Across Wisconsin and across the nation, literacy instruction is changing. In Wisconsin, the passage of Act 20 has accelerated those changes, prompting elementary schools to rethink how reading instruction is designed and delivered and leading educators to consider how those best practices extend into middle and high school classrooms.
Districts have invested in stronger screening systems, professional learning and coaching to support explicit instruction and structured literacy approaches, comprehensive research-backed curriculum resources, and clearer systems for identifying and supporting students when they need help.
For many schools, the impact has been transformational. Teachers are building stronger early readers. Students are developing more reliable word recognition skills. Instruction is becoming more systematic, more explicit, and more responsive to data.
But Act 20 raises an important question for educators: What happens when those students move into middle school and high school?
Many districts have extended this work into grades four and five. Still, research reminds us that literacy development continues far beyond the elementary grades. Act 20 may have started the conversation, but the next chapter of literacy improvement must extend into middle and high school classrooms.
The science of reading gave educators powerful frameworks for understanding early literacy, including Scarborough's Reading Rope and the Simple View of Reading. These models clarified that skilled reading depends on two interacting systems: Word Recognition and Language Comprehension.
Elementary shifts across Wisconsin have rightly focused on strengthening these foundations. But as students move into upper elementary, middle school, and high school, reading becomes more complex. Texts become denser. Ideas become more abstract. Disciplines require different ways of thinking and reading.
Newer frameworks, such as the Active View of Reading, expand our understanding of what adolescent readers must coordinate. In addition to decoding and vocabulary, readers must integrate background knowledge, syntax, discourse structures, and self-regulation to construct meaning from complex texts.
In other words, decoding may open the door to reading -- but comprehension, knowledge, and language systems allow students to walk through it.
And for many adolescents, those systems still require instruction.
Across Wisconsin and beyond, many middle and high school teachers are working incredibly hard to support students. Yet the instructional structures in many secondary literacy classrooms have not evolved as quickly as research on reading and learning.
Through CESA 6 curriculum reviews, classroom visits, and district partnerships, several common instructional patterns emerge:
Taken together, these patterns suggest that students are often expected to work independently with complex texts without the modeling, guided practice, and responsive instruction that support skill development and allow students to develop independence over time. In many secondary classrooms, incremental practice is sometimes perceived as giving students the answers rather than building the scaffolded success that leads to true independence.
For some adolescents, this also means continued development of foundational literacy skills. Literacy researchers Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey note that secondary students may still require explicit instruction in multisyllabic decoding, morphology, and word analysis when gaps remain from earlier grades (Fisher & Frey, Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers, 2025).
Without this kind of instructional support, complex texts can quickly become inaccessible.
One of the most powerful findings across decades of educational research is the importance of explicit instruction combined with gradual release of responsibility.
The Gradual Release of Responsibility model -- often described as I Do, We Do, You Do -- helps students move from supported practice toward independence through modeling, guided practice, feedback, and application.
Fisher and Frey have emphasized that this structure allows students to experience incremental success, which builds both competence and confidence (Fisher & Frey, Visible Learning for Literacy, 2016).
Similarly, John Hattie's synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses on student achievement highlights that teacher clarity, explicit instruction, and feedback are among the most powerful influences on student learning (Hattie, Visible Learning, 2009).
Students do not become independent readers simply by being asked to read independently. They become independent readers when instruction carefully scaffolds the path to independence.
Another consistent message from literacy research is that language and knowledge drive comprehension. Literacy expert Joan Sedita explains that older students must continue developing syntax, academic language, and morphology to successfully comprehend complex texts (Sedita, The Writing Rope, 2019).
Similarly, Timothy Shanahan has written extensively about the importance of disciplinary literacy -- helping students learn how experts read and reason within different subjects such as history, science, and literature (Shanahan, Disciplinary Literacy: Just the FAQs, 2017).
This means secondary literacy instruction must intentionally support students as they learn to analyze complex sentence structures, understand academic and domain-specific vocabulary, interpret arguments and evidence, and synthesize ideas across texts. These skills do not develop automatically. They require purposeful instruction embedded within meaningful reading and writing tasks.
Across the country, elementary educators have been guided by the work of Jan Burkins and Kari Yates, whose books Shifting the Balance, Grades K-2 (2021) and Shifting the Balance, Grades 3-5 (2023) helped teachers translate the science of reading into practical classroom shifts. Their work outlines two sets of instructional shifts -- six for K-2 and six for grades 3-5 -- that help schools rethink long-standing balanced literacy practices.
But as students move into the secondary grades, literacy instruction must evolve again.
At CESA 6, we have been working with districts to extend this thinking into grades 6-12 through seven instructional shifts for secondary literacy:
These shifts are not about abandoning what teachers already do well. They are about refining classroom practice so that reading, writing, language, and knowledge-building work together to support adolescent learners.
The progress happening in elementary literacy is something to celebrate. But if we want students to graduate ready for college, careers, and civic life, we must ensure that the science of reading grows into the science of adolescent literacy.
This next phase of work is not about starting over. It is about keeping what we know works, strengthening effective instruction, and refining practices that do not yet reflect what the research tells us about how adolescents learn to read, build knowledge, and make meaning from complex texts.
Literacy instruction must aim for more than helping students lift words from a page. The goal is for students to analyze complex texts, evaluate evidence, and communicate their thinking clearly.
Act 20 helped bring significant attention and momentum to early literacy across Wisconsin.
The next phase of this work is building on that momentum as students grow into capable adolescent readers, writers, and thinkers. This work includes supporting educators as they examine current practices, identify strengths, uncover gaps, and determine where targeted adjustments can have the greatest impact on student learning.