A Marathon not a Sprint: Starting Your Science of Reading Journey

It was wonderful to welcome James Dobson last week to share his expertise as part of the Spellcaster Implementing Evidence Aligned Practice in Education webinar series. A classroom teacher and learning specialist based in Victoria, James has driven whole school instructional transformation at schools in both the Northern Territory and Victoria.

James's core message about driving change in schools was to to start small and be strategic rather than trying to change everything at once. Ultimately, the answer to "where do we start and how fast do we move?" Come back to that age-old answer "it depends" - "It depends on your skill, it depends on your circumstances... One thing which is slightly frustrating sometimes is that we often have to start with baby steps."

James acknowledges that this measured approach can be frustrating because "we want what's best for our students and we want to get that now." However, he emphasizes that successful implementation takes years, noting about his own school's journey: "This has taken my current school three, four years to do and and we're still working on it."

To help get the ball rolling, James provided practical advice for rolling out and embedding science of reading aligned instruction across schools and within classrooms. James' advice reflects his broader philosophy about implementation - start somewhere manageable, learn from experience, and refine your approach.

Phonemic Awareness

"My first baby step was phonemic awareness," James shared. While initially embracing longer daily practice sessions with programs like Heggerty's phonemic awareness, his approach has since shifted to become more targeted and efficient.

For phonemic awareness, this means focusing on three high-impact skills (blending, segmenting, and manipulation) while linking to letters as early as possible. "You can do phonemic awareness in the dark," he noted, "but it's better if we turn the lights on and actually link phonemes to graphemes as quickly as possible." This doesn't mean throwing out a program like Heggerty, it just means fine tuning its implementation.

Notably the evolution of James's practice reflects the evolving literature around how to best do phonemic awareness. This is a reminder that the science of reading is a constantly evolving field of study and it is important to evolve with it!

Fluency: Building the Bridge

James is a big advocate for reading fluency, which he calls,"the bridge between that word recognition side and the language comprehension side," of the simple view of reading.

In James' experience, the most effective way to build fluency is through partner reading. James' approach is deliberately systematic. Students are assigned consistent reading partners (avoiding the time sink of daily partner selection) and positioned side-by-side with shared text. A critical component, according to James, is teaching students how to give meaningful feedback. "You can't just assume that they're going to give feedback," James noted. "It's hard enough for us as teachers to give meaningful feedback. We need to make sure we're teaching our students."

Again, James' thinking about the routine has evolved over time, particularly regarding repeated reading. "I would have said, I don't really mind whether they go on with the reading or whether they go back to the start. But I think my mind has shifted that repeated reading is underrated." Repeated reading provides particular benefits for struggling readers, giving them multiple exposures to the same text.

Vocabulary

In James' experience, another powerful avenue embedding the science of reading has been through schoolwide explicit vocabulary instruction. Not only is vocabulary instruction a powerful lever for language comprehension, teaching it explicitly offers an opportunity to build a shared understanding of what explicit teaching actually looks like. As James noted, "Everybody says they do explicit teaching but somehow it looks incredibly different in lots of different classrooms."

James recommends starting with Tier 2 vocabulary - words that can be used across different contexts but aren't super common parts of everyday speech (words like "persist", "abstain", or "depict"). These words offer the most instructional value because students can use them across different types of writing and different subject areas.

To support consistent explicit implementation, James initially created a term's worth of daily slides for teachers that structured the instruction. Each word was introduced in context, given a clear student-friendly definition, illustrated with examples and non-examples, and regularly reviewed.

Importantly, James advocated against the common but time-consuming practice of asking students "Who knows what this word means?" As James explained, "[occasionally] you might end up with the right answer straight away. But more often than not, you get given a completely incorrect answer or an almost correct answer, which is almost just as hazardous for our students." This wastes precious instructional time and risks confusing students who did know the correct meaning but have now heard incorrect definitions.

Systematic Synthetic Phonics

The biggest shift schools often focus on is implementing systematic synthetic phonics. This is particularly pertinent now given policy changes mandating the implementation of phonics across schools in Australia and NZ. One big challenge that comes with this mandate is that many teachers, including James, weren't taught about phonics in a meaningful way at university. "It's certainly something that I wasn't taught at university and I had to learn as I was teaching. And that's the case for many experienced teachers."

Initially, therefore, the emphasis should be on reducing educators' cognitive load and making it as easy as possible to be successful with implementing phonics. This way teachers can feel like they can execute a program and gradually build a touch sense for evidence based reading and spelling instruction.

To support this, James emphasizes choosing one high-quality program and implementing it with fidelity: "There are so many great programs...The important thing probably is to start with one and just be consistent with that one to make sure that it's working rather than just picking and choosing from a whole range of them." What typically tends to happen from there is that as educators and schools become more confident in delivery they will tailor the programs and their scopes and sequences to get better bang for buck.

Assessment

James advocates for a significant shift in assessment practices. He points to research showing that traditional tools like running records with leveled texts are "about as good as flipping a coin", in identifying students at risk in reading.

This insight is critical given how time intensive these assessments can be. As someone who had conducted extensive running records (at one point assessing an entire school), James noted: "I've got a lot of experience with running records and know how long they take. So if I'm spending that long with students, I want the assessment to be accurate."

Instead of assessment tools that promote three-cueing strategies (using multiple cues to guess words), James recommends reliable screening tools like DIBELS, CUBED or Acadience. "The great news about these screeners," he notes, "many are free and they also take a fraction of the time."

Importantly, James emphasizes the need to maintain clear links to curriculum standards rather than relying solely on reading levels. "Too often with benchmark running records, we'd just say 'oh they're Level D' or 'they're at age expectation' and skip the crucial step of checking what our curriculum standards actually say students should be capable of." This focus on curriculum alignment ensures assessment serves its true purpose - understanding and supporting student progress against clear learning outcomes.

The Implementation Journey

While the research behind structured literacy is compelling, the path to implementation isn't about dramatic overnight transformation. Instead, it's about choosing strategic entry points and building from there. Change takes time but starting small and being strategic can lead to sustainable transformation for schools, teams and, most importantly, our learners.

You can find more resources and insights from James at his website Laying the Foundations. The slides from this presentation are available here.