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Chapter 8: Building Writing to Support Comprehension

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Chapter 8: Building Writing to Support Comprehension

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Using data to inform Zach's intervention plan for comprehension building through writing

What Research Says about Writing Supporting Comprehension

Ideas for Using Writing to Build Comprehension

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Using data to inform Aliyah's intervention plan for fluency

Effective interventions for fluency instruction

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Book Study Facilitator

Naomi Watkins, Ph.D.

Secondary ELA Specialist

Utah State Board of Education

naomi.watkins@schools.utah.gov

Thank you for joining us for this book study! I'm looking forward to learning and collaborating with all of you!

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No two students in grades 4-8 are identical, and many struggle with literacy for different reasons. Using a teacher-friendly, hands-on approach, this eminently practical book walks educators through the nuts and bolts of literacy intervention in the middle grades. Highlights include "North Star" principles to orient instruction, an assessment flowchart, and extended case studies of three middle-grades learners. The book offers evidence-based intervention practices for targeting specific literacy components, including word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Teachers are guided to plan structured but flexible interventions that promote literacy growth and engagement. Sample lesson plans and clear, engaging figures illustrate how to make literacy intervention work for all students.

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Literacy Intervention in the Middle Grades: Word Learning, Comprehension, and Strategy Instruction, Grades 4-8

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No two students in grades 4-8 are identical, and many struggle with literacy for different reasons. Using a teacher-friendly, hands-on approach, this eminently practical book walks educators through the nuts and bolts of literacy intervention in the middle grades. Highlights include "North Star" principles to orient instruction, an assessment flowchart, and extended case studies of three middle-grades learners.

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Introduction to the text

Dispelling myths about adolescent literacy/middle grade readers

"North Star" Principles

Overview of the 3 case studies

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Chapter 1 & 2: Literacy Intervention for Middle Grades

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Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text

Part 3A. Build students' world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text

Part 3B. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read

Part 3C. Teach students a routine for determining the gist of a short section of text

Part 3D. Teach students to monitor their comprehension as they read

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reading intervention; reading instruction; literacy; reading difficulties; reading disabilities; comprehension; fluency; decoding; comprehension monitoring; world knowledge; word knowledge; vocabulary; stretch text; grade 4; grade 5; grade 6; grade 7; grade 8; grade 9

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WWC | Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9

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Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text Part 3A. Build students' world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text Part 3B. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read Part 3C.

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Background on why/how kids in grades K-3 have been taught to read

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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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9/19/2024

As secondary educators, we are increasingly aware of the significance of the science of reading and the nationwide implementation of K-3 legislation. However, we must consider how reading research applies to older students.

Secondary educators have been trained to primarily focus on teaching literature as content-area educators, with less emphasis on teaching reading during our undergraduate or professional learning. Despite our focus on standards and summative assessments, many students need help reading grade-level content and demonstrating proficiency in performance tasks. This raises the question: Why are so many of our adolescent students facing challenges in reading?

Numerous misconceptions exist regarding the reading process and its impact on reading proficiency in secondary classrooms. To improve reading outcomes, it is imperative we understand how the brain learns to read and acknowledge that our belief systems and myths about reading could hinder our efforts to improve literacy outcomes for all students. Let's thoroughly explore the beliefs we hold onto.

Belief No. 1: Good Readers Rely Heavily on Context Clues

In 1964, Dr. Kenneth Goodman, professor emeritus of Language, Reading, and Culture at the University of Arizona, conducted a study titled " A Linguistic Study of Cues and Miscues in Reading," which examined the reading abilities of 100 first, second, and third grade children. The study evaluated their ability to read a decontextualized word list and retell a passage using contextual cues. Dr. Goodman concluded that students could read more words in a contextualized text than in a word list, demonstrating their reliance on syntax and semantics cues. This led to the formulation of the three-cueing theory. Despite four decades of reading research, many educators still believe children rely heavily on using context clues in reading.

To comprehend how a child learns to read, insights from the research on eye-tracking by the late Dr. Keith Rayner, a distinguished cognitive psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, are beneficial. Dr. Rayner's 1998 article in the American Psychological Association Journal, " Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing: 20 Years of Research," elucidates specific characteristics of eye movements, information integration, and individual variances during reading. His focus on cognitive processes in reading involved the study of eye movements, with direct recordings indicating the eyes fixate on each word and exhibit prolonged fixation on complex words.

His work demonstrated that the complexity of phoneme-grapheme correspondences influences the duration of fixation on each word. According to eye-tracking research, the reading brain does not excessively rely on context clues, as theorized by Dr. Goodman. Educators must recognize that fluent reading depends on the brain's capacity to decode words on the page. When a child encounters too many unfamiliar words, they may resort to context clues as their only available strategy. It is conceivable that Dr. Goodman observed what less-skilled readers do when confronted with an unfamiliar word-they guess or utilize strong oral language skills to bridge the gaps. As educators in secondary education, our priority should be to ensure students possess strong decoding skills, enabling them to derive meaning from the text in front of them.

The research conducted by Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist, has revealed that the reading process occurs in the brain's left hemisphere. There are two primary regions where neural networks must be developed to enable the decoding of words on a page. The brain contains a visual word form area in the occipital lobe dedicated to processing words, and at the base of the frontal lobe, there exists a language processing system tailored for language comprehension. For a child to read written words, it is necessary to establish neural pathways that bridge the brain's language and visual word form areas.

