Evan Williams

“Oral Reading Fluency: The Gateway Skill to Middle School Success” is the innovative program created by Williams for students at Reynolds Middle School. The program, which began as a pilot study, was developed by teachers at the school to improve the reading achievement of students by focusing on oral fluency. According to the teachers, oral fluency is a basic reading skill that is a barrier to the success of students in middle school. They have researched how students learn to read and combined the findings with three years of data they collected from their own students to create the program. Students in the program read a one-minute fluency passage at the beginning of the week and repeat the passage at the end of the week to measure growth. Throughout the middle of the week, the students are put in pairs to read aloud from novels they personally select and the teachers use the opportunity to tutor and monitor the progress of the students. Williams, who lives in Portland, hopes the students will exceed the average of 20 words per minute each year and increase their fluency by 30 words per minute each year.