use decodable text or leveled text in reading instruction. Let’s see if we can clear up some of this confusion.
During the past several decades, educators have argued whether teaching phonics is necessary to teach a child to read. You will even hear teachers say that they were told by administrators that they were not allowed to teach phonics. I think what teachers really mean is that their administrators spent millions of dollars on evidence-based curriculum materials which must be taught with fidelity, meaning teach the purchased materials with little leeway to meet the needs of students. Luckily, I never had an administrator who told me this, because it is clearly impossible to teach a struggling reader without phonics.
Currently, teachers are being dissuaded from using leveled texts or leveling their students as it is not considered an equitable practice, nor does it align with the Science of Reading. With the recent purchase of new curriculum materials costing taxpayers millions of dollars, teachers are instructed to use these materials with fidelity. Hmm, this sounds to me like an ongoing recipe for disaster.
For those of us who have taught hundreds of struggling readers to read, we know that there is a continuum of teaching and learning that happens when kids learn to read. “Decodable texts are carefully sequenced to progressively incorporate words that are consistent with the letters and corresponding phonemes that have been taught to the new reader.” These texts are important for early readers as they require students to use phonics to read them.
On the other hand, “Leveled books are books characterized and categorized by the level of difficulty of the text, based on a number of criteria…such as word knowledge, vocabulary, and sentence structure.” Without understanding students as readers, teachers waste valuable time on skills and concepts that are not growing their students as readers. As children grow through the continuum of literacy instruction and learning, they must be exposed to a LOT of books below their reading level to build confidence. They must be taught with books at their level to grow as readers. They must be read to from books just above their level to frontload important vocabulary and content that will help them successfully read books at those levels soon. As an Instructional Coach, it was clear that a teacher needed additional support if they could not easily discuss the level of their students and what that means for them as readers.
There is a time and a place to use both decodable texts and leveled texts. We must not substitute one for the other as the reading wars rage on. We need to use common sense as educators and avoid the noise that typically comes from those who have never taught kids to read.
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