FRONTAL TEMPORAL PARIETAL OCCIPITAL

Phoneme Analysis

Phoneme-Grapheme Association

Pronunciation

Articulation

To improve outcomes for secondary school students, prioritizing decoding is essential. In 1998, Philip Gough and William Tunmer formulated a framework known as the Simple View of Reading, which shows the reading process. The Simple View of Reading posits that reading comprehension results from decoding, word recognition, and language comprehension. If a student cannot decode the words in a text, it will impede their comprehension. As stated by David Kilpatrick in " Equipped for Reading Success," "The most direct route to good reading comprehension is to make the word recognition process automatic so the student can focus all his or her mental energy on reading."

Belief No. 2: If Students Haven't Learned To Read Before They Reach Secondary School, It's Too Late

As students transition to fourth grade, reading instruction typically shifts from learning to read to reading to learn. The Common Core State Standards' scope and sequence of foundational skills further reinforce this instructional shift. According to the standards, by second grade, students are expected to master long and short vowels in one- and two-syllable words. Third grade focuses on reading multisyllabic words with morphology as part of the foundational skills. The foundational skills progression culminates in fourth grade with a focus on knowing and applying grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.

However, the limited emphasis on phonics beyond the fourth grade and the greater focus on reading and understanding complex informative and narrative texts in the upper grades may lead secondary teachers to assume that students have already mastered foundational skills from lower grades. Contrary to this belief, it is essential to acknowledge there is always time to teach foundational skills, even in middle or high school.

In their article " Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems," Sharon Vaughn and Jack Fletcher highlight ample evidence to suggest educational systems can be developed so that nearly 95% of students can become reasonably successful readers. The remaining 5% who do not make adequate progress are likely to be truly reading disabled due to persistent reading difficulties. This underscores the responsibility of educators to provide explicit, systematic phonics instruction with a focus on building neural networks to teach all children to read.

In transitioning to this approach, leaders and educators must recognize that despite the shift in focus toward reading comprehension, students must possess the ability to decode text for effective language comprehension. The Simple View of Reading framework, developed by Philip Gough and William Tunmer in 1986, outlines the reading process, establishing that reading comprehension is a product of decoding, word recognition, and language comprehension.

It is important to note that older children who struggle in reading often face challenges in decoding vocabulary or both. Their deficits may not be apparent when reading one-syllable words, but they do struggle with multisyllabic words. While the Common Core State Standards emphasize the language component, educators should understand students can only derive meaning from text if they can read the words on the written page.

To ensure the vast majority of students attain basic literacy skills before graduating from high school, a shift in beliefs about content and approach to Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) is imperative. The National Center for Improving Literacy provides valuable guidance to school leaders about building a robust MTSS system, emphasizing establishing a leadership team as the initial step. The leadership team should be formed based on shared values and a strong focus on the literacy vision and mission.

This team should include members from different areas of literacy, such as school principals, reading coaches, reading specialists, and content-area teachers. Regularly scheduled meetings should focus on Response to Instruction (RtI) using progress-monitoring data, as well as formative and summative assessments. These meetings should take place at various levels of leadership, including grade level, content level, and building level. It is crucial to ensure the roles and responsibilities of each member are clear so the group can work together toward the shared vision and mission of improving literacy outcomes.

If secondary schools are committed to ensuring all students graduate with basic literacy skills, it is fundamental to invest in a strong leadership team dedicated to improving literacy rates. This team should evaluate district literacy performance data to comprehensively understand the existing reality.

Subsequently, the leadership team can prioritize areas that require the most attention to support instructional efforts. There should be a concerted focus on addressing decoding skills as an intervention and within content-area classes. The What Works Clearinghouse practice guide, " Providing Reading Intervention for Grades 4-9," offers evidence-based instructional techniques to support the development of all learners' reading skills. Following the prioritization, the leadership team should devise an action plan to be implemented during the year, supported by coaches and leaders.

If research indicates students must possess decoding skills to comprehend text and that the vast majority of students can learn to read at any age, it is incumbent upon school leaders to realign their focus and enhance their approach to teaching reading.

Establish a Multi-tiered System of Support in Reading (MTSS-R) Leadership Team

School Principal (team leader)

Reading Coach

Reading Specialists

One Classroom Teacher from Each Grade

One Parent or Family Member

Other members, as appropriate (special education teacher, school psychologist, etc.)

Meet monthly (every other month, at a minimum)

After fall, winter, and spring screenings
Focus: universal screening data

Months between screenings
focus: instructional planning and implementation

End of the year
focus: data and planning for next year

Team Responsibilities

Evaluate and support MTSS-R implementation

Use data to oversee the systematic improvement of MTSS-R implementation and student reading outcomes

Support teachers and staff implementing MTSS-R

The research reported here is funded by a grant to the National Center on Improving Literacy from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, in partnership with the Office of Special Education Program (Award #S2B3D160003). The opinions or policies expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of OESE, OSEP, or the U.S. Department of Education. You should not assume endorsement by the Federal government. Copyright © 2019 National Center on Improving Literacy.

Belief No. 3: If a Student Is Taught in Their Preferred Learning Style, They Will Learn Better.

