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Teach once a week.

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Foundation- Morphology- Prefixes & Suffixes

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Van Cleave - Morphology Matters: Using Bases & Affixes to Develop Vocabulary in Students of All Ages

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce

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ODE: World Smarts Using Morphology Bases & Affixes to Develop Vocabulary Skills

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Comprehension strategies can help build knowledge, but you also need knowledge to be able to use ... [+]
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Educators don't need to choose between building students' knowledge and teaching reading comprehension strategies. The question isn't whether to teach strategies-it's how to do it and when.

"Are we supposed to teach reading strategies or not?" an anonymous teacher recently asked reading researcher Timothy Shanahan. "I keep coming across contradictory information. Some writers say the research supports strategy teaching and some say that we should teach background information instead."

In a blog post, Shanahan gave a response that has garnered lots of praise on social media -and one that I am largely in agreement with. Shanahan pointed out that strategies like monitoring your comprehension require you to pay more attention to the meaning of a text, helping you acquire knowledge from it. He also observed that "none of these strategies pays off unless the reader possesses sufficient topical knowledge to make them work."

So, Shanahan is saying, it's a reciprocal relationship: strategies require some knowledge in order to work, and strategies can also build and deepen knowledge. "It should not be a choice between the two," he wrote.

I couldn't agree more. I would just add that it's not only sufficient knowledge of the topic that's needed. If readers lack a threshold amount of general academic knowledge and vocabulary, and/or familiarity with the complex sentence structure of written language, strategies still might not help them.

The puzzling part of this exchange is that the teacher who submitted the question-along with many others, apparently-had gotten the idea that you do have to choose between strategies and knowledge. And although Shanahan himself doesn't say this, commenters on his blog and on Twitter are implying that those who advocate for building knowledge-like myself-have been propagating this false dichotomy. "Unfortunate that some popular education pundits pit knowledge and comprehension strategies against each other," one tweeted.

As I've argued before, it's not that there's anything inherently wrong with teaching strategies. The problem is that American schools have gone way overboard on teaching them-plus a number of comprehension "skills" that Shanahan himself has said there's little or no evidence for, like "finding the main idea."

Strategy Instruction Has Gone Off the Rails

The standard approach to comprehension instruction has been to focus on a "skill of the week," which the teacher first briefly models for children, using a text chosen not for its topic but for how well it lends itself to demonstrating the skill. Then students practice the skill, using texts on random topics that have been determined to be at their individual reading levels, which could be years below their grade level. In American elementary schools, the average amount of time spent on reading every day is two hours, and much of that time is spent practicing comprehension skills.

This approach ignores the reciprocal relationship between knowledge and strategies. Even if the texts are simple, students may not have the requisite background knowledge to use the strategies they're supposedly practicing. Not to mention that in a very simple text, there may not be much content to, say, "make inferences" about.

And when students reach higher grade levels, the texts assume much more complex knowledge and vocabulary, Even if students have practiced a strategy like "making inferences" for years, it won't help them if they haven't been able to acquire enough of the knowledge assumed by the text to understand it at least at a superficial level.

Nevertheless, this kind of instruction goes on year after year, repeatedly covering the same round of skills and strategies. And schools have been relying on this approach for decades. During that time, reading test scores have been stagnant or declining and test-score gaps between low- and high-achievers have been growing ever larger.

You might think that would lead schools to conclude the approach isn't working. But instead, in an effort to raise scores, many schools have spent more time on comprehension skill-and-strategy practice. That has meant reducing instructional time for an already marginalized subject like social studies, which is more likely to build the knowledge that enables reading comprehension.

This regime has left many students-and especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum- woefully unprepared to meet the expectations of the high school or even middle school curriculum.

Using Strategies to Build Knowledge

This approach to literacy is what I and other advocates of knowledge-building have been arguing against. And what we are arguing for is an approach to literacy that uses skills and strategies in the service of building and deepening students' knowledge, rather than teaching them as ends in themselves.

That means that instead of choosing books or texts to teach a skill-of-the week-maybe "comparing and contrasting" or "determining author's purpose"-teachers bring in whatever skills or strategies would help students think about a particular topic or text.

That's the approach taken by the several knowledge-building literacy curricula that have been developed in recent years. I don't have first-hand familiarity with all of them, but the ones I am familiar with are constantly asking kids to do things like make inferences or compare-and-contrast-even if those activities aren't necessarily identified as "strategy instruction."

For example, in the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum-the one I'm most familiar with because it was being used in a second-grade classroom I followed through a school year-children were asked to predict who would win the Civil War, after they had studied that topic for a while. They were asked to infer whether the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe was helpful or harmful for the United States during the War of 1812. They were asked to compare Ancient Greek civilization to other ancient civilizations they had studied.

The difference between this approach and the standard one is that these second-graders actually had the knowledgethat enabled them to use these strategies. For example, the curriculum, which these kids had been getting since kindergarten, had already covered ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. So after the teacher asked that compare-and-contrast question, several eager hands flew up.

When the teacher called on a student, he explained that one reason Ancient Greek civilizations were unique (he used that word) was that "they weren't near a river and they didn't have any fertile soil, so it was difficult for them to farm." These students, by the way, were all from low-income families, and most-including the boy who provided the answer-came from non-English-speaking families.

Putting Content in the Foreground

I don't know whether Shanahan would consider this to be strategy instruction, but I don't see why it wouldn't be. It's putting the content in the foreground rather than the strategy, but there's some evidence to indicate that approach actually works better.

One study compared strategy-focused comprehension instruction to an approach that just asked kids to answer questions orally about the content of a text. The students who got the content-focused questions scored better on most measures of comprehension and also had richer class discussions. One of the researchers, Margaret McKeown, suggested a reason: The kids who got strategy-focused instruction had to first think about how to engage in the strategy, and they might have been paying more attention to that than to what the text actually said.

There's one point where I do depart from the recommendations in Shanahan's post. "Reading strategies are something students are likely to learn only in a reading lesson," he wrote. "As such, they deserve special attention in those lessons."

Maybe that's the case now, but it certainly doesn't have to be-nor should it be, given the dearth of actual learning that goes on in most reading comprehension lessons. There's evidence that comprehension strategies can be successfully taught in, for example, a social studies class.

And the National Reading Panel, of which Shanahan was a member, didn't say strategies should only be taught in the context of a reading lesson. That's the context in which most of the research had been done, but in its report, which came out over 20 years ago, the panel noted there was some evidence that strategy instruction in a social studies context could improve reading achievement. The panel called for further research in that area.

In fact, recent studies have shown that combining content-area instruction with literacy instruction-instruction that includes the use of skills and strategies-can provide a greater boost to reading comprehension than the standard approach.

A Little Explicit Strategy Instruction Is Enough

Shanahan and others might argue that it's important to explicitly teach students a strategy like "making predictions" rather than simply asking questions about content that implicitly require them to do that. They might say that students need to understand that a strategy exists in order to be aware that they can apply it in a variety of situations.

I'm not sure there's any evidence to support that contention, but let's say they're right. It shouldn't take very long to help students understand a concept like "making predictions" or "summarizing." The studies that support such instruction generally last no more than six weeks, and a prominent reading expert has concluded that students accrue all the benefits they're going to get from it after just ten sessions, which is equivalent to two weeks.

So why have them "practice" these skills and strategies month after month, year after year? Why not have them start applying those strategies to content in subjects like social studies, science, and literature as soon as possible, so that they're using them to acquire, deepen, and retain new knowledge?

It's not just that there's no need to choose between teaching strategies and building knowledge. More fundamentally, it's impossible to help students acquire knowledge without bringing in strategies, even if they're not identified by name. But if schools continue to put strategies in the foreground of instruction and confine that instruction to a reading class that lacks any specified content of its own, they'll continue to deprive students of the very thing that enables any skill or strategy to work: knowledge.

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No, Teachers Don't Have To Choose Between Knowledge And Strategies

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Educators don't need to choose between building students' knowledge and teaching reading comprehension strategies. The question is how to bring in strategies and when.

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Don’t discard comprehension strategies - Five from Five

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Share this post Dr Jennifer Buckingham, 23 June 2023 As greater consensus has been reached about how to teach children to decode and read words fluently, the focus of discussion among practitioners and researchers has shifted to reading comprehension. Some of this discussion has centred on the utility of teaching comprehension skills and strategies explicitly […]

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Beginning and struggling readers and spellers need to learn how to pull words apart into sounds, and represent them with letters/spellings, and blend sounds together into words.

The sounds part of this task (phonemic awareness) is difficult for many, and English spelling is famously complex, as meaningful word parts (morphemes) also affect spelling. This website aims to help you teach beginners and strugglers about sounds and spellings using explicit, systematic synthetic phonics and knowledge of morphology, giving them a solid foundation on which to build their fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression.

The Spelfabet materials were designed by an Australian Speech Pathologist for non-experts to use in teaching struggling spellers/readers how to sound out words. They are carefully-sequenced, easy-to-use, affordable, downloadable and reproducible resources, which should be used with decodable books. They are supplementary resources, not a complete program.

This site includes resource lists to help you find good resources for teaching encoding and decoding skills, many of which also target vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, plus:

Blog: Reviews of resources and teaching strategies, plain English discussions of theoretical stuff, and the occasional reflection or rant on teaching spelling and reading.

Video tours of Spelfabet materials: workbooks, games, moveable alphabet.

Spelling lists: Find free, carefully sequenced spelling lists, the many ways each English speech sound is spelt, and the main sounds represented by each spelling pattern.

Therapy service: We offer individual and group intervention in North Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia, targeting phonemic awareness, orthographic and morphological knowledge and other language-based aspects of reading and writing. Tiana, who makes our appointments, works 9.45 to 5.45 Monday to Thursday, phone: (03) 8528 0138 or email admin@spelfabet.com.au.

Spelfabet is also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Spelfabet acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we work. We pay our respects to the Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, extend this respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait people from other communities, and seek to help close the appalling literacy gap between indigenous and other Australians.

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Learning the building blocks of words - sounds, their spellings, and word parts

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Instructional Routines

Instructional routines like those found below help students to grow over time. They are teacher directed whole or small group activities that last for five to twenty minutes, to help students construct numerical relationships as they work together with the teacher. They often involve asking students to solve problems on their own, then to discuss, compare, model, verbalize, find and describe patterns, and make generalizations.

To allow for these routines to become routine, they are done regularly with students in small amounts of time in between and in additional to core curriculum. You may be familiar with our favorite "routine" called Problem Strings, but there are many others that provide opportunities for the types of discussion we want to engender in math classes.

Below is a list of some of our favorite instructional routines. Each routine is great for any grade level!

Click on one of the routines below to see examples that we've posted to social media.

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Find a list of our favorite instructional routines! Follow the links for examples of each one.

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Reading Science in Schools: paired fluency reading routine

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Vocabulary tiers
Vocabulary can be divided into three tiers. They are:

Tier 1 - common in oral language, likely learned from everyday experiences (e.g. 'eat', 'animal')

Tier 2 - academic, procedural, common in written language, essential for reading and writing (e.g. 'evaluate', 'conceptualise')

Tier 3 - domain specific, common in written language, essential for specific/specialist subject study (e.g. 'isotope', 'aphasia')
How we learn words
When we first start learning words we are very young. For most children this happens through hearing speech sounds joined together to form words and having word meaning attached to that sound combination. This is phonological input and semantic association. In the simplest terms, we need to hear the word and we need someone to tell us the meaning that goes with the word's sound properties.

Think about watching a baby. How do they learn a word? An adult will say, 'mumma' and refer to themselves, or say 'dog' over and over and point or refer to a dog (real, toy or in a book). So that's the first part. That is how Tier 1 vocabulary develops. Phonological input paired with meaning association.

Semantic mapping (the pairing of sound with meaning) happens via what is called fast and slow mapping.

Fast mapping: To start laying down new lexical representations, students initially hear a new word, they store its phonological form and begin to map semantic features to that form. Think quick and superficial from a few exposures.

Slow mapping occurs over an extended period. Students continue to hear the word and they refine the phonological and semantic representations of the word as it occurs and reoccurs in various contexts. Slow mapping leads to deep word learning and by extension, comprehension growth. So, it is slow and occurs after many, many exposures.

Children with language and/or learning difficulties typically have slower fast and slow mapping so they need more exposures at both fast and slow mapping stages.

Many words that occur frequently in text (especially academic texts), occur infrequently in everyday spoken language. Students are therefore unlikely to learn academic language through spoken language. That also means that students from early to mid-primary school and beyond will come across unknown words all the time when reading. When there are many words that they don't know this can be quite disruptive for Reading Comprehension (RC). Of course there is no way we can teach students all words. Through reading we continue to learn new words for most of our life. But, if we explicitly teach academic language we can reduce the number of unknown words they encounter when reading over time.

So, on top of phonological and semantic input, for RC they also need:

- Multiple exposures to the orthographic representation

- Multiple exposures to the word in a variety of sentences types (varying syntax)

- Multiple exposures to the word's diverse morphology (i.e. to understand how the word can be modified and to what effect)

When we come across an unknown word in oral language phonological input comes first and meaning is mapped to that. In text, orthographic input comes first and meaning begins to be mapped to that. Either way, for rich mental representations of word meaning to develop, we need all of the above to occur.
How well we know a word
"Knowing a word is not an all or nothing proposition" (Beck et al., 2015, p.10).

Have a look at these two models:

Dale (1965) describes our word knowledge levels as:

1. Never saw it before

2. Heard (or saw) it but don't know what it means

3. Recognise it in context as having something to do with _______.

4. Know it well

Beck, McKeown & Omanson proposed a more detailed model in 1987:

1. No knowledge

2. General sense (e.g. I know it means something bad)

3. Narrow, context-bound knowledge

4. Has knowledge of the word but is unable to recall it readily enough to use it/know it in an appropriate situation

5. Rich, de-contextualised knowledge of a word's meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses

Beck, McKeown and Kucan (2013) describe this in detail in their book which I have put as a suggested resource below. Developing high quality mental representations of words involves teaching all aspects detailed above. Make sure your vocabulary instruction has a large focus on text level language. Multiple repetitions and/or multiple encounters are required. We are aiming for "rich, de-contextualised knowledge of a word's meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses" (Beck, McKeown and Kucan, 2013, p.11).
The aim is a literate lexicon
"The 'literate lexicon' includes difficult words that occur in academic contexts, particularly in middle school and high school classes that students often take. In science, for example, students may encounter words such as prediction, deformable, exploration, and genetic; in mathematics, literate words may include algebraic, Pythagorean, transformation, and geometric; and in literature, students may encounter affectation, luminous, meticulous, and contiguous (Nippold, 2017a). Of note, all of these words are morphologically complex in that they each contain a root word and one or more affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and that all of the words express abstract meanings and have a low frequency of occurrence in the language." ( Nippold, 2018, p.211-212)

A literate lexicon includes well developed Tier 2 (and 3) vocabulary. The capacity to define words, and create associations, combinations, and relations between words, are critical skills in the academic context, and they are essential skills for RC. Learning in context is not enough.

Good vocabulary knowledge is associated with good RC in the literature. Knowing many words in oral language is helpful for RC, but what is more helpful is knowing many words in the context of text. As much as possible we should base our vocabulary work in text. My view is that it is best to develop Decoding (D)/Word Recognition (WR) and oral language in the first two years of school then get stuck into text-level approaches as detailed below.

How to choose words

Beck, McKeown and Kucan (2013) and others are clear that Tier 2 words are the most important and valuable to teach. Of course, domain specific words matter too (Tier 3). The work of Averil Coxhead (2000) has been so helpful in this regard. She developed and evaluated The Academic Word List (AWL) as part of her master thesis.

If you are interested in reading about the development, evaluation and later reflections, these are the details you will need:
Coxhead, A. (2000). A new Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238. Coxhead, A. (2012). The Academic Word List 10 years on: Research and teaching implications. TESOL Quarterly, 45(2), 355-362.
Some word list links are provided in the suggested resources below.

Deliberate, direct, teacher-led instruction

I mostly use the work of Hollingsworth and Ybarra (2018) to guide me in developing instruction and lesson plans. I've listed their book below in the suggested resources.

Below is a brief sample outline of part of one lesson. It's an example of what the first slide might look like when teaching a new word. I've chosen a rare word to make this is bit more interesting for you. I suggest developing a base slide or two. Develop a list of Tier 2 words that you want to teach. You can then insert the target word and appropriate examples for each slide.
_________________________________________________________________________
absquatulate

Definition: To leave suddenly or abruptly

Synonyms: abscond, bolt, depart, disappear, flee, scram, run off

Antonyms: stay, arrive, stand still
Sentence examples:
During the important meeting, the woman apologised about her need to absquatulate.

I was at the park hoping my toddler would not absquatulate like last time.

When caught digging in the garden my dog seems to absquatulate.
This is tedius. In my mind I am absquatulating. The shopkeeper absquatulated with the day's earnings. As an introvert, absquatulation is my favourite pastime.
_________________________________________________________________________

Here are some examples of partial scripts and steps to guide you:

Today we are going to learn a new word.

Repeat both the word and the meaning 2-3 times.

Activate prior learning and link to real life examples.

Ask students to tell you (out loud) what the word is.

Ask students to tell their partner what the word is.

Ask the students to write the word.

Then I'll say the word again and they'll say the meaning (all aloud)

Then I'll say the meaning and they'll say the word (all aloud)

I will ask 1-3 students to tell me the meaning of the word (random selection)

Then: Let's talk about some synonyms. Remember a synonym is a different word with the same meaning. [go over the synonyms]

Let's talk about some antonyms. Remember an antonym is a different word with the opposite meaning, [go over the antonyms]

Present written sentence examples. Start simple and straightforward (3-5 clear sentence examples that use the word correctly). You can use a picture to support each sentence if you'd like.

