Reflections on Collective Teacher Efficacy

Recently, in many trainings (various Science of Reading work, the Indiana Literacy Cadre, and LETRS by Lexia), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what research tells us about learning to read. One of my biggest aha moments was reading that “all but 2-5 percent of students can learn basic reading skills in first grade, even in populations that are at greatest risk for chronic reading difficulties” (Mathes, Denton, Fletcher, Anthony, Francis, & Schatschneider, 2005). Other studies tell us that “Older students, in grades 3-5, can also improve to the average range and sustain those improvements if their remediation is sufficiently intensive, expert, and long term” (Torgesen, Alexander, Wagner, Rashotte, Voeller, & Conway, 2001). How does that happen? Through solid core instruction and a system of screeners, interventions, and progress monitoring data. The core instruction introduces the important skills students need, and with screeners, we can identify students who are falling behind, put into place supports that meet their needs, and track student work to see if our students are growing.

In January, the MTSS Leadership Team at the school where I work met with every grade level team. We talked about the importance of making sure that all those steps (screeners, interventions, and progress monitoring) are aligned. We also discussed designing goals for each student we had identified in our MTSS process as needing higher tiers of support. In other words, we want to make sure that we use interventions that meet the individual needs of each student. Then we want to use a progress monitoring tool that will appropriately measure data on the skills we are working on.

But alignment on those things is not enough to get all our students to reading proficiency. We also must be aligned in our mindsets. What does that mean? That’s where collective teacher efficacy comes in. The quote above is an important reminder. Through the unified efforts of your PLC, the MTSS Process, and the school, we can and will get our students to the level of proficiency that we expect for our learners.

The things I have learned about reading proficiency have caused me to reflect on some conversations over the years. One of the things that I have heard from teachers is a comment about how they “aren’t surprised” by the results of reading assessments when some students don’t show proficiency. I get it, as teachers, we believe in doing our best, moving kids as far as we can, and sometimes we don’t put a ton of weight on a standardized assessment score that is simply a snapshot in time for your learners. But when the number of students you “aren’t surprised” about is more than 5% of your class, maybe it should give you pause. Again, the research tells us that with explicit and sequential core instruction, reliable and valid screening, and interventions aligned with student needs, 95% of our students should be reading at proficiency by the end of third grade. And when I think about what an elementary school is here to do, teaching literacy skills to all should be job number 1. As Thomas Jefferson said:

“A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose. Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.”

When you see that research tells us all but 2-5 percent of our students can get to proficiency, what does that make you reflect on with your current students? Are there students in your class that probably should be at proficiency that aren’t? How can collective teacher efficacy help those students get to where they need to be? Remember, you aren’t going it alone! You have your PLC team, your MTSS team, your instructional coaches, and your leadership team to support you in these goals! But also know that a part of collective teacher efficacy is the belief that you can help your students to succeed. While it’s important to lean on your team around you, it’s even more important that you believe that you have the power to make a difference!

Credit for this design goes to @citizenruthbrand on Instagram. I love it so much, I ordered one!

And there’s something else we must keep in mind – the research says that this 95% of students who can reach proficiency includes all subgroups – ENL, Exceptional Learner, Transient students, etc. With that in mind, should we ever be ok with feeling like we “aren’t surprised” if a student isn’t performing at the level that they should be based on standards and learning progression?

Through collective action, starting on the very first day that our students start with us – for most of our students that means starting in kindergarten – and continuing through the last day they are with us at the end of fourth grade (or whatever the grade breakdown of your school may be), we must be diligent in our work to recognize where our students are. If they are not meeting standards, or falling behind others, that must raise red flags for us. The sooner we notice, the sooner we can intervene. And the sooner we intervene, the sooner we can close gaps. On the other hand, the longer we wait, the harder it becomes for us to close the gaps because with each day those gaps grow wider. And while we can close gaps in grades 3-5, those students who get to proficiency will most likely always read at a slower rate.

This means we all must have a laser-like focus on our students. Research tells us that early intervention is the key to getting to our goal of 95% reading proficiency by the end of their third-grade year. What commitment can you make in this last portion of the year to help set your student up for success in their reading future? Do you need to set a new SMART goal for your student? Do you need to utilize a new screener to make sure that you are correctly supporting them? Do you need to review your progress monitoring tool to make sure that it is appropriately assessing the skill that you are working with them on? Let us know what you plan to do in the comments below!

Assessment to Provide Early Intervention

I know that many of us have opinions about what it is that students need to know by the time they reach the end of any specific grade level. Those opinions are formed in several ways. One way is using grade-level standards, or another might be through our experience working with students at a particular grade. But how do we know if a student is struggling earlier than that? What should raise a red flag for us when a student isn’t progressing as fast as we think they should?

What research shows us, through a longitudinal study of approximately 400 randomly selected kindergarten students from a broad sample of communities across the state of Connecticut (you can see a bit more about this study here) is that early interventions are key. This study followed students until the end of high school. One of the interesting findings of the study is that between grades 1-9, students who started in the bottom 25 percent (the lowest one-quarter) of reading achievement remained there for the duration of the study. Students who were struggling in kindergarten were more likely to struggle throughout their educational career.

