Scientifically Based Reading Instruction for Minnesota Educators
A criterion-led pilot on phonemic awareness, phonics and other word-recognition skills, guided oral reading, extensive silent reading, vocabulary, comprehension, and higher-order thinking for readers of all ages and proficiency levels, aligned to the Minnesota READ Act.
Scientifically Based Reading Instruction for Minnesota Educators
- 1Foundations: the science and the statute
- 2Word recognition for beginning readers
- 3From decoding to fluency: oral and silent reading
- 4Vocabulary and comprehension
- 5Higher-order thinking and READ Act practice
- 6Apply the framework
Clock hours
3 clock hours claimed · measured design demand 246 active minutes
Mandatory area
Reading Preparation (license renewal)
Format
Self-paced online professional learning
Assessment
20 questions · 80% to pass
Minnesota's statutory charge: renewal reading preparation and the READ Act
Trace the legal line from license renewal reading preparation through the READ Act to the six reading elements a PELSB reviewer must be able to locate in this training.
- Minnesota has asked renewing teachers to demonstrate reading preparation for more than two decades, but the legal anchor has moved.
- The READ Act, enacted in 2023, states a blunt goal: every Minnesota child reading at or above grade level every year, beginning in kindergarten, with support for multilingual learners and...
- Renewal hook: Minn. Stat. §122A.187, subd. 5: reading preparation consistent with §§120B.118 to 120B.124, evidenced under Minn. R....
- Reviewer lens: PELSB's form checks six locatable elements from the historic statutory definition of scientifically based reading...
- District floor: READ Act: evidence-based instruction, approved K-3 screening three times a year, interventions, family notification....
How skilled reading develops: two models and one evidence base
Use the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough's Reading Rope to explain why word recognition and language comprehension both require deliberate instruction, and connect each rope strand to a lesson in this course.
- Two complementary models organize the research this course draws on.
- Scarborough's Reading Rope (2001) elaborates the same insight into instructable strands. [S16] The word-recognition strand braids phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of...
- The evidence base beneath both models was consolidated by the National Reading Panel's 2000 report, Teaching Children to Read, which reviewed experimental and quasi-experimental research...
Phonemic awareness: the sound foundation
Sequence phonemic awareness tasks from easier to more advanced, deliver them explicitly in short daily doses, and connect phonemes to graphemes rather than treating sound work as an oral-only exercise.
- Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken syllables and words. [S3, S7] It is not phonics: phonemic awareness concerns spoken...
- Phonological tasks form a rough progression from larger to smaller units and from easier to harder operations.
- Connecting sound work to print is where Minnesota's screening and instruction meet.
Phonics and other word-recognition skills
Deliver systematic, explicit phonics within a structured-literacy frame, extend word recognition to multisyllabic and irregular words through word analysis and orthographic mapping, and explain why cue-based guessing undermines word recognition.
- Phonics is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds, taught so that students can use those relationships to read...
- Systematic means a deliberate scope and sequence, generally moving from high-utility single consonants and short vowels, to consonant digraphs and blends, to long-vowel patterns and vowel...
- Systematic: A planned scope and sequence of letter-sound correspondences and word structures, taught cumulatively. [S12]
- Explicit: Direct teaching, modeled blending, guided practice, corrective feedback; no inference-from-exposure. [S13]
- Word analysis: Syllable patterns and morphemes that make multisyllabic words readable. [S15]
Guided oral reading: fluency built with feedback
Design guided oral reading routines with modeling, repeated or wide practice, and immediate feedback, and use accuracy, rate, and prosody evidence to adjust them.
- Fluency is the ability to read text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression, and it is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension: a reader who labors over words has little...
- "Guided" is the operative word, and it separates this element from merely assigning reading aloud.
- Evidence should drive adjustment.
Extensive silent reading, structured honestly
Design extensive silent reading that is purposeful, matched to students' decoding ability, and accountable, while stating honestly what the evidence does and does not support.
- Minnesota's statutory definition calls for extensive silent reading, and the professional case for it is straightforward: silent reading is how proficient adults read, it is the only...
- Four design features convert silent reading from a hopeful ritual into instruction.
- For older readers, silent reading is also where challenge lives.
Vocabulary instruction: direct, indirect, and morphological
Select words worth direct teaching, run a complete direct-teaching routine with multiple exposures and active use, and build the indirect and morphological pathways that account for most vocabulary growth.
- Vocabulary knowledge is both a cause and a consequence of reading: word meanings enable comprehension, and wide comprehension-driven reading grows word meanings.
- Direct teaching begins with selection, because a teacher can teach perhaps eight to twelve words deeply in a week and a text may contain forty unknown ones.
- Indirect pathways carry the volume.
Comprehension instruction: strategies, structure, discussion, knowledge
Teach comprehension as an active meaning-construction process using explicitly taught strategies, text-structure instruction, high-quality discussion, and knowledge building, with gradual release toward independence.
- Minnesota statute describes reading comprehension as an active process requiring intentional thinking, in which meaning is constructed through interactions between text and reader. [S3, S7]...
- Strategy instruction succeeds or fails on explicitness and release.
- Text structure and discussion give comprehension its skeleton and its social engine.
Higher-order thinking for readers of all ages and proficiency levels
Design instruction in which every reader, including beginning readers, striving decoders, multilingual learners, and advanced readers, engages in inference, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis with text.
- The statutory definition ends with its most demanding clause: instruction that fosters understanding and higher-order thinking for readers of all ages and proficiency levels. [S1, S3]...
- The design principle is to route thinking around the current bottleneck, not to postpone thinking until the bottleneck clears.
- High demand, varied access: Keep the inference and analysis constant; vary the route into the text (read-aloud, audio, partner, print).
- Text-dependent question spine: Three to five planned questions ascending from detail to inference to evaluation. [S14]
- Evidence norms: Every claim returns to the print: "show me where." [S14, S15]
The READ Act in daily practice: screening, data, curricula, and support
Use universal screening data, progress monitoring, and CAREI-reviewed curricula inside the district's MTSS process, and know where MDE support and required training fit.
- The READ Act converts the reading science of Modules 2 through 4 into a public accountability structure, and a renewing Minnesota teacher should be able to describe that structure precisely.
- What happens after screening is the multitiered system of support the Act presumes.
- Curriculum is the second pillar.
Case lab: three Minnesota readers
Analyze three reader cases with the Simple View and the rope, select the statutory elements each case requires, and defend an instructional plan with evidence.
- Case A: the beginning reader with a sound gap.
- Case B: the accurate but effortful intermediate reader.
- Case C: the multilingual seventh grader ready to think.
Capstone: a scientifically based reading instruction plan
Produce a de-identified instructional plan in which a PELSB reviewer can locate phonemic awareness, phonics and word recognition, guided oral reading, silent reading, vocabulary, comprehension, and higher-order thinking for all proficiency levels.
- The capstone is the course's professional-learning artifact.
- The capstone is complete when every section is present, each of the six review-form elements is locatable in a named routine, the thinking demand is visibly preserved for every reader...
- Self-scoring runs on four dimensions, each rated missing, partial, or demonstrated.