As part of our commitment to celebrating, uplifting, and highlighting teachers and their incredible work, we’re introducing a regular series called Talk to Teachers, where we interview teachers about their experience teaching reading and learning about teaching reading.

Our first conversation is with Francesca Corino, an instructional coach or pedagogical coordinator at an international school in Brazil. Francesca learned about structured literacy while searching for alternatives to and extra supports for Units of Study. The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity and concision. 

Tell me about your school.

I work at a private bilingual school in Sao Paulo, Brazil. When it comes to literacy, our school follows a constructivist approach, based on the work of Emilia Ferreiro, like most Brazilian schools. In our nursery program, kids are completely immersed in English, and then in kindergarten through 5th grade, kids are in bilingual classes, 50% of the content in English, 50% in Portuguese. We are a very affluent community.

Tell me about your job.

I’m the pedagogical coordinator for our kindergarten program. I spend most of my time watching classes and helping teachers with classroom management and designing lesson plans. I also have to deal with bureaucracy and solve problems with parents. 

How did you end up in this role?

I studied to become a teacher in college, and then when I graduated I started learning English because I always love learning languages. When I was 21, I came to this school as a pre-K assistant and I became a kindergarten teacher, and after five years, I became a pedagogical coordinator, and I’ve been in that role ever since. 

Tell me about reading instruction at your school. 

So remember: our students in nursery school only learn in English. Their bilingual education doesn’t start until kindergarten. When our students are four, we spend a lot of time playing and working with letters. We use different sensory activities like tracing letters in the sand. And we do a lot of read-alouds, all in English, to build vocabulary. And of course, we spend time building students’ phonemic awareness in English. This is very hard for them because they haven’t had time to acquire sounds and language in Portuguese, their mother tongue.  

What about Portuguese? How do you teach your students how to read in their native language?

Our students begin their bilingual education in kindergarten. In Brazil, the phonological approach to literacy is very new. Nobody does it. Reading instruction in Brazil is heavily influenced by Emilia Ferrerio, who says that a child goes through developmental different phases of language acquisition and that it’s important to respect that process. It’s a constructivist approach. In kindergarten, we read a lot of nursery rhymes in Portuguese, and then students basically start reading books and writing in Portuguese AND in English. 

How does that work—asking your students to read and write in two languages without a clear foundation?

It’s really hard. For English, in kindergarten, we use the Units of Study curriculum, and we have a problem because these books are too complex for our kids. There’s also no emphasis on decoding or phonemic awareness. That’s why we started doing it in the nursery school. It’s like the kids are expected to learn how to read naturally, but everything I read says the opposite. This is how and why we started searching for the science of reading. We’d like to get rid of the Units of Study curriculum. 

Who makes curriculum decisions at your school? How did you end up using Units of Study?

Our principal and elementary school coordinator made that choice. The coordinator was the one who purchased Units of Study. I actually went to Columbia University for training twice. The second time I went, maybe in 2014, I kept asking myself “What am I doing here?” Everything seemed too far-fetched for our kids. Even then I knew it wasn’t right. Our kids just need more instruction in phonemic awareness and decoding, especially the ones who struggle. 

How does your school approach students who are struggling with the demands of your curriculum?

In class, the teacher tries to use differentiation. They work with small groups of students according to focus on a particular skill they’re lacking. Sometimes, a student might stay after school for a remedial lesson. And if a child is struggling really badly, they would find a tutor. 

And are the tutors better able to support your struggling students? Do they have training in structured literacy?

They do not. They mostly use a drill and kill approach, writing and memorizing lists of words. Usually, our students who struggle in kindergarten or even nursery school are still struggling in second grade or third grade. 

So you mentioned earlier that you and some of your colleagues have started investigating the “science of reading.” Can you tell me more about that?

Because our students struggle so much, we were looking for different approaches to teaching reading, which is how we discovered the science of reading. That’s how we learned about phonemic awareness that we’re brought to our nursery school. Right now, this group of teachers and I are trying to learn about phonological and phonemic awareness, so we can help our students better. We’re big fans of Margaret Goldberg’s Right to Read Project. Basically, whenever we see a good resource, we read it and then start applying what we think makes sense for us. And that's how we've been doing that. 

What happens when you talk to your supervisor about making changes to the curriculum and the way you teach? 

We, the teachers, know that Units of Study is not helping at all right now. However, the other coordinators are enthusiastic fans of Lucy Calkins. They are not at all into the science of reading. I sent them the recent article in the New York Times, and they said “there will always be people saying that it is not good, but I still believe it's a great curriculum.” They don’t understand that if this curriculum isn’t working for American kids whose first language is English, it’s not going to work for bilingual kids whose first language in Portuguese. 

What changes have you and your teachers made in spite of your coordinator?

So, we have to use Units of Study, but we try to adapt it the best we can for bilingual learners. We do all of the read-alouds and then we have group discussions about the read-alouds. We’re supplementing it with decodable books, and instead of all of the open-ended writing, we’re spending time acting out the stories to get the kids immersed in them. 

What do you wish you knew more about? What would you ask a reading researcher to study if you could? 

I always want to learn more about foundational skills and the best sequencing and approaches to help my students. This may seem small, but I also wonder if it matters whether we teach uppercase letters or lowercase letters first, in nursery school.