This is why early intervention is key to reading support. “Once children are behind – which happens very early – they do not catch up unless intervention is intensive, timely, and well informed” (Moats & Tolman, LETRS Volume 1, p. 63). Recent trainings on foundational skills continue to remind me of the importance of taking the right steps, at the right time.

Sometimes though, I feel like we get a little too caught up in the formality of interventions. If we see a student who is struggling, we shouldn’t feel like we need to wait for the next official MTSS meeting to add in some interventions. We also sometimes get too caught up in how long we need to spend on these skills. When the group is small, and a gap is identified early enough, just 5-10 minutes a day can make a world of difference. And those interventions don’t always have to happen while gathered around a table. If you have 3 kids that you’re concerned about their letter ID or naming of sounds, have them walk near you in line, and do the intervention while you walk them to a restroom break, to their related arts class, or lunch. When we use the small moments, and chunk them together, we can make BIG differences!

The first step in supporting students is knowing who to support – who falls into that bottom quarter of students. This is where a universal screener is so important. This is an assessment you might use for all students to see who is flagged as struggling with foundational reading skills. In my district, we use NWEA MAP Reading Fluency, however, other districts might use other screeners like Acadience Reading K-6, easyCBM, and others. This helps us locate the students who are at risk for reading difficulties.

Once we identify those students who are at risk, we may not know how we need to support that student That’s where diagnostic screeners are so important. There are lots of resources that you could use to help with screening students. Assessments such as The PAST Test (accessible for free here), or a Phonics and Word Reading Survey can help you see where your students are and identify where you might want to start an intervention. I would suggest using an assessment like this to screen your students of concern, then bring the data to a PLC meeting to see how you might be able to work as a team to support your learners in their continued growth.

The key to identifying the risks of reading struggles is to figure out where your students are as quickly as possible. Quality screeners are a huge part of that. Research suggests that screening should take place at least 3 times per year so that we can identify students who begin struggling later in the school year. Once students of concern are identified, we must get a quality intervention in place to support that student. The science tells us that most of our students can develop strong foundational reading skills – 95% or better – by the end of third grade. But the longer we wait to support students who are at risk, the harder that task becomes. Through appropriate intervention, we can make sure that many of our at-risk students are helped before chronic, serious reading and writing delays develop. This work must start on day 1 of kindergarten. We can’t afford to wait. Our student’s reading skills are too valuable!

Share with us in the comments. What are some of the things that you look for in your grade level to identify students who struggle? How might you intervene? We’d love to learn from one another!

Foundational Reading Skills

This year has been one filled with a lot of learning about the process of reading, how children learn to read, and the knowledge of how to teach reading with the use of any good reading program. I’ve already shared a bit about my experiences at The Reading League’s National Conference, as well as items I’ve learned as part of our experience as members of Cohort 2 of the Indiana Reading Cadre. Currently, I am one of several members of the team in my building engaged in Lexia LETRS Professional Learning. In today’s post, I want to share with you one of my key takeaways from the first unit of LETRS.

First of all, what is LETRS? LETRS stands for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. It’s a professional development course of study for instructors of reading, spelling, and related language skills. Its goal is to take current research on reading instruction and bridge the gap to classroom practices that allow teachers to feel confident in their instruction.

Unit 1 covers a variety of topics, and I would describe it as something of an introduction to the learning that will be happening throughout the remaining seven units. For me, the most impactful section was on the topic of how children learn to read and spell. One piece of the key takeaways is that for students to develop the skills necessary to be skilled readers, we must teach them deliberately. As I’ve shared before, in previous posts (check out my previous posts on the purpose of reading) the ultimate goal of reading is to comprehend. In a skilled reader, that seems to be somewhat automatic. Their knowledge of word recognition skills combined with their language comprehension makes it seem as though reading is an automatic process. Recent science tells us that’s not true – with the development of eye-tracking software, we know that the human eye of a skilled reader will scan an entire word in 250 milliseconds (that’s a quarter of a second!).

The research of Linnea Ehri does a great job of helping to define the stages of reading development. To learn more about the typical development of reading, check out this post from Reading Rockets here. As teachers of reading, we want to move our students to a consolidated reading practice. For most kids, this happens sometime in 2nd or 3rd grade. Often, as students are moving towards the consolidated phase of reading, and truly skilled reading, we are concerned with their reading rate, or words correct per minute. When students do not become fluent readers, it has a great impact on their ability to comprehend.

One thing that I see at times when talking with teachers of struggling readers is a focus on their inability to comprehend their reading. But what is important to remember is that most of the time when a student struggles with comprehension, there is some underdeveloped skill that must be in place to get to strong reading comprehension. Instead of using interventions to support a student’s reading comprehension, we have to identify the gaps. Is there an issue with their phonological awareness or phonics skills that impact their comprehension? Or does the student lack key vocabulary? Or could there be a lack of background knowledge in the reading topics?