Educators' first exposure to learning styles typically occurs as students in the classroom and later in their undergraduate studies. At the school level, many secondary teachers strive to address students' challenges in grasping grade-level texts by tailoring their lessons to accommodate various learning styles. They often kick off the academic year with student surveys and meticulously design their curriculum around their students' individual ways of comprehending and processing information. Although learning styles gained popularity in the 1970s and continue to be discussed in educational circles today, there is no substantial evidence to support their existence.

According to Adam Grant in his book, " Hidden Potential," around 89% of teachers worldwide believe in matching their instruction to students' learning styles. While it's widely acknowledged that interest and motivation vary among students, leading to the assumption children have distinct learning styles, there is no credible evidence to support this idea.

In their 2012 article " Learning Styles: Where is the Evidence," Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler found the results from 20 studies were mostly negative. Although three studies showed positive results, they were not particularly convincing. Therefore, there is limited empirical support for tailoring instruction to students' supposedly different learning styles. As educators, it's important to acknowledge that while students may have preferences, there is insufficient evidence to support customizing instruction to accommodate individual learning styles.

The concept of learning styles is centered around the idea that individuals learn best through visual, auditory, or kinesthetic means. However, in reality, learning styles are more about preferences than inherent abilities. As Daniel Willingham highlights in his article, " The Myths of Learning Styles," a preferred mode of presentation often reflects a preference for tasks in which one excels and feels successful. If a student demonstrates proficiency when information is presented visually, it may be the result of their preference rather than a specific learning style. Educators noticing the student's success may be inclined to believe that continuing to present information in the same way will lead to continued success. In reality, this pattern is more a result of confirmation bias than a validation of learning styles.

We have a tendency to seek out information that supports our beliefs, so when we witness student success, we are more likely to attribute it to learning style than to critically consider alternative explanations. We know children do have differences; they are all unique individuals. However, when we consider how one child is proficient in a standard, we must consider the task they are asked to complete. We know reading comprehension is a product of decoding and language comprehension. Then, if a student needs to meet grade-level expectations, we must understand the lack of success is not due to a learning style but a learning difference in the reading brain.

Dr. Hollis Scarbrough, a leading researcher at Haskins Lab, and creator of the Reading Rope, shows that skilled reading is a fluent execution of word recognition and comprehension. She created the visual metaphor for reading in 1992 based on the studies of reading and reading disabilities in the 1970s-1980s. The main purpose of the Reading Rope was to support parents and educators in understanding the subskills of reading and to encourage discussions about the complexity of reading. So, if a child needs help attaining a grade-level proficiency mark, we must consider the individual subskills of reading, not a preferred learning style.

We also know many other factors play into reading achievement, such as attention, working memory, self-monitoring, social-emotional competencies, processing, and other executive functioning skills. So, as educators, yes, we want to look at the "whole" child, but we also need to understand that matching a learning outcome with a learning style will reap little reward. Instead, we need to support our students in creating a classroom culture that values all children and recognizes the intrinsic factors that affect learning, as well as teaching all areas of literacy with an evidence-based, research-backed curriculum and using principles of instruction that support explicit teaching that will support all students.

"Education isn't truly successful until all children, regardless of their background and resources, have the opportunity to reach their potential. Creating schools where students achieve greater things isn't about focusing on a select few and pushing them to excel. It's about fostering a culture that allows all students to grow intellectually and thrive emotionally."
Adam Grant, Hidden Potential

Educators often operate within long-held beliefs dating back to the beginnings of public education. By understanding and letting go of these belief systems surrounding literacy in secondary schools, we can open ourselves up to learning and growth as educators. This will allow us to create a classroom environment where all students can reach their hidden potential.

It's important to challenge beliefs such as the reliance on context clues for good readers, the idea that it's too late to teach a child to read if foundational skills weren't learned in elementary school, and the notion that learning styles support learning. These beliefs hinder our progress toward better literacy outcomes. According to Grant in his book " Think Again," educators should think like scientists. Instead of immediately sticking to an opinion, we should treat our emerging view as a hunch or a hypothesis and test it using data.

Reading is a complex process involving many cognitive and linguistic processes that are influenced by instruction and practice opportunities. As educators, we must be committed to understanding the sciences of reading, learning, and teaching to improve literacy outcomes for all.

About the Author

For more than three decades, Jeanne Schopf, M.Ed., NBCT, C-SLDI, has devoted herself to enriching the lives of children as an educator and a prominent figure in state and national literacy. With a wealth of experience as a K-9 teacher, literacy coach, reading specialist, and certified dyslexia interventionist, she has made a tangible difference in both primary and secondary education. Schopf wholeheartedly dedicates herself to education and literacy leadership. Her extensive expertise and understanding of literacy, leadership, and systemic change bring immense value to the teachers she mentors and the school leaders she guides as they work toward transforming their schools. As a certified John Maxwell speaker, trainer, and coach, Schopf is committed to empowering individuals by recognizing their potential, forging connections, and igniting lasting change. Her mission is to assist all educators and leaders in establishing Pathways Towards Literacy in their schools. Schopf is an independent contractor for the Transformative Reading Teacher Group, CORE Learning, and 95 Percent Group.

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Discover the myths that could be holding your older students back. Explore the science of reading and how it applies to secondary education, challenging outdated beliefs to improve literacy outcomes for all students.

