What Does a Child Need to Learn to Read?

The Developing Child Behind the Literacy Data

I have spent more than three decades in classrooms with young children.

Preschool. Kindergarten. First grade.

Over the years, I have had the privilege of teaching children in remarkably different settings... a church-based preschool, an Air Force Base school-age program, a project-based and environmentally focused charter school, reading intervention, and public Title I classrooms. Each setting has given me a different window into children and how they learn. I have watched children arrive at school with vastly different experiences, strengths, needs, and understandings of the world. Those experiences have shaped the questions I continue to ask about what children need in order to learn.

And now, once again, I am teaching first grade.

There is something about first grade that makes the question of literacy impossible to ignore.

This is the age when learning to read becomes increasingly visible. Some children arrive eager to decode almost anything placed in front of them. Others are still developing the foundational skills necessary to connect sounds and symbols. Some have extensive experience with books and language. Others are still developing vocabulary, oral language, attention, and confidence.

All of them, however, are developing.

And all of them are expected to learn.

That has led me back to a question that seems deceptively simple:

What does a child need in order to learn to read?

The question is not whether children should learn to read. They must.

It is not whether teachers should provide effective, evidence-based literacy instruction. They must.

And it is not whether schools should identify children who are struggling and intervene. They must.

The question is whether we have fully considered the developing child who is sitting on the receiving end of that instruction.

I believe we need to.

Literacy Matters

There is good reason for the renewed attention being given to literacy.

The evidence supporting explicit instruction in foundational reading skills is substantial. The Institute of Education Sciences recommends that educators deliberately develop academic language and vocabulary, phonological awareness connected to letters, decoding and word analysis, and opportunities to read connected text. These are essential components of early literacy instruction.

We should not retreat from that evidence. In fact, I would argue that taking the whole child seriously requires us to take literacy seriously.

Every child deserves the opportunity to become a capable reader. Teachers have a professional responsibility to understand how reading develops and to provide effective instruction. Schools have a responsibility to identify children who are not progressing, intervene early, and respond when instruction is not working.

Accountability matters.

Georgia's most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results illustrate why literacy remains an urgent issue. In 2024, Georgia fourth graders had an average reading score of 214, with 30% performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level.

Those numbers provide a picture of a system. But behind every percentage is a child. And that is where the conversation becomes more complicated.

Evidence-Based Instruction Is Delivered to a Child

A pacing guide can tell us what skill is scheduled for Tuesday.

It cannot tell us whether the child sitting in front of us is ready to master that skill on Tuesday.

It cannot tell us whether the child slept well, whether the child is anxious, whether the child has the language necessary to understand the lesson, whether the child can sustain attention long enough to practice, or whether previous experiences with failure have changed the child's willingness to try.

A pacing guide is a map. It is not the child.

Reading itself is also more complex than a single skill. Scarborough's Reading Rope illustrates how skilled reading develops through the interaction of word recognition and language comprehension, with strands such as phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, background knowledge, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge becoming increasingly integrated over time.

A first grader is developing all of these capacities within a much larger developmental system.

The child is learning to read while also developing attention, working memory, executive function, language, emotional regulation, motor coordination, social understanding, persistence, and confidence.

The reading lesson may appear to be about decoding a word.

But the child may simultaneously be listening to the teacher, holding sounds in working memory, remembering a pattern learned yesterday, suppressing the impulse to talk to a friend, managing frustration, monitoring whether the answer is correct, and deciding whether to try again after making a mistake.

The academic task is only the visible portion of the learning process.

This is where I believe the whole-child conversation belongs in literacy. Not as an alternative to the Science of Reading. Rather, as a way of understanding the child to whom we are delivering it.

The Child Behind the Behavior

Anyone who has spent time in a first-grade classroom knows that learning does not always look like learning.

Sometimes it looks like movement.

Sometimes it looks like talking.

Sometimes it looks like frustration or avoidance.

Sometimes it looks like a child staring at a page and simply not beginning.

Teachers have to respond to what we can see. But experience has taught me that while the behavior is visible, the reason is not always visible.

A child who refuses to participate may lack a skill.

A child who constantly leaves a seat may be struggling with attention or impulse control.

A child who shuts down during reading may have experienced repeated failure.

A child who appears oppositional may be responding to something entirely different from what the behavior suggests.

And sometimes a child is simply still developing a capacity that adults are asking the child to use.

Research on adverse childhood experiences gives us one reason to take this complexity seriously. A 2024 meta-analysis involving more than one million children and adolescents found associations between adverse childhood experiences and poorer academic performance and increased risk of grade repetition. These findings do not mean that adversity determines a child's academic future, nor do they mean that every struggling child has experienced trauma. They do remind us that children's developmental experiences and educational outcomes are connected.

