Key takeaways
- Heggerty and Eight Strands Literacy are different kinds of offering: Heggerty is a supplemental curriculum for foundational skills, while Eight Strands Literacy is a whole-school partnership.
- Heggerty is best known for phonemic awareness, with short explicit lessons designed to sit alongside a school's core reading program, and it is affordable and easy to implement.
- Eight Strands Literacy combines teacher training, a K–3 Tier 1 curriculum, sustained coaching from CERI-certified coaches, and leadership development to change instruction across a school.
- Choose a resource like Heggerty to strengthen one foundational skill within an existing literacy plan, and a partnership when the need is coherence across knowledge, curriculum, coaching and leaders.
Eight Strands Literacy and Heggerty solve different parts of the literacy puzzle. Heggerty is a supplemental curriculum for building specific foundational skills, principally phonemic awareness. Eight Strands Literacy is a whole-school partnership that combines training, curriculum, sustained coaching, and leadership development. One is a targeted classroom resource; the other is a system for changing instruction across a school.
Comparing two different things fairly
The most useful thing to say up front is that Eight Strands Literacy and Heggerty are not really the same kind of product, which means "which is better" is the wrong question. A more honest one is "which does my school need right now, and do they belong together?" Heggerty is a widely used, well-regarded curriculum for teaching specific foundational skills. Eight Strands Literacy is a partnership for building a whole school's capacity to teach reading. A school can use a resource like Heggerty inside the kind of system Eight Strands Literacy helps build. Here is how they line up.
What Heggerty is
Heggerty, from Literacy Resources, is best known for its phonemic awareness curriculum: short, explicit lessons designed to build students' awareness of and ability to work with the sounds in spoken language. Its phonemic awareness offerings now span early pre-K through grade 5, with intervention resources extending beyond those grades. In recent years, the product line has also expanded to include phonics, writing, and decodable readers, but the core identity remains a supplemental foundational-skills resource designed to sit alongside a school's core reading program rather than replace it.
Its strengths are real: it is affordable, easy to implement, requires little teacher preparation, and does one important job well.
What Eight Strands Literacy is
Eight Strands Literacy is not a single curriculum but an integrated school partnership. Its flagship model weaves together three things at once: teacher training in structured literacy and Orton-Gillingham foundations, a K–3 Tier 1 curriculum (Ditto Literacy™ Foundational Skills), and sustained coaching from CERI-certified coaches who work with teachers through ongoing cycles of practice and feedback. Alongside it sit an intervention curriculum for students who need more (Ditto Literacy™ Plus) and a yearlong Literacy Leadership Program for principals, assistant principals, and coaches. The organization is IDA Plus accredited and Orton-Gillingham-grounded.
The point of the model is not to hand teachers one more resource; it is to change how a whole school teaches reading and to make that change stick.
Side by side
| Heggerty | Eight Strands Literacy | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A supplemental curriculum, principally phonemic awareness | A whole-school partnership: training, curriculum, coaching, and leadership |
| Coverage | Targeted foundational skills, as a short daily warm-up | The full system around K–3 reading instruction |
| Grade band | Early pre-K–5 for phonemic awareness, with additional intervention resources | K–3 Tier 1, with intervention curriculum appropriate for students of any grade struggling in foundational literacy and language comprehension skills |
| Delivery model | A print and digital curriculum teachers deliver | An ongoing partnership with sustained coaching |
| Credentials | Grounded in the science of reading | IDA Plus accredited; CERI-certified coaches; Orton-Gillingham-grounded |
| Evidence | Evidence varies by product; a 2025 randomized study of an earlier, oral-only version found gains in phonemic awareness but not significant gains in word reading or oral reading fluency | Eight Strands Literacy Model and Ditto Literacy™ Plus: ESSA III (Promising Evidence), third-party review |
A note on phonemic awareness and evidence
Phonemic awareness is an essential part of learning to read, but its strongest instructional payoff comes when students connect spoken sounds to print and apply that knowledge in decoding and spelling. That distinction matters when schools evaluate any supplemental phonemic awareness curriculum.
