Top 12 Reading Coach Skills to Put on Your Resume
Crafting an impressive resume as a reading coach demands a sharp, strategic spotlight on the skills that actually move readers forward. The right mix shows you can grow decoding, fluency, and comprehension, coach teachers without grandstanding, and make data sing. Below you’ll find 12 core skills worth featuring—practical, current, and ready to signal real expertise to hiring teams.
Reading Coach Skills
- Literacy Assessment
- Curriculum Development
- Guided Reading
- Phonemic Awareness
- Lexile Framework
- Reading Fluency
- Comprehension Strategies
- Differentiated Instruction
- RTI Framework
- Google Classroom
- Zoom Facilitation
- Data Analysis
1. Literacy Assessment
Literacy assessment is the ongoing collection and analysis of evidence about a learner’s reading and writing—decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing mechanics—to pinpoint strengths, gaps, and next instructional steps.
Why It's Important
It lets a reading coach see what’s really happening beneath the surface. With clear data, you can target instruction, match interventions to need, monitor growth, and adjust quickly—no guesswork.
How to Improve Literacy Assessment Skills
Strengthen your assessment practice with breadth and precision:
Use multiple measures: Pair screeners and diagnostics with formative checks—reading inventories, oral reading fluency probes, high-frequency word checks, running records, and comprehension tasks.
Align to instruction: Let assessment steer small-group goals, text choices (decodables, appropriately complex texts), and explicit skill work.
Build assessment literacy: Deepen calibration on scoring, cut scores, and progress-monitoring cadence. Keep reliability in view.
Collaborate tightly: Co-plan with teachers, set shared goals, and review data in quick cycles using your district LMS or collaboration tools (for example, Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams).
Partner with families: Share plain-language snapshots of progress and simple at-home routines that reinforce taught skills.
Done well, assessment sharpens instruction and accelerates growth—student by student.
How to Display Literacy Assessment Skills on Your Resume
2. Curriculum Development
Curriculum development means designing cohesive, standards-aligned learning sequences—texts, tasks, routines, and assessments—that build decoding, language, knowledge, and comprehension in deliberate steps.
Why It's Important
Strong curriculum creates clarity. It scaffolds complexity, supports diverse learners, and keeps instruction anchored in evidence, not whim. Students feel the lift quickly.
How to Improve Curriculum Development Skills
Make your curriculum nimble and research-aligned:
Ground in evidence: Emphasize explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Align to the science of reading.
Center equity and representation: Use inclusive texts and tasks. Lean on resources from organizations such as Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance).
Leverage ongoing assessment: Let data shape pacing, grouping, and reteaching. Build in quick checks every step of the way.
Integrate technology: Curate digital texts, audio supports, and annotation tools that genuinely enhance access and engagement.
Engage stakeholders: Co-design with teachers. Invite student voice. Keep families in the loop.
Iterate: Pilot, gather feedback, refine. Treat curriculum as living, not fixed.
The result: a program that’s coherent, inclusive, and measurably effective.
How to Display Curriculum Development Skills on Your Resume
3. Guided Reading
Guided reading is targeted small-group instruction. Students work with a coach or teacher on stretch texts while practicing specific strategies—word recognition, language, and comprehension—supported in real time.
Why It's Important
Small groups let you zero in on what each learner needs next. Done right, it boosts accuracy, automaticity, and understanding, fast.
How to Improve Guided Reading Skills
Refine the approach with evidence and intention:
Group by skill need: Use recent data to group students by the skill that will unlock the most progress (decoding pattern, multisyllabic word work, vocabulary, text structure).
Match texts wisely: Choose decodable texts for early/struggling readers and appropriately complex texts for language and knowledge-building. Avoid texts that demand guessing.
Teach explicitly: Model, practice, and give immediate feedback on one or two focused targets—not everything at once.
Plan before/during/after routines: Quick priming of background/words, purposeful reading with prompts, then a short synthesis or application task.
Monitor and rotate: Adjust groups frequently. Keep sessions brisk—tight timing, clear roles, visible goals.
Coach the transfer: Help students use new skills in independent reading and content-area texts.
Precision beats volume. Short, surgical, consistent.
How to Display Guided Reading Skills on Your Resume
4. Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words—oral, ears-first work that underpins decoding and spelling.
Why It's Important
It’s the launchpad for accurate word reading. When students can segment, blend, and manipulate sounds, phonics clicks and print starts behaving.
