This Pinedale teacher’s approach is helping high school students fill reading gaps

FROM WYOFILE: 

Faith Howard’s literacy lab classes helped older students make huge comprehension gains.  Now she is working to spread the teaching method across Wyoming, where literacy has been a concern for years.

In her Pinedale High School literacy lab classroom, Faith Howard prompted her students to decipher an excerpt from the criminal justice memoir “Just Mercy.”

Howard, blonde and energetic in that caffeinated way of teachers, encouraged them to decode words by breaking them into segments and blending the sounds. She had them search for instances of the “bossy R” or “vowel teams,” focus on what prefixes and suffixes could tell them about the words and keep an eye out for other morphemes — like Greek or Latin roots — that could hint at meaning. 

Howard identified one particularly tricky word for them to study. One of her students, a freshman girl with a thick braid who is on an individualized education plan for special learning needs, examined it before attempting to pronounce it. She was quiet and hesitant, but correct.

“Is it coerced?” another student called out loudly.

“Yes,” Howard responded. “Coerced. Repeat it after me.” 

They all did so, this time without hesitation. 

Later, they read the text aloud, confidently pronouncing words like “incarcerated,” “redacted,” and, once again, “coerced.”

A casual observer wouldn’t pin the students as struggling readers — and that’s evidence Howard’s approach to literacy is working. 

When Howard was hired to help improve literacy in Pinedale high schools three years ago, she said, the nut she had to crack was this: How could she help struggling older readers without insulting their intelligence with literacy material designed for 5-year-olds?

Howard started from scratch. She developed her own curriculum based on the science of reading — an evidence-based body of knowledge on effective literacy instruction — and called her class “literacy lab.”

She incorporated fluency, comprehension, vocabulary and writing — but in the context of current events, more complicated language and the kinds of topics that engage high schoolers.

And in just two years, Pinedale High School saw a 79% drop in students reading below basic, and a 55% increase in those reaching proficient or advanced.

“It is proving to be really valuable,” Howard said. 

In a state with nagging literacy concerns as proficiency scores tick downward, Howard hopes to share her insights with other Wyoming educators. 

“I’ve kind of made it my mission,” she said, “really trying to crack the code on: What can we do so that we’re not graduating kids from high school who really don’t have the tools to be successful, even if they don’t go to college?”

A second teaching education 

Howard spent 16 years as a high school English teacher, assigning reading texts, grading essays and instructing on writing skills. Her family moved to Wyoming from  Colorado six years ago when she took a teaching job in Big Piney. Three years later, she was hired as a literacy specialist in Pinedale, where Sublette County School District 1 obtained federal grant money through the state to improve literacy scores. 

Pinedale High School students had historically tested well in reading compared to the rest of the state, she said. But in 2021, nearly 30% of 9th graders were reading below basic proficiency in standardized testing. Howard was enlisted to help turn that trend around. 

And that is where her second education began. As an English teacher, she said, she specialized in general classroom instruction, rather than the skills needed to teach students how to read.

“Secondary education teaching programs and teachers in general, for older students, are not taught any of this,” she said. 

At first, she worked with individual students who struggled. She realized, however, it wasn’t enough to just help students complete writing homework or study for English tests. 

“If I’m just helping them pass classes to graduate, we haven’t actually addressed the underlying issue,” Howard said. “So that’s when I said, ‘I need more training.’”

That included several sessions with the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education, which offers instruction on the science of reading through courses like morphology — the study of word structure — and phonological awareness, which has to do with spoken sentences.

Howard leaned into training, and learned the intricacies of literacy. She also realized that she faced a challenge. While literacy instruction for struggling readers is generally aimed at young children, many kids, she said, mask their problems and slip through the cracks.

To present older kids with rudimentary instruction designed for small children, Howard knew, wouldn’t work.

So she started working with small student groups and marrying morphology and reading fluency. “And immediately saw an uptick and success,” she said. “And that was only a piece of the pie.”

Howard expanded that with comprehension, writing and discussion. Her literacy lab class was born. 

Opting in 

“I’m basically doing targeted instruction to fill in the gaps of what students missed from elementary school without putting them in front of like, baby books,” Howard said in summarizing the class. As the students gain foundational tools, they also talk about current events, learn the meaning of complicated words and examine age-appropriate texts. 

The class is an elective. Students who qualify for literacy services or who have other indicators of reading challenges are invited. It can be a hard sell, she said, particularly as kids have to be willing to give up something like art or PE to take it. 

But within a year of the lab’s launch, the data began to confirm its success; today, the school’s “below basic” scores have plummeted to single digits. That has helped sway students and parents. Some kids, she said, even choose to remain in the literacy lab after they meet the exit criteria. 

