When it comes to reading fluency, many students can accurately decode words in isolation but struggle with connected text. For example, teachers often see students successfully read single words from a list of familiar words, yet stumble when they attempt to read words in sentences or an actual passage. Sound familiar?
This can obviously be frustrating and disheartening for students and teachers alike — solid phonics instruction is in place, yet students aren’t becoming fluent readers. To understand why, it is important to look not only at the amount of practice students receive, but also at how that practice is designed and delivered. For students to succeed, they need ongoing, intentionally designed practice opportunities that reinforce classroom instruction.
Instruction involves teachers modeling, explaining and demonstrating, while effective practice supports students remembering and retrieving information from long-term memory and applying it to new words and contexts. Through this practice, students consolidate and generalize information, making learning more efficient and automatic.
As such, instruction and practice should not be designed the same way.
Systematic, structured and varied practice can be designed to help strengthen memory, build flexibility and automaticity, support generalization and enhance fluency. This specified practice provides students the opportunity to “learn by doing,” which helps them stay engaged, motivated, and on the path to fluency. The six principles below are grounded in the science of learning—the body of research on what makes learning stick — and can successfully guide this work in the classroom.
Vary the tasks: Practice the same content in different formats rather than repeating the same drill. For early reading, this might include reading words in isolation, filling in missing letters in a word, reading words in sentences or short passages, sorting words by a pattern, or ordering syllables to make a word. Each of these practice activities helps students strengthen the network of connections so the regularities “pop” and can be generalized and flexibly used across contexts.
Target contrasts: Students build flexible knowledge when they practice distinctions. For example, comparing and contrasting long and short vowel sounds, or working with similar spelling patterns like –ight and –ite, sharpens category boundaries in ways that isolated practice does not. When students notice what makes two things different, they can sharpen their discrimination and better detect relevant patterns, both of which accelerate consolidation.
Interweave content: Intentionally and systematically mixing related skills or content during practice. For example, instead of practicing only one vowel pattern throughout an entire classroom lesson, have students alternate between previously learned and newly introduced vowel patterns. This helps strengthen students’ discrimination, retrieval and flexible application, all of which are key drivers of consolidation.
Review, rehearse and elaborate: In the cognitive science sense, review allows students to revisit what they have learned in various contexts — old and new. Rehearsal means practicing content over time rather than drilling it intensively all at once, while elaboration means connecting new learning to meaning, prior knowledge and context. All three extend learning by coordinating connections that support automatic retrieval and fluency. For example, try having students revisit an orthographic pattern across several lessons, connect vocabulary words to pictures and prior experiences, and generate sentences using words from an earlier passage. This will help deepen their knowledge, strengthen their long-term memory and retrieval pathways, and increase the likelihood that learning will transfer.
Provide productive difficulty: When practice is too easy, students don’t build the durable memory needed for reading fluency. Yet, when practice feels too hard, students can easily feel overwhelmed and shut down. Effective practice involves a level of manageable challenge — enough effort to require retrieval and coordination, but not so much that students’ performance collapses. In reading, specifically, this might mean gradually increasing the complexity of the words, syllable structures, or connected text students experience in practice.
Provide immediate feedback: Immediate, specific feedback helps students correct errors before they stabilize and reinforces accurate performance while neural pathways are active. For reading, this might mean quickly giving feedback on a decoding error, providing the correct pronunciation, and having the student immediately retry. Effective feedback is also precise and supportive—not just a “good job.” This helps sustain student engagement and make the practice more productive.
These science-of-learning-backed principles aren’t intended to increase teachers’ workload or take up extra time. Instead, they are intended to support classroom instruction better and strengthen the practice already happening in today’s classrooms. And when they are implemented cohesively and deliberately, they can go a long way toward helping all students become strong, confident and fluent readers.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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