How to Improve Phonemic Awareness Skills
Keep it brisk, explicit, and game-like:
Daily micro-doses: 8–10 minutes of oral practice—blending, segmenting, adding, deleting, substituting sounds.
Use manipulatives: Elkonin boxes, chips, or fingers to map sounds to positions before mapping to print.
Connect to phonics: Bridge from sounds to spellings quickly so learning transfers to reading and writing.
Spiral complexity: From simple CVC to blends, digraphs, long vowels, and multisyllabic word parts.
Keep it fun: Songs, rhymes, quick challenges—high reps, high engagement.
Short and consistent outperforms long and sporadic.
How to Display Phonemic Awareness Skills on Your Resume
5. Lexile Framework
The Lexile Framework measures reader ability and text complexity on a shared scale to help match students with texts that are accessible yet stretching.
Why It's Important
It offers a common language for selecting texts and tracking growth. Used judiciously, it supports goal-setting and independent reading pathways.
How to Improve Lexile Framework Skills
Use Lexile as a guide, not a cage:
Assess routinely: Track growth and adjust text ranges as decoding and vocabulary improve.
Consider the whole picture: Weigh qualitative factors—content load, background knowledge demands, text structure, interest—alongside the number.
Diversify genres: Balance fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and technical texts to broaden strategy use and knowledge.
Build vocabulary: Pre-teach critical words and morphology to lift comprehension within higher-Lexile texts.
Set goals with students: Co-create reading targets; celebrate milestones to sustain momentum.
The metric informs; your professional judgment decides.
How to Display Lexile Framework Skills on Your Resume
6. Reading Fluency
Reading fluency is accurate, automatic reading with appropriate phrasing and expression—so the brain can focus on meaning, not just sounding out.
Why It's Important
Fluency is the hinge between decoding and comprehension. When it’s strong, understanding accelerates. When it’s weak, everything drags.
How to Improve Reading Fluency Skills
Boost fluency with deliberate practice:
Model and echo: Read aloud with prosody; have students echo and then read together.
Repeated readings: Short, targeted passages practiced several times—track rate and accuracy to show growth. The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk highlights this well-supported routine.
Phrasing work: Mark phrase boundaries; practice chunking rather than word-by-word plodding.
Readers theater: Purposeful performance builds pacing, expression, and confidence.
Progress monitoring: Use regular fluency probes to individualize instruction and celebrate gains.
Fluency thrives on feedback, repetition, and meaningful text.
How to Display Reading Fluency Skills on Your Resume
7. Comprehension Strategies
Comprehension strategies are the tools readers use to make sense of text—predicting, questioning, monitoring, summarizing, visualizing, inferring—anchored by strong vocabulary, background knowledge, and awareness of text structures.
Why It's Important
These strategies turn words into ideas. They help readers interrogate, connect, and retain information, turning passive reading into active thinking.
How to Improve Comprehension Strategies Skills
Make thinking visible and transferable:
Teach text structures: Narrative arcs, cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast—signal words and graphic organizers included.
Build knowledge and vocabulary: Pre-teach critical terms, activate and add background knowledge, and teach morphology (prefixes, roots, suffixes).
Model metacognition: Think-alouds that show predicting, clarifying, and synthesizing in action.
Use purposeful annotation: Quick marks for main ideas, questions, confusions, and connections—lightweight but consistent.
Short write-to-learn: One-paragraph summaries, quick comparisons, claim-evidence statements to consolidate understanding.
Discuss authentically: Structured talk—tiny debates, turn-and-talks, Socratic stems—to deepen interpretation.
Explicit strategy teaching plus knowledge-building beats strategy drills alone.
How to Display Comprehension Strategies Skills on Your Resume
8. Differentiated Instruction
Differentiated instruction tailors content, process, product, and environment so every learner can access and master reading goals—without watering down rigor.
Why It's Important
Classrooms brim with variation. Differentiation makes that variation an asset, not a barrier.
How to Improve Differentiated Instruction Skills
Plan for flexibility, not exception:
Know your learners: Use formative data and interest surveys to guide grouping and text selection.
Set clear, shared goals: Keep targets visible and bite-sized; allow multiple pathways to reach them.
Flexible grouping: Rotate groups by skill, strategy, or text demand; change often based on new data.
Vary modalities: Mix direct instruction, small-group coaching, centers, and independent practice.
Offer choice: Choice boards, scaffolded tasks, and varied products (oral, written, visual) to keep engagement high.