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Types of Assessments

Assessment Flowchart

Selecting a Pathway

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USBE Resource | Supporting Adolescent Readers: A Guide for Secondary Educators

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USBE Resource | Supporting Adolescent Readers: A Guide for Secondary Educators

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see page 3 for assessment flowchart

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Helpful infographic that summarizes assessment terms by the Institute of Education Sciences

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Helpful infographic that summarizes assessment terms by the Institute of Education Sciences

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Project for Adolescent Literacy: Public School Educators Survey

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Project for Adolescent Literacy: Public School Educators Survey

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Project for Adolescent Literacy: Educators Survey

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Guide from Florida Center for Reading Research (2009): Assessments to Guide Adolescent Literacy Instruction

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Guide from Florida Center for Reading Research (2009): Assessments to Guide Adolescent Literacy Instruction

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Analysis of Eight Informal Reading Inventories

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Analysis of Eight Informal Reading Inventories

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A Critical Analysis of Eight Informal Reading Inventories

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There are a number of current informal reading inventories — each has its strengths, limitations, and unique characteristics, which should be considered in order to best fit a teacher’s needs.

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How to Administer an Informal Reading Inventory

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support

Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration

Publisher Approved Professional Learning

Online Elementary Reading Academy

Adolescent Literacy Solutions

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Rise in Math

Math Coaching

Online Math Academy

Onsite Math Academy

Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support

Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration

Publisher Approved Professional Learning

Online Elementary Reading Academy

Adolescent Literacy Solutions

Curriculum Adoption

Curriculum Implementation

Rise in Math

Math Coaching

Online Math Academy

Onsite Math Academy

Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

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Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures, 2nd Edition - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration Publisher Approved Professional Learning Online Elementary Reading Academy Adolescent Literacy Solutions Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Rise in Math Math Coaching Online Math Academy Onsite Math Academy Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Literacy Coaching & Site Implementation Support Early Literacy Planning & Implementation Collaboration Publisher Approved Professional Learning Online Elementary Reading Academy Adolescent Literacy Solutions Curriculum Adoption Curriculum Implementation Rise in Math Math Coaching Online Math Academy Onsite Math Academy Teaching Reading Sourcebook 3rd Edition

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Informal Decoding Inventory Final-2 | PDF | Word | Syllable

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This document provides directions for administering the Informal Decoding Inventory assessment. It is divided into two parts, with Part I assessing single-syllable decoding skills and Part II assessing multisyllabic decoding skills. It instructs examiners to begin with the more advanced Part II for upper elementary students. Each subtest contains 10 real words and 10 nonsense words to evaluate, with mastery criteria of 80% for real words and 60% for nonsense words. Scores are used to determine if students need review, systematic instruction, or can move to the next assessment area.

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What do Upper-Level Students Need When They Are Struggling to Read?

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What do Upper-Level Students Need When They Are Struggling to Read?

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Our guest authors are Sue Pimentel, co-founder of StandardsWork, and David Liben, and Meredith Liben founders and directors of Reading Done Right.
In American middle schools, it's not enough to merely know how to read. Students are expected to understand, analyze, and make meaning from grade-level complex texts, which is only possible if they have the skills and knowledge to read well-fluently and with ease.

Yet nearly one in three U.S. eighth-graders reads below a basic level, including almost half of Black and Hispanic students. Most often, these students blame themselves for weak literacy skills and assume they just aren't as bright or talented as their classmates. Extra help that uses materials from elementary school does little to dispel the notion. And it denies students access to the sophisticated grade-level vocabulary and content that can help them catch up, a vicious cycle where students are forever left behind.

American educators need a better playbook to coach upper-level students up to grade level-one that seamlessly integrates within a mainstream classroom while exposing all students to appropriately rigorous content and ideas. It's never too late to learn how to read well, and it need not come at the expense of learning the knowledge and vocabulary they are expected to know by graduation.

Explicit strategies exist to improve the reading of upper-level students who are reading below grade level. We're not talking about remedial or pull-out programs, or placing students in lower-level courses or with lower-level texts. We're talking about strategies that can accelerate their learning and support them in benefitting from grade-level instruction alongside their peers, including tactics that use grade-level texts to teach foundational skills in individual or small-group extra-help sessions that are tightly integrated and overlap with tier-one content as the source of the extra student practice.

First, all effective literacy instruction should be embedded in a content-rich academic program that stimulates and sparks learning for all students. They maximize engagement, honor the intellect and maturity of older adolescent students, and allow for student choice and individualization. Then, within such a program, there are two evidence-based strategies that can accelerate development and build confidence so students not only read, but read well:

Strengthen decoding skills through grade-level instruction and texts

Promote fluency through interactive activities, including read-alouds and other oral extension activities

Use grade-level content to teach and practice decoding to achieve automatic word recognition
When a student first learns how to decode words in early elementary school, instruction in foundational skills is central and explicit and, over time, develops their ability to recognize words automatically, without effort. Upper-level students who haven't yet achieved automatic word recognition work harder than the typical student and progress more slowly through texts. Their brains are focused on decoding the words instead of interpreting their meaning. Comprehension is nearly impossible. They need additional explicit instruction to develop automatic word recognition, especially through decoding the multisyllabic words they'll frequently encounter in grade-level texts. It's where they most often stumble. Students need lots of practice breaking apart, blending, and accurately sounding out those complex words. But they also need that instruction incorporated into their ongoing grade-level learning where they remain in the classroom with their same-age peers, to gain and protect a sense of self as reader and learner.