To help us understand where a student is in their reading progression, tools like The Cognitive Model of Reading Assessment (see below, created by Michael McKenna and Katherine Stahl) is a great tool to think of the skills that build solid reading comprehension. I like to think of the skills as building on one another. If I have a student who is struggling with reading fluency, then The Cognitive Model reminds me that maybe the underdeveloped skill is actually in decoding and sight word knowledge. This would impact the type of intervention I might want to use for a student, as well as what my progress monitoring tool might be. If I want to identify more specific needs, I might use a diagnostic tool such as the Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) or some form of a letter naming and word reading survey (LETRS has one included in their assessment resources).

Ultimately, we need to remember that the thing we think is the issue is not always the issue. Often, there are underdeveloped skills that come earlier in the progression of reading skills that will lead to the struggles that we see right now.

Think about a student in your class. What is the thing that they seem to be struggling with? Take a look at the cognitive model, and think about the areas that come earlier. Could you do a quick formative assessment on that skill to see if there actually are gaps there that are impacting the reading comprehension? If so, you need to take a step back on the progression. Share with us what you are thinking about as you reflect on the students you serve. Share with us how it might impact your next steps with that child.

Reading comprehension strategies aren’t the point

As I continue to learn, I find myself spending more time reflecting on the teaching practices I used when I was a classroom teacher. Many times, I think back to a practice I used and realize that I wouldn’t do the same if I were to go back into a classroom teacher position. Today, I was specifically thinking about the way I taught reading comprehension when I was a sixth-grade teacher.

As a new teacher, I frequently searched for ways to enhance my teaching skills, particularly regarding the teaching of reading. I found two books, which I read and utilized often, that helped me in teaching students how to comprehend what they were reading. These books were Guiding Readers and Writers: Teaching Comprehension, Genre, and Content Literacy and Teaching for Comprehension and Fluency: Thinking, Talking, and Writing About Reading, K-8, both authored by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. These books significantly influenced my teaching methods for several years, especially when teaching intermediate grade students.

While it would be hard to name a single takeaway from these texts, one of the things that was influenced by these books was the way I thought I needed to teach reading comprehension. I would teach reading comprehension as independent strategies that a reader might just pull out and utilize at the correct moment. When I taught this way, I might choose one text and use it to learn about the main ideas and supporting details. Then I might select another text to work on inferencing. This may sound familiar to any of you who have been in the education realm in the past 30 years (or possibly more!).

This was the primary work that I did to teach comprehension. It seemed like the strategies were the key to comprehension, so we would cycle through lessons in small group, whole group, guided reading, etc. Then last fall, I read the newest version of Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Upper Elementary Classroom by Katie Egan Cunningham, Jan Burkins, and Kari Yates. If you are an upper elementary/intermediate grade teacher, I think this is a highly accessible text for you to learn more about The Science of Reading. It does a great job of distilling some of the timeliest research into a format that teaches you a bit about the science behind a shift, and then gives suggestions for new practices.

But, if you’re like me, be prepared to have moments when you begin to doubt what you thought you knew about teaching reading. For me, the first moment (but not the last) came when I got to page 43, Shift 2: Rethinking the Role of Strategy Comprehension in Learning to Comprehend. If you go back a couple of paragraphs to my description of teaching comprehension strategies, I think there was a part of me that believed the teaching of the strategies was the teaching of comprehension. So, when I read this quote from the work of Nell Duke, Alessandra Ward, and P. David Pearson, I had a moment of guilt that I think many of us have when we learn that what we thought was a great practice might not have been so great based on more current research:

What I have now learned is that while those strategies may help with comprehension, by themselves it’s not enough. In addition to those strategies, readers need so much more. Those things include “vocabulary knowledge, executive function skills, working memory, familiarity with language structures, knowledge of text structures, verbal reasoning, and motivation” (Cunningham, Burkins, and Yates, p.44-45).

As a classroom teacher, what are we to do? How can we engage those other skills? I’m definitely not telling you to go throw out any lesson you’ve done in the past on comprehension strategies, because students need to be introduced to those skills. But, just as the purpose behind a systemic and explicit structure literacy program is to help students get to automaticity in their decoding of words, providing readers with the right strategies will help them get to automaticity in comprehension and fluidly move between different strategies to become proficient readers. I really like the kid-friendly language that Cunningham, Burkins, and Yates use to describe what they call “The Strategic Six.” Here are some thoughts on what might help your students move toward proficiency (the headings below come from the intermediate version of Shifting the Balance):

