Fall 2025 Newsletter
MORE partners with rural districts to advance equity and usable knowledge
Over the summer, teacher leaders and district administrators from seven rural districts came together at Harvard to take part in the MORE Summer Leadership Institute. Participants spent two days working together to develop a shared understanding of MORE and of why their district chose to invest in the program. Teams drafted detailed implementation and communication plans, set SMART goals, defined roles, and explored high-quality instructional strategies like collaboration, discussion, and concept mapping. Lessons are beginning in many schools this week!
At the READS Lab, we build long-term partnerships with school districts to solve grand challenges in literacy and education. We’re excited to begin these new partnerships and to learn with and from these districts as they adapt this evidence-based program to their own contexts. Together, we hope to support successful literacy learning for every student.
READS Lab in the news!
In a presentation at the Planet Word Museum, READS Lab’s Principal Investigator James Kim walked through the history of reading research and its impact on public policy—including the big bets America’s presidents have made on reading, from Head Start through the Every Student Succeeds Act.
In conversation with award-winning journalist Emily Hanford (host of Sold a Story), Kim explores what we’ve already mastered—teaching kids to decode—and the next frontier: ensuring all students can read for understanding. This conversation provides a context-rich primer on how MORE stands on the shoulders of what we have learned from the great literacy pushes of the 20th and 21st centuries to make progress on the previously elusive goal of helping students make sense of complex, content-rich texts.
Teacher tip: Learning a new curriculum? Try a table read!
When we “unpack” a lesson, we break down each part—objectives, materials, and instructional steps—to understand the lesson purpose and flow. A “table read,” on the other hand, is a collaborative rehearsal where educators read through the lesson script together, just like actors preparing for a play. This lets teachers hear the language out loud, anticipate student questions, and practice delivery before stepping into the classroom.
A table read prepares you for confident, engaging teaching—while also giving you feedback, fresh ideas, and sometimes a few shared laughs with colleagues along the way.
At our Summer Institute, a small group of teacher and district leaders take the plunge and “table read” the first MORE lesson that their teachers will work with this fall.
READS Lab launches new book series
This fall, at some of our partner districts, third graders will launch into life science with a new READS Lab-authored book series, designed around a shared schema.
This engaging three-book series guides students through the scientific process—one used not just by paleontologists, but by biologists and archaeologists as well—instilling inquiry skills and a deeper understanding of relationships in the natural world, past and present.
These books are part of our new partnership and we hope to make them available publicly in the near future.
Dr. Mosher scores with SSSR award
You may know Dr. Doug Mosher as that guy on the READS Lab team who loves talking about trees and the Celtics, but there’s more to the story. Dr. Mosher recently won the 2025 Early Career Outstanding Paper award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR). His award-winning paper shows how a simple shift—adding structured prompts to classroom read alouds—helped third graders strengthen reading comprehension on four grade-level measures. It’s a low-lift, high-impact strategy we’re proud to see recognized. Congratulations, Doug!