Present some written sentences where it is used correctly and incorrectly and get them to identify which are examples and non-examples. I expect them to justify in full sentences why.

Get them to write three different sentences using the word (give feedback/get them to share).

Notice in the examples I've provided that there is an increase in complexity (via morphology). Depending on their level, you can play around with morpheme additions. Do not do this in the first instance but something like this is a good task for students during guided and independent practice. You can get students to write a range of sentences using various affixes with the root words and these can then be discussed as a whole class or they can discuss with their peers and compare/contrast their examples.

Another step-up task could be to have students write/describe a time they felt a need to absquatulate and why. This requires them to demonstrate a deeper knowledge of the word (an application).

Further step-ups relate to learning to play with the word meaning in their writing. Being able to use a word to evoke emotions, to induce laughter, to set a scene or mood, are all ways students demonstrate to us they have developed a deep knowledge of the word meaning.

Remember Beck, McKeown & Omanson's (1987) stages of word knowledge from above:

1. No knowledge

2. General sense (e.g. I know it means something bad)

3. Narrow, context-bound knowledge

4. Has knowledge of the word but is unable to recall it readily enough to use it/know it in an appropriate situation

5. Rich, de-contextualised knowledge of a word's meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses

Your vocabulary instruction is building stages 2-5, so sequence your instruction accordingly. Start basic and move to more complex. Stage 5 really develops over time after reading (and writing) the word in many contexts, for many purposes and audiences, and attaching and detaching various morphemes from its root. Stage 5 can't necessarily be taught, but set them up as best you can for this to develop over time. As the minimum, when they come across words in text that we have explicitly taught them, we want them to be at Level 3 (above).

In-context instruction and strategies for students

Of course, in-context instruction matters too. Some would say it matters more! Teaching students to monitor and self-manage their comprehension is vital. We need to explicitly teach them how to do this, not just expect them to figure it out. There are two main ways we can do this.
Contextual abstraction
This is a fancy term for guessing. Guessing is not okay when we are teaching Decoding (D)/Word Recognition (WR) as per the Simple View of Reading (SVR), but it is strongly encouraged in the Linguistic Comprehension (LC) aspect of the SVR. This is an important distinction. We need to teach students how to make informed guesses as to the meanings of unknown words, when possible.
The four contexts (as per Beck, McKeown & Kulcan, 2013, page 7)
How easy or hard unknown words are to guess the meaning for depends on the context within which they occur. The four contexts unknown words occur in are listed here from easiest to hardest:

1. Directive - the context is likely to lead to the student identifying the correct meaning

2. General - the context provides enough information for the student to place the word in a general category

3. Non-directive - the context is likely to offer no assistance as to the word's meaning

4. Mis-directive - the context is likely to direct the student to the opposite meaning
Some key questions for students to ask
Teach students how to interrogate text-level language through demonstration and provision of guided practice, then support students to be able to do this for themselves. Key questions that we want them to be able to ask when confronted with unknown words are:

1. What is the purpose of the unknown word here? Is it acting as a noun, verb, adjective etc.? Obviously, you need to have explicitly taught word categories previously.

2. What is going on around this word? Look at meaning word by word then overall in the sentence or paragraph. Look at syntax. What is the structure telling us in part or in its totality?

3. What detail or idea is missing that this word could account for?

Then students are expected to make some educated guesses. This can be done by inserting some words they know the meaning for, in place of the unknown word. Then their role is to decide what the added word does to the sentence in terms of meaning and structure.

4. What does the hypothesised word meaning do to this sentence? Do I think I am on the right track?

5. [ask a peer] Do you think this makes sense? Why or why not? Do you have any other suggestions? What is the reasoning behind your suggestions?

Given the four contexts that I have described above, these questions can vary in their effectiveness but students are always taking something away from this learning experience with respect to their LC and Reading Comprehension (RC) if we are encouraging them to analyse and deduce in such a structured and thorough way.

In your deliberate direct vocabulary instruction you can also incorporate these contexts i.e. explicitly teach students that words can and do appear in these four contexts. Get students to write sentences with the new word(s) they have learned in the lesson, using them in each of the four ways. They can then swap with their partners/peers and compare/contrast.
Morphological analysis
First students need to know what morphemes are and how to identify them. Teaching vocabulary requires teaching morphology. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaningful information within a word. There are two different ways we can categorise and describe morphemes.
Free and bound morphemes
In the word 'cats' there are two meaningful elements. The 'cat' part tells us we are talking about an animal that can be a pet, it has whiskers, it purrs, it can scratch etc. The 's' part tells us that there is more than one cat. This is the plural 's' marker.

'Cat' is what we call a free morpheme because it is free to stand alone. We can also refer to this as the root word. The 's' is what we call a bound morpheme because it needs to be bound to another word to function. On its own it does nothing.
Lexical and grammatical morphemes
Morphemes can be lexical (function as key markers of meaning) or grammatical (function as key markers of grammar).

Lexical morphemes have dictionary definitions i.e. they are free morpheme/root words. Lexical morphemes can also be affixes like 'pre-' meaning 'previous to' or 'before'. The key here is that they have meaning as opposed to grammatical function.

The word 'happy' is a lexical morpheme. It has a dictionary definition.The word 'happily' has two morphemes. The '-ly' is a grammatical morpheme. An adjective has been changed to an adverb. Morphemes are grammatical when they perform a strictly grammatical function. They are not words. They are morphemes. Some suffix examples are:

- Present progressive -ing

- Plural 's'

- Past tense -ed

I suggest explicitly teaching affixes. The direct teaching advice I gave above works fine for this. You can find lists of prefixes and suffixes online and there are some structured word approaches available. With younger students (early years) I suggest teaching grammatical morphemes first, orally and in text form, then you can focus on teaching the many lexical bound morphemes (prefixes and suffixes) in text form from mid-primary school onward.

Teaching students to complete morphological analysis once the above has been taught:

1. Model how to do it many times

2. Guided practice with feedback

3. Independent practice

We want them to be able to independently:

1. Identify the number of morphemes

2. Identify the root word (free morpheme) and the affixes (bound morphemes)

3. Identify the meaning of as many morphemes as possible

4. Ask themselves whether this looks like or sounds like any other words that they know

5. Make a guess as to what the collective meaning could be and how morphemes are influencing one another

6. Discuss with a peer and compare ideas

7. Ask the teacher for support (provide explicit direct instruction as required)
A final note on in-context learning
There is of course scope for direct instruction in-context too, for one student, a small group, or the whole class as appropriate. I often encourage students to use their strategies first but when I can see that the context of the word is mis-directive or non-directive I will usually break from the task to explicitly teach it. Remember, strong mental representations require phonological, semantic, orthographic, and morphological features to be taught and reinforced multiple times in multiple contexts.

What the literature tells us

- Vocabulary is a predictor of RC in children and adolescents

- Once students are reading, vocabulary development depends on exposure to print NOT oral language

- Explicit teaching of words alone is insufficient and in-text/in-context experiences are vital

- Explicit vocabulary instruction research findings are mixed i.e. some studies only show improved RC for words learned, not general RC improvement (e.g. Elleman et al., 2009; Wright & Cervetti, 2017)

- Less skilled readers benefit more from explicit vocabulary instruction than skilled readers (therefore it makes a good RtI Tier 2 intervention for those who are behind)

- Interactive instruction is better than definition/dictionary based. I've described above some ways to ensure you do this. Do not get students to look up unknown words in the dictionary. Word learning has to go so much deeper.

Suggested resources

Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Beck, McKeown & Kucan (2013)

Explicit Direction Instruction: The Power of the Well-Crafted, Well-Taught Lesson by Hollingsworth & Ybarra (2018)

Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook by Oakhill, Cain and Carsten (2015) [Chapter 5 - Knowing and Learning the Meaning of Words]

LSHSS Forum on Vocabulary Across the School Grades: https://academy.pubs.asha.org/2019/10/lshss-forum-on-vocabulary-across-the-school-grades/

https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist (Coxhead, 2000)

http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm (based on Coxhead, 2000)

http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/nawl-new-academic-word-list (Browne, 2013)

https://cer.schools.nsw.gov.au/professional-learning/middle-years.html (NSW Centre for Effective Reading, nd)

Professor Pamela Snow provides an introduction to vocabulary instruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aAsP_my4Do&feature=youtu.be

Emina McLean talks about how to teach vocabulary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfTz3-2HtaI&feature=youtu.be

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How to teach vocabulary for reading comprehension

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A little about vocabulary Vocabulary tiers Vocabulary can be divided into three tiers. They are: Tier 1 - common in oral language, likely learned from everyday experiences (e.g. 'eat', 'animal') Tier 2 - academic, procedural, common in written language, essential for reading and writing (e.g. 'evaluate', 'conceptualise

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Examples of the tools we use in orthographic inquiry: word sorts, word webs, word sums, matrices, and flowcharts are shown.

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Science of Reading: The Podcast, hosted by Susan Lambert, delivers the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Listen today!

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One of the hardest things for us to fit into our day is listening to every student read aloud. In days gone by, this was a daily feature. Even if s...

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Timothy Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University. He has written over 150 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited over 15 books or curriculum programs on reading education.

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Imagine the best stories being read aloud to you by our favourite storytellers - well that's Story Box Library!

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Last week I went to two days of training with Speech Pathology Australia's queen of knowing everything about literacy, Dr Roslyn Nielson from NSW. They were two excellent days, jam-packed with blogworthy ideas and information, about which (it's only fair to warn you) I will be raving for some time.

One neat metaphor for reading Ros presented is The Reading Rope, devised by US psychologist Dr Hollis Scarborough, who has kindly given me permission to put it in this blog post, as long as I don't alter it, and include the published source ¹.

Dr Scarborough emailed me saying, "I drew it originally for talks with parents and I think it works especially well for that purpose", and I think a plain English blog about sounds and spellings is probably the internet equivalent.

Many strands

According to the Reading Rope metaphor, skilled reading is like a rope woven of many strands.

At the top are multiple Language Comprehension strands - background knowledge, vocabulary, grammar, semantics, verbal reasoning and knowledge about literacy itself, for example how a book is organised and the difference between fiction and non-fiction, formal and informal writing, and a letter and an advertisement.

At the bottom are some Word Recognition strands - awareness of the sound structure of words, the idea that letters of the alphabet represent sounds, knowledge of which letters/patterns correspond to which sounds, and recognition of familiar words.

These twist together to form the two main strands of the rope.

Lower and upper strands

With practice, weaving the main lower, Word Recognition strand becomes more and more automatic, until it is done effortlessly and unconsciously.

At the same time, language skill development, practice and life experience allows you to weave the upper strand in an increasingly strategic way.

If any of the strands are weak or not tight enough, this affects the strength of the whole rope.

Language disorders significantly weaken the upper strand, which is one of the reasons most children with language disorders struggle with reading (as well as listening, speaking and writing).

Poor phonemic awareness and spelling pattern knowledge lead to a weak lower strand, again weakening the whole rope and making fluent, skilled reading for meaning difficult.

The Writing Rope?

There's no similar diagram of the Writing Rope, but if you drew one (I won't try, I can't draw for nuts) it would have to include all the strands of the Reading Rope, and more.

Writing invariably involves reading (well, most of us check what we have written before we show anyone else), whereas we often can and do read without writing.

Writing is a complex fine motor activity, whether you're typing, holding a pen or up a ladder with a paintbrush. Writing taxes your spelling pattern knowledge much more than reading does - how many people do you know who can read but not spell well?

Writing involves planning a text and thinking about the audience's perspective more than reading does, plus you have to use expressive language rather than receptive language when you write. Most people find putting an idea into words harder than understanding someone else doing it.

"I didn't know Speech Pathologists worked on reading"

The Reading Rope is about the best answer I've seen to the question, "What have Speech Pathologists got to do with reading?"

On the surface, reading looks like a simple, visual activity, but when you take a closer look at the strands from which it is made, it's very complex, and most of the strands are related to speech sounds and/or language. Weaknesses in the speech/language strands are as much core business for Speech Pathologists as other communication difficulties.

1. Scarborough, H. (2001 Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory and practice. In S. Newman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of Early Literacy Research.pp. 97-110. New York, Guilford Press.

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Last week I went to two days of training with Speech Pathology Australia's queen of knowing everything about literacy, Dr Roslyn Nielson from NSW. They were two excellent days, jam-packed with blogworthy ideas and information, about which (it's only fair to warn you) I will be raving for some time.

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If information processing theory attempts to articulate the unobservable (Tracey and Morrow, 2012), then it is relevant to explore, with the development of scanning technology, what is observable in the brain when reading occurs. This is particularly relevant if we reject the concept that reading is a natural and inherent process that can be discovered in much the same manner that humans develop language fluency....

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This post has been written as a quick response to a debate on Twitter about whether teachers should be teaching letter names or sounds or both to young children just embarking on learning to read and spell

Until young children (Reception/Y1) are secure with sounds - i.e, they understand that letters are representations of sounds in words - they should not be introduced to letter names. Teaching letter names (as well as sounds) to young children is bound to cause many children confusion and it increases the amount of cognitive load imposed on the child. The child is learning how to segment and blend, they are learning the code and the direction of the code from speech sounds to their individual spellings, and, as well as all of that, they also have to cope with the medium in which reading lessons are presented (extraneous cognitive load). Adding something that is as inessential as teaching them letter names at this point is completely unnecessary.

Teaching letter names also flies in the face of all logic: how does saying the letter names S A T enable us to hear the word 'sat'? How does saying the letter names F L I G H T enable us to hear the word 'flight'. It doesn't and so far no one has been able to explain to me how it does. On the other hand, what makes perfect sense is that if we say the sounds /s/ /a/ /t/, we can straight away hear the word 'sat'. By the same token, if we say the sounds /f/ /l/ /ie/ /t/, we can hear the word 'flight'.

What's more, children taught letter names are caught between two different orientations. If they are, as some are, beguiled by letter names, trying in vain to read and spell words using them, the confusion very often lasts well into secondary school. Key Stages 2, 3 and 4 abound with students who can't read and write properly and are thoroughly mixed up about how the writing system works.

But, understand that teaching letter names from the start isn't the same thing as talking about sound symbols collectively as 'letters'! So, for example, a teacher might teach the two-letter spelling < ss > and say, "This," pointing to the < ss >, "is two letters but it's one sound. It's /s/. Say /s/ here." Why is this different from telling the pupil that the spelling is 'double ess'? For three very good reasons: first, the alphabet code is a code for the sounds in our speech and the two-letter spelling < ss > in the example represents the sound /s/; second, because we want to orient pupils in the direction of understanding how the code works: we can spell sounds with one, two, three or four letters; and third because we want children to understand the direction of the code: from each sound in speech to its spelling.

To take another example: the pupil is reading a book and stumbles over the spelling < ea > in the word 'stream'. Assuming that the pupil is still working with the one-to-one sound-spelling correspondences and also that the pupil is being taught to segment and blend to a high degree of proficiency, the teacher simply runs their pencil under the spelling and says, "This is /ee/. Say /ee/ here." And that's it! Really simple! And the bonus is that the pupil is being 'sensitised' to what will shortly be taught formally.

If the pupil is writing, the teacher should be encouraging pupils to think about how to spell sounds in words as they write. A high-quality phonics programme will be doing this from the start. Inevitably, pupils will come to areas of complexity that, as yet, exceed their competence. Again, when the pupil says they cannot spell a particular word, there is a judgement call. If the child is still in the early stages of learning the code and they want to write a relatively complex word like 'delicious', clearly there too many different complexities to make sense to a child. In this instance, the teacher can and should supply the word. However, if the difficulty is with a word, such as 'bright', for example, the teacher should be asking the pupil what the difficult bit in the word is for them. As before, if a pupil is working with one-to-ones and can segment and blend, the bit beyond their present knowledge will be the spelling of /ie/. In this case, the teacher writes the spelling < igh > on a whiteboard and says, "This is how we spell /ie/ in 'bright'". Again, what could be easier?

When pupils reach the stage of learning that sounds can be spelt in more than one way and that most spellings can represent more than one sound, the formulation changes. By now, the pupils should understand the nature of the alphabetic code: i.e, that letters, singly or in combination, represent sounds in our language. This is when the teacher no longer has to write the spelling on a whiteboard but can simply respond to the question 'How do I spell the /ie/ in 'bright'?" with "It's the i g h (said as letter names) spelling".

This technique works perfectly well for learners of any age. At age five, the teacher may well need to write the required spelling on a whiteboard; at age nine, when the word is 'archaeology' and the pupils are learning about the Egyptians, the teacher can give the required spelling as letter names: 'We spell the sound /ee/ in this word 'ay' 'ee' ."

Once pupils understand how the code works, letter names then become a useful adjunct to our teaching - in effect, a shortcut. Instead of having to write on a whiteboard or in a book, we can give the letter names. If children are taught how to read and spell in a systematic, highly structured way by people who understand the right combination of skills, concepts and code knowledge needed to learn such a complex body of knowledge, they are likely to be able to impart the requisite knowledge at the appropriate moment.

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This post has been written as a quick response to a debate on Twitter about whether teachers should be teaching letter names or sounds or both to young children just embarking on learning to read and spell Until young children (Reception/Y1) are secure with sounds - i.e, they understand that letters are representations of sounds in words - they should not be introduced to letter names.

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Phonemic awareness instruction: What's the evidence? (eminamclean.com)

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Phonemic awareness instruction: What's the evidence?

