Doug Lemov's field notes

What makes us most optimistic about learning these days? The fact that thousands of schools, school districts (US) and trusts (UK) have adopted explicit, systematic phonics curricula, and that teachers that have been using them have been more intentional about using the science to shape instructional decisions.  There is a lot of great progress to feel positive about.

However, implementing a curriculum (even a really good curriculum) can be challenging. So, we’re excited to announce that we have two upcoming Foundational Literacy workshops—one that we’ll offer in-person in Cardiff, Wales and one that we’ll offer as a remote webinar—to support teachers and leaders in better understanding the components of their chosen phonics curriculum as well as how to more effectively  prepare for  and implement it.  Whether you join us in-person or online, here’s a preview of the topics that we’ll cover:

• Attention: The letter-sound correspondences students must learn in order to be successful readers is the biggest (and we think most important) body of knowledge that students will ever acquire. Given the foundational role of attention in any learning task, we’ll start by studying ways to ensure that classroom environments and materials support student attentiveness during this critical learning time.

• Designing and leading routines for student practice: Explicit, direct, consistent instruction that includes a high volume of practice is necessary for students to learn the large body of technical knowledge that’s at the foundation of skilled reading. Luckily, what might appear at first to be repetitive, mechanical, or even boring is incredibly joyful for students (and teachers!). When taught with consistency and enthusiasm, students love the energy and confidence of learning through direct instruction. It feels good to know things. We’ll study and practice leading routines to ensure lots of high quality, joyful student practice in the following areas:

• Phonological and Phonemic Awareness*
• Phonics Drills
• Decoding in Text
• Fluency

* While research shows that phonological awareness is not a prerequisite to phonics, we do think it supports decoding, so we’ll study phonemic awareness routines like segmenting that will support students’ decoding efforts.

Anyone who has come to one of our workshops knows that we take participant feedback very seriously—it’s driven how we’ve refined our workshops over the years. Here’s some of the feedback from Foundational Literacy participants: If you want to know more or sign up to join us you can do that here:

Foundational Literacy in Cardiff

Remote Foundational Literacy

Hope to see you there!