Summary
What does effective literacy intervention look like for students in middle and high school? Faith Howard returns to Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works to explain how she built Literacy Lab, a 6–12 intervention model that combines the science of reading with age-appropriate, grade-level texts.
Faith shares how a glorified study hall became a focused literacy intervention, why secondary educators need practical support in teaching foundational reading skills, and how schools can build sustainable literacy capacity instead of depending on one-time professional development. She also explains why teachers—not computer programs—teach kids, and how decoding, morphology, vocabulary, and rich novels can work together for adolescent readers.
Faith Howard is an adolescent-literacy leader and educational consultant with 17 years of experience in education. She has taught middle and high school English language arts, coached ELA and social studies teachers, served as a director of curriculum and instruction, and worked as a literacy specialist.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Meet Faith Howard and the case for adolescent literacy
- 01:48 — Why the original intervention model was not working
- 03:50 — Faith’s self-study in the science of reading
- 05:02 — Building Literacy Lab with foundational skills and grade-level texts
- 05:58 — Why teachers teach kids, not programs
- 08:11 — Making structured literacy meaningful for teenagers
- 10:39 — What “teen-friendly” literacy intervention really means
- 12:40 — Decoding, morphology, vocabulary, and complex texts
- 14:04 — What secondary teachers need from literacy support
- 17:27 — Demystifying the science of reading through modeling
- 21:11 — A sustainable sequence for schoolwide literacy improvement
- 24:16 — From professional development to practice and follow-through
- 44:49 — Building local capacity and letting the work speak for itself
- 46:36 — Gene’s closing message
Show Notes
Faith’s work focuses on students who have been overlooked or left behind by unsuccessful literacy interventions. Literacy Lab brings explicit foundational-skills instruction into a teen-friendly setting, pairing work with multisyllabic words, morphology, decoding, and vocabulary with thought-provoking, grade-level books.