Switch on What You Know (Activate Prior Knowledge) – We might teach this skill by engaging in a pre-read of a text. This might involve looking at headings, titles, pictures, and diagrams. Help students ask themselves “What do I already know about this?” (Or maybe, what don’t I know).
Map the Text (Notice Structures) – As you do the pre-read, what do you notice about the text? Are there patterns? Section headings or chapter titles that might help you know what to expect? In a fiction piece, who is the narrator? From what point of view is the story told?
Keep a Close Eye on Comprehension (Monitor and Clarify) – This is all about metacognition and being aware of our own thinking. This means paying attention to our thoughts as we read. If something doesn’t make sense, where did it break down? Do I need to reread? Slow down? Fix-up strategies like this help improve comprehension.
Dig Below the Surface (Ask and Answer Questions) – Long ago, I came across an old comprehension model called SQ3R. This stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recall, Review. During a pre-read (survey), you might jot down a few questions you think could be answered while you are reading. As you read, you monitor your thinking looking for answers to those questions. Then, you go back to your questions and see if you can answer them based on the reading you just did. Finally, you check your answers by going back to the text. This helped my students develop the skill of asking questions prior to and while reading.
Fill in the Missing Pieces (Infer) – When we think about inferences, it’s often about the conclusions we draw based on previous experiences. We make inferences all the time. Imagine walking into your home, you see dirty dishes in the sink, the mixer is out on the counter, along with a mess of flour and dough, and you can smell that something is baking. You may not be able to see what, but you know that your daughter is making chocolate chip cookies because she likes baking and is the only one at home. This is an inference. Once students understand that using clues to understand what’s happening is inferencing, they will notice their inferences all the time! An activity that I have seen used is the paper bag mystery person. You can do this, or you can ask students to create their own. In one example you might have a bag with a pair of running shoes, a medal from a 5k, a number bib from a half marathon, and a pair of socks. As you share the items have the students make an inference about the person by creating a list. More items will likely lead to more specific inferences.
Sum up the Core Ideas (Summarize) – As students are reading, they should be thinking about some of the key details. In a narrative, this might involve the setting, key characters, the problem and solution, and what happened at the end of the story. If you’re looking for a way to support this, you might consider story frames. Reading Rockets has a couple of great graphic organizers to support this. Here is one option, and here is another. For nonfiction reading, you might use a concept map like this for students to identify main ideas and key details. These tools will support students in thinking about what the key details are that they need to share a meaningful summary.

This is not the end-all, be-all list of important things students “need to know” to comprehend their reading. You might find a dozen other blogs with a dozen other thoughts, but the ideas listed above are supported by research as high-leverage ways to help grow reading comprehension in our students.

As I’ve shared before, the goal of reading should always be to comprehend. But we must remember that proficient readers will use a variety of strategies with automaticity based on their needs while they read. Comprehension is not the use of a single strategy, rather it’s an active and ongoing process that might involve shifting between several different strategies to help with comprehension. This is why teaching strategies in a stand-alone format with a specific text is not the only way to practice our comprehension skills.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you been teaching strategies thinking that would help your students learn to comprehend? What is something new you can commit to trying as a result of your reading today? Share with us in your comments below, or have a conversation with your PLC team about how you might be able to integrate some of these thoughts into the work you do in your classroom.

Page 19 Thinking

A while back, I was listening to an episode of The Tim Ferris Show. For those of you who don’t know who Tim Ferris is, he is an author, blogger, and businessman, but I came to him as a podcast host. On the podcast, Tim does long-form interviews with a wide variety of people on many different topics. While it is rare that a guest on the podcast has direct ties to education, I often find value as an educator in aspects of the interviews. I will say that at times, the topics are not interesting to me, and when that happens, I’ll skip that episode, but often I find myself sucked into the conversations that I wouldn’t have expected to find interesting.

Last May, Tim had Seth Godin on the podcast (you can find the show page here). Seth is the author of 21 international bestsellers, and while the topics are generally related to marketing, his books and blog often venture into topics far beyond the realm of marketing. In addition, Seth has given multiple TED Talks, each with millions of views.

What stood out to me about the conversation was a five-ish minute clip about the concept of “Page 19 Thinking.” Honestly, the title of this concept could have been any number, but Seth chose to use 19. He described it as thinking about working on a book as part of a team. In the beginning, the team knows that there will be a page 19 in the book, it must be written, illustrated, footnotes added, etc. As a team of authors, you say “We know there will be a page 19. We know it’s coming from this team, but we also know that nobody here knows everything about what’s going to go on page 19.”

In this situation, the solution is to start with somebody writing a sentence, then someone can take that sentence and add to it to create a paragraph. The team may say “Let’s make this better” so then someone else will do some research and add another paragraph. Someone else might create an illustration, and someone else might add a footnote. Eventually, the team gets to a version of page 19 that they are happy with, and they “ship it” to the printer or publisher.

Along the way, team members relentlessly criticize the work, but they never criticize the person who did the work. And remember, criticism is closely related to the concept of a critique, where there is careful judgment, expression of opinion, and evaluation of both the good and bad qualities of something. If the goal is to create the best work possible, we must start somewhere. Rarely is our first idea also our best idea. Criticism forces us to reflect on our work and the ways to make it better.

Page 19 thinking allows people the freedom to speak up and contribute. Think about some of the best-known companies in the world. Whether you’re talking about Google, or Apple, or Amazon, what they are known for today is not necessarily how they began their work. Take a moment to look at your phone – personally, I have an iPhone. This is now the third iteration of the iPhone that I’ve had. Each has been different – they have changed in size, features, etc. Most people feel that the new features added have made the device better. But if we think about what the original iPhone could do, compared to the phone you are probably carrying with you each day, the changes have been dramatic. (If you want to see an interesting comparison between the original and the most recent iPhone, you can check out this short video) Those changes would not be possible without the work of a team to iterate and improve the device. And what’s interesting to think about is that Apple wasn’t a phone company in the beginning. It was formed to create the Apple I computer, but over time has become the maker of the iPod, iPad, Apple Watch, and various other accessories. The company has iterated many times.

