MADISON, Wis. — Teachers around Wisconsin are being asked to modify their literacy lesson plans due to the state’s 2023 Act 20 legislature, affecting reading and writing instruction in Madison elementary schools.
One of the major building blocks of the act is teaching students to break down words letter by letter, as opposed to popular strategies that teach them to use context clues and memorization to form words and sentences.
“When a child encounters a word that they don’t know, the prompts from the teacher would be about relationships between letters and sounds,” said Barb Novak, the director of the Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Literacy.
“You would not hear prompts like ‘Take a guess’ or ‘Look at the picture.’ Instead, you would hear prompts like ‘Try that first sound,'” said Novak.
Other Act 20 hallmarks include personal reading plans, transparency guidelines between schools and parents and updated teacher education requirements.
It all comes after the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that 33% of Wisconsin 4th graders were at or above proficient reading level in 2022, meaning two-thirds fell behind in literacy.