Leadership: Slide 85, Slides 33-36 and Closing Slide

Teachers are more likely to implement new practices well if they receive ongoing support. This support includes additional lessons, practice opportunities, and working with reading experts. Fluency is important for good reading comprehension and motivation. Fluent readers recognize words automatically and can focus on understanding the text. Less fluent readers struggle with decoding, leaving little attention for comprehension. Reading fluency has four elements: accuracy, rate, phrasing, and expression. Vocabulary instruction is essential, as knowing words helps with reading. Supporting educators. Teachers are more likely to implement new practices well if they receive support while trying them in the classroom. Ongoing support includes sessions during which additional lessons and techniques are demonstrated, opportunities to practice techniques in role-play situations, and there's time for teachers to work together and with reading experts such as coaches, consultants, and other reading leaders. Teaching fluency includes guided oral reading in which students read aloud to someone who corrects their mistakes and provides them with feedback, and independent silent reading where students read silently to themselves. Why is fluency important? When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically. They group words quickly to help them gain meaning from what they read. Fluent readers read aloud effortlessly and with expression. Their reading sounds natural, as if they are speaking an aspect of fluency that is termed prosody. Readers who have not yet developed fluency read slowly, word by word. Their oral reading is choppy and lacks prosody. Fluency is important for several reasons. First, fluent reading is a foundation for good reading comprehension. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding words, they can focus their attention on what the text means. They can make connections between the ideas in the text and their background knowledge. In other words, fluent readers recognize words and comprehend at the same time. Reading fluently also affects a child's motivation to read. Children and adults typically do not enjoy activities that feel burdensome and difficult. When children's reading is not fluent, they often don't enjoy reading, and they are less inclined to practice reading, which may contribute even further to a decline in their reading skills. In addition, learning to read fluently helps children become better prepared for the demands of upper grades. In middle school and high school, students are usually expected to do a lot of independent reading. Even if students can read accurately, if they are not fluent, they may take much longer to complete their schoolwork. Fluent reading is a product of strong decoding and strong language comprehension. Less fluent readers, however, must focus their attention on figuring out words, leaving them little attention for understanding the text. Fluency is important because it frees students to understand what they read. There are four elements of reading fluency. Accuracy. Accuracy is the ability to read the words in the text as they are written. The goal of accurate reading is automatic and effortless word recognition. No decoding, no word solving, just reading. The second is rate. Rate is the speed at which a person reads text. The goal is for the reader to have the ability to read the text at the appropriate speed and to determine what is appropriate based on the nature of the text. Third is phrasing. Phrasing is the ability to group words together as in normal speech, pausing appropriately between phrases, clauses, and sentences. Phrasing requires readers to read the text in meaningful chunks, paying attention to the prepositions and punctuation. And fourth is expression. Expression is the ability to read words in the text with the appropriate stress and intonation. It's often called reading with feeling. Porosity, or the defining feature of expressive reading, requires proficiency in all the variables that speakers use to help convey aspects of meaning and to make their speech lively. So, timing, phrasing, emphasis, and intonation. Vocabulary instruction is an essential component of literacy instruction. It is a component of language. A child's vocabulary is made up of all the words that a child understands. It is easier for a reader to use what they have learned about phonics to translate a written word into spoken words if they have heard the word before, especially if they already know what that word means. Teachers must teach students how to recognize words and understand them. The National Reading Panel found that vocabulary instruction and repeated contact with vocabulary words is important. Thank you for joining us today for the District and School Leader Webinar, Designing a System that Supports Effective Literacy Instruction. Please remember to look into the description section to find the palette of all the additional resources that we used during the session today.