Students can thrive when foundational skills instruction is incorporated into ongoing grade-level learning. While the instructional content needed for automatic word recognition is generally the same for upper-level and younger students, the instructional delivery methods, texts, and content should be adjusted to reflect students' maturity and the demands of secondary school. Evidence from the What Works Clearinghouse and a solid base of research point the way:

Teach simple and more advanced letter-sound combinations, building on what students already know and using words encountered in the core classroom materials. This work can be embedded seamlessly into any fluency or close reading activities.

Engage in regular morphology study, including but not limited to having students:

Read aloud a list of high-frequency prefixes and suffixes in unison, or by taking turns; optimally, these words should be selected from the core classroom readings

Underline prefixes and suffixes in a word list and then read them aloud in unison, or by taking turns

Circle root words and then read them aloud, slowly emphasizing each syllable in unison or by taking turns; then, blend the syllables and read normally in unison, or by taking turns

Write new words by adding a prefix and/or a suffix to base words

Embed spelling and vocabulary instruction in lessons to solidify students' understanding of letter-sound combinations that form words, including but not limited to having students:

Spell targeted prefixes and suffixes or sounds in dictated words, which should emerge from classroom readings

Spell multisyllabic words containing targeted spelling patterns and morphemes to review and reinforce learning, using words from content instruction as often as possible

Provide students with a research-based routine for decoding multisyllabic words, which should be from classroom materials whenever possible. This could include, but is not limited to, having students who need it:

Practice vowel combinations in multisyllabic words they encounter in a text or vocabulary list

Read aloud a list of words drawn from a lesson to a partner, noting any multisyllabic words they have difficulty reading; then, read the list to the partner a second time

Read aloud a list of up to 20 multisyllabic words drawn from the lesson in unison, or by taking turns (alternatively, the teacher can read first and then ask students to read next)

Using the same words as above, ask students to time themselves to see how they improve with repetition, making sure instructions call for students to alternate reading top to bottom and bottom to top to avoid memorization

Read aloud sentences containing multisyllabic words in unison or by taking turns (alternatively, the teacher reads first, and then students read next)

Build fluency with grade-level texts
Research shows dysfluency causes as much as 40 percent of the variance in students who pass tests versus those who fail in every testing grade through grade 12. Fluent readers can read sophisticated texts accurately and with expression relevant to their purpose. The expression and pace that work for informational texts are different from narratives. The tone and meaning of, for example, a historical document like the United States Constitution is different from Esperanza Rising or A Raisin in the Sun -all of which are commonly assigned in secondary school.

Upper-level students benefit from purposeful fluency-building activities using grade-level texts connected to the topics students are learning that build and depend on automatic word recognition. Teachers should build in flexible opportunities to repeat such activities. Students benefit from 15 to 20 minutes of reading practice daily to avoid dysfluency. The first read should be read for initial comprehension before they are used for fluency. Students also learn and master words and grow their fluency through repeated exposures to vocabulary and texts over time. Repetition also enhances another benefit of fluency work, by making core texts available to all students, irrespective of their current ability to access them independently. Research supports these strategies:

Engage in repeated readings of familiar grade-level text under timed conditions. This can improve students' fluency and, in the long run, their comprehension. Texts should not require great prosody (e.g., use informational texts on what a coastline is or a comparison between two planets). Make this a game-based learning exercise, such as class reading competitions and group challenges with points, badges, and prizes.

Repeat oral readings of the same text every day, but in a different way and for different purposes over several days. This reinforces proper pronunciation and phrasing, increases students' automaticity with words and phrases, and allows them to demonstrate their growing comprehension of the text. In addition, ask students to read the passage containing the words they are learning with a different emphasis (e.g., read for expression, read in voices).

Utilize repeated oral reading fluency protocols that successively provide more support for students, such as:

Whole-class choral reading - all students read the same text aloud with the teacher. Texts are drawn directly from the curriculum. This allows students to hear a model of prosodic reading from the teacher and receive immediate assistance pronouncing unfamiliar words and phrases. It also provides safe cover for readers who struggle, as individual students are not singled out.

Echo reading - the teacher reads a section of the text aloud, stops, and then students take turns reading the same section aloud. Echo reading is especially beneficial for insecure readers because it chunks passages for fluency practice.

Buddy reading - students take turns reading the text to each other and follow an established protocol for taking turns, proceeding when a student doesn't know a word, and supporting one another with positive feedback. It works best when less fluent readers are paired with more fluent classmates.

Establish Reader's Theatre, where students and the teacher "perform" a script as they read it aloud. This is a common instructional move in elementary grades, though less common in secondary. Readers' Theatre, by its nature, simultaneously develops comprehension, offers access for all, and is respectful and collaborative. Students do not need to memorize the script, though they should reread it to build familiarity with the language and attain proper expression and complete fluency.

No research can tell us how much repetition any one student needs, so teachers must determine what's appropriate. High-quality curricula can support them in doing this. The Knowledge Matters Campaign has recently added 6-8 exemplars to its Curriculum Directory, which includes a discussion of how these knowledge-rich programs support upper-level students when they are learning to read.
Serve as coach and cheerleader
To these well-established recommendations, we add one more suggestion: nurture students' efficacy and self-worth since spending years as dysfluent readers can be soul-crushing. Studies show that as early as 5th grade, struggling readers are "more likely to consider themselves angry, distractible, sad, lonely, and unpopular."