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What is phonemic awareness? Phonemic awareness is a component of phonological awareness. "Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words" (NRP, p. 2-1) Phonemic awareness skills include phoneme isolation, identification, categorisation, blending, segmenting, and deletion. What does the research evidence tell us?

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Leveled Reading Groups Don’t Work. Why Aren’t We Talking About It?

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You might want to sit down for this one, friends. The most pervasive practice in K–5 reading instruction is probably small group work in which students are grouped by reading level. Experts estimat…

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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5 tips for effective writing conferences - Oz Lit Teacher Narissa Leung

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Writing conferences can be a daunting task for teachers. These 5 practical tips will help make all of your conferences more effective.

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Access a free inspiring image, story starter and short burst writing activities, every day! Inspire your most reluctant writers and improve writing stamina

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Welcome to The Literacy Shed - the home of visual literacy. Here at Literacy Shed we aim to provide teachers with high quality films and animations that can be used in the primary classroom to enhance the teaching of reading and writing. All of the films on the site we think are suitable for primary aged children although some films may not be suitable for younger children. We urge that teachers watch any films before showing them to children.

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A website for teachers filled with ideas for literacy teaching using visual resources such as film, animation, photographs and picture books.

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Suggested Learning Intentions

To gather and organise data to answer questions about our world

To explore various graphic techniques and explain how they provide a different picture of the shape of the data

Sample Success Criteria

I can gather and organise my data to answer questions about the sample population the data came from

I can demonstrate my solution and thinking using a variety of manipulatives

I can describe key features of graphs

I can construct graphs in ways that help me represent and understand data

Expand all

Materials and texts

Coloured pencils

1m strips of thick paper or card (one per group)

1m rulers

Tape

Calculators (optional)

Pet Graph problem: docx PDF

Sample survey topics: docx PDF

Frequency Table: docx PDF

Data Journals: docx PDF

Get started

Year 5 students are naturally interested in their peers. This stage provides an opportunity for students to find out more about their classmates. Pairs of students will formulate questions, collect, and represent 'Class Statistics' data using frequency tables, strip graphs and pie graphs.
What is data?
Tune in students using the following discussion prompts:

What is data?

Why do we need to collect data?

When do we collect data?

Why is data collection a valuable tool?

In what situations may we need to pose questions and collect data?

What's in a graph?
Start by displaying a graph with no labels on a large screen, such as the graph from the Pet Graph problem (source: NRICH, University of Cambridge). A downloadable version of the graph is available in the Materials and texts section.

Facilitate a maths talk that will get your students asking questions and thinking and talking about data. Use the following prompts to assist:

What do you think this graph is about?

What questions do you think the person who made this graph was trying to answer?

How do you think the data was collected?

What labels would you include to make it easier to read and interpret the graph?

What statements can you make based on the graph?

Would the results be different if....[change of sample/population/setting]?

Also draw students' attention to 'shape of the data':

"a sense of how data are spread out or grouped, what characteristics about the data set as a whole can be described and what the data tell us in a global way about the population form which they are taken" (Van de Walle et al., 2019, p. 530).

Discuss the way the column graph shows how the data clusters in different categories and they way the type of graph adds a dimension of quantity. Ask students: Where is the data 'clustering'? Where is it not?
Pet Graph
Next, distribute copies of the Pet Graph problem to students. Explain that students should read the problem and figure out the solution without using pencil or paper.

Give students time to solve the problem in their heads. Ask students to quietly give a 'thumbs up' against their chest to signal when they have the solution.

Invite students to share their strategies and ask them to justify their answers. As students share, record their strategies and record their names on an anchor chart. This gives the student ownership over their particular strategy. Invite more students to share by asking, 'Did anyone do it differently?'

Enable students requiring further support by asking:

Which bar was the easiest to identify?

How could you record what you know?

Extend students by asking them to devise their own class data problem.

Go deeper

In this section, students pose questions and survey their classmates. They learn how to represent the information in strip graphs and pie graphs. The value of having students construct their own graphs is that they are personally invested in the data, and they learn how a graph conveys information. It is recommended that students work in pairs for this task.
Formulating questions
As a whole class, brainstorm ideas about when or why we need to collect data and the types of questions that are asked.

Ask students: 'What is the difference between a statement and a question?'

One example is that we use questions to help us gather information about a statement. Invite students to develop a statement about something they would like to explore and collect data about.

Next, develop and refine questions so that they are worded in a way in which they can be answered using statistics (see Stage 2). Model how to create questions for students, focusing on ensuring precise wording is used. For example, if a student is asking something about 'the most popular' - what do they mean by that? How do they check? Are their questions going to give them the information they want?
Collecting data - which method?
Compare methods of collecting data. For example, which method should be used to decide what month has the greatest number of student birthdays in it? Data could be collected by surveying students as they arrive at school, using the class roll, creating a tally sheet for students in each classroom to complete or grouping students in the school into birth months on the oval or in a large space and counting.

Ask: ' Which method would be the simplest? The most helpful? The most accurate?'

Students decide on the method they will use to answer their questions and justify their choice. Why do they think it will be helpful?

Once students have decided on their method, ask students how they will systematically record their data (unless they are using pre-existing data). For example, students might construct a Frequency Table with the following the headings: Category, Tally, Frequency and Fraction. Discuss the definitions of each of these terms.

Demonstrate how to record the categories and data in the frequency table. For example, if the topic is 'Favourite Drinks', the categories should be options that will be popular with other children their age. Choose four popular categories, for example, soft drink, milk shake, hot chocolate, cordial. All other choices will be counted as 'other'.

Revise how to record tally marks and record the number in the Frequency column. Demonstrate how to record the frequency as a fraction of the whole class. For example, if 6 out of 22 students prefer soft drink, the fraction will be ⁶/₂₂.

Provide time for students to collect and record their data.

Enable students by helping them to make, record and count the tally marks (by fives) and record the frequency and fractions. For a class of 22 students, for example:

Extend students by asking them to estimate the probability of a random student having a certain preference.
Represent the data
Introduce the students to making a strip graph.

Ask students 'How might we present our data on this 1-metre-long strip of paper?'

On a strip graph, the segments of the strip represent the different categories. The strip graph will be broken into five parts to represent the five different choices.

Ask students 'How might I divide my 1 metre strip into 22 parts (for 22 students)?'

Encourage students to suggest how to divide the strip. For example, students may suggest that 100 divided by 20 is 5, and 22 is close to 20, so each part is close to, but slightly smaller than 5 centimetres long. Students may wish to use a calculator to discover the exact answer, which may lead to discussion of 'rounding'.

Divide the strip based on student suggestions. Identify each category through shading and labelling on the strip.

Ask students: 'What if one of the choices has zero frequencies?'

Provide time for students to represent their data on a strip graph.

Fasten the ends of the strip together to create a circle. Place the circle on a piece of paper and draw a circle around it. Estimate the centre of the circle and mark the five sections (categories) by drawing lines from the centre to the edge of the circle. Next, demonstrate how to turn the strip graph into a pie graph. Remind students that pie graphs (or circle graphs) are a useful way to show relative sizes or proportion, making it easy to see favourite options immediately.

Mark each section of the pie graph with the category and the fraction. For example, 'Soft drink ⁶/₂₂'.

Draw students' attention to the 'shape' of the data and how pie graphs each show how the data cluster in different categories. "A pie graph focuses more on the relative values of this clustering" (Van de Walle, 2019, p.530).

Enable students requiring further support by using a beaded string and looping it around the circle. Invite students to count the beads in each sector. This visual aid helps students to see connections between the fraction of the class total (e.g., ⁴/₂₂) and the percentage.

Extend students by demonstrating how to convert fractions to percentages using a calculator. A percentage is a fraction of 100, so ⁶/₂₂ x 100 = 27%.

Areas for further exploration

You could extend student understanding of pie graphs by:

providing students with this pie graph and ask them to create a short story to match the data; prompt them to describe the survey question and the total amount of survey participants

exploring misleading graphs.

Reflect and consolidate

Interpreting data
Make a wall display of students' work. Invite students to present their findings in small groups. Model how to describe data and make basic inferences. Depending on the data produced by your class, some prompts could include:

What does this data tell us about our class? What doesn't it tell us?

Where does/doesn't the data 'cluster'?

What might we infer about Year 5 students?

What similarities and differences might we find if we surveyed another class? Or if we surveyed teachers? Variability is an important statistical concept.

Assess student understanding of data vocabulary by asking them to complete a Frayer model. Vocabulary terms might include data, percentage, column graph and pie graph. You might divide the class into groups and ask each group to examine a different statistical term, then present their thinking.You could use this strategy to build data vocabulary throughout the learning sequence, andcollate the Frayer models to build a word wall. More information about using Frayer models to support student understanding can be found here.

Formative assessment of student learning can include the use of data journals. You might ask students to sketch their graphs and explain what each graph shows, or to describe the mathematical skills learned in this stage. Invite student to provide evidence of how they are demonstrate their current understanding of data:

I can gather and organise my data to answer questions about the sample population the data came from.

I can construct graphs in ways that help me represent and understand the data.

I can describe key features of graphs.

References

Smith, D. J., 2020. If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World's People. 2 ed. Toronto: Kids Can Press Ltd..

Walle, V. d., Bay-Williams, J., Lovin, L. & Karp, K., 2018. Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics. Developmentally appropriate instruction for grades 6-8. 3 ed. New York: Pearson Education.

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1. Class Statistics | DET - Learning sequences

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Suggested Learning Intentions To gather and organise data to answer questions about our world To explore various graphic techniques and explain how they provide a different picture of the shape of the data Sample Success Criteria I can gather and organise my data to answer questions about the sample population

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ABOUT

Dr Nathaniel Swain

I am a Teacher, Instructional Coach, Researcher and Writer. I am passionate about language, literacy and learning, and effective and engaging teaching for all students.

I teach a class of first year foundation students, in a space affectionately known as Dr Swain's Cognitorium in a Government Primary School in Melbourne, Australia. I also work as Science of Learning Specialist in my school.

In 2019, I founded a community of teachers and other educators committed to the Science of Learning: THINK FORWARD EDUCATORS.

A NEW BLOG ABOUT teaching a GROUP OF LEARNERS IN THE FIRST YEAR OF PRIMARY SCHOOL.

The Cognitorium is a place which holds the learning experience as sacred. Journey with me as I put the Science of Learning into practice, honouring the experiences, motivations, and curiosities of each of my students.

Movers, Shakers and Policymakers
Dr Nathaniel Swain: prep teacher, instructional coach, writer

Australian Teacher Magazine, June Issue 2022, By Grant Quarry

Keen to chart his own path, the first 10 years or so of Dr Nathaniel Swain's career were spent studying linguistics, then Speech Pathology, a PhD in Education, and then lecturing at Melbourne Uni. Having built a real passion about young people at the margins of society, he is determined that they have excellent learning experiences. Now teaching foundation students in a school in southeast Melbourne, he's doing some incredible work to ensure that every single student learns to read and write and can do maths from a young age.

EducationHQ and Australian Teacher Magazine have a very reasonable yearly subscription which I recommend for teachers to stay up-to-date for everything affecting Australian educators now.

An 'uncomfortable truth': Do innovative learning spaces really improve outcomes?

Australian Teacher Magazine, March 22, 2022, By Sarah Duggan

Dr Nathaniel Swain has no qualms that his space might look 'out of step' with current layout and design trends.

He is well aware that to the casual observer his classroom might appear different. For starters, desks are arranged in neat, front-facing rows. There's not a collaborative 'cluster' or 'U' shape formation in sight. For the teacher, instructional coach and researcher, it's a simple set up that feeds perfectly into his instructional practice and the learning routines he wants to establish with his prep students.

Striking Instagram feeds that now showcase teachers' decorative endeavours don't necessarily tell the full story, he suggests. "A lot of people look at those feeds and there's a lot of beautiful classrooms and stunning spaces, and really interesting aesthetic things that are done. What those pictures don't reflect is actually how the learning is working in those spaces..."

"It's the quality of the learning taking place that really matters, he says. "I think what's really pushing teachers all the time is, 'How do I make sure my classroom doesn't look tacky or boring?' Or there's pressure that there has to be stuff on the walls that teaches students, rather than the teacher being there to actually teach..."

EducationHQ and Australian Teacher Magazine have a very reasonable yearly subscription which I recommend for teachers to stay up-to-date for everything affecting Australian educators now.

Literacy as easy as A,B,C? Not in all Victorian schools

the age op-ed, February 18, 2022, By Nathaniel Swain

It is a reasonable assumption that schools will teach our kids to read and write proficiently. But data from national and international assessments reveal a large and persistent group of underperforming Australian students, many of whom are functionally illiterate. So, how well are most schools teaching the foundations of literacy?

Time-poor teachers struggling to prepare effective lessons for students

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, January 31, 2022, By Lisa Visentin

Nathaniel Swain, a teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne, said he'd noticed an increase in recent years in the scope of teachers' responsibilities and the number of administrative tasks they were required to do, with the stress driving some out of the profession. He said his school was in the process of implementing a plan to tackle burnout by creating shared resources and curriculum materials, which would be ready by the end of the year.

Minister signals curriculum changes

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, February 5, 2022, By Jordan Baker and Adam Carey

The proposed national curriculum also reinforces the primacy of phonics in teaching young primary school students to read, a development that could place pressure on Victoria to follow NSW's recent cue and move away from its dominant method of balanced literacy.

Nathaniel Swain, a speech pathologist and primary school teacher at Brandon Park Primary in Melbourne's south-east, said the current Victorian curriculum has "mixed messages around how we want early readers to decipher text. They have phonics in there, and they have some of the foundations in there, but they have a whole lot of other stuff thrown in there as well," Dr Swain said.

Brandon Park diverges from the Victorian curriculum in that it emphasises synthetic phonics - which teaches children the 44 sounds in the English language and the letter combinations that make them - over balanced literacy, where students are taught to memorise whole words and learn phonics while reading stories.

Experts urge review of masks in four weeks amid fears students can't hear

Sydney Morning Herald Interview, February 1, 2022, By Jordan Baker

Nathaniel Swain, a teacher and speech pathologist, said he struggled to hear quieter students when they wore masks. "Quieter kids will also tend to hide behind the mask and not want to speak up and find it difficult and muffled," he said.

"Students with [English as second language] backgrounds are not as expressive as they might have been without the masks on." Some struggle to understand. "They need to see the face and the mouth and piece that together with the acoustic information," he said.

the community of teachers and other educators committed to social equity, using the Science of Learning

Founded by Dr Nathaniel Swain

Connect with like-minded professionals

Discuss research-based practices and initiatives

Find solutions to your questions

Develop professional knowledge and skills

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I am a Teacher, Instructional Coach, Researcher and Writer. I am passionate about language, literacy and learning, and effective and engaging teaching for all students. I teach a class of first year foundation students, in a space affectionately known as Dr Swain's Cognitorium in a Government Primary School in Melbourne, Australia.

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It was a pleasure to collaborate with Jeanette Breen on this blog post. Jeanette is a learning specialist and educator at Templestowe Heights Primary School. She is also Head of Global Partnerships at No More Marking and chairs the Think Forward Educators Writing Network with Nathaniel Swain. Jeanette has been a passionate advocate for/driver of change when it comes to writing assessment and instruction in Australia over the last few years. Jeanette and I share our experiences in our own primary schools below, 12 months into the No More Marking Australian Writing Project.

Docklands Primary School (Emina McLean: English & Literacy Leader)

Docklands Primary School is a new primary school in inner-city Melbourne. Our school is on Wurundjeri country, part of the Kulin nation. We strive to provide an outstanding education for every student in our care, and to grow great teachers. We invest heavily in our people, because we know that no single asset or resource matters more to our aims. Our teachers are united in their commitment to practice excellence and driven by the pursuit of improvement in all we do. Our work is informed by the best available evidence, and we set high expectations for behavioural and academic outcomes for all students.

We are in our second year of operation. We have a diverse, warm, and vibrant school community. We have a close to average ICSEA value. More than 70% of our students speak English as an additional language. We have just over 400 students now, with more than half of those students in Foundation and Grade 1 (the first two years of school).

We participated in the first No More Marking Australian Writing Project in our first year (February/March 2021). One year later, we get to see how far we’ve come. I'm thrilled with the progress our teachers and students have made in writing in this 12-month period, particularly given:

2021 was our first year of operation.

We had multiple remote learning periods.

Our curriculum and pedagogy were new to most staff.

In 2021, the bulk of our professional learning, planning, instruction, and coaching. focus was early reading instruction and implementing our knowledge, language, and text rich curriculum across the school.

In 2021 we implemented The Writing Revolution (TWR) sentence-level and planning instructional techniques. All educators were given the book to read, and some staff completed the formal training through the Clarendon District. All educators accessed at least two in-house professional learning sessions that were focused on the what, why and how of TWR instructional techniques. We ensured writing was embedded in content daily across English, Humanities & Science, but we didn't get much further than that. 2022 was bookmarked as our big writing focus year, but excitingly it looks like we've already shifted the needle.

Grade 3 (March 2021)

Based on No More Marking (NMM) comparative judgement data, our 2021 Grade 3 cohort was below the national average scaled score and writing age.

Average scaled score

Average writing age

All schools

487

7 years 8 months

Docklands PS

476

7 years 4 months

Grade 3 (March 2022)

Now, we can compare our 2021 and 2022 NMM data. Our Grade 3 cohort this year is above the national average scaled score, and 2 years and 5 months ahead of the 2021 cohort.