Now, when we talk about criticism, sometimes when an idea is criticized, it can feel like personal criticism. But if we’re working as part of a team to create the best thing possible, we understand that the criticism is of the idea or the work, not the person. Hopefully, when we take on a mindset of page 19 thinking, we can allow ourselves the freedom to speak up and contribute, as well as to take feedback. Then as a team, we can iterate our way to excellence.

This whole process has me thinking about the PLC structure. When we get together as a PLC team, we have a goal of helping one another be the best teachers we can be to help our students grow. In the PLC process, questions 3 and 4 are about what we’re going to do if students aren’t learning, or what we will do if they are. In this portion of the process, we’re creating ideas to help our students continue to learn. If our PLC takes on a mindset of page 19 thinking, we know that the ideas we share are going to be criticized, but that criticism is about making the idea better, which in turn leads to better outcomes for students. We must let our own work be generously criticized, and we must generously criticize the work of others.

The teamwork that goes with allowing others to contribute their talent will always help our ideas become better. In a collaborative environment, it’s important to make sure that we all are welcome to the ideas of one another because the work of the team helps all our students.

What are your thoughts on page 19 thinking? How might this way of thinking impact the work your team is engaged in? Is there a time that criticism from someone else helped you to get better at the work you were doing? Let us know about your experiences in the comments below.

The purpose of reading (part 4)

Over the last couple of months, my posts here have been focused on the primary purpose of reading. In the first post, I shared that in my belief, the ultimate reason we teach our students to read is so that they can learn how to comprehend text (you can see that first post here). Then over the course of that post, along with part 2 and part 3, I dug into a few of the key concepts that students need to be able to do in order to read with solid comprehension. As a reminder, the 4 key things that students need to be able to do to comprehend what they read is to:

Read the words accurately and fluently.
Understand the meaning of the words.
Have adequate background knowledge.
Focus attention on critical content.

In the first 3 posts, we dug into those first 3 concepts. Today’s post is going to primarily be thinking on how we help students to focus on critical content. Much of my thinking around these four concepts comes from a session led by Anita Archer on reading comprehension that I attended while at The Reading League National Conference in Syracuse this fall. She created a checklist for teachers to know what skills students need to so that they can accomplish each of the 4 key things listed above. Here’s the checklist related to focusing on critical content:

Ask questions on critical content as we read books to students.
Ask text-dependent questions as students are reading text.
Have students generate questions on passages they read.
Teach text features, both narrative and informative.
Use retrieval practice procedures to review key content.
Have students write in response to passages.

The first thing that I note as I look over this list, is that as the teacher, we must be prepared in advance with a knowledge of the text. If we want to help our students focus on critical content, we must pre-read a text so that we know what content is critical. During that pre-read, it’s a great time to mark key passages that you might want to ask a question about, and ideally plan what that question might be.

But that last bullet point that you see above regarding writing responses was reiterated in a recent blog post by Timothy Shanahan. A key point that I pulled from that post is:

So, as we are reading to our students, or as our students are reading independently, we need to be able to ask questions that guide and monitor students’ comprehension (that’s what the National Reading Panel said back in the year 2000). Ideally, those questions we ask should be text dependent – in other words, students must also provide evidence from the text to support their answers (I used to call this “Back your Smack” when I was a classroom teacher). We want to be sure that our students have read the text!

But at the same time, it is valuable for our students to develop their own questions as they are reading. They might choose to ask questions about the main character, the setting, the problem in the story and how it was solved, or what happened in the end. We want to be sure that students learn to ask questions like the ones we’d ask – in other words, they must ask questions that can only be answered if you have read the text. This could also be a great time to teach students about Depth of Knowledge – to help them learn about the different types of questions that exist, and how they might develop questions with higher levels of thinking.

But let’s get into some of what Shanahan was getting at in his post – focusing on those reading comprehension strategies that we often teach as a stand-alone skill do not always support our students in learning to comprehend what they read better. What we’re learning as more research studies are shared is that while there is “nothing wrong with asking questions about what the kids have read, just don’t expect such practice to exert much impact on the ability to deal with specific question categories, nor even to have any impact on reading comprehension.” (Shanahan, 2023).

In the quote in the graphic above, Shanahan suggests that summarizing, developing an understanding of text structure, and/or paraphrasing are much more impactful in growing student comprehension. And that makes sense to me – to do any of those things, readers are required to think deeply about a text, which is certainly going to improve reading comprehension.

So what does that mean in practice? We often talk about how readers are writers, and writers are readers. One thing you might consider implementing with your students is a protocol for writing about the text we’re reading. Not just making connections, but truly thinking about pieces of the text structure – things like the setting, who the main character is, what is the character’s problem/conflict/goal, how does the character comes to a resolution, what happened in the end of the piece, and what are the themes.