Teachers can help unwind these negative assumptions by articulating and reinforcing two big ideas:

First, students' cognitive capacities are not the reason they struggle to read; prior ineffective instructional approaches during their early years of schooling are to blame. Teaching students about the science of reading can help them understand why this is the case.

Second, ineffective instruction is why upper-level texts feel hard. Students who were denied the opportunity to master reading skills at a young age currently have smaller banks of vocabulary and knowledge to call on to understand texts. The work they are being asked to do can get them where they can and should be.

The activities and approaches outlined above are only a sample of the successful approaches research has shown to be effective with upper-level students who are struggling to read. To gain a sense of the full range of these activities, why they are effective, and which ones would fit best into your instructional context, we recommend consulting the many studies linked.

Learning to read well is not easy, and too many students have been poorly supported in their efforts for too long. But with candor, encouragement, and evidence-based instruction, educators can accelerate all students to realize their potential.

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No Statute of Limitations on Learning to Read Well: What do Upper-Level Students Need When They Are Struggling to Read?

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With candor, encouragement, and evidence-based instruction, educators can help all students realize their potential.

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Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR)

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Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR)

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Welcome to the Adolescent Assessment of Literacy or AAL! This assessment has been specially developed as a screener to assess literacy skills of students from the 3rd to the 12th grade in the fall. When you are ready, watch the video below then press "Get Started" to begin the assessment. Please ensure a stable wifi connection for the duration of the assessment. Thank you!

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Welcome to the Adolescent Assessment of Literacy or AAL! This assessment has been specially developed as a screener to assess literacy skills of students from the 3rd to the 12th grade in the fall. When you are ready, watch the video below then press “Get Started” to begin the assessment. Please ensure a stable wifi connection for the duration of the assessment. Thank you!

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Fountas and Pinnell have written a series of blog posts defending their popular curriculum, which is being criticized as based on discredited ideas about how children learn to read. (See Emily Hanford's post here; EdReports evaluation here, many comments in the blogosphere.) The question is why school systems should continue to invest in the F&P curriculum and other products if they are inadequate.

Their blog posts indicate that Fountas and Pinnell (hereafter F&P) have not benefited from ongoing discussions about approaches to reading instruction. They are staying the course. The posts are restatements of their views that add little new information.

Here are some further observations, from a reading researcher who has been looking closely at several curricula that dominate the enormous market for such materials. I've summarized basic flaws in their approach and responded to their defense of it. The quotes are from the F&P "Just to clarify" posts.

1. Fountas and Pinnell's misconceptions about the knowledge and mental operations that support reading, and how they are acquired, make both learning to read and teaching children to read more difficult.

Being able to read and understand words quickly and accurately is the basic foundation for reading, which enables the development of more advanced forms of literacy.

Because the F&P curriculum doesn't adequately address the development of these skills, it focuses on coping with the struggles that follow. Beginning readers are seen as plodders who, knowing little about the written code, need ways to figure words out. This can be done by using several "word solving" strategies. There is greater emphasis on teaching children how to cope with their lack of basic skills than on teaching those skills in the first place.

Thus: Fountas and Pinnell's approach to reading creates learning difficulties for which their curriculum then offers solutions. The rationale for the approach collapses if children are given sufficient opportunities to gain basic skills.

2. In defense of their approach, F&P (like Lucy Calkins) cite the example of a child who reads the word HORSE as PONY. This example clarifies what is at stake.

For F&P such errors are a natural occurrence in beginning reading. The error shows that the child understands the context (perhaps from pictures) and just needs the tools to correct the error, with the teacher's support. Later they will be taught to "monitor" their own reading to identify when errors have been made and use the strategies to correct them.

I view the error quite differently: it indicates an astonishing instructional flaw, failing to teach the child basic facts about print. A child who is attending to the printed word and has learned that the spelling of a word represents its sound would know that the word cannot be PONY. This type of error is called a semantic paralexia when it occurs in adults whose reading is impaired because of stroke or other brain injury. It's a rare error among beginning readers unless they haven't been adequately taught about print.

3. The best "cue" to a word is the word itself. That is the great thing about alphabetic writing: the spelling of a word tells you what the word is. B-o-o-k is the word BOOK, pronounced /bʊk/-rhymes with /tʊk/ and /lʊk/, similar in meaning to TEXT and MAGAZINE. The spelling is far more informative than strategies such as look at the picture, take a running start, skip the word and go back at the end, and other ways to "solve words." Readers who have gained the ability to recognize words quickly and accurately from the written code do not need the F&P strategies. The proof is that they can do this for words in isolation-with no context and no strategic options. This ability carries over to reading words in sentences, where skilled readers recognize words with little dependence on context.

Context is important, of course, just not in the way F&P recommend. A reader or listener uses the context in which the word occurs to determine which of its senses is relevant: whether TEXT is used as a noun or verb, for example, or whether the magazine is a periodical or weaponry. Language being inherently ambiguous we do this all the time, rapidly, automatically, and without conscious awareness. Recognizing a word and integrating it with the prior context is much more efficient than predicting or deducing the word using context and strategies. (For details, see chapter 11 in my book.)

4. Skilled word recognition is like a reflex: looking at a word elicits recognition within a fraction of a second, providing access to information that is associated with it. This process is so automatic it is hard to prevent from happening. The goal of instruction is to help the child develop this "reflex" as efficiently as possible, allowing them to move on to the many other aspects of literacy. Whereas my model for reading words is the reflex-an involuntary response to a stimulus-F&P's model is figuring it out. Like this:

[Child has misread the word HORSE. Teacher responds.]