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Average scaled score

Average writing age

All schools

496

8 years 0 months

Docklands PS

535

9 years 9 months

Grade 4 (March 2022)

We can also follow the 2021 Grade 3 cohort into Grade 4 in 2022. This cohort has increased their average scaled score to almost equal to the national average, and the average writing age has increased from 7 years 4 months in 2021 to 9 years 4 months in 2022. That’s two years growth in one year, a year ahead of the 12 months of growth we’d hoped for.

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Average scaled score

Average writing age

All schools

529

9 years 5 months

Docklands PS

527

9 years 4 months

We did not take part in the October 2021 assessment period, so we only have year on year comparisons. From now on we are assessing twice per year. Obviously, we need to dig deeper than scaled scores and writing ages, so we've developed our own writing sample evaluation checklists for each grade. These are based on/matched to our detailed writing scope and sequence, so we're clear on the grade-level knowledge and skill expectations and have solid information for reporting and feedback purposes.

While our significant grade and cohort growth is really pleasing, we need to work hard to close the achievement gap between girls and boys, and lift the students at the lower end of achievement. Our spread of scores is still too wide. In Grade 3, the average scaled scores range from 482-597 and the average writing ages range from 7 years 6 months to 14 years 1 month. In Grade 4, the average scaled scores range from 448-607 and the average writing ages range from 6 years 8 months to 14 years 1 month. Our gender gap is greater than the national average in Grade 3 (girls are ahead of boys by 23 months in our school compared to 7 months nationally) and Grade 4 (girls are ahead of boys 13 months in our school compared to 10 months nationally).

We have already commenced our 2022 professional learning focus on writing development and instruction, but perhaps it's useful to outline our 2021-22 plans.

2021 writing focus areas

Implement and embed high-quality spelling instruction (Sounds-Write and Spelling Mastery)

Implement and embed high-quality handwriting instruction

Implement and embed explicit Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary instruction

Implement and embed sentence-level writing instruction (including punctuation) across English, Humanities and Science

Implement and embed planning instruction (paragraph planning) from the end of Grade 1 in English, Humanities and Science and trial across genres

Ensure students write in every English, Humanities and Science lesson about what they read about and learn about

Ensure students spend 5 hours per week writing or receiving writing instruction

Teach summarisation and note-taking across subjects (3-6)

Pilot oral and written narrative language program in Prep

Pilot Comparative Judgement

2022 writing focus areas

Monitor quality of/further refine all 2021 efforts

Implement and embed oral and written narrative language program in Prep-2

Implement and embed genre macrostructure instruction (informational, narrative and persuasive)

Implement and embed genre microstructure instruction (functional grammar and linguistic devices)

Implement and embed NMM Comparative Judgement across the school to ensure more reliable and useful moderation practices

Implement and embed sentence-level knowledge assessments in 2-6 via the NMM Writing Hub

Implement and embed consistent formative assessment practices across the school

Implement and embed consistent whole class feedback practices across the school

Targeted attention - gender achievement gap

Targeted attention - lowest achievement group

We're grateful to NMM and TWR for providing some of the foundational tools for our writing assessment and instruction. Our results are well ahead of where we thought we’d be by now. We're so proud of our impactful and responsive teaching team and we're fortunate to have such expert and passionate educators. The teachers who have contributed to this student growth are Amber, Shevani, Dan, and Leah. Well done to you and your students!

Templestowe Heights Primary School (Jeanette Breen: Learning Specialist and 3/4 Team Leader)

Templestowe Heights PS, in the inner east of Melbourne just celebrated 50 years open. It has undergone many changes over its history. The last 5 years of strong leadership has resulted in a simple, yet powerful phrase - to be the school of choice in our local community. With this goal, THPS has invested in staff with a view to an impact on teacher knowledge and student outcomes. We have seen a great deal of growth, many challenges and identified several factors as making a difference:

Consistency - minimising variance between teachers and students

Maintaining high expectations - not placing a ceiling on a child’s capability

Commitment to gathering and using various forms of data - ensuring we are vulnerable and fluid in using the evidence of research

Our student population is just below 500 and growing all the time. The THPS response to online learning during the Victorian Covid lockdowns was efficient and demonstrated a connection to not just engagement and wellbeing, but to learning and instruction where we attempted to influence these in responsive and visible ways.

The understandings gained over this time about how learning works was instrumental thinking in the decision to overhaul our approach to Writing. Leading to the exploration of a Comparative Judgement (CJ) project with No More Marking (NMM). Responding to the need to minimise time wasted, and focus on essential skills drove us to several key changes:

1. A deeper understanding of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and its effect on young writers

a concrete, not abstract approach with a focus on writing mechanics

2. Dissection of Rosenshine’s Principles

retrieval and review of writing scaffolds

sequencing writing into small steps with opportunities for repeated practice

models and exemplars that provide visibility to sentence level work and assessment loops to measure whether these are embedding

closer look at feedback

less focus on extended writing

more efficient feedback that incorporates whole class, yet leads to greater impact for individuals

3. A development of the 5 pillars for Writing that scaffold our overarching approach bringing much writing research together in one framework

If you can, picture a school landscape at the cusp of these writing changes undergoing the first touchpoint of the CJ data. Our Year 3 cohort had the following:

Time 1 – March 2021

​

Average scaled score

Average writing age

All schools

487

7 years 8 months

Templestowe Heights PS

486

7 years 8 months

Based on the NMM data, our 2021 Year 3 cohort was consistent with the average when rated against 1,265 students from 25 schools in the first project.

If you can then imagine that for the rest of 2021, despite repeated lockdowns and school closure, we continued to implement our Writing changes. This took particular innovation throughout online learning, but in essence we were able to map writing skills in a more effective way, using what minimal time we had and armed with the framework described earlier.

In continuing to follow the Year 3 cohort:

Time 2 – October 2021

​

Average scaled score

Average writing age

All schools

501

8 years 3 months

Templestowe Heights PS

530

9 years 6 months

It is pleasing to see the growth particularly when we are measured against schools nationally (by this time we had 33 schools), who did not endure the same level of online learning as Victoria. Our students have grown by almost 2 years in a period of 8 months while the overall growth for schools in the project is consistent with time – 7 months. We can only surmise that our approach to writing is having an impact.

When the Year 3 cohort, now as Year 4s undergo CJ again in Feb 2022, this time against 42 schools and 1,975 students:

Time 3 – February 2022

​

Average scaled score

Average writing age

All schools

529

9 years 5 months

Templestowe Heights PS

554

11 years 11 months

We see the growth continue by over 2 years – however a caveat here. The writing age is a way to provide understanding to the scaled score and NMM have shared how this has looked across much larger sample sizes than the Australian one at present. It is enough to know that our students are performing well within their age group. We then layer this with our curriculum, we use the writing samples and exemplars to pull apart exactly how students are or are not, demonstrating their learning.

Furthermore, their writing samples and individual stories play a huge part in our dissection of the data. Tracking individual students over time and the gender gap (written about here), show us that while growth is to be celebrated there is still work to be done.

Our professional development is mapped to the continuing CJ data (projects will include Year 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10 in writing data) and will continue to focus on student learning linked to the 5 pillars. However, these are a general overview and we must dig deeper.

The challenge is the CLT for teachers and doing fewer things in greater depth, as Mary Myatt puts it - with clarity around the purpose.

However, the data is affirming evidence of purposeful work that is proving useful, which is the reason we began the search for a more effective way to measure writing in the first place.

Like DPS we have several writing goals aligned to our professional learning. These are linked to restructuring our assessment schedule. Like many educators I am hugely influenced by experts like Emina who generously share their resources.

Embedding teacher knowledge of the Science of Language

Tiering an intervention approach linked to phonological awareness

Aligning teacher moderation linked to CJ assessment data

Embedding of lesson structures that support Vocabulary instruction and background knowledge

Specifically, for writing this entails:

dedicated time to writing instruction across all curriculum areas

writing mechanics including handwriting

note-taking and paragraph outlining

building a scope and sequence that maps our instruction and assessment with research based tools (The Writing Revolution, DIBELS, Comparative Judgement)

As we continue this journey that began with curiosity about how we could better understand and influence our students as writers, the NMM data has played a key part. A scaled score or writing age is more meaningful when we are tracking an intentional approach versus the open-ended method left to student choice that we have moved away from. Looking beyond Australia to evidence of what is working globally is an exciting initiative that I hope can build our knowledge as educators here on our island. We look forward to sharing further insights as we seek to improve writing for all Australian students.

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It was a pleasure to collaborate with Jeanette Breen on this blog post. Jeanette is a learning specialist and educator at Templestowe Heights Primary School. She is also Head of Global Partnerships at No More Marking and chairs the Think Forward Educators Writing Network with Nathaniel Swain. Jeanet…

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Copyright © 2022 No More Marking All Rights Reserved

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The Writing Revolution, an invaluable resource for teachers of all kinds, is not only a tool for developing the command of the sentence. It is a framework for understanding and utilising the paragraph to organise thinking and writing.

In my recent talk for the Victorian DET, I explored some of the key methods for tackling paragraph writing with students. I covered the following main ideas in the talk:

Breaking paragraphs into manageable chunks

Planning and outlining paragraphs

Links between writing paragraphs and knowledge

Revising and editing

I hope this Professional Learning opportunity is of use to teachers of both primary and secondary students.

Watch my whole presentation here↓

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Supporting students with paragraph writing - Dr Nathaniel Swain

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The Writing Revolution, an invaluable resource for teachers of all kinds, is not only a tool for developing the command of the sentence. It is a framework for understanding and utilising the paragraph to organise thinking and writing. In my recent talk for the Victorian DET, I explored some of the key methods for tackling paragraph writing with students.

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The Writing Revolution is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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I am thrilled to share that I am embarking on a new project: developing an innovative line of math resources called "Escape Room Adventures"! These interactive digital puzzles are designed to engage students and facilitate the revision and practice of specific math concepts. Each adventure is centered around a unique ...

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Resources for teaching STEM to students.

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Love Maths offers a number of services to schools- classroom modelling, professional development days, planning effectively for maths and after-school professional development sessions. For information about how to get in touch follow the contact link.

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At youcubed, we inspire, educate and empower teachers of mathematics, transforming the latest research on mathematics learning into accessible and practical forms.

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Unleash your creativity with the world's best virtual manipulatives!

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Maths300: Engaging lessons and professional support

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Directions: Complete the story problem and answer statement. Version 1 (Difficult) Lucy has _____ apples. She has nine _____ (more/less) than Marcus. How many apples does _____ (Lucy/Marcus) have? _____ (Lucy/Marcus) has _____ apples. Version 2 (Medium Difficulty) Lucy has _____ apples. She has nine less than Marcus.

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Classroom Maths Ideas & Activities | Rob Vingerhoets Maths is Fun

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Addition/Multiplication Lesson Ideas Fraction Warm-Ups "Going Shopping" "Make A Dollar" "Marvellous Me" Matching Numbers to Words Modelling: Patterns Ordering Two-Digit Numbers Place Value Activities "Uncle Jack's Cookies"

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Effective math teachers give their students plenty of opportunities to explore math concepts through the use of math manipulatives-objects that are designed to aid a student in comprehending mathematical concepts by manipulating, handling, or even playing with it. Math manipulative can include counting cubes, geoboards, marbles, fraction strips, number frames and more.

Why? Because visual and hands-on math activities that promote exploration improve student performance. In fact, according to Stanford Professor and Math Education Expert, Jo Boaler, visual mathematics is an important part of mathematics for its own sake and new brain research tells us that visual [and hands-on] mathematics helps students learn numerical mathematics.

When you give students opportunities to play with and explore difficult math concepts including fractions, decimals, area models, and probability, they are better able to make develop a deep understand and comprehension that is not reliant on rote memorization. When it comes to using manipulatives, most teachers opt to use physical objects that students can manipulate while sitting at a desk in a classroom-and there are hundreds of amazing activities and applications like building fraction kits out of construction paper, using playing cards to explore mean, median, and mode, and exploring area and perimeter using cheez-its to name a few.

And while physical manipulatives are a great tool, they also have many limitations. Students have to be present in the classroom to use physical manipulatives and they can also be expensive and difficult to maintain. However, with the prevalence of students having access to computers, remote learning, and a growing push for more technology in the classroom, more and more websites are offering free (an amazingly useful) virtual math manipulatives that students can use on computers, tablets, and even smart phones.

It is important to note that virtual manipulatives often provide the exact same benefit of physical manipulatives in that they give students unique opportunities to explore challenging math concepts by manipulating through some form of manipulation, handling, or play.

If you are looking for awesome virtual manipulatives for math, there are currently dozens of website sharing free virtual math manipulatives for topics typically covered in grades K-8 ranging from basic arithmetic to fractions and decimals to probability to algebra. To save you tons of time sorting through many websites to find the best virtual math manipulatives, we have compiled what is, in our opinion, the best free virtual math manipulatives, all of which are accessible via the links below.

Each virtual math manipulative includes a preview image along with a reference to the website source and a link to explore that websites other math manipulatives. Simply click on the image preview to be redirected to the website to start using that virtual manipulative for math learning.

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Virtual Math Manipulatives-Free Library for Grades K-8 - Mashup Math

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Looking for the best free virtual math manipulatives all one page? This collection of virtual manipulatives for math covers K-8 math topics including base ten blocks, fractions, algebra tiles, number lines, and more.

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Same But Different is a powerful routine for use in math classrooms. The images can be used for teaching a way of thinking: grayscale thinking, categorical thinking; helping students to build a network of ideas and an approach for learning and thinking about mathematics.

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Top

Please Note:

Mixed, improper and proper fractions should be interspersed throughout fractions teaching and learning so that the students build flexibility with these early.

"Models" include linear, area, volume, and set representations.

Please note:

The most appropriate models for multiplication and division of fractions are number lines and rectangular area models (array models).

Mixed, improper and proper fractions should be interspersed throughout fractions teaching and learning.

Students will use their understanding of the inverse relationship between multiplication and division to solve tasks. This may mean that they solve division questions using multiplication.

Prior to commencing learning about multiplication and division of fractions, students should have a solid understanding of:

the multiple meanings of multiplication and division with whole numbers;

unit fractions;

number lines and area models for representing, comparing and adding/subtracting fractions.

OPERATIONS WITH FRACTIONS: MULTIPLICATION AND DIVISION

Created by Dr. Cathy Bruce, Tara Flynn, and Shelley Yearley.

Fractions Learning Pathways are inspired by Dr. Jere Confrey's work, based on international and Ontario classroom research, and informed by feedback from classroom teachers and student thinking.

The purpose of this interactive planning tool for teaching fractions is to provide educators with a research informed framework. It includes a range of field-tested tasks (grades 3-10) that have proven to be effective in Ontario schools. The collection of tasks follows a logical sequence that can be modified and/or adjusted to fit teacher and student needs. Video and photos are also included to bring the learning to life. This interactive planning tool also includes one page summaries of key fractions math ideas as well as anticipation guides that feature Ontario students' thinking.

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Top Please Note: Mixed, improper and proper fractions should be interspersed throughout fractions teaching and learning so that the students build flexibility with these early. "Models" include linear, area, volume, and set representations. Please note: The most appropriate models for multiplication and division of fractions are number lines and rectangular area models (array models).

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Math Is Visual: Let's Teach It That Way | Free Visual Math Talk Prompts

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Access free Visual Math Talk Prompts to build fluency and flexibility with number sense and operations for your K-12 Math Class or at Home.

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The 4 English Sentence Types | Grammar | EnglishClub

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English sentences can be 1) declarative. statement. 2) interrogative? question? 3) imperative. command! 4) exclamative! exclamation!

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Welcome to the Big Life Primary Schools Website! Click on an image below to explore the site, or click here to go straight to the Big Life Boost Resources.

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Stories about our popular Moon Dogs characters doing activities at home. These are free resources to read and print at home.

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Just Breathe: < spire > Add to cart

Diving in deeper with the base <spire>, we can investigate analytic and synthetic word sums, replacing the single, final, non-syllabic <e> suffix convention, and free vs bound bases.

We can look closely, too, at the <-ion> suffix. Why is it <-ion> and not <-tion>? Remember, graphemes do not cross morphemic boundaries. And why do we spell 'inspiration' with <ir> and not <er>?

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Skip to content Home / Shop Showing 1-10 of 23 results Just Breathe: Add to cart Diving in deeper with the base , we can investigate analytic and synthetic word sums, replacing the single, final, non-syllabic suffix convention, and free vs bound bases. We can look closely, too, at the suffix.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

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Etymology & Morphology 101: Why We Can’t Just Teach Phonics

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A free word reading, spelling and learning curriculum. Quality core literacy skills curriculum ready to teach.

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Progress Monitoring with DIBELS 8th Edition

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When I run online workshops and free PL I often ask, “who finds it difficult to manage the range of student needs in your classroom?” Every single ...

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Is Reading Comprehension an actual thing?

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Is Reading Comprehension an actual thing?

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The purpose of reading, according to Elder and Paul (2006:3) is to 'figure out what an author has to say on a subject'. This 'figuring out', or reading comprehension as we know it in schools, has become a proxy for reading ability and the manner in which reading ability is assessed and measured ( see Tarjinder's exc ellent post here). As such, the teaching of reading comprehension as a skill became ubiquitous throughout the last few decades (see here) and the way of assessing reading comprehension is, of course, the reading comprehension test.

