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. 

For this installment, I spoke with Moriah Geller, a kindergarten teacher and literacy specialist in the Bay Area, whose science of reading journey started after a conversation with a grad school classmate. The following conversation was edited for clarity and concision. 

What did you learn about teaching reading in college?

In my undergraduate program, we learned about the reading wars and the history of reading. We didn’t learn about phonics or whole language in depth - beyond what each of those meant - but we did learn about “the pendulum,” so to speak, which swung back and forth about every decade. We also learned a lot about motivation and engagement, which was valuable but not sufficient for understanding how to teach kids how to read. After graduating, I went into a master’s degree and credential program. There, too, the literacy courses were mostly focused on motivation and engagement, along with comprehension strategies, state standards, and the components of balanced literacy.

When did you start learning about structured literacy? 

I was in my credential program. I had finished the literacy coursework and was taking a special education course, which was taught by an amazing school psychologist. One of my classmates is dyslexic, and she told the class about how she learned how to read through Slingerland tutoring and is now a Slingerland teacher herself. For an assignment, she shared how helpful David Kilpatrick’s One Minute Activities are in helping her students develop phonological awareness. Our amazing professor built on this to share her experience with dyslexia screening and assessment, particularly the role that phonological awareness can play in language-based learning disabilities. Intrigued by the connection between phonological awareness and dyslexia, I ordered David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success and learned that there was a whole world of research out there that sheds light on how kids actually learn to read. That got me going down the science of reading rabbit hole!

What happened after the special education class?

It was near the beginning of COVID, so I was spending a lot of time at home and did a lot of reading. Once I read Equipped for Reading Success, I learned that there was so much I didn’t know about early literacy development and instruction. On a mission to understand more and to improve my practice, I read Daniel Willingham’s The Reading Mind, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, Louisa Moats’ Speech to Print, and anything else I could get my hands on. I was so hungry for knowledge about literacy development and I couldn’t believe how much information there was about teaching kids how to read. As a kindergarten teacher, the information felt incredibly relevant and practical. I was surprised that it was news to me.

How did your reading instruction start to change? 

I feel lucky that my current school is very open to and invested in aligning practice to research and ensuring that early literacy instruction and intervention are high quality. We’ve adopted Fundations for our phonics program, Heggerty for phonemic awareness, and DIBELS for screening and progress monitoring. We’ve also bulked up our science and social studies curricula with the goal of building wide and deep background knowledge. The conversation about reading and writing curricula is ongoing among faculty and administration. 

How else have you continued to grow your knowledge and change your practice?

As soon as I finished my first Master’s Degree in Education and my teaching credential, I started a second Master’s Degree in Reading and Literacy. The program was grounded in science and the coursework was largely theoretical. We learned about models of the reading process and my capstone project involved creating a professional development workshop designed for early elementary teachers to bridge the gap between research and practice. I also had the chance to participate in Orton-Gillingham training, which provided the more practical side of things: how to implement evidence-based practice in the classroom. 

Tell me about your Orton-Gillingham training. 

It was valuable in that I learned how to put theory into practice. I had been reading so much research and I finally got to learn how to apply it. It was helpful that I had enough background knowledge about literacy - thanks to my aforementioned science of reading deep dive! - to really understand the “why” behind the classroom and intervention applications of OG instruction.

And how do you use your Orton-Gillingham training in your classroom? 

We do a lot of multisensory work from sand writing to skywriting to moving our bodies for phonemic awareness exercises. The training has also given me a better understanding of all of the routines and procedures we’re using in Fundations (it was born out of the OG approach, so a lot of best practices from the training are built in) and it’s helped me understand the value of systematic and explicit instruction. The kids love our phonics instruction - it's truly their favorite part of the day as they thrive from the structure of the program and feel so successful when they notice their skills growing. 

As an aside, I’ve also been able to apply what I’ve learned about early literacy instruction to other content areas, like math. Students benefit from explicit, systematic, and multisensory instruction there, too. 

Why do you think that multisensory instruction is so valuable and important for neurotypical learners? 

There’s a metaphor from my OG training that stuck with me. My instructor mentioned that she even shares it with kids. Visualize a rabbit that needs to cross a field to get to the other side. If it hops through the field once, there will be a small path, barely noticeable. But then if it hops to the field again, there will be a slightly bigger path, and so on. The best way to make a path in the field is to get a bunch of animals together - a rabbit, an elephant, a giraffe - and march through the field together. The path will be so much more substantial, especially if they all do it at the same time. Similarly, the way to make our brain “pathways” stronger is to engage many senses at once. An added bonus is that it’s fun! 

What big questions do you have about teaching reading that you would like answered?

I think about teacher education a lot, and I think my most burning question has to do with how we can optimize pre-service teacher preparation. We know how important it is that reading teachers enter the field with knowledge about how reading works. We also know that there’s a huge body of research that sheds light on this topic, but unfortunately, many education students don’t get access to it in their programs.

So, how can we structure those programs more effectively and also more efficiently? For example, would it make sense for credential programs to be more grade-specific, with a K - 2 credential that focuses most heavily on early literacy development and foundational skills, and a 3 - 5 credential that focuses most heavily on fluency, comprehension, and language structures?

It’s one thought in response to a large, important, and complicated question about how we can ensure that teachers enter the classroom as knowledgeable and capable reading teachers. Our students deserve it!