As knowledge of the science of reading reaches more and more schools, teachers, and students, we practitioners can expand our practice beyond the basics of structured literacy. Yes- explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics is an imperative for effective foundational literacy instruction. Yet, there are opportunities to make our application of structured literacy better suited to the diverse students we serve.

Let’s say you are trained in LETRS like me. While this knowledge base is an excellent foundation for helping all students crack the code of the English language, we must also find ways to be culturally responsive while facilitating lessons. In theory, I see myself as a culturally responsive educator. However, I found that my structured literacy instructional block was the time that I demanded the most control and order in the classroom- a stressful environment for both me and students, and certainly not what culturally responsive teaching tells us is best for the learning brain (Hammond, 2014).

To do better, I created a framework called “Student-Structured Literacy,” which bridges culturally responsive teaching with best practices in explicit and systematic foundational reading instruction. The Goyen Literacy Fellowship gave me an opportunity to share how I used the framework I created for Student-Structured Literacy in real time, in a real first grade classroom with students who were multilingual and came from many different cultural backgrounds.

Want to try it? Incorporate some of the following in your structured literacy instructional block:

1. Flexible roles for communication. 

Are there times when your students can be the teacher? Instead of the traditional dictation, where I would tell students what to write, a student volunteer seeks input from her classmates to collectively determine the dictated sentence for the day. The picture cue I put on the slide ensures that they will use the word “note” which aligns with the vowel-consonant-e focus of that day’s lesson. Beyond that, student creativity was welcome and students appeared much more engaged in dictation when it was a sentence that they had collectively composed. Here, a student takes the lead during the dictation portion of our whole group phonics lesson.

2. Collaboration and shared responsibility.

While in traditional structured literacy lessons I would plan out everything in advance on my own, in student-structured literacy, I explicitly told students I needed their help. If you’ve ever hung out with a first grader, you know that kids at this age absolutely love to have a job. Students were tasked with things like brainstorming lists of words to segment for phonemic awareness practice, contributing to our daily Google slide deck by composing our daily “question of the day”, or choosing the next word in a word chain for encoding practice by thinking about changing just one phoneme to make a new word.  

In the phonemic segmentation game, the words went into a bag, and the “teacher”—not always me—called them out for their peers to segment into phonemes. Students were highly engaged listening for their chosen word to come up and took pride in segmenting high-interest words that were part of their existing lexicon. 

3. Creativity and flexibility.

Decodable readers and pre-made fluency texts are great. What if they included your students’ names and interests in them? In the picture, my student smiles about a fluency pyramid I wrote with her interests in mind. I was inspired by her creativity and skill in art class using clay.. Her motivation to read and engage with the text skyrocketed when she saw that she was the main character and the background knowledge of her own hobby boosted her fluency and comprehension. 


4. An emphasis on existing knowledge and skill assets.

One key shift that the student structured literacy framework helped me achieve was to celebrate the many formal languages and English dialects students spoke at home and brought to the classroom. I encouraged students who spoke different languages to teach us words they knew. I often spoke in Spanish with students during class as we made connections between home language and what we were learning in the classroom. Here, a welcome sign that a student created at home with her mom in Amharic is posted outside our classroom. We also had welcome signs posted in Russian and Spanish. 

5. Student agency, choice, and voice.

Generally, updating families on what students were learning in school would be my job as a teacher. However, this year, students had the job of writing a weekly newsletter for their families which they collaborated in teams to write. Providing feedback on the newsletter was a great way for me to incorporate some explicit instruction in phonics. Their perspective on what we had done that week was incredibly enlightening for me and allowed me to keep a close pulse on what mattered to them.

6. A critical lens to traditional pedagogy and learning materials.

Don’t get me wrong- Fundations is endorsed by the International Dyslexia Association and is a great starting point for implementing systematic and explicit phonics instruction. However, I noticed that it did not meet the needs of my multilingual learners. Daily, I created a slide deck with visuals to match the words kids were decoding and encoding. During stations or choice time, students were given control of the slides and enjoyed scrolling through on their own, an activity they called “playing teacher”. Here, a small group of students leading their own review of vowel team words during choice time. First, they decode the word and then with a click, the picture cue appears to confirm their reading and reinforce the meaning of new words and the spelling of homophones for students learning English. 

7. Joyful engagement.

For me, adding a culturally responsive, student-centered lens to my instruction made being a teacher so much more fun. My stress was lessened because kids were naturally more invested in our work and after they got used to having more control, they joyfully took over many portions of our literacy block. Another way I built in joy was to include plenty of gamification. Games were used often in our spiral review of phonics concepts. Here, see students collaborate on an I-Spy activity for reviewing r-controlled vowels within our morning message text. 

Including Student-Structured Literacy elements into my approach to teaching foundational literacy was a game changer for me. Not only was I able to teach phonemic awareness and phonics in keeping with best practices from the science of reading research, I saw students engage in a more joyful and collaborative way as they took ownership of their literacy learning through a more culturally responsive model. If you are an early literacy practitioner, consider adopting this framework as you plan for effective and engaging reading instruction next school year. Start small by trying just one of these options and you might be amazed to see where the kids lead you with their creativity and leadership in literacy.