Sublette County School District 1 Curriculum Director Greg Legerski oversaw the literacy grant and worked closely with Howard. The district had to pivot significantly to address literacy, he said. “Faith really embraced that challenge.”

Howard’s receptivity to learning and adapting is unique, Legerski said. 

“She really had an immense thirst for professional growth,” he said. “She was continually seeking out opportunities and refining her craft. She always wanted to grow as an educator.”

When she learned something new, Legerski said, she would seek feedback to check her work, and happily share her knowledge with others. The impact has been remarkable, he said.

“She took that current research and really transformed it into something that’s practical, impactful and really changing the lives of students within the classroom,” he said. “She’s done an outstanding job.”

Literacy landscape 

It’s not news that Wyoming reading scores have ticked down in recent years. In 2024, 36% of fourth graders and 29% of eighth graders performed at or above the proficient level in reading on national standardized NAEP tests, lower than the previous five years. 

Some 32% of Wyoming fourth graders performed below basic, which was a slight increase from 29% in 2022. For eighth graders, 30% scored below basic in 2024, up one percentage point from 2022. 

Wyoming’s scores hovered above the rest of the country; the state has long ranked comparatively high in national testing. But literacy challenges are widespread, Howard noted. 

“People across the country have been struggling with the same things,” she said. “We’re getting kids in middle and high schools that really do not know how to read very well, and they’re missing all of these core components from elementary school, those foundational reading skills.”

Thanks to reporting from journalists like Emily Hanford, awareness of widespread reading instruction failures has also grown. Hanford’s podcast “Sold a Story” exposed how educators across the country believed they were teaching a best-practice approach to reading that was later disproven.

The results Howard has seen in Pinedale, she said, are evidence that with the right method, even those students who slipped through for years can gain the crucial skills. Educational band-aids will just fail kids, she said. 

“If you don’t address the underlying issue, it’s always going to be there, and the gap is just going to widen even more because the text levels get more and more difficult,” she said. 

“It’s a good time to be in this work,” she said, “because you can have such a huge impact if you’re able to find something that works.”

More alarm bells 

The Legislature’s Joint Education Committee has made K-3 literacy a priority topic for the interim, or off-season, for six years running. 

In May, a group of mothers attended the committee’s Casper meeting to urge it to act in a meaningful way. Their testimonies illuminated how kids here end up lacking literacy tools well into their school years. 

Annie McGlothlin’s son went through nearly three years of school before his dyslexia was identified, she said, and it’s been an ongoing struggle to fight for the right interventions. It’s time for Wyoming to overhaul literacy to reflect the science of reading in a way that’s uniform and rigorous, she said.

Chandel Pine’s son, Paul, struggled in school starting from day one, she testified. He repeated kindergarten, received reading interventions and was diagnosed with ADHD, and was behind his peers for most of his life, she said. Despite the challenges, her son presented as an OK reader and passed subsequent grades.

It wasn’t until fifth grade that the scope of his reading deficiency was identified, she said, and that was after she specifically requested an IEP. 

“He was in the third percentile in reading for his age,” she said. Paul committed suicide that year in school. 

The women urged lawmakers to mandate early and ongoing dyslexia screening for grades K-12 and strengthen teacher training and certifications for literacy interventions, among other things.

A challenge, committee members said, is trying to impose a statewide system on Wyoming districts, which have broad local autonomy. 

Still, Sen. Charles Scott, R-Casper, proposed a bill to amend Wyoming statute provisions related to identifying and addressing struggling students. His bill would sharpen definitions, mandate better tracking and create an avenue for parents to appeal to the Wyoming superintendent of public instruction. The bill would also create a small statewide team of staff to focus on literacy needs. The committee voted to advance the draft.

Organic expansion

Howard will expand her labs into the Pinedale Middle School next year. She is also intent on sharing what she’s learned with other educators. 

“It’s just a total passion project for me, and something that I’m trying to get the word out about because I do think that there are other districts and other states that are looking for answers,” Howard said. “I don’t have all the answers, but I think I’ve figured out a few things that could really help kids in other places too.”

She has presented at Wyoming’s literacy conference for three years, led virtual trainings and sits on the leadership committee for a group of Wyoming educators who are looking to learn more about literacy. She also welcomes educators to visit and observe her labs.

For other districts looking to pursue a similar program, Curriculum Director Legerski said, it’s doable. It just takes prioritizing literacy by hiring specialists or finding the right teacher who is willing to receive additional training. 

“It’s really scalable, across many schools,” he said.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on July 8, 2025.