To develop these skills with students, you might start with partners doing a shared retell – maybe partner A defines the setting of the story, the main character, and the problem, while partner B shares about the beginning, middle, and end of the story and the eventual resolution of the problem. Through verbal practice, collaboration, and feedback, students will learn how to then craft their own summary. Over time, you might then work towards having students work collaboratively on developing a summary of the story. Creating a list of sentence stems might help in this process. Some ideas for what that might look like include:

The problem that exists with much of our question-and-answer strategies of stand along comprehension skills is that really, all it’s doing is testing a student’s recall of the test. This is something we’d do for an assessment, not a strategy for teaching a student how to comprehend. Through our guidance, we can help our students to analyze what it is they read. This analysis forces our students to dive back into the text, to reread, and to think deeply about what the text is really saying. These thinking skills will support comprehension much more than basic question and answer skills.

Have you ever utilized written or spoken responses in your class? How has it supported your students in developing their comprehension skills? Do you have any new ideas from what’s shared above? Let us know a bit about your thoughts in the comments below!

The purpose of reading (part 3)

In recent posts, I’ve really been focused on how we move our students from the stage of understanding phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding across the bridge to reading comprehension. Ultimately, the purpose of reading revolves around understanding what it is that we read. That means helping to develop students who are fully literate – able to both read and write fluently. In part 1 (found here) I dug into the purpose of reading, some of the work from Anita Archer around the 4 things all students must be able to do in order to comprehend what they read, and then some ideas about how we make sure that our students are reading fluently.

In part 2 (found here) we looked at the importance of helping our students develop a wide vocabulary. One of the ways we do this is by teaching vocabulary explicitly. That post walks through what an explicit vocabulary routine might look like.

Today’s post is going to dig into the importance of adequate background knowledge. Let me share an example of how background knowledge impacted me recently. I consider myself to be a pretty fluent reader. When I run into vocabulary I don’t know, I have lots of tools to help fix that problem. But a few weeks ago, my daughter had a reading assignment for her biology class. She asked me to help her out a little bit. The article was a 4-page research piece on slime molds. As a former science teacher, I felt like this was something I could definitely help with.

Then I started reading. I clearly did not have enough background knowledge. I was able to read the article quickly, but I could not understand much of what was happening. I was lacking the necessary background knowledge to be able to truly comprehend what the article was saying. After sitting with the article for an hour, googling some terms, and doing some additional research, I was able to build enough schema to truly help my daughter with her assignment.

The moral to this is that even for our fluent readers, if they don’t have the appropriate background knowledge, they will not be able to comprehend the things that they have read.

But what does the research say about background knowledge?

While doing some research for this post, I read about a study that was done that took readers with a wide variety of reading abilities based on fluency and comprehension screeners. All readers read an article about baseball. No matter a student’s ability, the readers who already had background knowledge about baseball scored higher on the comprehension measures. Having background knowledge of the topic built a schema that impacted comprehension more than their reading ability.

With this knowledge in mind, Archer suggests there are some things we can do to be sure to build more background knowledge for our readers:

Read informative read-alouds, especially in the primary grades, including a variety of books on similar topics to build a knowledge network.
Directly teach science, social studies, and health.
Promote wide independent reading
Directly teach critical background knowledge before reading a passage

So, how might we go about directly teaching that critical background knowledge? Well, first of all, as the teacher, we have to be sure we have pre-read the passage. This allows us to identify key knowledge that our students will need to understand. A few of the things you want to be sure to call attention to might include:

Is this a fiction or non-fiction piece?
If there are characters, who are they? Introduce their identity and some basic information (gender, age, etc.).
What is the setting? Describe the time and place. You might show the location on a map or globe, and then zoom in using something like Google Maps.
This would also be an excellent time to include key vocabulary from the story. When teaching these words, if you can pull pictures that help build the background knowledge, that can support vocabulary development.
If the setting is from a different period, do we need to provide some background knowledge about how people lived at that time?
Finally, you might wrap up this section of building background knowledge with some retrieval practice. You might ask students “What are some things you have learned about…?” Since we want everyone to do everything, you might first have them write a few ideas down on a whiteboard or sheet of paper. Then you could partner students up and have them take turns sharing using the sentence stem “One thing I learned about…”

By helping our students build solid background knowledge prior to reading, we help set them up to be able to better comprehend the things they read. What are some of the ways that you go about helping to build background knowledge for your students? Share your methods and ideas in the comments below!

The purpose of reading (part 2)

In last week’s post, I began to really dig into the concept of the purpose of reading. With our work around Science of Reading, we have really spent a lot of time, especially in our early grades, focused on structured literacy and skills like phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding, but as Natalie Wexler reminds us:

What I was focused on in my last post (which you can see here) is digging into the idea that the ultimate purpose of reading is to comprehend the words that are on the page. At a conference I recently attended, Anita Archer shared the four things that all students must be able to do in order to comprehend:

Read the words accurately and fluently.
Understand the meaning of the words.
Have adequate background knowledge.
Focus attention on critical content.

Last week, I focused on the idea of accuracy and fluency. Today I’ll be digging into the idea of understanding words. In future posts, we’ll dig into building background knowledge and focusing on critical content.

As you know, I always love to understand the why behind what we do, so what does the research say about understanding the meaning of the words in relation to comprehension? I think we can all agree that vocabulary is related to reading comprehension. In fact:

“…one of the most eduring findings in reading research is the extent to which students’ vocabulary knowledge relates to their reading comprehension.”
~Osborn & Hiebert, 2004

I think we’d all agree that for our students to be able to read fluently, they need to know the words that they are reading. When our students don’t know the meaning of a word they are decoding during text reading, they must use context to figure out what the words mean. This added cognitive load takes away from fluency – one of the things that must be in place for solid reading comprehension.

