Top 12 Reading Teacher Skills to Put on Your Resume
Landing a job as a reading teacher means showing the right mix of sharp, classroom-tested skills. Your resume should make that blend unmistakable: the craft of literacy instruction, the spark of engagement, and the steady habit of measuring progress. Done well, it signals you can grow readers who comprehend deeply and, just as important, want to read again tomorrow.
Reading Teacher Skills
- Literacy Instruction
- Curriculum Development
- Assessment Strategies
- Classroom Management
- Differentiated Instruction
- Phonics Expertise
- Reading Comprehension
- Student Engagement
- Educational Technology
- Guided Reading
- Interactive Whiteboards
- Google Classroom
1. Literacy Instruction
Literacy instruction is the day-to-day work of teaching students to read, write, and make meaning. It blends explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension with authentic reading and writing experiences that feel alive.
Why It's Important
Strong literacy instruction opens every other door. It builds accurate decoding, fluent reading, and critical thinking, so students can tackle grade-level texts, share ideas clearly, and navigate real-world reading with confidence.
How to Improve Literacy Instruction Skills
Sharpen what works and cut the noise. Practical moves that matter:
Teach explicitly and systematically: Map a clear scope and sequence for foundational skills. Model. Practice. Spiral back.
Blend code and meaning: Pair decodable practice with rich, knowledge-building texts. Students need both the how and the why.
Differentiate with purpose: Small groups, targeted mini-lessons, and brief 1:1 conferences aligned to data.
Build vocabulary and background knowledge: Frontload key words, connect to prior knowledge, and revisit terms across units.
Read a lot, every day: Frequent, supported practice—choral reads, partner reads, independent reading with accountability.
Involve families: Simple routines at home—shared reading, quick phonics games, talk about books.
Keep learning: Stay current on reading science and effective intervention design. Try, reflect, adjust.
How to Display Literacy Instruction Skills on Your Resume
2. Curriculum Development
Curriculum development for reading means planning coherent units: choosing texts, sequencing skills, and designing tasks and assessments that steadily raise the bar while keeping students engaged.
Why It's Important
A well-built curriculum prevents gaps, reduces guesswork, and ensures every student gets systematic practice with foundational skills and complex text. It also reflects diverse voices and genres, so more students see themselves in the work.
How to Improve Curriculum Development Skills
Make the roadmap clearer and the journey richer:
Start with data: Place students, set goals, and plan backward from clear outcomes.
Use research-backed practices: Align to reading science for foundational skills and to evidence-based comprehension routines.
Diversify text sets: Mix decodables (early stages) with high-interest fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and multimedia that build knowledge.
Thread vocabulary and writing across lessons: Deliberate word work and short, frequent writing tied to text.
Embed universal design (UDL): Offer multiple ways to access content and show understanding.
Iterate: Reflect after each unit. Keep what sings, refine what stumbles.
How to Display Curriculum Development Skills on Your Resume
3. Assessment Strategies
Assessment strategies include formal and informal ways to understand how students read: screeners, running records, decoding inventories, fluency checks, comprehension tasks, and simple observations during conferences.
Why It's Important
Good assessment clarifies what to teach next. It highlights strengths, pinpoints obstacles, and shows whether instruction is landing—so support comes faster and smarter.
How to Improve Assessment Strategies Skills
Measure what matters and act on it:
Balance formative and summative: Quick exit tickets, conferring notes, and weekly fluency checks alongside unit assessments.
Use multiple lenses: Phonemic awareness checks, decoding/encoding inventories, oral reading accuracy and rate, retell/rubrics for comprehension.
Provide timely, actionable feedback: One next step, clearly modeled, with a chance to try again soon.
Monitor growth over time: Chart progress to see trends and respond early through MTSS/RTI supports.
Leverage tech when it helps: Digital quizzes, auto-scored practice, and dashboards—useful if they inform instruction that week.
Keep it humane: Assess to understand, not to label. Celebrate gains, however small.
How to Display Assessment Strategies Skills on Your Resume
4. Classroom Management
Classroom management in reading is the art of creating calm, predictable routines where students know what to do, how to do it, and why it matters—so the focus stays on reading.