But consider whether a reading comprehension test actually assesses reading comprehension. The nature of any comprehension test requires the assessed pupil to read a text and then answer questions related to that text based on a series of assessment criteria. This is not, however, how it seems we extract meaning from a text. According to Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), comprehension is a moment by moment process during the act of reading. The mind is assailed by every word in the moment of reading and is thus charged with determining which words to repress, emphasise, correlate and organise as it constructs the right weight, influence and force for each expression, all under the influence of establishing purpose and meaning from a non-present communicator (Thorndike, 1917). This results in meaning, the product of comprehension, never being stable. A change in one variable, knowledge for example, will alter the construction of meaning with the product of comprehension changing moment by moment (Pearson, 2001).

Rather than the extraction of information from text, which is what comprehension tests require, readers actually interact with information in the text in order to make sense of it (Palincsar and Brown, 1989), drawing on information from several sources concurrently to construct meaning. As a reader progresses through a text, they attend to the information and combine it with vocabulary knowledge, language conventions, semantic knowledge and general and disciplinary knowledge. The reader is continually updating the new information and relating it to prior content knowledge and integrating it with knowledge gleaned from the text, drawing connections and making inferences from within and without the text (Beck et al. 1997).

A comprehension test cannot assess this understanding and it can certainly not assess the primary goal of deep reading: 'understanding the meaning of a text such that this knowledge can be used later' (Allen and McNamara, 2020, p262).

For an assessment to be valid, it must measure what it purports to measure otherwise it is worthless (Cohen et al. 2015). So, if a reading comprehension test does not measure reading comprehension then it does not appear to have very much value...if any.

This has significant implications for the development of reading comprehension in schools and the assessment of it.

Firstly, the teaching of comprehension as a skills-based construct has no place in reading education despite the improvements in comprehension outcomes associated with this approach ( see here). Teaching comprehension skills is a test-based and focused construct driven by the assessment. It puts the cart before the horse. The skills taught and learned will certainly improve test outcomes and, by implication, statutory assessment results but are unlikely to improve reading comprehension beyond the benefits of reading practice. Take, for example, the skills-based reading programme 'Success For All', which reports significant gains in reading test outcomes. Pupils are taught to take the role of 'Text Detective' when questions requiring inference are addressed and encouraged to 'read between the lines' to find the answer. But as Willingham (2015) posits (great blog from Clare Sealy), authors require readers to infer what they assume the reader already knows and therefore omit. How can a reader infer what they don't know? This is possibly why skills-based comprehension had such robust research initially: because researchers used comprehension test data and that is exactly what skills-based comprehension teaching improved. It may also be why 'Success For All', according to Jonathon Kozol (2006), cannot sustain its results, with students, one year after leaving the programme, in significant reading deficit, and three years after leaving, unable to read. So incensed was Kozol (2006) that he described it as, '...an apartheid course of study for an apartheid schooling system.'

The next implication for the development of reading comprehension within schools is an understanding of the role that prior knowledge plays in the extraction of meaning from text. This is nothing new - although it may seem like it sometimes. Bartlett, as long ago as 1932, described "schemata" as organisations of past experience and Ausubel (1963:18) claimed that 'the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.' Anderson et al.'s (1977) study on the interpretation of ambiguous passages in text concluded that reader's interpretations of messages from text were heavily influenced by high level schemata.

Kintsch's (1998) 'Construction-Integration Model' of reading comprehension is particularly helpful (Rayner et al. 2012) as it portrays comprehension as having three distinct layers. At the first level readers identify the words and phrases that make up the text. At the second level the reader uses information from the text, allied to their own knowledge to form a basic idea about notions proposed by the text. At the third level, however, the reader elaborates ideas and events from the text by integrating them with related prior knowledge to create a fully fleshed out mental representation of the text. And it is this deep, rich, coherent understanding, argues Kintsch (1998), that readers are seeking as it is associated with learning from a text rather than merely reading a text - not something a comprehension test can easily measure, if at all

Kintsch's (1998) model dovetails with the concept of top down and bottom up reading comprehension strategies (Carrell, 1989; Young and Oxford, 1997). Readers who utilise a bottom up strategy (usually novice readers) understand texts at a local level through word decoding and sentence parsing thus, creating meaning from the read words. Readers who utilise a top down strategy bring a global perspective to their reading (Mills et al., 2006), utilising wide contextual and domain knowledge and deep understanding of complex semantic structures and patterns to create meaning with the read words (Afflerbach, 1986; Shapiro, 2004).

'Reading comprehension and knowledge have a reciprocal relationship in which knowledge supports comprehension and comprehension builds new knowledge...' (Cervetti and Wright, 2020); or as Pearson (2006) put it, 'knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge.'

There are, nevertheless, different kinds of knowledge, which in turn, it appears, have differing impacts on reading comprehension. Topic knowledge (closely related to the topic of a text) appears to have a consistently positive impact on questions that require bridging inferences and connecting ideas and information within a text (Pearson et al.,1979), whereas domain knowledge (related to a disciplinary area, eg. biology) appears to benefit the identification of themes and gist within a text and the answering of questions that require background knowledge (Haenggi and Perfetti, 1992). Cultural knowledge has been shown to support comprehension of narrative texts with student's showing far greater understanding of texts with themes and characters consistent with their own socio-cultural experiences (Bell and Clark, 1998; Kelley et al., 2015) suggesting that where this is not the case, explicit investigation of cultural knowledge may be useful and necessary. More general, or world knowledge, has a greater positive effect on the comprehension of expository texts rather than narrative texts but still appears to be important for understanding of narrative (Best et al., 2008).

It is perhaps unsurprising that making inferences places a greater demand on prior knowledge compared to recall. Knowledge allows readers to selectively focus on the most important ideas in a text and form stronger connections among individual elements (Cervetti and Wright, 2020). This helps readers connect a series of discrete pieces of information into meaningful parts and chains, such as sequences, cause-effect relationships and plots. The integration of text with prior knowledge enables the reader to employ bridging inferences and in-text inferences thus, enabling the reader to learn from the text (Kintsch, 1986).

Furthermore, strong background knowledge supports vocabulary development (Puilido, 2007). The link between vocabulary and content knowledge, particularly in expository texts has a significant research base with strong background knowledge supporting high rates of incidental vocabulary learning while reading (Puilido, 2003, 2004, 2007). It has been suggested that high levels of knowledge are a proxy for vocabulary (Moje et al., 2020). (More on vocabulary in the next TRA post).

Knowledge and reading ability do appear to make complementary contributions to reading comprehension. High levels of reading ability allied with excellent prior knowledge result in highly effective comprehension (Cervetti and Wright, 2020); however, particularly in younger readers, good topic and domain knowledge can compensate for less effective reading ability (Recht and Leslie, 1988; Taylor, 1979). Younger readers, nevertheless, often require explicit instruction (from a teacher) in making meaningful connections between knowledge and inferencing (Rapp et al., 2007). Furthermore, high levels of prior knowledge can benefit students when reading texts with less cohesion which require greater inference during reading (McNamara et al., 1996).

So, if prior knowledge is a key element of extracting deep meaning from a text how can schools and teachers focus on this rather than on comprehension as a 'skill'?

Studies appear to suggest that the activation of prior knowledge for students is the answer; but only once there is knowledge to activate. Where students have merely been questioned about their prior knowledge in an attempt to activate it, comprehension of text has not improved (Peek et al., 1982) and activating inaccurate prior knowledge may negatively impact comprehension (Van Loon et al., 2013). More effective, is where students have received explicit topic and domain knowledge instruction prior to attempting to read a text (Elbro and Buch-Iversen, 2013).

This building of specific prior knowledge to support reading comprehension appears to be key (Guthrie et al., 2004). Cervetti and Wright (2020) suggest that it is the building and leveraging of conceptual, disciplinary, cultural and world knowledge that are the most powerful elements to support reading comprehension and thus developing students' engagement with texts. A conclusion seems to be appearing from the research that if students are to extract deep, rich and coherent meaning from any text, then they must first have sufficient prior knowledge, and that this knowledge needs to be explicitly taught.

This emphasis on knowledge as a fundament of comprehension implies that 'close reading' of text is thus not per se a necessary comprehension activity and perhaps even that knowledge can compensate for text complexity.

This is not borne out by the research which suggests that exposure to complex syntactic structures and language features is an essential element of developing deep reading comprehension (Just and Carpenter, 1992). Hiebert (2017) suggested that where teachers use texts simplified for readability (usually in areas of higher social deprivation), reading comprehension of more complex texts is compromised. For deep learning to occur. Hiebert concluded, students should be exposed to the complex language structures of texts above instructional level. Furthermore, studies revealed that students often read for less than four minutes per English class (Fisher, 2009) with the majority of the time taken up with watching films or listening to lectures and teacher-led comprehension was observed as little as 20% of the time (Vaughn et al., 2013). For deep comprehension to develop, students need to read a great deal, read complex texts, have the comprehension scaffolded by an expert (teacher) and have regular opportunities to discuss the text (Litman et al., 2017).

The research appears to suggest the following 'best bets' for schools:

* Reading comprehension is not 'the next stage in reading'. The artificial divide between 'learning to read' and 'reading to learn' is a misapplication of Chall's (1983) stages of reading development. Comprehension develops in tandem with reading acquisition and is aligned with listening comprehension and developing schema.

* Reading comprehension is not a skill and should only be taught as such as an exam technique.

* Prior knowledge is fundamental to reading comprehension and crucial for inference. Knowledge comes in many forms. For a pupil to be able to understand a text they must be furnished with sufficient knowledge to be able to read it with a top down, global perspective.

* This relevant knowledge must be built explicitly...

* ...by teachers.

* Knowledge of complex language and syntactic structures is essential to reading comprehension. Regular exposure to these structures is essential through experience with high-quality texts above instructional level. Students will require expert, explicit scaffolding to negotiate these text...

* ...from teachers.

* Reading comprehension is also a factor of vocabulary. Vocabulary is a function of greater knowledge. Vocabulary grows more quickly through explicit teaching. Students' vocabulary appears to grow more quickly in classes where the environment is rich in language and teachers have a wide vocabulary. This is particularly important in early schooling and in areas of higher social and economic need.

A final thought on statutory assessment:

The conclusion that comprehension tests are an invalid assessment of reading comprehension begs the question: how can we measure it? It would seem that we can't. There is just too much going in in the brain. So why bother? To hold schools accountable for ensuring that children can read. So why not measure what we can measure. We can measure words read per minute and we can measure reading accuracy. Not very satisfactory? Not according to Rasinski et al. (2015); it seems that words-read-per-minute is a very accurate proxy for academic outcome.

And if we can't measure reading comprehension...at least we now know how to teach it.

The purpose of reading, according to Elder and Paul (2006:3) is to 'figure out what an author has to say on a subject'. This 'figuring out', or reading comprehension as we know it in schools, has become a proxy for reading ability and the manner in which reading ability is assessed and measured ( see Tarjinder's exc ellent post here). As such, the teaching of reading comprehension as a skill became ubiquitous throughout the last few decades (see here) and the way of assessing reading comprehension is, of course, the reading comprehension test.

But consider whether a reading comprehension test actually assesses reading comprehension. The nature of any comprehension test requires the assessed pupil to read a text and then answer questions related to that text based on a series of assessment criteria. This is not, however, how it seems we extract meaning from a text. According to Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), comprehension is a moment by moment process during the act of reading. The mind is assailed by every word in the moment of reading and is thus charged with determining which words to repress, emphasise, correlate and organise as it constructs the right weight, influence and force for each expression, all under the influence of establishing purpose and meaning from a non-present communicator (Thorndike, 1917). This results in meaning, the product of comprehension, never being stable. A change in one variable, knowledge for example, will alter the construction of meaning with the product of comprehension changing moment by moment (Pearson, 2001).

Rather than the extraction of information from text, which is what comprehension tests require, readers actually interact with information in the text in order to make sense of it (Palincsar and Brown, 1989), drawing on information from several sources concurrently to construct meaning. As a reader progresses through a text, they attend to the information and combine it with vocabulary knowledge, language conventions, semantic knowledge and general and disciplinary knowledge. The reader is continually updating the new information and relating it to prior content knowledge and integrating it with knowledge gleaned from the text, drawing connections and making inferences from within and without the text (Beck et al. 1997).

A comprehension test cannot assess this understanding and it can certainly not assess the primary goal of deep reading: 'understanding the meaning of a text such that this knowledge can be used later' (Allen and McNamara, 2020, p262).

For an assessment to be valid, it must measure what it purports to measure otherwise it is worthless (Cohen et al. 2015). So, if a reading comprehension test does not measure reading comprehension then it does not appear to have very much value...if any.

This has significant implications for the development of reading comprehension in schools and the assessment of it.

Firstly, the teaching of comprehension as a skills-based construct has no place in reading education despite the improvements in comprehension outcomes associated with this approach ( see here). Teaching comprehension skills is a test-based and focused construct driven by the assessment. It puts the cart before the horse. The skills taught and learned will certainly improve test outcomes and, by implication, statutory assessment results but are unlikely to improve reading comprehension beyond the benefits of reading practice. Take, for example, the skills-based reading programme 'Success For All', which reports significant gains in reading test outcomes. Pupils are taught to take the role of 'Text Detective' when questions requiring inference are addressed and encouraged to 'read between the lines' to find the answer. But as Willingham (2015) posits (great blog from Clare Sealy), authors require readers to infer what they assume the reader already knows and therefore omit. How can a reader infer what they don't know? This is possibly why skills-based comprehension had such robust research initially: because researchers used comprehension test data and that is exactly what skills-based comprehension teaching improved. It may also be why 'Success For All', according to Jonathon Kozol (2006), cannot sustain its results, with students, one year after leaving the programme, in significant reading deficit, and three years after leaving, unable to read. So incensed was Kozol (2006) that he described it as, '...an apartheid course of study for an apartheid schooling system.'

The next implication for the development of reading comprehension within schools is an understanding of the role that prior knowledge plays in the extraction of meaning from text. This is nothing new - although it may seem like it sometimes. Bartlett, as long ago as 1932, described "schemata" as organisations of past experience and Ausubel (1963:18) claimed that 'the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.' Anderson et al.'s (1977) study on the interpretation of ambiguous passages in text concluded that reader's interpretations of messages from text were heavily influenced by high level schemata.

Kintsch's (1998) 'Construction-Integration Model' of reading comprehension is particularly helpful (Rayner et al. 2012) as it portrays comprehension as having three distinct layers. At the first level readers identify the words and phrases that make up the text. At the second level the reader uses information from the text, allied to their own knowledge to form a basic idea about notions proposed by the text. At the third level, however, the reader elaborates ideas and events from the text by integrating them with related prior knowledge to create a fully fleshed out mental representation of the text. And it is this deep, rich, coherent understanding, argues Kintsch (1998), that readers are seeking as it is associated with learning from a text rather than merely reading a text - not something a comprehension test can easily measure, if at all

Kintsch's (1998) model dovetails with the concept of top down and bottom up reading comprehension strategies (Carrell, 1989; Young and Oxford, 1997). Readers who utilise a bottom up strategy (usually novice readers) understand texts at a local level through word decoding and sentence parsing thus, creating meaning from the read words. Readers who utilise a top down strategy bring a global perspective to their reading (Mills et al., 2006), utilising wide contextual and domain knowledge and deep understanding of complex semantic structures and patterns to create meaning with the read words (Afflerbach, 1986; Shapiro, 2004).

'Reading comprehension and knowledge have a reciprocal relationship in which knowledge supports comprehension and comprehension builds new knowledge...' (Cervetti and Wright, 2020); or as Pearson (2006) put it, 'knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge.'

There are, nevertheless, different kinds of knowledge, which in turn, it appears, have differing impacts on reading comprehension. Topic knowledge (closely related to the topic of a text) appears to have a consistently positive impact on questions that require bridging inferences and connecting ideas and information within a text (Pearson et al.,1979), whereas domain knowledge (related to a disciplinary area, eg. biology) appears to benefit the identification of themes and gist within a text and the answering of questions that require background knowledge (Haenggi and Perfetti, 1992). Cultural knowledge has been shown to support comprehension of narrative texts with student's showing far greater understanding of texts with themes and characters consistent with their own socio-cultural experiences (Bell and Clark, 1998; Kelley et al., 2015) suggesting that where this is not the case, explicit investigation of cultural knowledge may be useful and necessary. More general, or world knowledge, has a greater positive effect on the comprehension of expository texts rather than narrative texts but still appears to be important for understanding of narrative (Best et al., 2008).

It is perhaps unsurprising that making inferences places a greater demand on prior knowledge compared to recall. Knowledge allows readers to selectively focus on the most important ideas in a text and form stronger connections among individual elements (Cervetti and Wright, 2020). This helps readers connect a series of discrete pieces of information into meaningful parts and chains, such as sequences, cause-effect relationships and plots. The integration of text with prior knowledge enables the reader to employ bridging inferences and in-text inferences thus, enabling the reader to learn from the text (Kintsch, 1986).

Furthermore, strong background knowledge supports vocabulary development (Puilido, 2007). The link between vocabulary and content knowledge, particularly in expository texts has a significant research base with strong background knowledge supporting high rates of incidental vocabulary learning while reading (Puilido, 2003, 2004, 2007). It has been suggested that high levels of knowledge are a proxy for vocabulary (Moje et al., 2020). (More on vocabulary in the next TRA post).

Knowledge and reading ability do appear to make complementary contributions to reading comprehension. High levels of reading ability allied with excellent prior knowledge result in highly effective comprehension (Cervetti and Wright, 2020); however, particularly in younger readers, good topic and domain knowledge can compensate for less effective reading ability (Recht and Leslie, 1988; Taylor, 1979). Younger readers, nevertheless, often require explicit instruction (from a teacher) in making meaningful connections between knowledge and inferencing (Rapp et al., 2007). Furthermore, high levels of prior knowledge can benefit students when reading texts with less cohesion which require greater inference during reading (McNamara et al., 1996).

