Some Kids Aren't Struggling Readers. They're Guessing.

Education has no shortage of things to worry about. Engagement. Differentiation. SEL. Twenty-three open tabs of professional development, each one insisting it is the single most important lever in the building.

And somewhere beneath all of it, quietly, load-bearingly, never invited to the staff meeting, sits a floor that everyone assumes is already poured and cured: whether the kid can actually read the words on the page. Not vibe them.

Not reverse-engineer them from the picture and the general energy of the sentence. Read them.

This week, we’re climbing down into the basement to check on it.

🔈️ But first, this week's sponsor is for those who want to learn more about marketing themselves in today’s day & age:

A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

And now back to making you an even better teacher. ⬇️ 

Noteworthy News

The Floor Nobody Mentions Until It's Missing

Literacy is the rare classroom skill that becomes completely invisible the moment it works. Nobody walks into a Grade 7 history lesson and thinks, "Incredible, every student here can decode the textbook." They just teach the Treaty of Versailles and move on, secretly trusting that the reading part got handled somewhere upstream, by a colleague, by a previous grade, by the general passage of time. It's the plumbing of the whole enterprise. You only notice it when something backs up.

And here is the uncomfortable backdrop, said plainly: there are educators out there — credentialed, well-meaning, possibly sitting near you — who will argue that teaching kids to sound out words is actively bad for them.

This newsletter does not, as a rule, enjoy wading into pedagogy wars. They're exhausting, nobody wins, and someone always brings a laminated infographic. But arguing against decoding is roughly the pedagogical equivalent of arguing against the floor.

You can have opinions about the carpet. You can debate the lighting. The floor is not up for discussion, because the floor is the thing keeping everyone from falling into the crawlspace.

The good news is that holding the floor doesn't require picking a side in anybody's war. It requires noticing. And noticing, it turns out, is something teachers are already disturbingly good at; we can detect a phone hidden inside a hoodie sleeve from forty feet away. This is just that, pointed at a different problem

Reading vs. Performing Reading (Spot the Difference)

Here is a plot twist that catches a lot of us teachers off guard: the most fluent-sounding reader in the room is not automatically reading.

Some kids have developed a genuinely impressive party trick where they glance at the picture, register that the first word starts with a "b," clock that the scene involves a dog, and confidently announce "balloon" — when the word is "borrowed." It's smooth. It's fast. It has the cadence of competence. It is also, technically, improv.

That behaviour is not a problem to be embarrassed about. It's information, freely offered. When a student hits an unfamiliar word, watch what they do with their face and their hands. Do they look at the picture? Skip the word entirely and keep sailing? Take a wild swing based on the first letter and the surrounding mood?

Each of those is a little flare going up, telling you the difference between a student who is reading and a student who is performing a very convincing one-person show titled I Am Definitely Reading This.

The tricky part is that a good guesser can coast for years. Their guesses are plausible, their confidence is real, and the system is busy. A kid who reads aloud with swagger rarely gets flagged, because nobody assumes the swagger is hiding a gap. But fluency of sound and fluency of decoding are two different muscles, and one can absolutely fake the other right up until the picture clues run out (usually somewhere around the moment the textbooks stop having pictures).

The Floor Check: A Ten-Second Habit, Not a New Program

Before anyone's stomach drops at the phrase "new diagnostic tool," relax — this is not that. There is no binder. There is no app with a quarterly licensing fee.

The Floor Check is a habit, a small reflex you bolt onto things you already do, and it has roughly four moves.

First: watch the tells, as covered above. Second: keep one decoding prompt loaded and ready. When a student guesses, resist the deeply human urge to nod and accept "close enough," and instead try, "Let's actually look at that word — what sounds do you see?" Ten seconds. It quietly communicates that the word on the page is, in fact, the word, and not a suggestion.

Third (and this one's for the secondary crowd who just felt a chill) name the skill explicitly, even with older students. There is a persistent myth that decoding is somebody else's department, filed away in the elementary wing along with the rug and the alphabet posters. But if a Grade 9 student is genuinely stuck on "hypotenuse" or "photosynthesis," walking through the phonemes is not beneath anyone's dignity. It's not remedial. It's not babysitting. It's just teaching, wearing slightly different clothes.

And fourth, the one teachers forget to do for themselves: let kids hear you sound things out. Hit an unfamiliar surname on the attendance list, a tongue-twister of a vocabulary term, a place name that looks like a keyboard fell down the stairs — and decode it out loud, on purpose, in front of everyone.

Modelling that adults still sound out hard words strips the shame right out of it. It reframes decoding as a real strategy used by real, competent grown-ups, rather than a thing you're supposed to have outgrown by the time you got a locker.

Holding the Floor When Nobody's Handing Out Awards

There is no assembly for this. The work of holding the floor is almost aggressively unglamorous; it happens in ten-second increments, mid-sentence, while forty other things are also happening, and it leaves no trace except a student who, somewhere down the line, can actually read the assignment instead of decoding the vibe of it.

But it's foundational in the most literal sense.

The teachers who quietly, stubbornly take the question "can they actually read this?" seriously are doing some of the most consequential work in the building, precisely because almost nobody notices it's being done. They are the reason the engagement strategies have something to engage with, the reason the differentiation has a baseline to differentiate from, the reason the whole beautiful upper floors of education don't quietly sink into the dirt.

Not every student needs the same support; some kids decoded the cereal box at age four and never looked back. But every student, regardless of grade or subject or how confidently they faked their way through page twelve, deserves a teacher who treats "can they actually read this?" as a real question worth asking. That is not a low bar. That, when you get right down to it, is the whole game.

Mind the Floor

None of this is one more initiative to wedge into a week that's already structurally over capacity.

The Floor Check has no kickoff meeting and no acronym. It lives entirely inside things teachers already do — the listening, the noticing, the catching of small things before they become large ones — and it asks for about ten seconds it can give back with interest.

So here's the soft challenge for the week ahead (for those of us lucky enough to not be on summer break yet): run one Floor Check.

Catch one tell. Slip in one "let's actually look at that word" and watch what a student does with it. The floor doesn't get poured all at once, and it never makes the highlight reel, but every teacher who refuses to let a guess slide is holding up a whole lot more of the building than anyone's going to thank them for. Consider this your thank-you, slightly early.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

We would LOVE to hear from you!

Reply to this email, or send us a message on Instagram! We’re here to walk with you in these crazy times!

Part of what makes The PEN Weekly community so special is the fact that our readers are teachers from around the world! We’re not going to lie, we think that’s pretty darn cool!

We’ll see you again on Wednesday 🍎

Share this newsletter!

Do you know someone who would appreciate reading the PEN? Share this newsletter with them! Our goal is to reach as many teachers as possible, and to build a community of teachers supporting teachers.