You said PONY; the letter P is not in this word. Try again!

Get a running start this time.

Look at the picture. What is that?

The children are at a farm. What kinds of animals live on a farm?

And so on.

Word solving is the opposite of word recognition as I've described it. It is slow and effortful. It requires conscious awareness. Whereas the spelling decisively identifies the word, the strategies are fallible and vary in how efficiently they guide the child to the word. Readers are meant to use "all types of information simultaneously," but the process of remembering and combining relevant information is effortful and inefficient.

F&P nonetheless remain concerned that teaching children to recognize words from print-sometimes called "decoding"-is ill-advised because it may draw their attention away from understanding the text:

"They may give so much attention to decoding that they have little attention to give to thinking about the meaning, the language, and the messages of the text."

This is only true if, as in the F&P program, children haven't been adequately taught to decode. Acquiring this skill requires instruction, feedback, and practice. There's a learning curve. It too can initially be slow and effortful. But the payoffs are huge. The reader gains sufficient knowledge to continue learning with less and less direct supervision. Facility with words frees attention to be focused on comprehending the text, the principal goal. That is why doing a good job with basic skills instruction is so important.

Ironically, F&P's focus on word solving itself draws children's attention away from comprehending the text. The child is focused on figuring out the word rather than following the text. Whereas learning about the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of words carries over into and promotes the development of skilled reading, the strategies do not. "Get a running start" is not an element of skilled reading.

5. There is a major problem with the top-down, word-solving approach that seems to have been wholly overlooked. As in the horse-pony example, children often need several tries to "solve" the word (the same is true in the Calkins approach). Readers will often make multiple errors along the way: incorrect guesses, multiple mispronunciations, re-reads that produce new errors, and so on. Advocates of this approach ignore the fact that children learn from the errors they produce, not just when they arrive at the correct answer. Say a child has misread a word. The teacher suggests a strategy and the child produces another error. Such errors are not consistently corrected or explained; the teacher may instead turn to a different strategy. And then another. The child is continuously learning from these exchanges, including their incorrect responses.

This is a deep flaw in the strategies-guessing-solving approach. It creates a massively inefficient form of learning, which we know from studies of learning in humans and in AI systems ("machine learning"). The scenarios that F&P offer as illustrations of the merits of their approach have characteristics that produce slower, less efficient learning in computational learning systems.

I have only a few additional brief comments.

6. It's widely agreed that teachers need better preparation for teaching reading than colleges currently provide. Teachers are left to learn on the job, and on the job they learn about reading from curriculum gurus such as Fountas & Pinnell and Lucy Calkins. The teacher's manuals, supporting documents and materials, workshops, posters, websites and, yes, blog posts shape teachers' beliefs and practices.

Why are we ceding teacher education to the individuals and corporations that market these materials?

7. The leveled texts. The other big part of the F&P program is their unique system of assigning texts to levels. It's a complex, proprietary system with a scientific veneer. The leveling system and leveled texts raise concerns that I just cannot get into here. The basic concern (as expressed by teachers and other observers) is that the texts are not challenging enough. Children succeed at reading them but learn very little from the effort. I have not studied the links between the curriculum and the texts. But, if children are having difficulties gaining basic reading skills because they aren't adequately taught, and word solving strategies are fallible and inefficient, then the texts might well have to be simplified for children to get through them.

Finally, F&P note that teachers matter more than programs. I completely agree. But in the context of their blog posts, F&P seem to be saying: look, our materials may be flawed but not to worry, teachers matter more than programs. So, stay with us. I think that teachers need to have the best preparation for the job and the best instructional materials to use. They are not getting either from F&P. I'd like to see a moratorium on purchasing these systems until better ones come to market, which will happen. Invest the savings in teachers: in-service support, professional development, reading coaches and classroom aides.

Thanks to Emily Hanford, Maryellen MacDonald, and Steve Dykstra.

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Fountas and Pinnell have written a series of blog posts defending their popular curriculum, which is being criticized as based on discredited ideas about how children learn to read. (See Emily Hanford's post here; EdReports evaluation here, many comments in the blogosphere.) The question is why school systems should continue to invest in the F&P...

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Chapter 4 Highlights: Automatic Word Recognition

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Chapter 4 Highlights: Automatic Word Recognition

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Using data to inform Aliyah's intervention plan for automatic word recognition

Effective interventions for automatic word recognition

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Brief Explanation of Scarborough's Reading Rope

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Brief Explanation of Scarborough's Reading Rope

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What Is Scarborough's Reading Rope?

In 2001, Dr. Hollis Scarborough created the Reading Rope using pipe cleaners to convey how the different "strands" of reading are all interconnected yet independent of one another. For many students, learning to read is a challenge. Scarborough's Rope captures the complexity of learning to read.

Scarborough's Reading Rope is made up of lower and upper strands. When all these component parts intertwine it results in skilled and accurate, fluent reading with strong comprehension.

The lower strands include:

Phonological awareness

Decoding

Alphabetic principle

Letter-sound correspondences

Sight recognition

The upper strands include:

Background knowledge

Vocabulary

Language structures

Verbal reasoning

Literacy knowledge

The Lower Strands

Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness is a skill set that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language - parts such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes. Did you know that you can improve your students' ability to read unfamiliar words without showing them a single printed letter?

