You're a skilled educator doing your best inside a system that measures a narrow slice of what you actually teach. You complete the reporting, you meet the compliance requirements, and then you do the real work alongside it. What you're looking for isn't permission to teach differently. You already are. What you're looking for is a clearer framework for what that teaching actually is, and language to describe it — to yourself, to your learners and to the people who fund your program.
Or perhaps you're someone who understands the accountability system deeply and works within it strategically. You know what the framework can and can't do. You've developed professional judgment about where to push and where to hold. You're deliberate about your decisions. And you're looking for something more comprehensive and sophisticated that truly represents literacy in our lives.
Or you're designing curriculum — making decisions about what gets taught, how it's sequenced and what frameworks guide instruction across a program or a team. You need something credible enough to stake professional decisions on, practical enough to actually use and coherent enough to share with others.
Or you teach in a setting where the compliance pressures are lighter — a community program, a volunteer or family literacy setting, or a program funded to leave you room. You're not fighting a framework for space to do the real work; you already have it. What you're looking for is a way to use that space well — a clearer picture of the different things learners do with reading and writing, so your teaching can be as deliberate and responsive as your freedom allows.
Or you're early in this work — still building the judgment that comes with years of experience. You may have been handed an accountability framework and told, in effect, that it's what we use. What you're looking for is a truer picture of what the work actually is, before the paperwork becomes the whole map. This isn't a shortcut past experience — there isn't one — but a foundation to build it on: a clear sense of the different things learners do with reading and writing, so that the judgment you're developing grows around what matters rather than only what's counted.
The practice types emphasize what people actually do with literacy in their work, school and everyday lives. Some of those practices are complex. If you work with adults who are beginning readers, some practice types — narrative, creative, and simple procedural practices — are more accessible than others, and they're a good place to start.
But the practice frame still applies from the very beginning. A beginning reader is already doing literacy for real purposes — telling a story, following a simple set of steps, writing something that matters to them. Foundational skills develop best inside that purposeful doing, not in a separate stage before it. What changes for a beginning reader isn't whether the practices apply, but where the emphasis falls: more instructional attention goes to the foundational work of decoding, word recognition and basic writing, carried out within accessible practices rather than in isolation from them.
A learner who is still in foundational literacy development will typically show some of the following signs. When you see them, foundational approaches deserve the greater share of your attention — and the practice types throughout this site help you keep that work anchored to real purposes, and become more central as the foundation firms up.
Reading that is slow and effortful, with significant attention going to decoding individual words rather than comprehending meaning
Limited automatic recognition of common words
Writing that is effortful to produce, with spelling that is phonetic or inconsistent
Listening comprehension that significantly exceeds reading comprehension — the learner understands far more when texts are read aloud than when reading independently.
This framework won't ask you to start from scratch. It will ask you to look carefully at what you're already doing — and to see it with more precision, more variety and more possibility than the systems you work inside tend to allow.
That's a small ask. But it's the one that tends to change things.
Take a moment before you move on. Think of one learner you're working with right now. What kind of literacy practice is at the centre of what they need? Hold that in mind as you read; it will make everything more concrete.