Use accessibility tools: Captions, read-aloud supports, font and spacing adjustments, bilingual glossaries.
Feedback that fuels: Specific, actionable, frequent—aimed at strategy use and transfer.
Design for variability up front—universal design thinking pays off.
How to Display Differentiated Instruction Skills on Your Resume
9. RTI Framework
Response to Intervention (within an MTSS model) is a multi-tiered system for spotting risk early, delivering evidence-based interventions at increasing intensity, and monitoring progress to guide next steps, including special education referrals when appropriate.
Why It's Important
It brings structure and urgency to support. Students get what they need—quickly, precisely, and with fidelity.
How to Improve RTI Framework Skills
Make the system tight and humane:
Universal screening: Screen all students multiple times a year with reliable measures to surface need early.
Tiered interventions: Tier 1: strong core for all. Tier 2: targeted small-group intervention. Tier 3: intensive, high-frequency support.
Progress monitoring: Use curriculum-based measures weekly or biweekly for at-risk students; adjust quickly based on trend lines.
Fidelity checks: Short look-fors, coaching cycles, and materials alignment to ensure interventions match design.
Collaborative problem-solving: Data meetings that are brief, regular, and action-oriented—who, what, by when.
Family partnership: Share goals and simple home practices; keep communication clear and supportive.
MTSS/RTI works when core instruction is strong and interventions are truly additive.
How to Display RTI Framework Skills on Your Resume
10. Google Classroom
Google Classroom is a hub for posting materials, assigning work, collecting evidence, and delivering feedback—clean, centralized, and trackable.
Why It's Important
It streamlines literacy workflows: differentiated assignments, quick checks, rubrics, and timely feedback all in one place.
How to Improve Google Classroom Skills
Turn it into a reading powerhouse:
Organize ruthlessly: Topics by unit/skill, clear naming, consistent templates for guided reading, fluency, and vocabulary.
Fuel feedback loops: Use private comments, rubrics, and revision cycles to nudge growth.
Embed collaboration: Shared Docs for annotations, Slides for jots, Jamboard or whiteboard tools for word work.
Collect quick data: Short Forms quizzes for exit tickets; auto-grade where it makes sense; spot trends fast.
Differentiate seamlessly: Assign to specific students by level or skill; attach supports (sentence frames, vocabulary banks, audio).
Blend media: Add read-alouds, short videos, and modeled think-alouds to lift access and engagement.
The platform should make instruction lighter, not heavier.
How to Display Google Classroom Skills on Your Resume
11. Zoom Facilitation
Zoom facilitation means orchestrating online reading instruction—clear structure, interactivity, and tools that keep students thinking, not just watching.
Why It's Important
When distance or logistics intervene, skilled facilitation keeps coaching and learning nimble and human.
How to Improve Zoom Facilitation Skills
Design for pace and participation:
Plan tight segments: Short mini-lessons, active practice, quick checks, and reflection—repeat.
Use breakout rooms intentionally: Small-group decoding, partner reading, or text-dependent questioning with clear roles and timers.
Leverage interactivity: Polls, chat prompts, reactions, and on-screen annotation to surface thinking.
Make visuals do work: Clean slides, enlarged text excerpts, and live modeling with a digital whiteboard.
Accessibility first: Captions on, recordings (when appropriate), and materials shared ahead of time.
Follow up: Post notes, exemplars, and next steps in your LMS to cement learning.
Online doesn’t have to mean distant. Keep it brisk, interactive, and clear.
How to Display Zoom Facilitation Skills on Your Resume
12. Data Analysis
Data analysis is the disciplined review of assessment and observation data to spot patterns, choose interventions, and verify impact.
Why It's Important
It turns “I think” into “I know.” Students get targeted help sooner, and wins become visible.
How to Improve Data Analysis Skills
Make your data work harder:
Standardize your toolkit: Clear protocols for entering, cleaning, and viewing data—spreadsheets or dashboards that spotlight growth and risk.
Track the right metrics: Accuracy, rate, error patterns, strategy use, and transfer to authentic reading—not just overall scores.
Run short data cycles: Plan–teach–check–adjust every 1–2 weeks for intervention groups.
Visualize trends: Simple charts for students and teams; goal lines and progress lines that drive decisions.
Protect privacy: Follow district policy and FERPA requirements when sharing and storing information.
Build team fluency: Coach teachers on interpreting data and selecting next-step moves.
Clarity in the numbers leads to precision in the teaching.
How to Display Data Analysis Skills on Your Resume