So, if prior knowledge is a key element of extracting deep meaning from a text how can schools and teachers focus on this rather than on comprehension as a 'skill'?

Studies appear to suggest that the activation of prior knowledge for students is the answer; but only once there is knowledge to activate. Where students have merely been questioned about their prior knowledge in an attempt to activate it, comprehension of text has not improved (Peek et al., 1982) and activating inaccurate prior knowledge may negatively impact comprehension (Van Loon et al., 2013). More effective, is where students have received explicit topic and domain knowledge instruction prior to attempting to read a text (Elbro and Buch-Iversen, 2013).

This building of specific prior knowledge to support reading comprehension appears to be key (Guthrie et al., 2004). Cervetti and Wright (2020) suggest that it is the building and leveraging of conceptual, disciplinary, cultural and world knowledge that are the most powerful elements to support reading comprehension and thus developing students' engagement with texts. A conclusion seems to be appearing from the research that if students are to extract deep, rich and coherent meaning from any text, then they must first have sufficient prior knowledge, and that this knowledge needs to be explicitly taught.

This emphasis on knowledge as a fundament of comprehension implies that 'close reading' of text is thus not per se a necessary comprehension activity and perhaps even that knowledge can compensate for text complexity.

This is not borne out by the research which suggests that exposure to complex syntactic structures and language features is an essential element of developing deep reading comprehension (Just and Carpenter, 1992). Hiebert (2017) suggested that where teachers use texts simplified for readability (usually in areas of higher social deprivation), reading comprehension of more complex texts is compromised. For deep learning to occur. Hiebert concluded, students should be exposed to the complex language structures of texts above instructional level. Furthermore, studies revealed that students often read for less than four minutes per English class (Fisher, 2009) with the majority of the time taken up with watching films or listening to lectures and teacher-led comprehension was observed as little as 20% of the time (Vaughn et al., 2013). For deep comprehension to develop, students need to read a great deal, read complex texts, have the comprehension scaffolded by an expert (teacher) and have regular opportunities to discuss the text (Litman et al., 2017).

The research appears to suggest the following 'best bets' for schools:

* Reading comprehension is not 'the next stage in reading'. The artificial divide between 'learning to read' and 'reading to learn' is a misapplication of Chall's (1983) stages of reading development. Comprehension develops in tandem with reading acquisition and is aligned with listening comprehension and developing schema.

* Reading comprehension is not a skill and should only be taught as such as an exam technique.

* Prior knowledge is fundamental to reading comprehension and crucial for inference. Knowledge comes in many forms. For a pupil to be able to understand a text they must be furnished with sufficient knowledge to be able to read it with a top down, global perspective.

* This relevant knowledge must be built explicitly...

* ...by teachers.

* Knowledge of complex language and syntactic structures is essential to reading comprehension. Regular exposure to these structures is essential through experience with high-quality texts above instructional level. Students will require expert, explicit scaffolding to negotiate these text...

* ...from teachers.

* Reading comprehension is also a factor of vocabulary. Vocabulary is a function of greater knowledge. Vocabulary grows more quickly through explicit teaching. Students' vocabulary appears to grow more quickly in classes where the environment is rich in language and teachers have a wide vocabulary. This is particularly important in early schooling and in areas of higher social and economic need.

A final thought on statutory assessment:

The conclusion that comprehension tests are an invalid assessment of reading comprehension begs the question: how can we measure it? It would seem that we can't. There is just too much going in in the brain. So why bother? To hold schools accountable for ensuring that children can read. So why not measure what we can measure. We can measure words read per minute and we can measure reading accuracy. Not very satisfactory? Not according to Rasinski et al. (2015); it seems that words-read-per-minute is a very accurate proxy for academic outcome.

And if we can't measure reading comprehension...at least we now know how to teach it.

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IS READING COMPREHENSION AN ACTUAL THING?

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The purpose of reading, according to Elder and Paul (2006:3) is to 'figure out what an author has to say on a subject'. This 'figuring out', or reading comprehension as we know it in schools, has become a proxy for reading ability and the manner in which reading ability is assessed and measured (see Tarjinder's excellent post here).

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Syntax Matters! A Kendore Learning Webinar Featuring William Van Cleave.

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http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2023/01/guest-post-getting-reading-right-on.html

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Test of Reading Comprehension | Maze Passage Generator | Intervention Central

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The test of reading comprehension Maze Passage generator is an important tool that can be included as part of a teacher resources network for classroom management

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The Writing Revolution, an invaluable resource for teachers of all kinds, is not only a tool for developing the command of the sentence. It is a framework for understanding and utilising the paragraph to organise thinking and writing.

In my recent talk for the Victorian DET, I explored some of the key methods for tackling paragraph writing with students. I covered the following main ideas in the talk:

Breaking paragraphs into manageable chunks

Planning and outlining paragraphs

Links between writing paragraphs and knowledge

Revising and editing

I hope this Professional Learning opportunity is of use to teachers of both primary and secondary students.

Watch my whole presentation here↓

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Supporting students with paragraph writing - Dr Nathaniel Swain

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The Writing Revolution, an invaluable resource for teachers of all kinds, is not only a tool for developing the command of the sentence. It is a framework for understanding and utilising the paragraph to organise thinking and writing. In my recent talk for the Victorian DET, I explored some of the key methods for tackling paragraph writing with students.

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Customizable Templates - The Writing Revolution

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©Copyright The Writing Revolution, Inc. All rights reserved. THE HOCHMAN METHOD®. THE WRITING REVOLUTION®, and ADVANCING THINKING THROUGH WRITING® are registered trademarks of the The Writing Revolution, Inc. for its education services and may not be used by others without its written permission.

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Experts Explain webinars — Reading Science in Schools

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If you watch any of our FREE Expert Explain webinars, please consider donating to our partner charity:

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OSPI + Glean | Expert Webinar Series with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck | October 20, 2022

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Rethinking Reading Grps Problems & Solutions

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Rethinking Reading Grps Problems & Solutions

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Rethinking Guided Reading Sharing Best Practice Perth

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Over the next couple of months, I'm going to be posting some excerpts from Reading Reconsidered here on Field Notes. This is the beginning of Chapter 5, which discusses how and how much students read.

Reading Reconsidered: Chapter 5
Approaches to Reading: Reading More, Reading Better
Consider, for a moment, how much reading you were required to do in college. Almost assuredly there were days when the time you spent reading stretched into hours. Some classes probably required a book a week or a daunting array of journal articles-possibly both. Maybe you glanced at the syllabus and asked aloud, "Five articles by Tuesday?!" Did your professors not understand that you were taking more than one class at a time?

The message was clear: you had to read a lot if you wanted to understand whatever discipline you studied and meet the standards of economics, chemistry, political or literary theory. Extensive reading gave you knowledge, context and perspective, an ear for how the discipline talked. It was required not just to "pass" but to earn a degree and enter society. But we don't really need to convince you of that. If you are reading this book, the importance of reading probably requires little explanation. Extensive reading gave you what you needed to succeed, but it was not easy. You needed lots of practice to prepare you.

Almost ten years ago now, our first graduates from Uncommon Schools reported back from college campuses and described a version of this struggle. They encountered not just difficult reading but daunting quantities of it day after day. The extent of the reading pushed to the limits even those who graduated with flying colors. But not every one of our graduates did finish college. For many, reading loads were one reason why.

Other chapters in this book describe steps you can take to make sure students read better, more perceptively, and across all formats of text. Still, we should also remember that quality reading requires quantity reading. Students must read not only well but also widely and extensively.

Running is a decent analogy. If you want to be a distance runner, you have to put in the miles. Sure, you can improve your results by refining your strategy and studying up on the science of training. In the end, though, there is no way around the fact that success requires a lot of road miles. In the case of reading, we sometimes refer to this as "miles on the page." Quantity matters.

This observation points out two challenges. The first is that most students don't read as much as they should, both in and out of school. A few years ago, for example, a colleague of ours followed a sample of students through their day at New York City public schools and found that, on average, students were reading for twenty minutes per day. Twenty minutes! What's even more disheartening is that almost 40 percent of students did not read at all during the school day. Of course, this assumes that during the time students were reading, they were reading well and attentively, which is no sure thing.

Surely, 20 or 40 or 60 minutes of reading a day doesn't cut it. In fact, even if students read for twice what those numbers suggest, it would still not likely be enough.

Getting young people to read more has perhaps always been a challenge, but today there is increasing competition for students' attention, both in school and at home. Some of the world's brightest people spend their lives designing devices and applications to make everything that could possibly distract students instantly available almost every moment of the day. The buzzing, pinging, and flickering reminders cause students (and many adults) to disengage not only from "mere" reading but also from the sort of sustained, uninterrupted reading that the most demanding texts require. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, the average American teenager reads outside of school for an average of four minutes per day on weekends and nine minutes per day on weekdays.

Fascinated by our colleague's finding following some of New York City's school children, we set out to measure the amount of time spent reading in classrooms of a sample of middle school teachers from a variety of schools we worked with. The average was seventeen minutes per hour for English and reading classes. The rest of the day it was assuredly lower. More important, seventeen minutes was significantly less than the amount of time teachers thought they were reading. This points to the second challenge: we may read less than we think we do in our classrooms. The time that we allocate to "reading" is in fact spent talking about reading, say, or talking about topics brought about by reading. Less often is that time filled with actual reading; how many road miles students really log with reading is an open question.

We have discussed this finding with teachers at our workshops. They often observe that we all suspect that if we could simply make our students read more-a lot more-and love reading more, much of the reading gap might be eroded. Yet this is not so easily done. There are student barriers-students often don't want to read, or we don't really know how well they are reading-and teacher barriers. One teacher at a workshop noted that his own perceptions were an issue. He didn't feel as though he was teaching if all that students were doing was reading. When his students read in class, he lived in fear that an administrator would walk into his classroom.

In this chapter, we reflect on tools that teachers can use to maximize road miles: to help students read more, enjoy reading, and accrue the benefits of extensive reading. We'll start with a look at three different approaches to reading: reading independently, reading aloud, and listening to oral reading.
Module 5.1 Approaches to Reading
Of course, teachers must balance the amount of reading students do with the quality of the reading they do. Three different approaches are worth considering. The way these three approaches are implemented-and the balance among them-can have a dramatic impact not just on the amount of miles students cover but also on the quality of their reading-even their love and passion for reading.

There are clear benefits to giving kids robust opportunities to interact with text in each of the three approaches we discuss, but each also has limitations. As we look at these benefits and limitations, it's important to remember that it's not a competition. The goal is not to identify the best format for reading but to recognize synergies that can allow us to use all three in conjunction-to give students the most meaningful and productive interactions with the texts they read.
Students Reading Independently
Reading independently is ultimately how students read on exams, in college, and in their adult lives, so it is especially important to give them lots of practice in doing so. On both sides of the Common Core debate, there is clear consensus that all kids should have ample opportunities to read independently, which is why in countless schools and homes across this country, parents and teachers alike stress the importance of making sure that students have a book in their hand as much as possible.

At the same time, there are limitations to reading independently, and some of these limitations go unacknowledged. Most significant, there is very little accountability for readers when they are reading independently. Readers, especially our most struggling readers, often practice reading poorly by inscribing errors when they read independently. They might decode vowel sounds poorly, drop word endings, or skip over words they don't know. They might read quickly or idly and fail to process the meaning of the words. As a result, they don't effectively practice-or get better at-reading, and they miss opportunities to make meaning out of what they read. Independent reading, for all its strengths, is also, well, independent. Part of the pleasure of reading-sharing the story as it unfolds-is tacitly sacrificed.
Students Reading Aloud
One way to address the limitations of independent reading is to design it for greater accountability (more on this in Module 5.2). Another is to balance it with other approaches to reading. Giving students, especially developing readers, frequent opportunities to read aloud in addition to reading silently is a great way to do this, though students' reading aloud also has benefits and limitations.

On the plus side, when students read aloud, they are able to practice fluency, decoding, and most of all prosody-the art of using rhythm, intonation, and stress to connect words into meaningful phrases. This, you might say, is a hidden skill, relevant even-perhaps especially-for older students who read complex texts for which the ability to create such linkages can be a key to unlocking the text's meaning. Having students read aloud also provides rich and constant data to teachers on the quality of their reading. Without reading aloud, we know far, far less about the quality and skill of the reading students do. With that constant data come opportunities for immediate-and therefore highly effective-corrections.

Most important, having students read aloud connects students with the pleasure of reading. A classroom where expressive reading by students is the norm, where students take pleasure in books-pleasure that is visible to their peers and therefore infectious-is a classroom where students change their relationship to reading. In that classroom, students come to understand why every culture on Earth tells and loves stories.

However, there are downsides to students reading aloud. One is the challenge of what the students who are not reading are doing when one student is reading aloud. Are they staring out the window? Looking at the text and pretending to read? Teachers are, in fact, often instructed not to have students read aloud in class for this reason. This strikes us as throwing out a very valuable baby due to some easily addressed issues with the bathwater. Later in the chapter, we will discuss modifications and adaptations that can address this challenge.

Another limitation of student oral reading is that it may not fully prepare students to read on their own. In fact, it can result in student reading that is more focused on expression than comprehension-reading during which it is all but impossible to stop and reflect. These issues, generally, are remediable via adaptation, and simply require balance -that is, the use of student oral reading in combination and synergy with silent reading.
Students Listening to Oral Reading
The third approach to reading is reading to students. It is often the "forgotten" approach among the three, especially for older students, and it too presents a set of benefits and limitations.

A clear benefit is that when teachers read aloud to their classes, the best reader in the room breathes life into the text by modeling fluency, creating meaning, and adding drama. Reading aloud to students also communicates a love and a passion for great books. Perhaps most important, it allows students to access a text well beyond what they can read on their own, enabling them to familiarize themselves with more complex vocabulary, rhythm, and patterns of syntax. Although many educators recognize this benefit in regard to younger students, the benefits of reading to older students is much less often considered. For example, scientific writing, as we discuss in our chapter on nonfiction, has its own unwritten rules and stylistic conventions-the way, for example, some clauses are meant to be parenthetical and de-emphasized. Reading part of an article from a scientific journal to your students would help them hear those rules and conventions, as well as make it more likely that subsequent reading will accurately capture a text's tone and meaning. This may be the best way we can think of to address the nonfiction micro rules we discussed in chapter 3.

The downsides of reading aloud to students are more clear-cut. Reading aloud involves teacher modeling, not actual student practice. The teacher embeds meaning in her own expression-meaning that students may not infer on their own. Everyone has to read at the same pace-and from the same text.
Meaningful Reading
Given the benefits and downsides of the three approaches to reading (listed in Figure 5.1), the goal then is to use each of them in a strategic way which ensures that we can maximize its benefits but also minimize its limitations. Recognizing these benefits and limitations, this chapter outlines a set of concrete actions teachers can take to improve both the quantity and the quality of reading that students do-to ensure that our students log as many high-quality road miles as possible.

For independent reading in the classroom, we use Accountable Independent Reading, an approach that helps ensure that independent reading is accountable and of high quality. For students reading aloud, we call our approach Control the Game, subtly engineering how you call on students to read aloud in a way which ensures that not only the primary reader but all readers are benefiting. And finally, for students listening to oral reading, we keep our approach simple and call it Read-Aloud.
Module 5.2 Accountable Independent Reading (AIR)
The vast majority of high school and college classes require students to complete and absorb extensive amounts of independent reading. They also require students to both discuss and write cogently about what they have read-sometimes moments, hours, or even days later. Almost every assessment serving as a gateway to college admission is built on a student's ability to read, retain information from, and comprehend a text independently. In those critical settings, students have to make sense of what's read without their classmates' or teacher's help.

Recognizing the need to increase the amount of independent reading students do in preparation for college, many classrooms utilize sustained silent reading (SSR)-essentially designated times for students to read, quietly, from books of their choosing. Whether called DEAR (Drop Everything and Read), FUR (Free Uninterrupted Reading), or any other clever acronym, the idea is to get students more reading road miles by letting them read books that interest them. There is often little in terms of assessment or accountability surrounding this free reading time; it's just time spent with books.

On the surface, programs like DEAR offer a compelling solution. They get more books in more kids' hands and get more teachers, schools, leaders, parents, and students reading. In Marilyn Jager Adams's analysis of reading research, she notes that "if we want them to read well, we must find a way for them to read lots," and we agree wholeheartedly. Yet general SSR methods can focus on reading quantity to the detriment of reading quality. Enter Accountable Independent Reading (AIR).

Accountable Independent Reading involves students in reading texts independently (and silently post grades K-1)-and allows teachers to assess whether effective reading is actually happening. Much of the reading students do in schools fails to meet these criteria. And, unfortunately, the students reading the least are often the ones who need to read the most. Some flip idly through pages, gazing at pictures, while others read lazily or poorly, practicing and reinscribing weak habits as they go. This kind of "reading" fails the accountability test.

The key to making AIR effective is preparing students to read on their own productively, accountably, and efficiently. To effectively bring AIR to your classroom, you want to encode success in reading independently, then start to increase both difficulty and length to build stamina.

First, let's take a look at some of the barriers we face in making sure that independent reading is accountable-and consider how to overcome them.
Barriers to Accountable Independent Reading
Given the necessity of effective, independent reading, teachers would be doing their students a disservice if they failed to provide them with extensive opportunities to practice reading on their own throughout their school careers. However, attempts to increase independent reading can quickly butt up against three key barriers: accountability, stamina, and the report-back lag.
The Accountability Challenge
The first barrier teachers face in ensuring successful independent reading is the accountability challenge. As we've already noted, when students read independently, it's hard to be completely sure whether they are actually reading. Or whether they are practicing effective habits or inscribing poor ones. Or that independent reading is not functioning regressively-that is, as an activity that causes good readers to get better by practicing effective habits, and bad readers to get worse by reinforcing bad habits (for example, dropping word endings, reading hastily, not attending to punctuation). Practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes permanent. It's perfect practice that makes perfect.