Understanding a child's circumstances should never become an excuse for lowering expectations. It should lead to better questions.

What am I seeing and what might I be missing?

Children Learn in Bodies

The whole child is not simply a more compassionate way of talking about the brain.

Sleep, nutrition, movement, physical health, sensory experiences, relationships, and the physical environment all accompany a child into the classroom.

The CDC's Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child framework recognizes these connections among health, development, and learning. Its framework includes physical activity, nutrition, social and emotional climate, the physical environment, health services, counseling and psychological services, employee wellness, family engagement, and community involvement. The CDC also identifies connections between healthy behaviors and academic achievement.

This does not mean that reading difficulties can be explained by a child's diet, sleep, physical activity, technology use, or home circumstances.

Nor should whole-child language become a way of blaming families.

The point is simpler.

A child arrives at school as a whole human being. We cannot leave the body at the classroom door and teach only the mind.

We ask young children to sit, listen, sustain attention, remember information, manipulate symbols, manage frustration, navigate relationships, and persist when something is difficult. These are significant developmental demands.

So we should be willing to ask whether children are having the developmental experiences they need to build the capacities those demands require.

That is not an argument for lowering expectations. Rather, it is an invitation to understand development more deeply.

Attention, Regulation, and the Conditions for Learning

This is also where research on mindfulness becomes relevant, but only if we are careful about what the evidence actually says.

Mindfulness does not teach phonics. It does not replace explicit literacy instruction, and it does not remediate dyslexia.

However, research suggests that school-based mindfulness interventions may support some capacities associated with learning. A 2022 systematic review of 77 school-based studies involving more than 12,000 students found evidence of improvements in areas including attention, executive function, resilience, and prosocial behavior, although the strength of evidence varied by outcome.

A separate meta-analysis of 66 randomized controlled trials involving more than 20,000 children and adolescents found small benefits in areas such as attention and executive functioning compared with passive controls, with less consistent findings against active controls.

That is a much more useful way to think about mindfulness in education.

Not as a literacy intervention, but as one possible way of supporting conditions for learning.

The same principle applies to movement, predictable routines, relationships, opportunities for exploration, and other practices that may help children become more available for instruction.

The evidence for each of these areas is not identical, and we should resist turning every promising practice into a universal solution.

But we should also resist the idea that the only things that matter are the skills written into the curriculum.

Children do not learn in pieces.

The Teacher Is Part of the Learning Environment

There is another developing human being in the classroom whose capacity matters.

The teacher.

Teachers are expected to provide explicit instruction, differentiate, intervene, assess, document, communicate with families, manage behavior, respond to individual needs, collaborate with specialists, and maintain a classroom environment that is both academically productive and emotionally responsive.

None of these responsibilities exists in isolation. They accumulate throughout the day, requiring teachers to move continually between instruction, assessment, behavior support, relationship-building, problem-solving, and emotional regulation.

Teacher wellness, then, cannot be reduced to just self-care. It is also a question of whether the conditions of teaching allow educators to sustain the attention, patience, and presence that good teaching requires.

Teacher wellness is an educational condition.

Research increasingly connects teacher well-being with working conditions, job demands, resources, and classroom outcomes. A 2024 meta-analysis of 173 studies involving nearly 90,000 participants found that teacher well-being is influenced by both personal and occupational factors, including job demands and resources.

More recent research has also found associations between teacher burnout and teacher-student interactions, student motivation, and student achievement.

Teachers have professional responsibilities. So do schools.

If we want teachers to create environments in which children can regulate, connect, persist, and learn, we need to consider the conditions under which teachers themselves are expected to do that work.

The child is not the only developing human being in the classroom.

Keep the Child at the Center

Education needs systems.

We need standards, assessments, screening, intervention, progress monitoring, and structures that help schools identify children who need additional support.

But systems are means, not ends. A reading score tells us something important. A benchmark tells us something important. A progress-monitoring graph tells us something important.

But none of them is the child.

This is where I think our professional judgment matters. When a child is not learning to read, we should not simply ask whether the child has failed to meet the benchmark.

We should ask what the evidence tells us about the child's current skills, what instruction has been provided, what has worked, what has not worked, and what the child needs next.

Sometimes the answer will be more explicit instruction.

Sometimes it will be targeted intervention.

Sometimes it will be more time and practice.

Sometimes it will involve language development, attention, regulation, relationships, or other developmental factors.

Often, it will be several things at once.

This is not an argument against accountability.

It is an argument for better accountability... accountability that asks not only whether a child is meeting the standard, but whether we are responding intelligently when the child is not.

Moving beyond decoding

There is one final distinction I believe deserves attention.

Teaching children to read is not exactly the same as growing readers.

We need both.

Children need explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, decoding, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

But they also need language.

