Education News

To boost kids’ reading, Minnesota schools start to shift the way they teach

Read Act Progress
Kindergarten teacher, Holly Hins watches her students during class at Middleton Elementary on Dec. 12 in Woodbury, Minn.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

Quick Read

Rising concern over childhood reading skills has led to a reckoning on how reading is taught. Minnesota school leaders see hope in the changes underway, but it’s a long journey that requires “unlearning” old ways.

On a cold winter morning, kindergartners gather on a rug in Holly Hins’ classroom at Woodbury’s Middleton Elementary School. 

“Our next sound that I want you to spell is ‘sh,’” she coaxes the kids. “What two letters do we need to make this sound?“

Some quickly draw the letters on their handheld white boards while others ponder. “This is a tricky one,” Hins says. “Remember? This is the one where we almost called the principal because I thought you were telling me to be quiet?”

“No,” one student calls out. “We were telling you the sound, ‘sh’!”

Read Act Progress
Arihauna Littrell writes letters on the board during class at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

Her students are learning to recognize sounds, decode words and learn phonetic patterns to let them read and spell with confidence. Called structured literacy, this method boasts decades of research showing it as the most effective way to teach kids to read.

But it’s not the way Hins used to teach, and it’s not how she learned literacy instruction in college. Like elementary school teachers around Minnesota and the nation, she’s had to come to terms with a difficult reality: What she was doing wasn’t working, and she had to change.

“We are doing this wrong, and here I’m telling these kids to look at the pictures — and they are, and it’s not helping them. So we need to do something different,” she recalled thinking of the years she taught reading using a method known as ‘balanced literacy’ that was considered best-practice. “That’s how my journey started.”

Read Act Progress
Roark Gentile and Eliza Leirness write letters on the board during class at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

Tens of thousands of public school teachers in Minnesota are on the same journey now as Hins. Concerned about test scores showing a decline in the reading performance of Minnesota children since just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the state in 2023 passed the Read Act, requiring all Minnesota schools to train their teachers in the structured literacy approach.

Overhauling decades of instructional practice is a massive, expensive undertaking. Hins and others, though, say the initial results are encouraging. 

“I just poured myself into all the outside information that I could to try to learn as much as I could,” Hins said. “This is actually backed by the research … and then you see the kids. It’s pretty validating.”

‘The foundation of everything’

Most Minnesota districts are halfway through their first year training their first round of teachers, focusing first on early elementary instructors as well as special education and K-12 reading interventionists. 

South Washington County, where Hins teaches, has embraced the change aggressively. They’ve gone beyond requirements to train elementary, language arts and reading specialist staff and are introducing nearly every staff member and district leader to structured literacy, including gym teachers, school counselors, science and math instructors.

Read Act Progress
Peony, Carly, and Eliza write letters during a class at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

It’s a huge commitment. South Washington schools started the process in 2023, just after the Read Act was passed, by rearranging their 2024-25 school calendar and dedicating a full eight days of valuable staff training time to literacy instruction.

The amount of staff time it’s taking to get teachers trained is so costly that districts last year petitioned the Legislature to change state requirements and grant them more time to train teachers, even at the expense of direct instruction hours. 

“Reading is the foundation of everything, and literacy is the key to civilization,” said assistant superintendent Kelly Jansen. “It really is the cornerstone on which we build everything else. And so to get everyone to believe that was part of the lift as well.”

State education officials say they understand the enormity of what they’ve asked school districts to take on. 

Read Act Progress
Kelly Jansen, assistant superintendent at South Washington County Schools, at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

Bobbie Burnham, an assistant commissioner for teaching and learning at the Minnesota Department of Education, calls the Read Act “one of the largest comprehensive reform efforts” Minnesota has taken on in quite a long time.

“We’re asking them to make some really significant shifts in their daily instructional practices,” Burnham said. “It’s a reform effort at multiple levels — the state, the local level, including school administrators, down to the educators down to the  paraprofessionals. So this is quite an effort that the state is going through.”

‘I didn’t know better’

Hins understands better than most why implementing the Read Act has been such a costly lift. 

A few years ago, she started to doubt the reading instruction methods she’d been taught in her undergraduate training. It happened during a meeting when first and second grade teachers told the kindergarten teachers that students were not advancing with the reading skills needed to succeed. Hins started asking questions. 