A 2025 randomized controlled study by Coyne and colleagues examined an earlier, oral-only version of the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness curriculum with 782 first-grade students across 13 schools. Students receiving Heggerty made significantly greater gains in phonemic awareness, but those gains did not translate into significantly stronger word reading or oral reading fluency. The researchers evaluated the 2014 version of the curriculum; later editions have incorporated greater connections between sounds and print.
The larger lesson for school leaders is not that phonemic awareness—or Heggerty—doesn't matter. It is that no isolated foundational skill should be expected to carry reading development on its own. Phonemic awareness should connect to phonics, decoding, spelling, fluency, and ultimately meaning. A strong resource can support one part of that work; instructional coherence is what connects the pieces into an effective literacy system.
This is the difference in kind between the two. Heggerty provides a targeted resource for particular parts of foundational-skills instruction; Eight Strands Literacy helps schools build the knowledge, curriculum, coaching, and leadership systems that make those individual resources part of a coherent approach to reading instruction.
Which fits your school
Choose a resource like Heggerty when you need a well-built, low-lift way to strengthen a specific foundational skill—and your school already has a coherent literacy plan around it. Teachers need to know how that instruction connects to phonics, decoding, spelling, and text, and leaders need the knowledge and systems to make sure those connections actually happen.
Choose a partnership like Eight Strands Literacy when the challenge is bigger than a single skill or resource: when you need to build teacher knowledge, create a coherent K–3 approach, sustain stronger instruction through coaching, and develop leaders who can recognize and support effective literacy practice. Adding another strong resource cannot, by itself, create that coherence.
In many schools, the two are not rivals at all. A targeted curriculum can be one component of an effective literacy system. The larger question for leaders is whether the system around that resource is strong enough to make it work.
Frequently asked questions
Is Eight Strands Literacy an alternative to Heggerty?
Not exactly, because they are different kinds of thing. Heggerty is a supplemental curriculum for specific foundational skills, principally phonemic awareness. Eight Strands Literacy is a whole-school partnership combining training, curriculum, coaching, and leadership. A school can use a resource like Heggerty within the broader system Eight Strands Literacy helps build.
What does Heggerty cover?
Heggerty is best known for its phonemic awareness curriculum: short, explicit, oral daily lessons for pre-K through grade 2, used as a whole-class warm-up. Its product line has expanded to include phonics, writing, and decodable readers, but its core role is a supplement to a school's core reading program.
What does Eight Strands Literacy provide that a curriculum doesn't?
Beyond a K–3 curriculum, Eight Strands Literacy provides teacher training, sustained coaching from CERI-certified coaches, an intervention curriculum, and a yearlong leadership program. The emphasis is on changing and sustaining instruction across a whole school, not delivering a single resource.
Does phonemic awareness instruction improve reading on its own?
Phonemic awareness is essential, but research indicates it produces the strongest results when connected to print rather than practiced only orally in isolation. A phonemic awareness resource works best woven into a coherent system that links sounds to letters and carries through to decoding and spelling.
How do their evidence bases compare?
Heggerty describes its programs as evidence-based, and the specific evidence varies by product, so verify the exact product you are considering. The Eight Strands Literacy Model and Ditto Literacy™ Plus are independently validated as ESSA III (Promising Evidence). Evidence should always be checked for the specific product and use.
Keep reading
- What is structured literacy?
- The 5 components of the science of reading
- How to evaluate whether a literacy program is truly evidence-based
- What are reading intervention programs? A guide for school administrators
- Explore the Eight Strands Literacy Model
Descriptions of Heggerty reflect the company's public materials as of mid-2026 and may change; confirm current details and product-specific evidence directly with the provider. The 2025 phonemic awareness study refers to a peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial of an oral-only phonemic awareness program. Eight Strands Literacy evidence claims (ESSA III, Promising Evidence) reflect independent third-party review of the Eight Strands Literacy Model and Ditto Literacy™ Plus.
Krista L. Johnson, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Krista L. Johnson, Ph.D., is the Chief Executive Officer of Eight Strands Literacy. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Northwestern University, with research in auditory neuroscience, and graduate training in specific learning disabilities. She leads the organization's work helping schools put the science of reading into practice.
