Doug Lemov's field notes

This past year TLAC’s reading team partnered with a group of Reading Reconsidered Curriculum teachers and leaders from across the country to study reading fluency. Fluency – as we share in our new book, The TLAC Guide to the Science of Reading – is an overlooked prerequisite to comprehension. It is defined, most simply, as “the ability to read at the speed of sight.”  It consists of three parts: accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. Studies find that about half of demonstrated reading comprehension is predicted by reading fluency. This is due in big part to the fact that fluent readers have to use less of their working memory to think about what the words they are reading say or how they are linked together so they can better attend to comprehension. When you can read effortlessly, you are free to consider the meaning of the text or perceive details within it. TLAC Director of Strategy of Curriculum and School Support Jaimie Brillante shared this reflection on the power of FASE Reading to build student fluency.

When students read with prosody and hear prosodic reading, the words begin to sound like spoken language and students build a more engaged internal reading “voice,” which supports comprehension during independent reading. In other words, as Doug recently shared in the Knowledge Matters Podcast, “We can change a student’s reading habits from the outside in.”  So, even though it is not widely practiced, it is imperative that middle school students get ample opportunities with oral reading, including both reading aloud and hearing fluent reading, making  FASE Reading an important technique for reading classrooms, even – and perhaps especially – for our most reluctant readers.

With this in mind, the TLAC Reading team worked closely with a small group of teachers and leaders on the successful implementation of FASE (Fluent, Accountable, Social, and Engaged) over the 2024-2025 school year. Our FASE Reading cohort engaged in remote workshops studying FASE Reading classroom routines, planning to proactively support readers of all levels, and practicing techniques for effective prompting when students struggle. Each teacher recorded themselves and their students using FASE reading at multiple points across the year, applying their new learnings. The cohort then came together to study each other’s video in what we call a Video Collaborative where we reflected on what worked and what we might try next time.

Consistently planning FASE Reading and attending to accuracy, automaticity, and prosody pays off. We asked our FASE Cohort to do a beginning and end of year assessment, a basic Dibels fluency assessment that measures oral reading fluency – or number of words students can read correctly in one minute – and accuracy, the percentage of words students read correctly. Both oral reading fluency and accuracy improved across the group regardless of grade level. In one school, the percentage of fluent fifth grade readers grew by a whopping 26% while accuracy increased an average of 12%.

The group of students who were dysfluent at the start of the year (defined as reading less than 110 words correct per minute or WCPM) increased their oral reading fluency by 43 WCPM. In fact, in all 5 schools, the classes with the highest number of struggling readers showed the greatest growth in oral reading fluency. Fluency practice doesn’t just help our struggling readers. In another cohort school, eighth graders started the year with 80% of students reading fluently. Students in this eighth-grade class still improved by an average of 17 WCPM.

Through this cycle of learning, practice, and analysis we learned a few best practices that we think are worth sharing as you roll out your FASE Reading systems this school year.

• Plan FASE Reading as you prepare your lesson: Choose unpredictable starting and stopping points paired with student readers. Strategically plan where you will bridge by reading aloud yourself (perhaps after a struggling reader to re-establish pacing or during a poignant plot point to emphasize expressiveness), and anticipate moments of struggle. All these decisions can easily overwhelm the working memory of a teacher if made in the moment, however, when planned in advance, the teacher can focus on being responsive to the student who is reading. Check out some sample FASE reading planning here.

• Microbridge: When a student struggles with wooden reading, one effective approach is microbridging, where the teacher reads a short burst of text (one sentence or less) to model prosody or tricky sentence structure and then directs the student to reread imitating the teacher’s model. This is more effective than simply prompting students to “read with more expression.” Click here to watch Nicaury Villar from Baychester Middle School microbridge as she and her students read The Outsiders.

• Intervene at Point of Error: When students struggle with accuracy, respond with quick simple consistent intervention at the point of error. This might sound like a simple rule drop, “Try that with a long a” or you might mark the spot by rereading the sentence until the point of error allowing the student to pick up and try again. To watch Jessica Bracey: Circle of Gold using this technique, click here. You can also check out our Supplemental Promoting Guide for additional ways to support students with accuracy.

• Positive and Safe Culture: Creating a positive culture of reading with lots of FASE Reading requires students to feel safe and successful when doing so. It requires teachers to roll out and implement the system with intentionality. Teachers must create a strong culture of error where students know that making errors while reading is normal and a valuable part of the learning process. This means providing consistent and brief prompts to address inaccuracy, ignored words, poor pronunciations, or dropped endings each time an error is made. This messages to students that reading accurately matters and that everyone makes mistakes from time to time – not just struggling readers.

Fluency growth cannot happen if students are not getting frequent and supportive opportunities to practice reading aloud. This school year we encourage you to double down on FASE Reading. Build the routine and make it a daily practice in all literacy-based classes. You can also learn more about FASE reading in our FASE Plug and Play or in an  module on TLAC Online. Want to learn more about reading instruction alongside our team? Check out our upcoming workshops at https://teachlikeachampion.org/training/workshops/ – we’ll be studying FASE at our March workshop in Memphis.

Special thank you to our FASE Reading Data Cohort participants, Alma Del Mar Charter Schools in Massachusetts, Milwaukee College Prep Charter Schools in Wisconsin, Tulsa Honor Academies in Oklahoma, Elmwood Village Charter School in New York, and Nashville Classical Charter Schools in Tennessee.

To learn more about Teach Like A Champion’s ELA curriculum, Reading Reconsidered, click here.