A new read on literacy Heeding scientific evidence, Evergreen School Division pivots to customized literacy programming strategy Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
By: Maggie Macintosh Posted: 1:55 PM CST Friday, Jan. 31, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/01/2025 (246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg (w-i-n-i-p-e-g) Beach (b-ea-ch) School (s-k-oo-l) is overhauling how it teaches young students to read with new back-to-basics lessons on phonetic pronunciations.

Over the last five years, the Gimli-based Evergreen School Division has done away with popular and costly literacy programs — including Reading Recovery and Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention — and reorganized its libraries.

The revamp is unfolding against the backdrop of the “new reading wars,” the latest episode of a decades-long debate in education circles involving two overarching philosophies on how to ensure all students can read, write, speak and listen effectively.

“I’m completely perplexed that this is even really a debate,” superintendent Scott Hill told a crowd of teachers who gathered for a literacy conference in Winnipeg last October.

“Letters represent sounds and they go from the left to the right in (English and French) words, so I thought, ‘Yeah, what follows from that is that we would sound them out.’”

The room erupted into laughter. It was packed with upwards of 100 supporters of structured literacy as well as others who were curious about the revival of direct and explicit phonics instruction and Evergreen’s take on it.

Structured literacy begins with teaching children to decode and blend words in a systematic manner; balanced literacy — often regarded as its rival — places importance on exposing students to interesting texts, building comprehension and encouraging children to guess unknown words using illustrations and other context clues.

The latter relies on the assumption reading is acquired naturally through exposure and has largely prevailed in schools across the province since 2000.

It has been propped up via group read-alouds, guided reading exercises built around introducing increasingly more difficult levels of texts and an emphasis on promoting a love of reading.

Manitoba celebrities are known to stop by classrooms during February’s I Love to Read Month to share their favourite picture books.

On a year-round basis, Evergreen administrators and school trustees have asked their teachers to make phonics fun with a new reading program that was custom-built by the division.

Their model challenges claims structured literacy is “drill-and-kill” instruction that bores and demotivates students.

For Hill, who oversees classrooms in Arborg, Gimli, Riverton and Winnipeg Beach, mastering vowel and consonant sounds and the enjoyment of reading are not mutually exclusive.

“You need to be able to do (anything) well in order to learn to love it.”–Superintendent Scott Hill

“You need to be able to do (anything) well in order to learn to love it,” he said in an interview.

That belief, backed by scientific research about how young brains become proficient in reading, is why a Gimli school board office became ground-zero for modern literacy education philosophies in Manitoba.

The province’s education department has attempted to remain neutral amid the controversial debate on reading instruction, but that has not stopped teachers from updating their practices — or, at the very least, taking a look at Hill and his colleagues’ homework.

Evergreen has been sharing its curriculum that is, as of last year, universal in its elementary schools, to anyone who’s interested, free of charge.

---

It’s just after 9:15 a.m. on a wintry weekday in the Interlake beachside town and Makayla Specaluk’s students have shed their puffy coats and mittens to find spots on the carpet in Room 5.

Specaluk is teaching her second graders about a new “long-vowel team” — the i-e and i-g-h combinations — this morning at Winnipeg Beach School.

“This is such a silly spelling because i-g-h, when you see these three letters put together, they make the “i” sound. This can come at the middle of a word, like ‘light’ or ‘might’ and it can come at the end of the word, like ‘high’ or ‘sigh,’” she tells the children.

Within moments, 18 students begin rehearsing in unison the different words that flash on the Smart Board.

They are first asked to read each word in their heads. Then, the seven- and eight-year-olds chant it out loud together: “Night! Fight! Bright! Flight! Sun-light!”

“Every teacher should be teaching this way because of the leaps and bounds (we’ve witnessed as parents). All of our kids are so individually different — some of them are sporty, some of them are quiet — but they are all readers,” said Monique LeDrew, whose son Hank is enrolled in the Grade 2 class.

His literacy lessons are a stark contrast to the rote learning she experienced growing up in the ’80s in Thompson.

LeDrew credits the school’s engaging, albeit repetitive phonics drills for turning her boy, who has ADHD and struggles with concentration, into a bookworm. He recently started reading chapter books and confidently completes his nightly “reading sheets” alone.

Specaluk was introduced to phonics when she was already on the job and teaching youngsters how to read through exposure, just as she’d been taught to do at the University of Winnipeg. The 2017 graduate said “nothing” about her undergraduate training on reading instruction has transferred into her professional life.

She commended Evergreen literacy consultant Della Magnusson for encouraging her to pilot a new structured literacy approach in her classroom in 2022. Since then, she’s fine-tuned an upbeat delivery that gets students excited about decoding words and blending sounds.

It had been nearly 40 years since the early iteration of structured literacy was losing favour to a trendy and more holistic approach to teaching reading.

The then-emerging ideology came out of well-meaning intentions to immerse students in reading materials that interested them, said Jeanne Sinclair, an assistant professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who studies language and literacy development.

The problem was that students were being exposed to texts without the foundational word-recognition skills necessary to understand them, said Sinclair, who describes herself as being in “the radical middle” of the reading wars.

