High-Quality Instructional Materials Aren’t Enough: Teachers Need Literacy Professional Learning
I once heard the phrase, “Programs don’t teach reading—teachers do.” It’s true. I’ve consulted with schools that have purchased or developed high-quality literacy instruction programs, but without teachers who possess sufficient knowledge of effective, evidence-based instruction, those programs are unlikely to be effective. Likewise, I have seen situations where teachers have deep knowledge of effective literacy instruction, but the lack of high-quality materials presents significant challenges. These teachers often must spend an inordinate amount of time creating materials for teaching foundational skills (e.g., letter–sound cards, phonics word lists, decodable texts) and locating high-quality texts needed to build students’ academic vocabulary and syntactic awareness; to teach and practice comprehension strategies and close-reading skills; and to teach writing skills that support learning.
In this post, I make the case that effective literacy instruction (ELI)—the kind that leads to strong literacy achievement—requires both high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and high-quality professional learning (HQPL). I also introduce to the literacy education community a formula that captures this relationship: HQIM + HQPL = ELI
