Our Vision
Inspiring all learners to love the written word and to find beauty, goodness, and truth in the natural and social world.
Our Mission
The READS lab is a university-based research initiative dedicated to improving children’s literacy at scale; creating relevant, rigorous, and replicable science; and advancing systemic equity through collective action with teachers and education leaders.
Our Work
READS stands for Research Enhances
Adaptations Designed for Scale in Literacy.
The READS Lab at Harvard, led by Professor of Education, James S. Kim, is a research-based collaborative designed to identify and scale adaptive solutions for enhancing children's literacy. We work with teachers and leaders in school districts, schools, non-profit organizations, foundations, and universities who are committed to applying adaptive strategies to improve children’s literacy learning opportunities.
How do we advance systemic equity through our work?
Our Values
We believe in building strong literacy ecosystems which impact all levels of the education system to support and enhance teacher and student learning.
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We value inclusiveness and fostering impact at scale by ensuring that all learners – students, teachers, school and systems leaders, researchers – have access to high-quality, evidence-based interventions that improve students’ literacy outcomes across whole systems. We place particular emphasis on knowledge-based outcomes like reading comprehension, argumentative writing, and academic vocabulary.
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We value trustworthy and accessible science that builds knowledge and actionable evidence for researchers and practitioners.
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We value building partnerships with education leaders and practitioners who bring diverse and distinctive perspectives to efforts to advance systemic equity. We focus our interventions on targeting all students and on improving the systems of supports that enable district, school leaders, and teachers to adaptively implement evidence-based interventions, practices, and programs.
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We value replication in our research and seek to make our findings and data widely available in an effort to advance knowledge in the field of literacy and take our work to scale.
We believe in servant leadership. We exist to serve others - students and teachers in school districts, the scientific community, graduate students, and postdocs.
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We value teachers as experts in their fields and work collaboratively to strengthen their knowledge and instructional capacity. Leveraging teachers’ expertise with adaptive (or personalized) solutions allows them to best support their students.
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We value the contributions of each member of our educational community and we intentionally create the conditions to help us understand and learn from each other. We believe that faithfulness to our shared goals and respect for each individual’s knowledge and practice is vitally important to our work.
We believe in whole-life flourishing and wellness. We put the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of our team as the highest priority. We believe that this enhances our ability to continuously grow and adapt as individuals and as a research team.