“All of our kids are so individually different — some of them are sporty, some of them are quiet — but they are all readers.”–Parent Monique LeDrew

“(Immersion) is a noble aim, but it is like swimming: when we are immersed, we can start to drown without the essential skills to stay afloat,” she said.

Students have been unnecessarily struggling to learn to read this way in contradiction to research from neuroscience, developmental psychology and related disciplines, Sinclair said.

Dubbed “The Science of Reading,” a vast collection of interdisciplinary research supporting structured literacy has long been ignored because the education field is stuck in an academic silo, said the researcher who oversees a graduate program on reading development and instruction in St. John’s, N.L.

She noted research indicates upwards of 95 per cent of students can eventually master reading, but at least half require high-quality, engaging and systematic instruction to do so.

If regular classroom instruction is systematic and explicit, about 80 per cent of students should be able to learn to read without individual intervention, Sinclair added.

Winnipeg Beach principal Crystal MacDonald recalled widespread nervousness as Evergreen leaders began to question status-quo teaching methods and how to update them to graduate a greater percentage of proficient readers.

Evergreen’s approximately 110 teachers are at various stages in their careers — some are new while others are nearing retirement after decades of leaning on the balanced-literacy approach.

Despite that, MacDonald said universal buy-in to the new program in a short period of time is “our proudest moment.” It has been tweaked repeatedly and accompanied by countless hours of consultation and professional development since 2020.

Last June, following the first year of division-wide implementation, five per cent more kindergarten-to-Grade 6 students were reading at grade level compared to the start of the school year, division data show. That figure jumped 12 per cent among Indigenous students.

Sinclair, who co-wrote the draft curriculum with Evergreen educators, said a key to the division’s success has been the use of mentors to model best practices.

“Quite frankly, what most teachers are learning in their bachelor of education programs isn’t aligned with what we know about how children learn how to read,” she said.

Evergreen educators cite the division’s small size, targeted hiring of “intervention” teachers to support struggling readers and the board of trustees’ receptiveness as factors that have allowed them to be nimble and revamp reading instruction.

Jillian Yorga, a school trustee and mother of four, said board members and residents are proud of the division’s decision to heed scientific evidence and make a pivot.

“This is the school division’s responsibility, to teach kids to read — it shouldn’t be the parents’,” the school board vice-chairwoman said.

Yorga spent numerous weekday evenings trying to help one of her children who was struggling to grasp reading prior to the overhaul and questioned how that was sustainable.

She said she is aware of how privileged her family was to be able to undertake at-home lessons that eventually, following trial-and-error, resulted in a proficient reader.

Evergreen trustees put forward a motion during last year’s Manitoba School Boards Association convention to lobby university faculties of education to create a structured-literacy course for the next generation of teachers.

Following a tense debate, the call to begin advocacy work that Yorga described as urgent and overdue was rejected. They are making another pitch in 2025.

“It feels like an emergency to me,” Britney Morrish, a speech-language pathologist, said in describing the absence of methodical phonic instruction in many literacy programs and the impact on literacy rates.

Historically, classroom teachers and school clinicians have communicated frequently about students in need, but there’s far less discussion about how they carry out their separate jobs from a technical perspective.

Morrish said she had been under the assumption phonics, which she studied during a master’s degree program she completed in 2010, was underpinning classroom lessons and individual interventions until recently.

She and Jessica Worden, a teacher who is now the divisional learning co-ordinator, have played leading roles in Evergreen’s literacy program overhaul.

Their partnership reflects Evergreen’s overarching goal to better integrate and co-deliver classroom instruction and clinical services; that mission was in the background when Worden interviewed teachers and clinicians about tools available to help struggling students in 2019-20.

“The line that is most memorable is what one of our intervention teachers told me: ‘We tell parents not to sound words out with their kids,’” said Worden, a former high school math and special education teacher.

That comment shocked her and later, Hill — who also spent the bulk of his career teaching high school — when she relayed it to him in the weeks before COVID-19 was first detected in Manitoba.

The realization teachers were actively discouraging students from practising evidence-based lessons on letter-sound relationships, combined with overall concerns about student reading levels, triggered the literacy overhaul.

“If we don’t give kids access to decoding in their developmental years, they’re actually losing out on so much more than lifting words off the page,” Morrish said.

She said students need foundational reading skills by the end of Grade 3 so they can expand their vocabulary, study school subjects and learn proper sentence structure.

Worden and Morrish spent much of the early pandemic reading up on the related science, listening to education podcasts and creating responsive teacher training.

The team, which included Magnusson, an in-house literacy consultant, was already brainstorming how to build their own phonics program and retrain teachers when the Ontario Human Rights Commission dropped its groundbreaking Right to Read report.

The Ontario document released in February 2022 found the province’s curricula was failing students, especially children with learning disabilities, by not employing evidence-based strategies to teach reading.

Later that year, American Public Media’s release of Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong, an award-winning podcast, also served as an endorsement of what was happening in Winnipeg Beach.

Meanwhile, the Manitoba Human Rights Commission is in the midst of a similar project on local literacy education that has been plagued by numerous unexplained delays.