There are several ways we can make sure that our students have that strong foundation in their vocabulary. Anita Archer suggests the following checklist to help build vocabulary:

Use high-quality classroom language.
Consistently use academic language.
Read narrative and informative read-alouds in primary grades.
Promote wide independent reading.
Teach word learning strategies (context clues, morphemes, and resources like dictionaries, thesauruses, etc.).
Explicitly teach critical vocabulary terms.

Over the years, I’ve spent time sharing about the work of John Hattie. His research says that vocabulary programs have an effect size of 0.67 (that’s pretty high, and definitely above the “hinge” point). In fact, Bob Marzano says:

“Direct vocabulary instruction has an impressive track record of improving students’ background knowledge and comprehension of academic content.”

So, what might a vocabulary instructional routine look like? This is the format that Archer suggests – just like with any other part of the five pillars of reading, it should be systematic and explicit. To do that, we should introduce the word, introduce the word’s meaning, illustrate the word with an example (and non-examples when it’s helpful), and then check for understanding. Let me take you through those steps a little more in-depth:

Step 1: Introduce the pronunciation of the word: You should display the word in some way, maybe on the screen, written on the board, or on chart paper. Then, read the word to the students and have students repeat it. With multi-syllabic words or more difficult words, repeat it several times. You might also have students read the word by parts, tap the word, etc.

Step 2: Present a student-friendly explanation: Tell the students an explanation, or have the students read an explanation with you. This might include using the word in a sentence, providing synonyms or antonyms, etc.

Step 3: Illustrate the word with examples: You might use concrete examples like having an object or acting the word out. You might use a visual example like an image or picture. Or you might use a verbal example to explain the word.

Step 4: Check students’ understanding: You might choose to do this in a few ways. You could ask deep processing questions, give the students think time, and then ask partner A to tell partner B. You might have students discern between examples and non-examples, so you might share a sentence and then ask students to say whether it is an example of the word or not. A third way you might check for understanding is to have students compare the vocabulary term with another term. You might have partner A share examples of ways the words are similar, and partner B share examples of ways the words are different.

Linnea Ehri tells us that if words have been read before and stored in memory, prediction strategies are not required for a reader to decode. When we can introduce difficult vocabulary words to our students in an explicit way before teaching, then our readers are better able to focus on their primary task in reading, comprehension.

What strategies have you tried in building vocabulary with your students? What has worked well? What hasn’t? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

What is the purpose of reading?

In the past few months, I have been deeply engaged in learning a lot about reading. What it takes to support our students in their reading growth, how do we create a foundation for learning to read, how do we assess where our students are as readers, and what do we do when a student is struggling. But even with all that learning, I don’t think I’ve taken a lot of time to reflect on the true purpose of reading. What would you say if you were asked? Pause and reflect on that for a second…

There are several things you might say. Some of the ideas that pop into my head have to do with gaining information about a topic, connecting information in the text to knowledge the reader already has or for the purpose of entertainment. Personally, I love to sit down with a good book and get lost in the words on the page, although I know this is not the case for everyone. But I think we can all agree that whether or not a reader sees reading as a joyful task, it is definitely a necessary task. Ultimately though, whatever the purpose of reading may be, it’s meaningless without comprehension of the words on the page.

In a recent post, I shared a little of what I had learned from Pamela Snow during my time at The Reading League’s Annual Conference (you can see that post on the connection between oral language and literacy here). But her presentation went even deeper than that connection, it also dug into the importance of comprehension in reading. She shared the following about reading comprehension:

Comprehension will suffer if a word has been incorrectly recognized, if the text includes words that are not in the reader’s oral vocabulary, if the linguistic structure of the text is overly complex, or if the topic of the reading material is so unfamiliar that the reader cannot make inferences (“read between the lines”) that are necessary to understanding the text. (Emphasis added by Snow)
Snow, Scarborough, & Burns (1999). What speech-language pathologists need to know about early reading. Topics in Language Disorders, (20)1, 48-58. (p.51)

While I agreed with the concepts of this statement and much of what Snow shared during her presentation, I was left hoping for a bit more on the how. I get the why of reading comprehension, but what can we do in practice to support readers in this area? That’s why I appreciated the afternoon session I attended that same day with Anita Archer. Her session that afternoon was titled Comprehension is an Outcome, not a Strategy. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t immediately familiar with Anita Archer’s name, however, I was mesmerized by her presentation. First, any presenter who can keep a room full of adults fully engaged for an entire one-hour presentation has my utmost respect. Most of the time I’m at a conference, I find myself tweeting out (X-ing out now… that just doesn’t have the same ring!) highlights of almost any session I’m in. I didn’t tweet once during this session. Not because there was nothing worthy of sharing, but because I was so engaged I didn’t want to look away. If you ever have the opportunity to hear Archer in person, you should absolutely take it!

