I’d like to tell you the story of the student who taught me a really important lesson that I know refer to as The Train Track analogy. I started working with Andrew when he was in 3rd grade. This was 2016, and I was very, very pregnant with my second child. The first time we met, there was an immediate connection. He was super smart, very dedicated to his growth, and such a delight to spend time with. We made each other laugh a lot.

I assessed Andrew’s independent decoding and encoding skills, talked extensively with his mom, looked at school records, and analyzed a recent writing sample. Having established a baseline of significant gaps in his foundational reading skills due to his severe dyslexia, I wrote my intervention plan. It addressed decoding and encoding gaps with explicit instruction through The Wilson Reading System®, which his baseline assessments clearly showed he needed. 

We dove into three-hour weekly sessions, plugging away at the scope and sequence of skills he needed in order to fill in those foundational gaps. With his significant dyslexia, each skill required multiple exposures, applied practice with immediate feedback, encouragement, incentives, and creativity to address trouble spots. 

Andrew worked through each step of the Wilson Reading System over the course of four years. It was grueling, he was a rockstar, and his accuracy with both decoding and encoding became consistent. His entire team was thrilled.

However, his fluency was still very low, meaning it took him a long time to decode each word. He knew how to be accurate, but still struggled with automaticity, which negatively impacted his ability to understand what he was reading. If you don’ t know what I mean by this, try it: Read a passage about something you don’t have much background knowledge on at a rate of about 40-50 words per minute. Set a timer on your phone to track it. Pay attention to your ability to understand what you are reading when the pace is slow. Now read the same passage closer to 100 words per minute. Can you feel the difference? It’s called automaticity. Automaticity of reading allows your brain to save your cognitive energy for understanding and analyzing what you read, moving you up Bloom’s Taxonomy. Not only was Andrew’s fluency a struggle, his written expression was disorganized, labor-intensive, and grammatically incorrect. It was not easy to understand what he was trying to express. At this point, he was in middle school, expected to craft successful multi-paragraph essays. He had so much to say, and it was apparent some additional instruction was needed.

At this point, I stepped out of teaching to lead Redwood Literacy full-time, and Andrew transitioned to the caseload of a colleague. It was a tear-filled goodbye, as the journey we had been on together was powerful. It never gets old, seeing someone who thought they couldn’t do something accomplish it with tons of hard work, grit, and the right guidance. As his new instructor and I tackled the next step of his intervention plan, we focused our efforts on a combination of Wide Reading Units,written expression, and assistive technology tools through Writing Our World™. This plan focused on building oral reading fluency and background knowledge through continuous reading, or wide reading, instead of repeated reading. If you are curious about understanding the difference between these approaches, check out this research summary by Dr. Elizabeth Norton at Northwestern University.

As Andrew and his new instructor began the second part of his intervention journey, I began to reflect on my mistake as a practitioner. I am constantly learning and growing as a professional, just like the students I work with and the children I am raising in my own home. Modeling the “know better/do better” mindset on a daily basis is one of the most powerful examples we can set for the next generation. What was the mistake? Did I regret having Andrew work through all 12 steps of the Wilson Reading System? No. He needed it. Did I regret recommending that Andrew work through the 49 steps of the Writing Our World™ scope and sequence? No. He needed that too. What about the wide reading units? He needed those. What about exposure and direct instruction around using assistive technology tools to reduce the cognitive load as the rigor of reading and writing expectations increased in middle school? 100% he needed that. I didn’t regret any of the individual recommendations. They had all proven to be very helpful to him.

What I regret is that during the early years of instruction I focused entirely on remediation but neglected to incorporate the assistive technology tools he needed -- I'd thought I could wait on that until he'd built up his fluency. Looking back, I wish I would have recommended right away, when he was in 3rd grade, that we start tackling both sides of what I call The Train Track. The Train Track is an analogy I now use every day while leading our teams in creating best-in-class educational support plans for neurodivergent students . In order to foster thriving, confident students, we must give them both sides of the track. 

Track #1 is the nitty gritty explicit instruction. It begins with getting a clear baseline on a student’s foundational reading, writing, and math skills – whatever instructors identify as an area of struggle – then building an individualized intervention plan embedded with progress monitoring and benchmarking. It’s essential not only that students are getting intervention, but that they’re getting the right intervention – an explicit instructional approach that follows a clear scope and sequence of skills and that is still flexible enough to be molded to each student’s individual profile. In Andrew’s case, those areas of need were diverse, from accuracy in decoding and encoding to written expression to oral reading fluency. This intervention needs to be delivered by a qualified instructor – ideally, one who has ongoing coaching support and a community of thought partners. And a sense of humor. The relationship aspect is crucial; it’s the foundation of instruction. An instructor should be an empathetic, creative, optimistic, outside-the-box thinker who builds relationship by showing up vulnerably and authentically. It’s the instructor’s job to model how to make mistakes and to create a safe place to grow. 

This is the first side of the Track – the remediation side. On this side of the track, relationship building, instructional expertise, and quality curriculum carry a student toward mastery of fundamental skills. 

But trains don’t get too far on one track…

Track #2 is all about building accessibility and expanding background knowledge. Establishing independent foundational skills takes a lot of exposure and time, especially for neurodivergent students. In the meantime, students need a way to access instructional content at or above their cognitive comprehension level (struggling to decode text doesn’t mean you don’t understand the ideas expressed in that text) or else they’ll fall behind. This is a big problem, and it often happens when students get intervention – if they don’t have an equal amount of emphasis on assistive technology tools to help them access grade-level content, they’re not getting the comprehensive support they need. “The Matthew Effect” describes the phenomenon in which students who do well in their literacy education early on continue to do well later, while those who struggle early on continue to do worse. When students’ attention is spent entirely on foundational literacy skills, they’re not being exposed to new vocabulary words or background knowledge; they’re not absorbing what their peers absorb. This Train Track model is a powerful way to counter the dispiriting consequences of the Matthew Effect. 

Where is Andrew now? He’s nearing the end of his high school journey and applying to prestigious schools around the country. I just attended his most recent IEP meeting and was floored by what I heard. On his SATs, he scored in the 90th percentile for reading and writing. For reading comprehension, he scored in the 75th percentile and, according to the comprehension index of the Feifer Assessment of Reading, he was in the 61st percentile for written expression. He is disciplined, independent, fierce, kind, and ambitious. I have no doubt he is going to accomplish anything he sets his mind to. He already has.

Nice try, Matthew.

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