---

Last month, 10-year-old Dean Riley paused before opening presents to read his birthday cards to himself.

“Dean took his time and read his birthday cards, without me or having his friends help him,” his mother Kelsey Riley said. “I am so proud of him.”

The Grade 5 student was diagnosed with dyslexia in September 2023.

Prior to the discovery, he was attending after-school tutoring that did not appear to be making a dent in his literacy level, much to his family’s frustration. Some of his letters and numbers were backwards and he was struggling with self-confidence.

Both his mother and aunt said there’s been a huge shift since he began participating in additional literacy lessons at Winnipeg Beach School and dyslexia-specific tutoring.

Dean is among 19 students at the kindergarten-to-Grade 8 school who are currently selected for extra phonics lessons. He spends 125 minutes doing intensive word-reading activities with two other boys throughout the school week.

He’s now conquered e-r, i-r, u-r and o-r, all of which were letter-sound combinations he found challenging in September.

Asked if he enjoys reading, Dean said: “If it’s a book I like,” and nods his head when asked whether he enjoys lessons with Ms. Milne.

“Students usually tell me what they feel — if they’re frustrated that day or if they felt like they should’ve known something and they didn’t remember it. Sometimes, they can be hard on themselves, but… I see the growth,” said Kelly Milne, an intervention teacher and Indigenous education consultant.

Milne said she does frequent check-ins to show children how they are progressing and encourages them to keep trying so they can read important documents, such as vehicle manuals and job applications, when they are older.

Her office, which doubles as a tutoring space, is decorated with an inspirational quote: “If you believe in yourself, anything is possible.”

Evergreen’s learning co-ordinator said there’s a misconception struggling readers need extra instruction different from the regular lessons delivered to classrooms at large.

Not unlike learning the piano or how to play a sport, reading requires practice — for some, more than others, Worden said, adding that’s why the new divisional program includes daily phonics lessons on different letter-sound combinations for everyone, as well as intensive sessions for smaller groups.

In addition to its homemade lessons and in-house professional development, the division has endorsed structured-literacy materials from the University of Florida Literacy Institute, better known as UFLI, pronounced “you fly.”

Milne and other former Reading Recovery teachers who were previously delivering the embattled program have had to unlearn past practices and get up to speed with UFLI.

While the Métis teacher said she was initially skeptical about dropping one program for another, the positive impact systematic phonics had on her students, especially Indigenous students who are more likely to struggle, owing to ongoing socio-economic inequities, changed her mind.

“The idea that some kids were not getting what they need (to become literate) — that always vexes us and always has,” said Hill, whose division is responsible for educating 1,500 students.

The topic triggers tears for Colleen Pona. Her middle child, Adelyn, has had a difficult young life, having been diagnosed with juvenile arthritis as an infant and suffering medical trauma related to being repeatedly prodded and scanned with ultrasounds, blood work and other tests.

The mother of three said her seven-year-old is timid and was “absolutely terrified” to start Grade 1 in September 2023.

The now-Grade 2 student entered last year below grade-level reading expectations, started meeting them in early 2024 and hit summer break exceeding them, despite frequent doctor’s appointments interrupting her classes, Pona recalled, tears streaming down her face after sitting-in on a recent literacy lesson.

“It’s been life-changing,” she said, praising Evergreen’s fun phonics lessons for building her daughter’s confidence and empowering her to participate in school.

“Addy” now spends much of her spare time creating storybooks.

Evergreen’s phonics instruction pilot findings

Evergreen School Division rolled out its custom-structured literacy curriculum, which features resources from the University of Florida Literacy Institute, in all of its elementary classrooms for the first time last year.

The Gimli-based board office hired a research firm to analyze student outcomes.

Evergreen School Division rolled out its custom-structured literacy curriculum, which features resources from the University of Florida Literacy Institute, in all of its elementary classrooms for the first time last year.

The Gimli-based board office hired a research firm to analyze student outcomes.

An executive summary compiled by PNG Research states the division’s adjustments made “statistically significant progress.”

Five per cent more students enrolled in kindergarten through Grade 6 were reading at grade level in June 2024 compared to September 2023.

Within 10 months, the overall percentage of students meeting expectations was 63 per cent, up from 58 per cent.

“Indigenous students showed remarkable improvement, with 12.17 per cent more students reading at grade level than at the start of the year, outperforming non-Indigenous students,” states an excerpt of the seven-page executive summary.

Superintendent Scott Hill said the initiative is rooted in social justice.

“Making sure that our kids become good readers is foundational to their school success, life success and their ability to access the democratic conversation.”–Superintendent Scott Hill

“Making sure that our kids become good readers is foundational to their school success, life success and their ability to access the democratic conversation,” Hill said.

Eleven teachers increased their respective grade-level achievement groups by upwards of 10 per cent. Two teachers grew theirs by more than 30 per cent.

On average, Grade 1 teachers made gains that surpassed 20 percentage points.

The firm defined grade level as the 30th percentile.

Manitoba’s latest Grade 3 reading scores show only 45 per cent of students were meeting expectations for their age as of fall 2023.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca