What the Research Says to Prioritize: A Reading Teacher’s Guide to the New Year
Before the routines set in and the pace picks up, the first days of a new school year offer something rare: a genuine window to establish the conditions that will shape everything that follows.
This isn’t a to-do list. It’s a set of questions worth sitting with as the year begins: each one grounded in the research, each one pointing to a place where a small shift in practice can make a meaningful difference. Each question connects to a deeper article in the Decoding Learning series, so if something catches your attention, there’s more waiting for you.
The items are organized across three categories: foundational skills, building meaning, and practice and fluency. Not everything will apply to every grade or every classroom. Think of it as a menu for reflection, not a mandate.
Category 1: Foundational Skills
Foundational reading skills (phonological awareness, phonics, and decoding) are the engine of early reading development. They are also the area where instructional approaches are extremely important. Three questions worth sitting with as the year begins:
1. Explicit and systematic phonics instruction
Explicit means the teacher directly teaches each skill. Systematic means the sequence moves deliberately from simpler to more complex patterns, with each new skill building on what came before. Research is unambiguous: children who receive explicit, systematic phonics instruction learn to decode more reliably and more efficiently than those expected to absorb patterns through exposure. If your phonics instruction feels more incidental than intentional, this is a high-leverage place to start. The phonics article in this series goes deeper on what systematic instruction looks like in practice.
2. Decodables for early readers
For children who are still learning to decode, the texts they practice with matter enormously. Decodable readers — books written specifically so that every word can be sounded out using the phonics patterns a child has already been taught — give children the chance to practice decoding rather than guessing from pictures or context. If your beginning readers are spending more time guessing than decoding, it may be worth revisiting the texts they’re practicing with. The decodables vs. leveled readers mini covers this in more detail.
3. Prompting language when reading
When a child gets stuck on a word, what do you say? Context-cueing prompts such as “Does that make sense?” “What word would fit there?” and “What does the picture tell you?” encourage guessing rather than decoding. “Look at the first sound” and “sound it out” are decoding prompts that build the habit of attending to print. The research is clear that context-cueing strategies, while intuitive, can undermine the development of accurate decoding. The three-cueing mini examines this in detail and is one of the most important reads in this series for any teacher working with early readers.
Category 2: Building Meaning
Decoding is necessary but not sufficient. Reading comprehension depends on what readers bring to a text: their vocabulary, their background knowledge, their understanding of how words work. Three high-impact changes in this category:
4. Pre-teach vocabulary before students encounter it in text
Vocabulary instruction often happens after reading, with students reading a passage first and then looking up unfamiliar words. The vocabulary article in this series makes a strong case for pre-teaching instead: introducing key words before students encounter them in text rather than after. When students encounter key words before reading, they process the text more deeply, retain the vocabulary more reliably, and build the kind of word knowledge that transfers to new contexts. It’s a low-effort shift with meaningful impact. The vocabulary article gives actionable strategies to use in the classroom.
5. Protect science and social studies time
When test prep pressure mounts, science and social studies are often the first casualties. This turns out to be a costly trade-off. Research consistently shows that content knowledge is not separate from reading ability, and is in fact one of its most powerful drivers. A child who knows something about the topic of a text will understand it more deeply than one who can decode every word but brings no prior knowledge to the page. Cutting science and social studies to make room for reading skills quietly undermines the very comprehension you’re trying to build. The background knowledge article and the content area reading article both go deep on why this matters and what to do about it.
6. Add explicit morphology instruction for students in grades 3 and up
By third grade, a significant portion of the new vocabulary students encounter in academic texts is morphologically complex — built from prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Students who can analyze the structure of an unfamiliar word (“if I know ‘bio’ means life, what might ‘biography’ mean?”) have a powerful tool for unlocking meaning across every subject. Morphology instruction is often underemphasized relative to its impact, particularly in the upper elementary grades. The morphology article explains the research and practical entry points for any grade.
Category 3: Practice and Fluency
How students practice matters as much as what they practice. Three changes that often produce the most noticeable results in reading outcomes:
7. Replace some silent reading time with structured oral reading practice
Sustained silent reading is a staple of many classrooms, and it has real value for students who are already fluent readers. But for students still developing fluency, silent reading provides little useful feedback and limited opportunity to develop the accuracy, rate, and expression that fluency requires. Structured oral reading practice — where students read aloud, receive feedback, and return to familiar texts until they feel automatic — is consistently more effective for building fluency than independent silent reading alone. The fluency article covers the research and a range of practical approaches, including repeated reading and partner reading structures that work across grades.
8. Replace cramming with spaced retrieval
The way most students practice reading skills (intensive review before a test, then moving on) is one of the least effective learning strategies the research has identified. Spaced practice, where skills and content are revisited across time with gaps between sessions, produces dramatically stronger retention. Retrieval practice (actively recalling rather than passively re-reading) produces stronger, more durable memory. What you practice recalling sticks far better than what you passively review. These principles apply directly to vocabulary review, phonics patterns, comprehension skills, and content knowledge. The value of practice article goes deep on the research and practical implementation.
9. Try interleaved practice
Most practice is blocked: students work through all of one skill before moving to the next. Interleaved practice mixes different skills or topics within a single practice session. It feels harder in the moment, and students who encounter interleaved practice often report feeling less confident. But the research is unambiguous: interleaved practice consistently produces stronger long-term retention than blocked practice, across subjects and age groups. In reading instruction, this might mean mixing phonics patterns within a practice session rather than drilling one pattern at a time, or returning to vocabulary words from previous units alongside new ones. The discomfort students feel during interleaved practice is not a sign that it isn’t working. It is a sign that their brains are doing more work, and that work is what makes learning stick. The value of practice article covers interleaving in detail.
10. Make comprehension active, not passive
Comprehension is not what happens after reading. It is what happens during reading, in the moment-by-moment work of making meaning from text. Students who are taught active reading strategies — asking questions, monitoring their own understanding, connecting new information to what they already know, summarizing as they go — comprehend more deeply than those who read through a text and answer questions at the end. The shift from post-reading comprehension questions to during-reading comprehension strategies is one of the most impactful changes a teacher can make, across every grade and every subject. The comprehension article covers the research and a range of strategies in detail.
A Note on Scarborough’s Reading Rope
If you’re looking for a framework that maps the full range of what reading instruction attends to (from word recognition to language comprehension), Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope is a useful place to start. The ten questions above don’t follow it precisely, but they touch on most of its strands. If the Rope is new to you, it’s well worth looking up. It offers a clear picture of how all the components of skilled reading are woven together, and why attending to each of them matters.
Where to Start
If you’re looking at this list and feeling the urge to do all of it at once, that’s a sign you care deeply about your students. It’s also a reliable path to exhaustion.
Pick one. The item that made you think “I’ve been wondering about this” or “I know I could do this better” is almost always the right place to start. Read the linked article. Try one thing for two weeks. See what happens.
The research behind every item on this list is strong. But the research also shows that sustainable improvement in teaching practice happens incrementally, through small shifts that become habits, not through wholesale reinvention at the start of the school year.
You’re already doing more right than this list might suggest. The goal is to keep building on it.
Your Turn
Which of these is already part of your practice, and which one made you pause? And is there something you’ve changed in your reading instruction in the last year or two that has made a genuine difference for your students?
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