What can we do to increase the amount of perfectly practiced reading that students do? To prepare students for successful independent reading, we can systematically build opportunities for successful practice that also include effective and efficient ways to constantly test for mastery-especially before adding complexity and/or further autonomy. We are preparing our students for a marathon, not a sprint, but well before anyone can run a marathon, he's got to be able to run a mile.
The Fitness Challenge
The second reading challenge shares the stuff of running challenges-namely, stamina. The fitness challenge has to do with a student's ability to read long and challenging texts. One former student noted, in reflecting on his first, struggle-filled year in college, that he simply wasn't able to read the fifty or sixty pages of challenging text assigned per class per night that his privileged peers often were. This was nearly his undoing. Students not only need to gradually grow more autonomous as they read but also need to build their stamina to read and concentrate for long blocks of time, a task made even harder by the highly distracting world we live in today.

A colleague who is a marathoner once described the challenging monotony of marathons by saying, "The hardest part of running a marathon is doing the same thing over and over without stopping for three hours (four or five for the mortals among us). The real challenge has less to do with running; it would be hard to play the tuba or even talk to a friend nonstop for three hours." Students need to encounter gradually longer stretches of reading to get in better and better shape as they inch closer and closer to the college marathon. Even though giving students long, sacred blocks of DEAR may seem to address this challenge, if students aren't held accountable for that reading, then it's unlikely that they are building stamina for actual reading. Building stamina for reading has a distinctive wrinkle: you have to understand and remember what you've read.
The Report-Back Lag
Unlike a marathon, which is over once you cross the finish line, reading requires that you remember it well enough to write or talk about it in a meaningful way. And you may have to retain the insights and understandings gleaned from your reading for minutes or hours or days before someone asks you to reflect on it. Difficulties around the length of time between the time something was read and the time it needs to be recalled make up the report-back lag.

Simply reading the seventy-five assigned pages of a biology textbook as part of your Biology 101 course assignment is not enough. You need to be able to make sense of what you've read and be able to recall it later, whether on an exam or in a later lab experiment. The report-back lag poses a significant challenge when asking students to read independently: not only do they have to actually do the reading, but they have to comprehend it and remember it at a later time.

Now that the challenges teachers face in getting students to read well by themselves have been defined, it's time to dive into how to surmount them.
Accountability Tools for In-Class AIR
Several key tools are useful for making independent reading accountable, enjoyable, and successful. The accountability tools that follow address the barriers that we face when giving our students meaningful and productive opportunities to read independently.
Limit Text and Gradually Increase
AIR should begin with limited text-reading in short intervals, under the watchful guidance of a teacher-before gradually moving toward longer stretches and extended reading assigned for homework. It's better to start by reading smaller chunks with greater accountability and comprehension than to read more text at lower quality. For developing readers or very hard texts, you might start with chunks as small as a single sentence and build up to a paragraph. The goal is to make a habit of reading independently and reading well, even if that means starting with and confirming comprehension after just a few lines of text. Starting with limited sections of text enables you to assess comprehension more accurately and consistently at more frequent intervals. Even very small doses of independent reading with seemingly modest goals can result in high amounts of student error at first-all the more reason to start small and scale up. The goal is for students to become socialized to reading well every time they read, at least as much as it is to increase the amount of time they read.

To build stamina over time, increase the amount of independent reading done in class. Lengthening the amount of text for AIR does not necessarily mean you should simply look to add a paragraph or a sentence each day. Gather data through questioning and observation, ensuring that written work demonstrates that students comprehend what they read independently before you add longer chunks of text. Before assigning longer independent portions, it's important to keep a pulse on pacing and accuracy.
Find a Focal Point
As students read on their own, consider providing a focal point before you dispatch them to read whatever chunk of text you've assigned. For example, you might say, "As you read this next paragraph independently, look for three details that describe the setting of our story" or "Take one minute to read the next paragraph on your own. I'm going to ask you what Theo learns about his mother in this paragraph, so make sure you're looking for it." Tell students what they should look for before they start reading. As is true of any skill, mastery (in this case, students' comprehension and readiness to take on longer reading) can be gauged only through a reliable Check for Understanding. Assigning a focal point gives you a reliable measure.

A focal point allows you to see whether students comprehended a key component from their reading and were reliably able to absorb the details that make strong comprehension predictable. Almost everyone can think of something vague to say after they read a paragraph; what you want to know is whether students can answer a specific question.

Further, this method allows students a reference point for metacognition-another step toward intellectual autonomy. After they read, they can ask themselves, "What did Theo learn about his mother?" "Where was the conflict?" If they can't answer, they know they need to reread.
Set Time Limits
Beyond assigning how much to read and what to read for, teachers can do a lot for the long-term growth of AIR by giving students finite time limits-limits that are tight and manageable but also sufficient and scalable. Initially, providing one to two minutes to read and mark up a few sentences gives students who work at different speeds the opportunity to finish, while not providing so much time that the fastest readers get distracted as they wait for the rest of the class to finish. Again, the goal initially is to read well, so the incentive should not be to rush. Following an independent reading chunk with an oral or written Check for Understanding can confirm that students comprehend the main takeaway of that portion of the text. And you can always dig deeper with additional written questions for your faster readers.

As any teacher of thirty students can tell you, there will be a wide range of comprehension in AIR across a classroom. Some students will read quickly, but not understand much. Others will read slowly and have a firm grasp on comprehension. And still others will both read slowly and have trouble comprehending the text. Given the range of possibilities found in any one classroom, you'll want to think about how to best differentiate AIR tasks to support and meet the needs of all students. Another way to gather data on the spectrum of reading skills in your class is to allow a finite period of time for students to read, without indicating how much text they have to read. Instead, have them use a hash mark to indicate where they are when time runs out ("When you hear the timer, mark the spot you've read up to"). Doing so allows you to assess the varying speeds with which different students move through content.

Over time, of course, you'll want to gradually release students to read longer chunks of text, for longer periods of time, with less scaffolding. As students progress, try including questions for analysis and slowly eliminating focal points before AIR-but only after your students have reliably demonstrated their ability to establish meaning of key elements of the text. You should also strive to systematically increase the amount of independent reading that students complete in class.
Assign an Interactive Reading Task
Add a level of accountability to your focal point by giving students an interactive reading task. For example, you might ask students to "Read to the bottom; write 'conflict' in the margin next to the place where we learn what the conflict is" or "Meet me at the top of page 104, and be able to describe the conflict that develops. Have at least one piece of evidence underlined to support your answer." The result is a double line of accountability: one which ensures that students have actually read independently, and the other which shows that students have understood what they have read.

The data you gather from observable markups can then inform discussion. You might choose students to Cold Call or Show Call (project their text markups on a document camera, as described in TLaC 2.0) on the basis of margin notes you have observed (for example, "Let's take a look at how Joaquin marked up his text. Notice that he underlined two pieces of evidence of our setting. Who had a different piece of evidence?"). While this helps support students who may not have identified the conflict in this selection of text, it also supports students more broadly by giving strong examples of interactive reading from their peers.
Confirm and Scaffold Comprehension
Following periods of AIR, confirm comprehension through both written and oral checks (for example, "In one sentence, describe the contrasting settings that appear in the opening paragraphs of Tuck Everlasting "). You may also consider having students read back chunks of text as evidence that supports their answer, as in, "Read back the part that demonstrates how the author uses figurative language to describe the contrast between the two settings."

Consistently checking comprehension for AIR is essential to ensuring meaningful reading. Written checks are even more accountable because every student in the class must complete them. They also better allow you to scaffold for different reading levels by varying the types of written comprehension checks. Initially, for struggling readers, your comprehension checks should be more about establishing the literal meaning of a passage. For more advanced readers, you may want to include additional comprehension checks that ask them to analyze meaning. Logistically, both of these comprehension checks should be available to all students. You might just have students first answer the "establish meaning" question before posing more challenging questions-giving faster students an opportunity to answer harder prompts. This is also useful because sometimes our fastest readers aren't actually reading carefully enough; the comprehension checks can cause them to go back and reread to confirm their own understanding-a useful college prep habit to develop.

As you release students to their independent reading, the classroom should be silent. And while that means establishing a strong culture of discipline among the students in your classroom, it also means establishing strong habits of discipline for yourself. Remember to try not to talk while your students are reading-if you repeat the directions, say, or make comments loudly enough for public consumption, you run the risk of disrupting comprehension.
AIR for Homework
Over time, AIR should become increasingly independent and autonomous. This should include accountable independent homework reading. Much like AIR in class, AIR outside of class should begin with small chunks and should stress accountability first and foremost. Remember, high-quality reading is what we want. Gradually, the amount of nightly reading should increase.

AIR assignments should not be confused with independent reading that students do nightly in books of their own choosing-and presumably in books at a reading level that is unlikely to cause them to struggle. For example, at Uncommon Schools, elementary students are asked to read independently at home for fifteen minutes per day-and up to thirty minutes independently in the upper grades. Although reading is tracked by parent-signed reading logs, this does not prove that students comprehend what they read, but it does help establish a lifelong habit of reading.

Accountable independent homework reading, by contrast, builds in an accountability check for comprehension. Checks serve as a means of holding students accountable for what they have read outside of class and help address the report-back lag, requiring them to remember what they have read after a brief passage of time. They also provide students with appropriate practice with the expectations of high school and college-being held responsible for reading done independently at home.

Comprehension checks can take a number of forms-classroom discussion, written assignments, or quizzes to name a few-and can vary in length at the teacher's discretion. A closed-book reading-check format-which includes three to five written-response questions that are specific enough to require careful reading and that are relatively straightforward if such reading has been completed-is one effective way to hold students accountable for out-of-class reading. The idea behind a reading check is to ask a quick-to-administer sample of questions about the text to see if students understood key aspects. You aren't trying to ask about the whole chapter; you're just asking enough questions that you have pretty reliable data.

Also, just because you give a reading check does not mean you need to grade or score it. If you graded on a variable-interval schedule-grading every second or third one or ten students' papers each time-you'd get a decent sample and build a healthy habit of accountability for simply doing the reading. That said, it is better (1) to use a simple reading check that you can grade every time than a more complex one that you can't, and (2) to discuss the answers afterwards so as to fill in gaps any students may have, before moving forward. As with any Check for Understanding, the data you get from student answers will help drive instruction and determine the effectiveness of the independent reading done outside of class. In later grades, significant chunks of reading should be done outside the classroom.

The accountability tools described here work in conjunction with each other to help build students' independence in logging high-quality miles on the page. Each of these tools can be gradually released across the course of the year as more and more students demonstrate that they are ready to successfully read independently. But even once that independence has been established, giving students opportunities to practice reading aloud is still crucial. Enter Control the Game.

Accountable Independent Reading, AIR, approaches to reading, Reading Reconsidered

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An Excerpt from Chapter Five of Reading Reconsidered - Teach Like a Champion

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Over the next couple of months, I'm going to be posting some excerpts from Reading Reconsidered here on Field Notes. This is the beginning of Chapter 5, which discusses how and how much students read. Reading Reconsidered: Chapter 5 Approaches to Reading: Reading More, Reading Better Consider, for a moment, how much reading you were required...

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Etymology & Morphology 101: Why We Can’t Just Teach Phonics

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I used Structured Word Inquiry in my Grade 5 classroom for nine years. I didn't wait to fully understand everything before I took the plunge. I just jumped in and learned along with my students. I knew who to ask when I was stuck, I took online classes when I could, I read many blogs, talked with others using SWI, and read books. My students have loved the fact that I don't have all the answers. We learn from each other. It is very collaborative and joyful!

During the entire time I've been using Structured Word Inquiry, I've kept a blog. I've also recorded a lot of the activities my students and I engaged in. Sometimes we prepared lessons to take to the Grade 2 and Grade 3 classrooms. Sometimes my students worked in small groups. Sometimes the work was individual. Sometimes we created videos to teach others what we were learning.

In this class, Bringing Structured Word Inquiry into the Classroom, I share the activities that worked well and give you lots of ideas to take back to your classroom. I will focus on the guiding principles and the 4 consistent questions of Structured Word Inquiry. We will specifically talk about many ways to improve your students' abilities to write thoughtful word sum hypotheses. Along the way I will explain many of the features of English spelling. We will also address the question, "Where do I begin? What should I start with?" The videos of my students let you see how they respond to this work.

The course is 5 episodes long. Each episode is 90 minutes. The cost of that 5 episode class is $100.

CURRENT AND UPCOMING CLASS SCHEDULES

###I'll be setting up some new schedules soon. If you have a preference for day of the week and time of day, please let me know at teachinfifth@gmail.com

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Thursday, January 26; 2:00 pm Central Time
Thursday, February 2; 2:00 pm CDT
Thursday, February 9; 2:00 pm CDT
Thursday, February 16; 2:00 pm CDT
Thursday, February 23; 2:00 pm CDT

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Thursday, January 26; 9:00 am Central Time
Thursday, February 2; 9:00 am CDT
Thursday, February 9; 9:00 am CDT
Thursday, February 16; 9:00 am CDT
Thursday, February 23;9:00 am CDT

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If these dates or times don't work for you, please send me an email so I know you are interested. Include dates and/or times that will work for you. Please include your time zone. I don't schedule a class until I know people are interested in signing up.

To register:

1. Submit payment through my Paypal link which is listed below. Include the email you want me to use when contacting you.

2. I will respond and make sure I know which schedule you are interested in.

Specifics:

Each class will be 90 minutes in length. All times posted are in Central Standard Time. Use this link to help convert to your time zone.

Cost is $100.00 for five 90 minute classes, paid through Paypal at this link: PayPal.Me/MaryBethSteven . Please send an email as well, stating the class and start date you are interested in. Then I will have your email for confirmation.

If dates offered do not work for you, please email with your preferences. I will do my best to coordinate and offer another session. Contact email: teachinfifth@gmail.com

Video of my students:

Here are a few videos of my students and what they learn with SWI:

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I used Structured Word Inquiry in my Grade 5 classroom for nine years. I didn't wait to fully understand everything before I took the plunge. I just jumped in and learned along with my students. I knew who to ask when I was stuck, I took online classes when I could, I read many blogs, talked with others using SWI, and read books.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

1. Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

Leahy, Lyon, Thompson and Wiliam (2005).
Very commonly, Wiliam presents these ideas in this helpful table, linking the strategies to core assessment concepts:

In my work as a consultant and teacher trainer, I give a lot of 'evidence-informed' advice to teachers. Of late, this has been influenced largely by discussions about a knowledge-rich curriculum and my reading of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, cognitive load theory, and various other papers linking cognitive psychology to classroom practice.

However, it occurred to me recently that most of this overlaps entirely with Wiliam's five strategies and that is what I want to explore here. To some extent, schools and teachers often feel they have have 'done AfL to death' in countless CPD sessions over the last 15 years. Time was when you couldn't get a job unless you said 'AfL' about 12 times in an interview. Sadly, my sense is that the wisdom at the heart of Wiliam's ideas about responsive teaching/formative assessment gets washed out either a) by the delusion that the strategies are already embedded in day-to-day practice or b) by the sense that this is a box ticked and people are really ready to move to the new thing. Truth be told, a lot of 'AfL' was and is a mile away from the formative assessment practice Wiliam is talking about.

Essentially, I feel that, among the important things every teacher should know, the five strategies should be there, part of the core curriculum for teacher development. Here's how I see it all connecting:
1.Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
Wiliam says 'if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there'. This is largely about curriculum planning. I read 'learning intentions' as meaning: what do we want all students to know and be able to do? In the detail, this means spelling out what knowledge - in all its forms - they should have and how to apply this knowledge in new contexts. It chimes perfectly with the wave of work being done around curriculum design. It also resonates with the strand of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction around sequencing concepts, providing models and appropriate scaffolding.

It also means 'what does excellence look like?'. This connects to ideas about assessment and comparative judgement and teachers knowing the standards. Significantly, the implication from Wiliam is that in 'clarifying, understanding and sharing' - teachers, students and their peers all need to know both the knowledge requirements and the criteria for excellence in any performed task. This goes far, far beyond writing a mandatory one-line LO on the board at the start of every lesson! (Aarrghh!). It suggests a lot of very explicit exposition and discussion about the target knowledge and the features of any endeavour that constitute ever increasing degrees of success.

This, in turn, feeds into ideas about self-regulation and metacognition. Successful learners will be good at self-regulation, planning and monitoring their progress towards learning goals in a deliberate self-directed manner. Knowing the learning intentions very well is essential for that process to work.

So the links here are numerous: curriculum, knowledge, standards, self-regulation, scaffolding, modelling.
2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
In some ways, this 'strategy' is a one-line summary of most of the rest of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. 'Discussions, tasks and activities' covers a lot of possibilities. At the centre of it is the idea of 'responsive teaching'. Instructional teaching has to be highly interactive so that teachers are getting feedback from their students about how well their schemas for the material in hand are forming and how fluent they are becoming retrieving and using what they've learned. The challenge for teachers is to involve as many students as possible which leads to the need for good questioning routines and good knowledge-check routines where the ratio of student involvement is high and the information received has a good diagnostic component.

Rosenshine talks about the need for checking for understanding and asking lots of questions in a probing style. Wiliam focuses on question design - including good diagnostic multiple choice questions - and the role of all-student response techniques.

