Some Georgia teachers will get extra help navigating the 'Science of Reading'

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A student works through classwork in a summer reading class in Bibb County last summer.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB

A collaboration between the Georgia Department of Education and the Atlanta-based Rollins Center for Language and Literacy will offer help to primary school teachers getting up to speed on new state reading standards. 

After the passage into law of Georgia House Bill 538, the state’s public schools now must teach reading through evidence-based instruction. The evidence is the cognitive science of reading.  

“This 25-year body of research that we have, it is so complex,” said Amy Denty, Director of Literacy for the Georgia Department of Education. 

She said that complexity means that even when teachers understand things like phonemic awareness and decoding and encoding words, the concepts can stay locked in teachers’ heads.  

“We don't want to just know it up here,” Denty said. “We want it happening in the rooms with those 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds.”

Over two years, the Georgia Literacy Academy will train a cohort of teachers — so-called navigators — in 10 school districts and three charter schools. The training is expected to help the navigators bridge the gap between understanding the science of reading to its practice with their colleagues. 

All of the program’s training material will also be made free and available online.