Why It's Important
Order makes space for thinking. With tight routines, transitions shrink, talk is purposeful, and every minute can tilt toward literacy growth.
How to Improve Classroom Management Skills
Keep it simple. Keep it steady:
Teach routines explicitly: Entering groups, partner talk, book shopping, using centers—model and practice.
Set clear expectations: Co-create norms, post them, and reinforce consistently with positive feedback.
Design the space for reading: Cozy library, clear pathways, materials within reach, minimal visual clutter.
Plan for engagement: Short, varied tasks; movement breaks; purposeful talk; visible timers.
Build relationships: Know readers by name, level, and interest. Warm trust lowers the temperature and lifts effort.
Reflect and adjust: If a routine keeps wobbling, reteach it. Don’t wait.
How to Display Classroom Management Skills on Your Resume
5. Differentiated Instruction
Differentiated instruction means tailoring teaching—content, process, and product—to students’ readiness, interests, and profiles, without lowering expectations.
Why It's Important
Readers don’t grow in lockstep. Smart differentiation meets students where they are and moves them forward with precision.
How to Improve Differentiated Instruction Skills
Make variation the plan, not the exception:
Diagnose first: Use quick screeners and work samples to know decoding, fluency, and comprehension needs.
Set focused goals: One skill at a time per group. Tight targets accelerate growth.
Use flexible grouping: Regroup often based on fresh data—skill groups, strategy groups, interest groups.
Offer varied materials: Decodables, leveled texts, articles, audiobooks, and graphic texts—matched to purpose.
Embed choice: Choice boards, book clubs by theme, or project pathways to fuel motivation.
Lean on UDL: Multiple means to access text (audio, visual supports) and show learning (oral, written, visual).
Feedback that moves: Specific, brief, frequent. Then practice.
How to Display Differentiated Instruction Skills on Your Resume
6. Phonics Expertise
Phonics expertise is knowing how sounds map to letters and patterns—and teaching those links explicitly, cumulatively, and with enough practice that decoding becomes automatic.
Why It's Important
Accurate, fluent decoding frees up brainpower for meaning. Without it, comprehension is a constant uphill climb.
How to Improve Phonics Expertise Skills
Deepen knowledge and tighten delivery:
Master the sequence: From phonemic awareness to complex spelling patterns, teach in a logical progression with review built in.
Model and practice daily: Blend, segment, encode, and read in connected text. Short, brisk, consistent.
Use decodable texts wisely: Early and often for application; transition to complex texts as decoding solidifies.
Diagnose errors: Analyze miscues to target specific grapheme-phoneme gaps.
Leverage simple tools: Sound boxes, word building, dictation, and routines that make the code stick.
How to Display Phonics Expertise Skills on Your Resume
7. Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is making meaning: grasping the literal, inferring the implied, and evaluating the whole.
Why It's Important
Comprehension is the point of reading. It drives learning across subjects and fuels curiosity beyond the classroom walls.
How to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills
Lift understanding with routines that stick:
Prime the pump: Preview topics, set a purpose, and activate background knowledge.
Teach vocabulary explicitly: Student-friendly definitions, morphology, and repeated exposure in context.
Model thinking: Think-alouds for monitoring, questioning, inferring, summarizing, and synthesizing.
Use graphic organizers: Story maps, cause-effect chains, compare/contrast charts—clear frames for complex ideas.
Discuss often: Structured talk that asks students to cite evidence, challenge ideas, and build on each other’s thinking.
Write to read: Quick writes, annotations, and summaries to consolidate meaning.
How to Display Reading Comprehension Skills on Your Resume
8. Student Engagement
Student engagement is the visible spark—attention, curiosity, and persistence—students bring to reading tasks.
Why It's Important
Engaged readers read more. More reading, better skill. It compounds quickly.
How to Improve Student Engagement Skills
Make reading irresistible, and the minutes add up:
Honor choice: Offer options by topic, genre, and format. Interest drives stamina.