Links: Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Shimamura's 'Generate-Evaluate' model. Ideas about retrieval practice. Nuthall's ideas about 'hidden lives' and the idea that we can't be remotely confident about learning taking place until we check - now, and again later.
3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Wiliam's work is the emphasis on moving learners forward. It's this thinking that informed the ideas I expressed in this ' feedback as actions ' post.

Some of the key messages that Wiliam offers in relation to feedback that I cite very often are:

Feedback is only successful if students' learning improves - and this depends on their capacity to understand it and inclination to accept and act on it. It's got an interpersonal, motivational element that can't be brushed aside. Giving feedback isn't a purely technical, objective task - although it does have to suggest actions students can actually take rather than offering a nebulous retrospective critique.

The goal is to change the students' capacity to produce better work, not just to improve their work. Austin's Butterfly is wonderful - because it shows what effective feedback can achieve - but Austin has only truly benefitted if, later, he is more able to 'look like a scientist' or draw beautiful butterflies without feedback: he needs to be able to generate his own feedback and become more independent.

This links formative assessment to metacognition and self-regulation and Rosenshine's ideas about moving from guided to independent practice. If we're still reliant on external feedback to tell us if we've succeeded (SatNav style), then we've still got a long way to go. Effective learners can link their work to the success criteria and generate their own ongoing self-correcting feedback narrative.

Links: Ethic of excellence, Rosenshine guided to independent practice, self-regulation.
4. Activating students as learning resources for one another
I think this is the feature of Wiliam's five strategies that deserves more attention. All too often teachers create major bottlenecks by forcing all classroom interactions to pass through them. However, if teachers develop strong routines where students support each other's learning in a serious structured manner, then the ratio, quality and frequency of student interactions with the knowledge in hand can increase significantly. We can't have a dialogue with every student at once but they can all be involved in meaningful dialogues with each other to support the process of working out 'where the learner is' and 'how to get to where the learner is going'. This is where disciplined ' think pair share ' becomes so powerful.

Wiliam cites Slavin in showing that well-designed collaborative learning can yield significant gains - but it has to be done such that everyone is learning. There are so many ways to do this e.g students checking their partners' answers using all manner of quizzing formats and generative processes and elaborative-interrogative questions (why? how?). Pairs are probably the most efficient and effective use of this strategy - because of the ease of switching in and out of the interactions. If one person in a pair acts as the verifier for the other, using exemplars, fact sheets, mark schemes as a reference, the extent of retrieval practice and feedback can be increased hugely. Another example might be using structured dialogues for practising the use of language or rehearsing explanations and arguments. Provided that there is a strong process for evaluating students' responses for accuracy and quality, a high volume of peer-to-peer interactivity is powerful.

Links: Hattie's 'reciprocal teaching', Shimamura's 'think it, say it, teach it', Slavin's collaborative learning, Sumeracki and Weinstein on elaborative interrogative questions and retrieval practice.
5. Activating students as owners of their own learning
In all honesty, I find that implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of 'noble intent' rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links directly to many other ideas. 'Owning your own learning' is at the heart of strong self-regulation and metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these 'goals' are not broad brush life goals; they are learning goals - the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge, confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before diving down into the details;

setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.

setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building - as per Shimamura's Relate in MARGE.

providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.

If a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing, self-regulation that fuels even more success.

Links: Rosenshine: practice; Shimamura: Relate; Growth mindset; self-regulation.

To some extent I feel that the issue has been that 'AfL' or even 'formative assessment' has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it's when you get into understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That's the understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It's powerful stuff, right there, where it's been for years.
Key References:
Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning(pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilam, D (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press.

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

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There are ways in which vocabulary development can be explicitly taught to support reading
comprehension. One way is to help children learn the meanings of specific words. Another is to help children become better at working out meanings of new words using context and/or morphology while reading independently.

It is important to encourage and enable students to find out the meaning of a word they do not know when reading rather than skipping it.

More detail about teaching vocabulary is provided in the Vocabulary section of this website.

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There are strong relationships between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. (Suggate et al., 2018). Individual words in a text are the building blocks for the comprehension of sentences and the text as a whole, but we also need to consider the complexity of word knowledge and how vocabulary is acquired across the lifespan to understand [...]

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Reading aloud to your class or a small group gives students access to literature they may not yet be able to decode and comprehend independently. It provides a perfect opportunity to explicitly teach the skills necessary for comprehension.

This extensive shared reading resource contains rich reading material of different text types for you to read aloud to your students. Each text showcases the features of its particular text type, and can be used as a context for explicit and engaging teaching opportunities.

When students become proficient decoders, they can also read these texts for independent or partner reading and fluency practice.

For each text, you will find:

downloadable versions of the text to share on-screen with your class or print (PDF and PowerPoint slideshow)

a teaching and learning sequence

hands-on, open-ended and engaging follow-up activities from the 'Big Six' areas of literacy acquisition, including free printable worksheets and graphic organisers

a teacher talk section with instructional practices that explain how to explicitly model and teach literacy skills and build upon students' knowledge

links to the Australian Curriculum (AC) descriptors, to demonstrate how each text and activity links back to a range of learning areas, with a focus on English.

For more detailed information about these texts download this overview (1.1MB).

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Reading aloud to your class or a small group gives students access to literature they may not yet be able to decode and comprehend independently. It provides a perfect opportunity to explicitly teach the skills necessary for comprehension. This extensive shared reading resource contains rich reading material of different text types for you to read aloud to your students.

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On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at comprehending what people say to you?

It's a bit of a silly question, isn't it? Whether or not we comprehend what we are told is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Talk to me about the first nine seasons of The Simpsons using familiar words and I'll comprehend pretty well. Talk to me about your favourite "anguilliform" Pokemon character and I'll probably stare at you blankly. Yes, there are some basic capacities that underpin our ability to understand what people say aloud, such as our hearing and our working memory capacity. But - on the assumption that these things aren't an impediment - our ability to comprehend what we are told is dependent on what we know about the subject at hand and the words being used to describe it. In other words, there is no generic listening comprehension ability. There is instead a vast network of understanding that determines the extent to which we can construct meaning from the words we hear. Trying to determine - or, heaven forbid, quantify - a person's ability to comprehend what they are told would rely on some way of measuring their grasp of all there is to know about the world and the language used to describe it. How do you measure a person's entire understanding of their world and their language? How do you effectively sample a domain this extensive? Answer: you can't.

And this brings me on to reading comprehension. Our ability to comprehend what we read is reliant on much the same network of understanding that is required for listening comprehension. Let's assume that we can recognise the words on a page fluently enough to free up the cognitive resources necessary for comprehension. Under these circumstances, whether or not we comprehend what we read is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Just as with listening comprehension, this is a domain so vast as to rule out valid assessment. To be clear, what I'm suggesting is that - beyond the development of relatively fluent word recognition* - our ability to comprehend what we read is based on everything we know about our world and our language, alongside an additional layer of knowledge related to written text conventions (e.g. punctuation, sub-headings, italics, etc). How do you measure a person's entire understanding of their world, their language and the conventions of written texts? Answer: you can't.

So, we've established that trying to measure reading comprehension is a non-starter.** From this, we can assume that the results from reading comprehension assessments need to be interpreted very cautiously, especially on the level of the individual pupil.

And this is where this blogpost would end if reading comprehension assessment hadn't warped the teaching of reading. But it has. A lot. For the sake of assessment, teachers have been incentivised to see reading comprehension as a generic skill, or, more precisely, a small set of generic skills. If this perspective were a canvas, it would look something like this:

Here is reading comprehension ability interpreted as a small collection of generic skills, things like retrieval, prediction and summarising. Reading comprehension assessments tend to divide the questions they use into a few categories such as these. Countless teachers and school leaders have thus made the understandable leap that teaching reading comprehension is the process of building up each of these generic comprehension skills. They attempt to add another broad-brushstroke layer to a pupil's prediction skill as a means of filling up the canvas. This conveniently allows for the creation of medium-term plans that state that a given class is working on prediction or inference or some other generic skill. It also allows schools to make lists related to those skills that can be ticked off as children develop. If we're going to gather evidence of a pupil's reading comprehension development, then what we presumably need is a small set of statements that correspond to a relatively small set of generic skills. This interpretation of reading comprehension achieves that.

The problem, of course, is that this interpretation is completely bogus. It is based on a view of reading comprehension that is palpably false. Yes, when we comprehend what we read, we tend to be able to retrieve information, to make predictions, to summarise what we have read, etc, and doing this stuff while we read is a useful set of habits that keeps us awake to what we are doing.*** But this is an unhelpful way to visualise our ability to comprehend what we read. I'd argue that this is better:

Forget for a moment the exact scene being portrayed, and consider the means of portraying it. Here reading comprehension ability is interpreted as a vast interacting network of understanding. It is not built up through broad brushstrokes, but through the painstaking accumulation of knowledge about words, texts and the wider world to which they relate. The natural consequence of such an interpretation is that the teaching of reading comprehension must prioritise the guided exploration of text, involving lots of reading and lots of rich discussion. Retrieval, prediction, summarising, etc will naturally form a part of this, but developing these habits is not the central goal of reading comprehension lessons. The central goal of reading comprehension lessons is to understand the specific text being read and the world to which it relates through exploration of the text's use of language. Everything else is secondary.

However, this interpretation leaves us with some problems. I've lost count of the number of school leaders and teachers who - despite their instinctive enthusiasm for this content-focused conception of reading comprehension - have asked the same two questions:

1. "How would we evidence this?"

2. "What would this look like in terms of our long-term planning?"

I will address these two questions in turn:

The answer to (1) is simple: Don't bother.

I'm serious. Just don't bother. Ofsted have made it abundantly clear that they don't want teachers gathering evidence for its own sake. If your method of assessment requires you to pretend that reading comprehension is something that it clearly is not, then it's time to dump that method of assessment. Think instead about how fluently your children read and how much they know about the English language and the wider world. The former can be assessed by hearing children read aloud and by undertaking quick fluency assessments; the latter, however, is not accessible via reference to simple rubrics. Standardised reading assessments may give a very rough idea, but they are not to be relied upon as precise measures of individual progress for all the reasons explained above. It's time to accept that there are some things that we can measure and other things that we cannot and to change our assessment decisions accordingly.

The answer to (2) is a little more difficult. Think back to the canvas above. To build up a picture like that, many thousands of dots are added across the breadth of the canvas, each chosen partly based on its relationship to the other dots on the canvas. In a content-focused view of teaching reading comprehension, our planning must focus on the content being read - the characters, the themes, the text features, the aspects of the world being described, etc. And it must do so in relation to the rest of that which has been, and will be, added to the canvas. In short, stop focusing on how non-existent generic comprehension skills will be taught. Instead focus on the texts themselves - not least their variety and their relationship to the rest of the curriculum**** - and on how you will ensure that pupils learn lots about them.

A content-focused approach to the teaching of reading comprehension aligns with a more accurate view of reading comprehension. It allows teachers to do away with pointless, time-consuming forms of assessment. It encourages school leaders to re-imagine their reading curriculum primarily in terms of the texts to be shared. Most of all, it offers our pupils a more authentic, enriching and effective experience of reading.

So, what's stopping us from teaching reading comprehension really well? Absolutely nothing.

If you'd like to find out more about teaching reading, please consider my book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties will be going to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

* Fluent word recognition is also dependent on our broader language comprehension alongside our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme relationships, phonemic skills, etc.

** The Teachwell blog has an excellent series on this idea: http://www.teach-well.com/reforming-the-key-stage-2-reading-sat-why-its-needed-and-possible/

*** There is lots of research into comprehension strategies. This blog is a good place to start if you want to know more: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/comprehension-skills-or-strategies-is-there-a-difference-and-does-it-matter#sthash.ZC5WlzWX.dpbs

**** This does not mean that every text has to directly relate to something else in your wider curriculum. It might even be the case that texts are chosen precisely because of how they supplement the curriculum. (E.g. If a primary history curriculum doesn't include a study of a South American civilisation, a non-fiction text relating to the Maya civilisation might be an apt choice to add breadth to the pupils' understanding of the challenging - and often controversial - concept of civilisation.)

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What's stopping us from teaching reading comprehension really well?

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On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at comprehending what people say to you? It's a bit of a silly question, isn't it? Whether or not we comprehend what we are told is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact...

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Don’t discard comprehension strategies - Five from Five

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Share this post Dr Jennifer Buckingham, 23 June 2023 As greater consensus has been reached about how to teach children to decode and read words fluently, the focus of discussion among practitioners and researchers has shifted to reading comprehension. Some of this discussion has centred on the utility of teaching comprehension skills and strategies explicitly […]

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Our New Middle Leaders Forum!

Calling all current and aspiring Middle Leaders.

We have different names in difference places. You might be a Lead Teacher, Instructional Coach, Learning Specialist, Head of Curriculum or a subject, or an aspiring leader...

Registration for the first event is below...

This forum is designed to give you a space to connect, learn new ideas, practical applications, and receive support from colleagues working in similar spaces to you. We are committed to seeing the Science of Learning reach every classroom you, and your work is crucial to see that through!

We are building the existing Think Forward Educator network to better support Middle Leaders and share your insights and challenges you currently face.

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Our First Event - How Cognitive Load Theory changed my teaching

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Zach Groshell is a secondary instructional coach in the Seattle area, and an experienced primary teacher. Zach holds a PhD in Education and presents often about cognitive science and education research. Zach's recent contributions include presentations about cognitive load theory for InnerDrive's Cognitive Science Network, and the chapter on assessment and feedback for the book, Amplifying Instructional Design. Zach hosts the podcast, Progressively Incorrect, and maintains an active professional presence on Twitter (@mrzachg) and his blog, educationrickshaw.com.

Christie Barrett is an experienced teacher having taught across Early Years and Primary settings in her native New Zealand, as well as London and Victoria. She is currently Head of Learning and Curriculum at an Independent Junior School in Geelong. The last 3 years have seen Christie lead a journey of change to develop and implement teaching practice in line with the Science of Learning in her school. She regularly develops and presents Professional Learning for teachers, working with a dynamic leadership team who is active in the change journey. They were recipients of the 'The Emeritus Professor Collette Excellence in Educational Leadership' Award, and Christie is currently part of the VCAA English curriculum review panel.

Kathleen O'Rourke is a teacher and aspiring middle leader in the NSW Department of Education's FASTstream program, currently placed at Jindabyne Central School. She was a Winner of the 2022 Commonwealth Bank Schools Plus Teaching Award in the Early Career Category. Kathleen is currently completing the Master of Education in Science of Language and Reading at La Trobe University, which is what motivated her to pursue the Science of Reading, Learning and Maths.

Our New Middle Leaders Forum!

Calling all current and aspiring Middle Leaders.

We have different names in difference places. You might be a Lead Teacher, Instructional Coach, Learning Specialist, Head of Curriculum or a subject, or an aspiring leader...

Registration for the first event is below...

This forum is designed to give you a space to connect, learn new ideas, practical applications, and receive support from colleagues working in similar spaces to you. We are committed to seeing the Science of Learning reach every classroom you, and your work is crucial to see that through!

We are building the existing Think Forward Educator network to better support Middle Leaders and share your insights and challenges you currently face.

Let's hear your voice!

Our First Event - How Cognitive Load Theory changed my teaching

Collaborate

This is a growing space to increase your knowledge, bridge the gap between research and practice, and hear the narratives of other educators achieving great things as middle leaders.

Connect

Join the movement of middle leaders interested to implement the Science of Learning in their setting.

Zach Groshell is a secondary instructional coach in the Seattle area, and an experienced primary teacher. Zach holds a PhD in Education and presents often about cognitive science and education research. Zach's recent contributions include presentations about cognitive load theory for InnerDrive's Cognitive Science Network, and the chapter on assessment and feedback for the book, Amplifying Instructional Design. Zach hosts the podcast, Progressively Incorrect, and maintains an active professional presence on Twitter (@mrzachg) and his blog, educationrickshaw.com.

Christie Barrett is an experienced teacher having taught across Early Years and Primary settings in her native New Zealand, as well as London and Victoria. She is currently Head of Learning and Curriculum at an Independent Junior School in Geelong. The last 3 years have seen Christie lead a journey of change to develop and implement teaching practice in line with the Science of Learning in her school. She regularly develops and presents Professional Learning for teachers, working with a dynamic leadership team who is active in the change journey. They were recipients of the 'The Emeritus Professor Collette Excellence in Educational Leadership' Award, and Christie is currently part of the VCAA English curriculum review panel.

Kathleen O'Rourke is a teacher and aspiring middle leader in the NSW Department of Education's FASTstream program, currently placed at Jindabyne Central School. She was a Winner of the 2022 Commonwealth Bank Schools Plus Teaching Award in the Early Career Category. Kathleen is currently completing the Master of Education in Science of Language and Reading at La Trobe University, which is what motivated her to pursue the Science of Reading, Learning and Maths.

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How Cognitive Load Theory changed my teaching - Inaugural Middle Leaders' Forum - Think Forward Educators

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Calling all current and aspiring Middle Leaders. We are building the existing Think Forward Educator network to better support Middle Leaders and share your insights and challenges you currently face. Let's hear your voice! Our first event was: How Cognitive Load Theory changed my teaching.

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CK Biography Series: Voices in History™ - Core Knowledge Foundation

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Voices in History is a Core Knowledge Biography Series that encourages young readers to learn about real superheroes in history. As a result of acts of extraordinary bravery, ingenuity, strength, and determination, these people made a difference and changed the world. Perhaps their remarkable stories will inspire young readers to become the superheroes of the...