If you’ve just finished your midyear assessments, first of all—take a deep breath.

Those are finally done. Thank goodness. And truly, you should feel proud of yourself. Assessing a classroom full of children (especially when many are struggling readers) is exhausting, emotional, and incredibly demanding work.

Now comes the part that really matters: using the data well.

Hopefully, you’ve taken time to study your results and can see where your students are showing patterns of need. If a majority of your class is weak in a particular skill, that skill belongs front and center in your Tier 1 instruction. Your schedule should reflect what students actually need—not what’s easiest to plan.

The New Year always brings a sense of renewal—new goals, fresh energy, and a chance to reset our instructional routines. Whether you are a classroom teacher or a reading specialist, January is the perfect time to pause and reflect on what truly makes the biggest difference for struggling readers.

Here’s the reminder we all need as we get back into the grind.

One of my biggest takeaways from Dr. Anita Archer’s session was the transformative potential of Active Student Responding (ASR). She reminded us that effective instruction—what happens inside the classroom—outweighs all other factors within a school system’s control (Heward & Wood, 2015).

If you’ve ever heard terms like phonemic awareness, decoding, or spelling development and wondered how they all fit together, you’re not alone. These concepts can feel technical—but they are actually at the heart of how children learn to read.

Why do some children seem to learn to read effortlessly while others experience years of difficulty? In their influential article, Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems, Vaughn and Fletcher (2020) remind us of a foundational truth from reading science: reading is not a natural process.