They need stories, poetry, humor, informational texts, conversation, questions, imagination, and opportunities to discover that books can take them somewhere they have never been.

The science of reading does not require us to choose between foundational skills and a rich literary life.

The two can - and should - coexist.

We should teach children how to read while surrounding them with reasons to want to read. A child can learn to decode a sentence without yet understanding why books matter.

Literacy is ultimately about access: access to knowledge, language, imagination, culture, information, and independence.

Foundational skills make that access possible. Rich language and meaningful experiences give children something worth accessing.

I believe every child should learn to read.

I believe teachers have a professional responsibility to understand how reading develops and to provide effective instruction.

I believe schools have a responsibility to identify children who are not progressing and respond early.

I believe accountability matters.

But I also believe we need to become more sophisticated in the way we think about the child who is not yet reading successfully.

Instead of asking only, Why isn't this child meeting the benchmark?

Perhaps we should also ask:

What does this child need in order to learn?

That question does not lower the bar. It helps us understand the path.

Because behind every reading score is a developing human being.

Behind every benchmark is a child.

And behind every literacy statistic is a story about instruction, development, experience, opportunity, and the conditions in which a child is being asked to learn.

We should not lower the bar. We should strengthen the path.

Research-Informed Practice

The ideas explored in this article are informed by research in literacy development, developmental neuroscience, child development, trauma-informed education, attention and self-regulation, teacher-student relationships, teacher well-being, and whole-child learning. Research is used here to provide context for classroom observations and questions, not to suggest that any single factor determines a child's ability to learn.

The goal is to consider what we know about how children develop alongside what we know about how children learn.

Selected References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Health and academics. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dunning, D. L., Tudor, K., Radley, L., Dalrymple, N., Funk, J., Vainre, M., Ford, T., Montero-Marin, J., Kuyken, W., & Dalgleish, T. (2022). Do mindfulness-based programmes improve the cognitive skills, behaviour and mental health of children and adolescents? An updated meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Evidence-Based Mental Health, 25(3), 135–142. https://doi.org/10.1136/ebmental-2022-300464

Emslander, V., Holzberger, D., Ofstad, S. B., Fischbach, A., & Scherer, R. (2025). Teacher-student relationships and student outcomes: A systematic second-order meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 151(3), 365–397. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000460

Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse. (2016, revised 2019). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade. U.S. Department of Education.

Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse. (2010). Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3rd grade. U.S. Department of Education.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Phan, M. L., et al. (2022). Mindfulness-based school interventions: A systematic review of outcome evidence quality by study design. Mindfulness, 13, 1591–1613. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01885-9

Qu, G., Shu, L., Liu, H., Ma, S., Han, T., Zhang, H., Huang, C., Wang, J., Yang, L., & Sun, Y. (2024). Association between adverse childhood experiences and academic performance among children and adolescents: A global meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(4), 3332–3345. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241246758

Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. B. Neuman & D. K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 97–110). Guilford Press.

Toste, J. R., Didion, L., Peng, P., Filderman, M. J., & McClelland, A. M. (2020). A meta-analytic review of the relations between motivation and reading achievement for K–12 students. Review of Educational Research, 90(3), 420–456. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654320919352

Wartenberg, G., Aldrup, K., Grund, S., & Klusmann, U. (2026). How strongly is teachers' burnout related to teacher absenteeism, teacher–student interactions, and student motivation and achievement: A meta-analysis and systematic review. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543261455273

Zhou, S., Slemp, G. R., & Vella-Brodrick, D. A. (2024). Factors associated with teacher wellbeing: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09886-x

About the Author

Dr. Pamela J. Cernjul is an early childhood educator with more than 30 years of classroom experience in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. She holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum, Teaching, Learning, and Leadership, with research focused on trauma-sensitive pedagogy and professional learning for educators.

Her work bridges research, classroom practice, and education policy, with a focus on whole-child education, literacy, trauma-informed practice, and teacher well-being.

She is the author of The P.A.M. Path: A Framework for Calm Classrooms, Resilient Kids, and Sustainable Teaching, a practical framework for creating calm, connected classrooms where children and teachers can learn and grow.

About The P.A.M. Path

The P.A.M. Path: A Framework for Calm Classrooms, Resilient Kids, and Sustainable Teaching grew from more than three decades of working alongside young children and teachers.

Grounded in neuroscience, trauma-informed practice, mindfulness, social-emotional learning, and whole-child education, the P.A.M. framework offers practical ways to build classrooms where regulation, connection, and learning can coexist.

P.A.M. stands for Pause, Acknowledge, Mind... a simple framework for helping educators slow down, look beneath behavior, and respond with greater intention.

The P.A.M. Path is not a reading program. It is a framework for creating some of the relational and regulatory conditions in which children and teachers can engage in the work of learning.