“What if the reason our kids aren't where they need to be … is because what we’re doing isn’t the right thing?” Hins said. ”I went home, and I started researching how to teach kids to read.”

Read Act Progress
Kindergarten teacher Holly Hins shows a letter to her students during class at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

What Hins discovered was the opposite of everything she’d been taught in college and graduate school about literacy instruction. 

According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, less than a third of teacher preparation programs nationwide adequately address the core components of reading instruction. 

Hins’ quest to understand the best way to teach reading skills led her to the 2022 podcast series Sold a Story, a project by APM Reports, an MPR News sister organization. In the podcast, reporter Emily Hanford exposed how a flawed method of  teaching reading that de-emphasized phonics ended up as the standard in schools, setting back a generation of children.

There, Hins learned more about the difference between the balanced literacy methods she’d been using and the structured literacy methods research indicated were more effective. After more than 20 years teaching, Hins said the realization was devastating.

Read Act Progress
Flashcards are seen during kindergarten teacher Holly Hins's class at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

“I’m getting goosebumps just talking about it, because it’s emotional,” Hins said. “You have this immense guilt of all the kids that have gone through your classroom and that you’ve basically told them to do all the things that struggling readers do … you can only do better when you know better.”

“And I didn’t know better. I thought I did. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was doing what we were all, everyone across the country, was being told to do. And so then crossing this path or bridge has been freeing. It’s been enlightening.” 

Implementing the Read Act has brought similar revelations for thousands of Minnesota public school teachers.

In southern Minnesota, Katie Baskin, executive director of academics and administrative services in the Austin Public Schools, said the training process has been emotional at times.

“Our teachers are doing an incredible amount of learning right now, which is great. It’s also really, really complicated because they’re also doing some unlearning, right?” Baskin said. 

“Some are learning things that, ‘Oh, goodness. I thought it was this way, and now I should be doing these practices instead,’ and some of that is hard,” Baskin added. “But I think we need to honor the fact that we’ve all come through this journey in different way”

Read Act Progress
James Tuohy and Azeem Ali listen attentively to their kindergarten teacher, Holly Hins, during class at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

‘We closed achievement gaps’

Despite its difficulties, most districts, teachers and education leaders seem to agree that overhauling Minnesota’s approach to teaching literacy is worth the effort, although many petitioned the state to grant more time and resources toward accomplishing the legislation’s goals.

In White Bear Lake, Willow Lane Elementary School principal Matthew Menier got a head start on changing his school’s literacy instruction several years ago. He brought in a new curriculum and began training his staff before the Read Act required it. 

Internal screening data shows his school’s earliest learners have made huge leaps. 

Three years ago, only 26 percent of kindergarten students were able to identify sounds and build simple words. Now, 70 percent of their kindergartners can read and decode simple words. 

Read Act Progress
Student drawings and portraits are displayed on the "Meet the Authors" board at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

“I put all of the credit on the backs of my kindergarten teachers who have really dug into this and are using their instructional minutes to make sure that the kids are getting what they need,” Menier said. 

The progress is especially exciting to Menier because it transcends the racial and economic achievement gap lines that have long troubled Minnesota

“We closed achievement gaps in a way that I’ve never seen before,” Menier said. “Literacy really is a social justice movement for us, and maybe one of the most important social justice things that I can do as a building administrator.”

Most Minnesota schools still have a long way to go to implement the Read Act’s requirements. Burnham, the Education Department official, said it will take three to five years before results start showing up on state test scores. 

“Change like this is not going to happen in a year, and it's not going to happen overnight,” Burnham said. “Give your teachers time to take the training, to be coached on implementing the practices that they've been trained on. Being patient is really key to a reform effort like this.”

Read Act Progress
Kindergarten teacher Holly Hins with her favorite book, Llama Llama Red Pajamas in her classroom at Middleton Elementary.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News

For Hins in South Washington County, it’s hard to measure her progress with data, especially because the Read Act is changing the way schools test and screen student learning. But she said her colleagues notice her students are more confident readers than kids who haven’t had structured literacy instruction. 

“These kids love to learn the rules of the English language. They are engaged. They are excited,” Hins said. “That feeds into them wanting to learn and they’re super excited to actually be reading. They feel like they’re reading versus just memorizing or repeating something they’ve heard.”

Volume Button
Volume
Now Listening To Livestream
MPR News logo
On Air
As It Happens with Chris Howden