Teacher presents 'body coda' phonics routine as a brief, high-leverage classroom strategy

Michelle Koopman, a career classroom teacher, told the commission that system-level change will not stick without teacher buy-in and recommended training teachers on a small set of high-leverage phonics strategies that can be used daily in early grades.

"A simple strategy called body coda has been shown as the most effective method for teaching young readers to blend sounds into words," Koopman said, describing how holding onto two sounds and blending to the vowel can reduce cognitive load and increase fluency in early readers.

Koopman described hands-on classroom approaches (two-letter tiles slid down a pictured slide) and tied the strategy to assessment outcomes such as DIBELS, arguing that improved fluency shows up in timed measures and classroom reading activity.