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Instructor-Guided Professional Learning

The Science of Reading in Florida

Most science-of-reading training is generic — the same course, sold in every state, on the same five components. This one is built on Florida's own statutory language, which is unusually specific and which most teachers have never actually read. Self-paced, four hours, and every claim traced to a source you can check.
4 Study Hours 59 Intermediate
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The Science of Reading in Florida

Why This Learning Experience?

This instructor-guided professional learning experience is designed to help educators learn on their schedule while still receiving meaningful support. Participants complete practical activities, connect ideas to real classroom practice, and build confidence through application-focused learning.

Learning Experience Overview

Florida law requires reading instruction grounded in the science of reading, taught explicitly, systematically and sequentially. The same subsection prohibits the three-cueing model and visual memory as a basis for teaching word reading. That is a clear line, and a great deal of material still in classrooms crosses it.

This course starts with the research — the Simple View, Scarborough’s Rope, and the orthographic mapping mechanism that explains why guessing at words fails. It then reads the statute closely, including what the prohibition does not cover, because the overcorrections are nearly as costly as the original problem. From there it moves into practice: phonemic awareness that earns its time, the six-part explicit phonics lesson, decodable text answered honestly rather than sold, and where older readers break down.

The comprehension module argues something less commonly taught: that background knowledge and vocabulary carry more of the load than strategy instruction, and it shows you the federal evidence ratings that complicate that claim rather than hiding them.

You finish by auditing one of your own units and rewriting one lesson.

Learning Outcomes

  1. State the Simple View of Reading and identify which component a struggling reader is failing on
  2. Explain what s. 1001.215(7) requires of reading instruction, in the statute’s own terms
  3. Identify three-cueing prompts in materials and replace them with prompts that direct students to print
  4. Structure an explicit phonics lesson that includes encoding, as the B.E.S.T. benchmarks require
  5. Explain why background knowledge and vocabulary carry more of the comprehension load than strategy practice
  6. Audit one unit of your own materials and rewrite one lesson against what you have learned

Who Should Participate?

Florida teachers in grades K–5 who teach reading, and secondary teachers whose students struggle with word reading — Module 2 covers a gap in the standards that affects you directly. Also useful for reading coaches, ESE and intervention staff, and administrators who evaluate reading instruction and want to know what they should be looking for.

No prior background in reading research is assumed.

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