This post originally appeared on the Quill and the Classroom Substack.
I typically subscribe to the idea that heroes in your life should be people you actually know—your parents, teachers, friends. But I make a few rare exceptions. You’ve already heard about my affinity for Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo. This month, it’s time to talk about a different sort of champion: Dolly Parton.
Dolly grew up in a two-room cabin in rural Tennessee, in a loving home filled with instruments, but no books. Her father was a farmer without a formal education and never learned to read or write; her mother was a homemaker from a musical family. An early talent, Dolly debuted at the Grand Ole Opry in 1959, at age 13. In the decades that followed, she learned to play 20 different instruments and practiced guitar to maintain callouses that wouldn’t bleed. She became a glitter-heavy, larger-than-life international superstar with hits ranging from the haunting “Jolene” to the clever, campy “9 to 5” (song and movie)—just two of the more than 3,000 songs she’s written to date.
All the while, Dolly has kept close to her Tennessee roots (her Dollywood theme park is just 8 miles from the family home), and never forgot her father’s missing education. In 1995, she founded the Imagination Library, a nonprofit that mails a free, high-quality book every month to children from birth to age five. Today, the program sends out 3 million books each month to children across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Iceland.
Dolly describes the Imagination Library as “a tribute to my Daddy.” And like so much about her life story and life’s work, it’s also a tribute to the power of practice.
How Practice Makes Learning
Our family participated in the Imagination Library program when my children were young. Those books became part of a cherished routine: we curled up, read together, and discussed beautiful stories and the person who sent them every month. By age 5, my daughter was asking me to “play some of Miss Dolly’s music,” and by 7, she wanted to dress as Dolly for Halloween—and so she did, with pink sequins, shiny boots, and big blonde hair topped with a cowboy hat.
It’s easy to focus on what makes Dolly sparkle. But her story and library program show that she understands something fundamental about how learning works. The Imagination Library doesn’t just send one book, one time. Young children receive one book every month—until they turn 5. This isn’t just reading. It’s also practicing to read. And that’s where true learning happens.
In my work as an instructional coach, I rely on mental models to make sense of complex ideas from cognitive science. One I use often is:
Explicit Instruction + Deliberate Practice = Learning
It’s a simplification, of course—but a useful one—the kind that helps you make decisions in a classroom on a Tuesday afternoon. When I work with educators, we unpack both sides of that equation:
- Explicit instruction: direct, clear, systematic teaching
- Deliberate practice: purposeful, aligned opportunities to apply that learning, ideally with feedback from experts
And then we name a key idea embedded in it: that the expertise level of the learner matters. Novices need more explicit instruction—they need to be told what to do and how to do it. But as learners gain expertise, they need more deliberate practice, or opportunities to keep doing what they’ve already learned how to do. Both matter. But with growing expertise, the balance shifts.
If the equation above sounds familiar, it’s because it’s similar to this well known equation from the world of reading research:
Decoding × Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension
Taken together, these models help clarify something important: students need both instruction and practice for decoding and language comprehension. And yet, I’ve noticed that in the field, we often emphasize one side of the equation more than the other. It seems that the literacy world is largely emphasizing explicit instruction. We ask this question a lot: What should we teach?
That’s not a bad starting point, but what if we turned the question around and asked: What should students be practicing, over and over again?
Because learning doesn’t happen from instruction alone—it happens through repeated, meaningful practice. Dolly didn’t master the guitar just through her uncle’s patient lessons; she also made time to practice playing, over and over again.
Aligning Instruction and Practice
Today, most educators are given training and materials to explicitly teach students foundational reading skills, which represents real progress for the field. But teaching sound-spelling patterns isn’t enough. Students also need opportunities to practice those patterns in connected text.
Connected texts are often referred to as “decodable texts,” which is fine—but I sometimes like to smile and point out that all books are decodable once you’ve mastered decoding. What matters is that early texts are aligned to what students have been taught, so they can actually practice the sound-spelling patterns they are learning.
When that alignment is missing—when students are taught one thing and asked to practice something else— to quote Wiley Blevins, “it’s like giving a student a piano lesson and then handing them a guitar.”
For a long time, this was one of the biggest problems that I saw in early reading instruction. And while that’s still true in some places, I’m noticing something different more often now: students aren’t getting enough practice at all. In many classrooms, students get the metaphorical “piano lesson” (phonics instruction) but then aren’t given much time to actually practice the piano on their own (in connected texts). Is it any wonder they sound a little shaky on the keys?
A somewhat inverse problem is happening when it comes to reading comprehension. Students have been acquiring language their whole lives, but still need to build depth. They are not novices and so they need less explicit teaching—but more deliberate practice to understand increasingly sophisticated forms of language. However, in many classrooms this distinguishing feature of learning is misunderstood. Students end up spending lots of time in lessons about reading—such as how to find the author’s purpose or determine a theme—but far less time actually reading rich texts. And that’s a problem, because we know:
- Students build stronger vocabulary through rich text, not just everyday speech
- Vocabulary grows faster when students read multiple texts on the same topic
- Knowledge and vocabulary develop together—two sides of the same coin, as Gina Cervetti puts it
In other words, comprehension doesn’t grow from learning what to do in order to read a text. Rather, it grows from doing a lot of reading. That doesn’t mean explicit instruction disappears—it just gets sharper. The explicit instruction diet needs to get a little leaner to make room for what students need most: practice making meaning of worthwhile texts.
Dolly’s Doing More than Working 9 to 5
Dolly Parton isn’t running professional learning on cognitive science principles or how to internalize high-quality lessons.
The Imagination Library isn’t an instructional program. But it’s a powerful practice engine. It gives children repeated exposure to language through stories, which are often richer than what they hear in everyday conversation. This creates opportunities for talk, connection, and meaning-making long before formal instruction begins.
I’m not advocating that we all turn into my hero Dolly and start mailing books to children (although if you are, I’m cheering for you). But we can apply this idea of deliberate practice to literacy instruction in our classrooms and schools. We should:
- Teach the sound-spelling patterns needed for decoding systematically
- Show students how to navigate complex text using a lean, targeted approach that centers the text
- Ensure deliberate practice does much of the heavy lifting
- Provide students with aligned, connected text to build fluency and automaticity with decoding
- Create sustained opportunities to read and make meaning of rich, complex texts with time to talk and write about what they read
- Expose students to sets of texts that build knowledge and vocabulary over time
Dolly Parton may not talk about working memory or the Simple View of Reading. But she understands something essential: readers aren’t built through instruction alone. They’re built through access, repetition, and meaningful engagement with language over time, and at high volume.
Practice makes global country-crossover superstars. And competent readers.
