Thanks to decades of research, we now have a solid understanding of what happens in the brain when learning to read. Although it may happen at different speeds for different students, this pathway to reading is the same for everyone. This knowledge is powerful because it helps identify places where literacy development is breaking down for students.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Charles Dickens. (A Tale of Two Cities, 1859) These century-and-half-old words describe what it is like being an educator today.

I once invited a refugee from Rwanda to be a guest speaker for my ELA/social studies class. She shared how she lost her entire family during the Rwandan genocide and was forced to live in a refugee camp for 17 years with no running water or electricity.

I stepped into the classroom for the first time at the Lab School on the campus of the University of California in Los Angeles more than a decade ago and did what I do best: I told stories.

School leaders hold the keys to unlocking literacy for young learners. However, like other educators, many school principals don't have deep knowledge of how the brain learns to read, effective instructional practices in the essential early literacy skills, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS), and identifying and serving students with reading disabilities.

The science of reading is by no means limited to phonics. However, phonics instruction is an essential component in a Structured Literacy classroom.