The Power of the Team: Shattering the Reading Ceiling Post-COVID

The 2022–2023 school year was a turning point.

We were finally back in classrooms—but something wasn’t right.

But the COVID gap was a barrier. For many of my students in grades 3–8 receiving school-based OT, I kept seeing the same pattern:

Bright kids. Strong thinking. Solid support plans.

And yet… when it came time to read, it felt like they were hitting a wall that “try harder” couldn’t fix.

Not motivation.

Not intelligence.

Something else.

Something physical.

When I looked at the data, it stopped me

I looked at the data for 20 of my students, the reality was eye-opening.

Their initial average reading accuracy for text at their instructional level was 71%.

That means nearly 1 out of every 3 words wasn’t being read accurately.

In one year, that accuracy improved by 20%.

So the question became—what changed?

We stopped framing it as effort.

And started noticing something more important:

Where exactly does reading start to fall apart for this student?

🤝 The shift: We aligned instruction, language, and visual-motor support

That question changed everything.

Real progress required a whole-system intervention. We aligned our expertise to support the student from the ground up:

Classroom Teacher & Instructional Coach: Provided systematic, explicit reading instruction.

Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP): Targeted language processing and phonological awareness.

Occupational Therapist (OT): Supported the sensorimotor-visual foundations needed to efficiently track and process text. I also incorporated structured literacy training, including Really Great Reading, to ensure alignment with classroom instruction and consistency across teams. It was because of this data that I went on to get more training on structured literacy,

Instead of isolated interventions…

We aligned the system.

📈What happened next was hard to ignore

Within one school year:

Average reading accuracy jumped from 71% → 91%

That’s a 20% increase in accuracy across the group.

But here’s what matters more than the number:

Students weren’t just doing better.

Reading started to feel less effortful, more automatic, and more accessible.

Because when the eyes, brain, and language system begin working together…

Progress happens exponentially.

🔓The bigger takeaway

Reading isn’t only a phonics issue.

And it isn’t only a motivation issue.

It is a whole-system skill involving:

• visual tracking and eye movement efficiency

• language processing

• phonics and decoding

• attention and coordination

When one part is strained, the whole system compensates.

When the system is aligned, growth accelerates.

💡 What this really means

That 20% jump isn’t just a data point.

It represents something bigger:

A shift from this student is struggling to

this system needs alignment.

🚀 If you’re seeing students plateau…

If you have students who are:

• trying hard but not moving

• stuck in accuracy or fluency

• appear fine on the surface but effortful underneath

It may be time to look beyond instruction alone.

To look at the foundation underneath reading itself.

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