As you sit down to read this Knowledge List, your brain is fast at work, even as your eyes move effortlessly across the page. You’re reading quickly and fluently because your brain has mapped and can recall these words automatically. They are part of your “sight word” bank.

For decades, elementary school classrooms have invested in building students’ sight word banks through the practice of memorizing high-frequency words. This might look like dividing up the Dolch or Fry word lists into sets of ten “sight words”—words that kids are asked to memorize and are then tested on weekly. Students practice these words at home and write them ten times in an independent center; teachers drill flashcards with students while waiting for lunch, and students are prompted to memorize each whole word. We tell kids these are the words that they just need to know how to read effortlessly, without applying any decoding strategies.

In their article “A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words,” literacy experts Linda Farrell, Michael Hunter, and Tina Osenga note after hundreds of classroom observations that “even schools embracing research-based reading instruction teach high-frequency words through rote memorization. It is as if the high-frequency words are a special set of words that need to be memorized and can’t be learned using sound–symbol relationships” (Farrell, Hunter, Osenga, 2019). In actuality, students need to know roughly 10–15 essential words that are not decodable before they begin phonics instruction. What’s most important is that students develop the skills to decode and store any word for automatic recall.

So, what do leaders need to know as they consider sight word instruction in their classrooms?

Inside this Knowledge List, we’ve rounded up the resources that we use every day with leaders to help them understand the research about sight words. These same readings informed our own journey from talking about “sight words” to thinking about the ways students can and should learn high-frequency words applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships to determine the ways these words conform to or break conventions.