Archer’s simple definition of comprehension is the act of understanding what you have read. But as educators, what do we need to do to make sure this happens? In Archer’s opinion, there are 4 things that all students must be able to do. The student:

Reads the words accurately and fluently
Understands the meaning of the words
Has adequate background knowledge
Focuses attention on critical content

What I loved about the presentation was that for each of these sections, she gave a little information on the research of why that skill is important, a checklist of things that we as educators should do to make sure that our readers are able to carry out these skills, and then a way you might go about teaching at least a piece of that skill. Today’s post is going to dig into the way we make sure that our students can read the words accurately and fluently.

First, though, why is this important? Here are a few pieces of research that help explain why our students need to read accurately and fluently:

Cognitive science has shown beyond a doubt that fluent, accurate word recognition is a hallmark of skilled reading with comprehension.
Adams, 1990; Rayner et al., 2001

…poor readers are almost always limited by their ability to use letter-sound skills (e.g., phonics skills) to identify unfamiliar words.
Ehri, 1998; Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992

Based on this research, it is imperative that ALL students get to the point of reading fluently and accurately. And it’s also important to remember that reading fluency is about more than just the rate of reading. There are actually three key aspects of reading fluency: Accuracy (decoding and recognizing words correctly), Rate (the pace of reading), and Prosody (use of intonation, stress, and phrasing). But how do we help all our students read fluently? Archer put together a checklist of what we should think about in order to be sure that our students have these skills (and it’s important to remember that these skills apply to all grade levels). If we are committed to making sure that all our students can read accurately and fluently, here are the things that Archer suggests we must do at our school:

Teach foundation skills to ALL students to mastery (print skills, phonemic awareness, letter-sound associations, decoding, fluency)
Teach advanced decoding of multi-syllabic words
Provide systematic interventions on foundational skills for struggling readers
Preteach the pronunciation of unfamiliar words before passage reading

A huge part of fluency instruction revolves around modeling, practice, and feedback. Strategies that can support fluency in reading might include scaffolded repeated reading, choral reading (teacher and class read together), echo reading (teacher or partner reads a sentence, and then students read the same sentence), recorded reading (have students record themselves reading a passage, then listen and self-reflect), read-alouds, and performance reading (like a reader’s theater).

When choosing to use a passage for repeated reading or any fluency work, previewing the text as the teacher is important. Are there print structures that might be difficult for students? Are there multi-syllabic words that students need support in decoding? Are there words that students might need to have pronunciation modeled? Once you identify those challenges, take a moment to pre-teach those structures or words. For pronunciation practice, you might read the word, show it to students, and have the class echo it back to you.

When we take the time to practice fluency routines, we set students up for success. When students are more successful in their fluency, they are able to better comprehend their reading. As you begin working toward that purpose of helping your students read more fluently and accurately, you are bound to notice higher levels of comprehension.

What are some of the specific things that you have found support the fluency work in your classroom? Do you have favorite tools or activities? Share with us in the comments below!

The connection between oral language and reading instruction

At the beginning of the month, I had the privilege to attend The Reading League’s 7th Annual National Conference in Syracuse, NY. I went with several others from our district. The goal of the conference is to develop a deeper understanding of the science of reading and learn about the implications for teaching and learning. In the coming weeks/months, I look forward to sharing with you some of my key takeaways from this conference. There were several amazing presenters!

One of the first sessions I attended was led by Pamela Snow. She is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology Much of her work is centered around the early transition from language to literacy and the ways this transition is supported in the classroom. In that session, she reminded me of something that I shared in our recent PD on the Science of Reading – Human brains weren’t originally meant to be a reading brain.

The chart below was one she shared during her presentation and served as a good reminder that less than 3% of human existence includes the use of written language.

What’s important for us to keep in mind given this information is the reminder that Language is a paradox (this theory comes directly from Pamela Snow) – “Humans have evolved a special facility for oral language, such that it is innate (biologically primary). We have a “language instinct.” However, it is highly vulnerable to a range of developmental conditions (e.g. hearing impairment, intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, brain injury, or developmental language disorder). For humans, language is highly sensitive to environmental exposure.”

At times, when a reader is struggling with transitioning from an oral language structure to learning to read a written language structure, or as a student expands their reading skills beyond the oral language skills they have been exposed to, students may struggle with their reading. Literacy (reading and writing), builds upon oral language skills (vocab, speaking/conversation skills, syntax, phonological/phonemic awareness). When students lack language comprehension (remember the reading rope?), they will struggle to read fluently, which will impact their reading comprehension.

Readers with strong oral language abilities are more likely to develop strong reading abilities. Those strong reading abilities in turn will increase a reader’s vocabulary and background knowledge, which will further strengthen their reading abilities.

So what does this mean in practice? It means that our classrooms need to not only be a literacy-rich environment (lots of reading and writing), it also needs to be an oral language-rich environment (listening and speaking). Whenever possible, for all levels of readers, we can strengthen oral language skills by building opportunities for conversation, narrative discourse (think storytelling), procedural discourse (explaining a procedure), and expository discourse (informative or persuasive). Ultimately we can think of the oral language as the engine of literacy skills, while high-quality instruction in language development and reading is the fuel for success.

What are some of the ways you support oral language in your classroom? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

The View from 518