Use interactive routines: Quick games, polls, and collaborative tasks (Kahoot!, Quizlet, book chats) to energize practice.
Connect to the world: Tie texts to current events, science, art—anything that makes ideas feel present.
Build a reading community: Reviews, recommendations, displays, and student-led book talks.
Celebrate growth: Track pages, genres explored, or fluency gains. Small wins, big momentum.
How to Display Student Engagement Skills on Your Resume
9. Educational Technology
Educational technology in reading means using digital tools—apps, platforms, accessibility features—to personalize practice, expand access, and gather timely feedback.
Why It's Important
Tech can amplify good instruction: more targeted practice, immediate insight into progress, and multiple ways to engage with text.
How to Improve Educational Technology Skills
Use tech to serve purpose, not the other way around:
Curate interactive texts: eBooks with audio, adjustable fonts, and built-in supports to lower barriers.
Leverage adaptive practice: Tools that adjust difficulty and surface skill gaps for quick reteaching.
Adopt accessibility features: Text-to-speech, speech-to-text, closed captions, and immersive readers for inclusive access.
Organize with an LMS: Google Classroom or Canvas to streamline materials, feedback, and routines.
Use data dashboards wisely: Look for trends, then act within the week. Data should drive instruction, not just reports.
Keep a light touch: If a tool doesn’t improve learning or save time, drop it.
How to Display Educational Technology Skills on Your Resume
10. Guided Reading
Guided reading is small-group instruction aimed at specific reading needs. Today, many classrooms blend this with structured literacy principles—decodable texts for early readers, increasingly complex texts and strategy work as decoding firms up.
Why It's Important
Small groups let you target instruction precisely, offer just-right scaffolds, and move students toward independence.
How to Improve Guided Reading Skills
Make the minutes laser-focused:
Group by need: Use fresh data to form temporary groups around a common skill or strategy.
Choose texts with intent: Decodables when practicing new patterns; rich, grade-level-aligned texts for comprehension and knowledge building.
Plan tight lessons: Brief warm-up, focused skill work, supported reading, and a quick transfer task.
Prompt strategically: Use clear, concise prompts; fade support quickly.
Rotate and adjust: Short cycles, frequent regrouping, and consistent progress checks.
How to Display Guided Reading Skills on Your Resume
11. Interactive Whiteboards
Interactive whiteboards (and modern interactive flat panels) turn the front of the room into a hands-on workspace—annotate text, sort words, replay modeling, and invite students to the board.
Why It's Important
Dynamic visuals and touch interaction raise participation and make abstract skills—like text structure or word patterns—concrete.
How to Improve Interactive Whiteboards Skills
Make the board work harder:
Blend media: Short clips, audio, and images to set context and build knowledge before reading.
Go interactive: Drag-and-drop word sorts, sentence building, and phoneme/grapheme mapping.
Annotate live: Highlight, code the text, and capture model annotations to revisit later.
Invite students up: Quick turns at the board to solve, explain, and teach peers.
Project accessible texts: Public domain eBooks and classroom-created passages with adjustable fonts and spacing.
Check understanding fast: Polls, games, and on-the-spot quizzes to guide next steps.
How to Display Interactive Whiteboards Skills on Your Resume
12. Google Classroom
Google Classroom—part of Google Workspace for Education—streamlines assigning, collecting, and giving feedback on reading work. It keeps materials organized and conversations flowing without piles of paper.
Why It's Important
Less time managing logistics means more time teaching. Classroom also improves access—students can revisit instructions, resources, and feedback anytime.
How to Improve Google Classroom Skills
Make it a hub, not a filing cabinet:
Organize by topics and units: Clear naming, consistent templates, and predictable weekly structures.
Embed supports: Read&Write, captions, audio instructions, and exemplars for clarity and accessibility.
Use Forms and rubrics: Quick checks for understanding, auto-feedback where appropriate, and transparent criteria.
Mix media responses: Let students submit videos, audio, or slides to demonstrate comprehension.
Keep feedback flowing: Private comments for next steps; summarize trends in class posts to guide reteaching.
How to Display Google Classroom Skills on Your Resume
