What Does Over-Teaching Look Like?
Over-teaching affects different kids in different ways.
For the highest-achieving students who may be reading novels at home, sitting through lessons on skills they’ve mastered takes up time that could be spent reading, writing, and learning deeply about science, history, and other subjects—and it can lead to disengagement. For struggling readers, including students with dyslexia, over-teaching reduces time for much-needed reading practice. These kids, for whom the self-teaching mechanism doesn’t kick in easily, require more examples and repetition for the most critical skills. Adding extra elements to instruction strains working memory for these students, making it harder to master basic skills.
Over-teaching is happening in a few main ways: (1) spending too much time on less impactful skills, (2) teaching extraneous skills and patterns, and (3) teaching content that only the teacher needs to know.
Teachers have always used chants, songs, and other mnemonic devices to help students memorize important information. Many adults can easily conjure rhymes like “i before e except after c.” And while mnemonic devices are surely helpful at times, they can also increase the cognitive demand for a task and divert from the skill itself. Many phonics programs and online materials widely used these days encourage students to memorize a dozen or more spelling rules, with long chants or sayings such as:
“If a one-syllable word has one short vowel that is followed by f, l, s, or z, double the f, l, s, or z.”
This rule, often known as the “Floss Rule,” is an important and fairly regular one, many teachers argue (though it does have some common exceptions, like bus and gas). The problem arises when this process—the memorization of the rule—becomes the focus of instruction, displacing what should be the end goal—that is, reading and spelling.
“It’s very common in my experience that kids have trouble verbalizing the rule, but they can still learn the skill,” says Spear-Swerling. But often in classrooms “being able to verbalize the rule is a prerequisite for moving on. And it shouldn’t be.”
Rhys Lamberg, an early literacy and advanced teaching roles coordinator for Dare County Schools in Nags Head, North Carolina, says she’s well aware of the potential for over-teaching rules. Her state passed legislation in 2021 mandating literacy instruction be based on evidence-based practices, and it has invested significantly in training pre-K through 5th-grade teachers in these practices. As schools make the transition to teaching phonics, she says, it’s natural to “worry we’re not giving word recognition all the attention it needs” and subsequently to “overcorrect.”
The schools she works with focus on assessing students’ needs and providing repetition and practice at their level. “The program we are using doesn’t overemphasize—there are no songs, no extra bits,” she says. “Just, this is the information you need to know to apply the rule and practice, practice, practice with the rule.”
Memorizing wordy sayings and rules can put particular strain on students with reading disabilities and language-processing difficulties. These children are already working hard to retain the basic sounds. Adding to that can put them over the edge. “It’s not about whether kids can parrot rules,” says Spear-Swerling. “You see kids at the lower end of the spectrum get confused when they try to articulate rules. But that [articulation] doesn’t matter as long as they can apply it.”
And kids at the higher end of the reading-performance spectrum—those 1st and 2nd graders who are reading chapter books at home? Some will simply check out when asked to memorize information they’ve intuited.
Schools are also teaching skills that could be eliminated from explicit instruction altogether.
In devising the University of Florida Literacy Institute’s foundational reading skills program, a mostly free online program known in classrooms as UFLI (pronounced you-fly), the development team looked closely at the necessity of teaching every phonics pattern. Holly Lane, the director of UFLI and an associate professor of special education at the university, says they decided, among other things, not to teach consonant clusters.
Some programs teach the letters bl as in black, as a cluster or unit. But that “doesn’t make sense linguistically,” she says. Instead, you can teach students the /b/ sound and the /l/ sound, and have students practice blending sounds together to make words.
“The vast majority of consonant clusters are plurals. Cats has a consonant cluster, but we don’t teach it that way. Why would we teach it that way for scat but not cats?” she says. “We wanted to purposefully exclude as many things as we were going to purposefully include.”
Removing instruction on consonant clusters (think br, gr, pl, sl, tw, str, and so on) deletes dozens of patterns from the teaching docket.
