Teacher candidates Joy Spettel (left) and Brenna Robin shape colored clay into miniature brains during a science of reading lesson in PSU’s redesigned Elementary Education program.
On a recent Wednesday morning, two dozen students at Portland State University shaped red, yellow, blue and green lumps of clay into palm-sized models of the human brain.
They were not neuroscience students. They were future elementary school teachers learning how children learn to read.
“Take your blue blob and make a frontal lobe as best you can,” Professor Dot McElhone told them.
The exercise was part of Literacy Methods I: Reading and Spelling Words, a required course in the College of Education’s newly redesigned Elementary Education program, which prepares teacher candidates to provide research-based literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading.
The lesson was simple and ambitious: build a brain and, in the process, understand how reading is learned.
Preparing teachers differently
The lesson reflects a broader shift in how teachers are prepared at PSU.
In their literacy coursework, teacher candidates study the science of reading — from phonological awareness and decoding to language development and assessment — while also learning strategies to support multilingual learners in elementary classrooms.
For McElhone, the “build-a-brain” exercise is more than a classroom activity. It’s a way to help future teachers visualize how reading actually develops in the brain.
“We were never born to read,” she told the class, quoting cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, and adding: “The reading brain doesn’t exist. It’s not born. It’s created for most of us through explicit instruction.”
Human brains evolved for spoken language, visual recognition and meaning-making. Reading, by contrast, is a relatively recent cultural invention. Teaching children to read means helping the brain build new neural pathways.
That process relies on neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself through experience and instruction.
“When kids struggle to read words, they haven’t fully developed the needed neural networks yet,” McElhone said. “As teachers it’s our job to help make that happen.”
Five networks, one word
The clay models became a map of the brain’s reading system. Using toothpicks and labels, students identified five neural networks involved in reading, most located in the brain’s left hemisphere.
The occipital lobe handles visual input. A specialized region often called the visual word form area learns to recognize letters. Another critical network connects letters to sounds, allowing readers to decode and encode words. Language comprehension regions support vocabulary and meaning. Broca’s area supports production of spoken phonemes — the smallest units of sound in a word.
After labeling each region, students turned to a partner to rehearse and explain the different functions.
The class also watched a video illustrating how the brain activates during reading. Visual input enters the back of the brain and moves forward in rapid succession as letters connect to sounds and meaning.
The sequence happens in milliseconds, but building the system takes years of explicit, systematic instruction and practice.
The reason we care about any of this brain stuff as teachers is because of what it tells us to do in the classroom.
The rope of reading
To connect neuroscience to classroom instruction, PSU’s elementary education curriculum aligns with the framework many literacy researchers use to explain how reading develops: Hollis Scarborough’s “Reading Rope.”
One set of strands focuses on word recognition — phonological awareness, decoding and automatic recognition of words — while the other focuses on language comprehension — vocabulary, background knowledge, syntax and verbal reasoning.
As both strands strengthen and intertwine, readers achieve fluency and comprehension.
While Literacy Methods I focuses primarily on the word recognition strands of the rope, a companion course next term examines language comprehension — exploring how oral language, vocabulary development and background knowledge support reading for understanding.
“I’m sending them out there with the knowledge they need to address all the components of Scarborough’s Rope,” McElhone said, “and to do it from a critical anti-bias, anti-racist perspective, tuned into the needs of multilingual learners.”
Why letters flip
Jose Lopez (left) and Maria Flores participate in a class discussion about neuroscience and how children learn to read.
For graduate student Jose Lopez, one concept stood out.
Humans were born with a symmetry bias. A chair remains a chair whether it faces left or right. The brain naturally treats mirror images as the same object.
Letters do not work that way.
The difference between “b” and “d” matters, but the brain does not automatically recognize that distinction. When young children reverse letters, they are often doing exactly what their brains evolved to do.
Lopez knows firsthand what it is like to struggle with reading. As a former English language learner, he remembers the challenge and the relief of gaining literacy.
“My biggest aha moment was learning about the visual input area,” Lopez said. “It helped me understand why some students can’t connect.”
Helping students succeed is one reason he wants to become a teacher.
“Seeing students light up about being able to read makes me happy,” he said.
Lopez has been volunteering in a Wilkes Elementary School classroom in the Reynolds School District for the last several years. He works one-on-one with students practicing early math and reading skills. At home, he also helps his 7-year-old sister as she learns to read.
Lopez’s classroom experience reflects a core part of the program.
Learning by doing
Before beginning their formal student teaching year, teacher candidates spend two terms volunteering in elementary classrooms alongside their literacy methods courses, so they can apply the research-based literacy strategies they study.
Each student conducts a case study of a child who is struggling to read. They administer literacy assessments — including measures of phonological awareness, decoding and oral reading fluency — and use the results to provide structured literacy instruction tailored to the child’s strengths and needs.
The goal is to help future teachers identify reading challenges early and respond with targeted instruction.
For Joy Spettel, a master’s candidate who moved to the United States from the Philippines in 2018, the clay brain exercise filled in gaps from her own schooling, which emphasized memorization and textbooks.
“This helps me understand what’s actually happening,” she said. “Now when I hear a child sound out a word, I understand what their brain is trying to do.”
As a multilingual speaker of Bisaya, Tagalog and English, Joy said she often moves between languages to make sense of what she reads — an experience that helps her better support multilingual learners in her future classroom.
Spettel has wanted to be a teacher since childhood, when she played school at home with her youngest sister as her student.
Now a mother of two, she is learning literacy strategies alongside her first grader.
“With my kid, I can model and practice it firsthand before I go in the classroom,” she said.
Spettel is particularly passionate about supporting students who might not have strong learning resources at home. “I want students, especially if they lack resources, to have support and get scaffolded for what they need,” she said.
Instruction that changes the brain
By the end of class, an assortment of multicolored clay brains lined the desks. Each model traced the networks that transform marks on a page into language and meaning.
For McElhone, the purpose of the lesson was not about memorizing brain structures.
“The reason we care about any of this brain stuff at all as teachers is because of what it tells us to do in the classroom,” she told the class.
Students slipped their clay brains into ziplock bags before leaving. Their homework assignment was simple: take the model home and teach someone how reading works.
A roommate. A parent. Even the family cat.
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