Decoding

Decoding is the ability to apply knowledge of sound-letter relationships (phonics) to correctly pronounce written words. Did you know that in 2019, only 35% of 4th graders were at or above (NAEP) proficient level on the reading assessment?

Sight Recognition

Our sight word memory is also referred to as our orthographic lexicon, which includes all the words we can read accurately and effortlessly. Literate adults have a sight word memory of 30,000 to 70,000 words. Starting in 3rd grade, it is estimated that "skilled orthographic mappers" anchor 10-15 new words a day into their sight word memories. Sight word recognition is foundational to fluent reading.

The Upper Strands

Background Knowledge

Background knowledge is an essential component in learning because it helps us make sense of new ideas and experiences. Readers rely on background knowledge to attend to and make sense of what they are reading. This is especially important for readers who are still relying heavily on word decoding rather than rapid word recognition. Having knowledge about a variety of subjects, topics, and ideas makes it more likely that they will be able to make sense of what they are reading and more likely that they will add to their body of knowledge.

Vocabulary

An extensive and rich vocabulary enables readers to make sense of what they are reading. A reader with rich auditory and oral vocabularies will find it easier to read through texts that contain words they have not seen in print before. If the student can use their growing decoding skills and match their result with a word they already know the meaning of, they will be more confident in their abilities and will spend less overall effort on reading a text.

Language Structures

Syntax - The arrangement of words in a phrase or sentence. The English language has patterns and rules for the way we order our words. It also has some flexibility and variety in acceptable patterns, and even then, speakers and writers are allowed some leeway with these patterns.

Semantics - In linguistics, semantics is the study of the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Knowledge of the meaning of a text is essential to reading.

Verbal Reasoning

Inference - a conclusion one can draw from known facts or evidence

Metaphor - a word or phrase used to say that something is another thing in order to suggest that they are similar

Literary Knowledge

Print Concepts - letters vs. words, 1:1 correspondence, reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom, spaces between written words, letter order matters, etc.

Genres of Literature - different types of books or stories defined by special characteristics

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row][oneHalf][/oneHalf][oneHalf]What Is Scarborough's Reading Rope?In 2001, Dr. Hollis Scarborough created the Reading Rope using pipe cleaners to convey how the different "strands" of reading are all interconnected yet independent of one another. For many students, learning to read is a challenge. Scarborough's Rope captures the complexity of learning to read.

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Tailoring Word Recognition Instruction for Secondary Settings

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Tailoring Word Recognition Instruction for Secondary Settings

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Slides/Resources from Louisiana's DOE on Word Recognition

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Slides/Resources from Louisiana's DOE on Word Recognition

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A recent blog post by Tim Shanahan titled "What should morphology instruction look like?" reminded me how important it is to teach students about word parts (i.e., roots, prefixes, suffixes) as a useful tool for determining the meaning of unfamiliar words and growing academic vocabularies.

One of the five components of our Key Vocabulary Routine is Teach Word Learning Strategies, which includes how to look for clues outside the word (use of context) and inside the word (use of word parts) when encountering an unknown word while reading. Outside clues include rereading the sentences before and after the word and using the context of the text. Inside clues come from recognizing meaningful parts of the word, i.e., using morphological knowledge.
Morphemes and Morphological Awareness
Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. The dictionary defines a morpheme as "a word or part of a word that has a meaning and that contains no smaller part that has a meaning." Morphemes include base words and roots, prefixes, and suffixes. They can be combined in different ways to express particular meaning or to fill grammatical roles. Some morphemes are free - they can stand alone (e.g., cat, walk, govern). Other morphemes are bound - they cannot stand alone and must be attached to another morpheme (e.g., re-, un-, geo, phon, -ed, -ment). Here are some examples:

The word cat contains one free morpheme

The word cats contains one free morpheme (cat) and one bound morphemes (s)

The compound word sandbox contains two free morphemes (sand, box)

The word unfit contains one bound morpheme (un) and one free morpheme (fit)

The word transportable contains three bound morphemes (trans, port, able)

Morphology means the study of word parts, and morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize the presence of morphemes in words. Research suggests that students can be taught various morphemic elements as a way to determine the meaning of new words (Edwards et al., 2004). Carlisle (2010) analyzed 16 studies about the relation of morphological awareness instruction to key components of literacy development. The findings showed that instruction about word parts was associated with improvements in word reading and spelling, and in determining the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Academic, School Morphemes
Academic vocabulary that must be learned beyond grade three often consists of words that combine a root, prefix, and suffix (e.g., poly + nom + ial = polynomial; manu + script = manuscript). In the upper elementary grades and higher, there are many opportunities to find words in content reading that contain Greek and Latin morphemes. Children in primary grades can begin to learn how morphemes combine by adding common prefixes and suffixes to short Anglo-Saxon words and also compounding them. For example:

jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, jumper

read, reread, reader, nonreader, reading

sunshine, schoolhouse, upstream

There are some limitations to morphemic analysis. Although it is useful, teachers must also make students aware that it doesn't always work. This is because some prefixes are not consistent in meaning (e.g., in- means both not and in). It is also because the meaning of many Greek and Latin roots have changed substantially over hundreds of years, so they no longer lend themselves to literal translation. For example, the literal translation of circumspect should be look around ( circum means around, spect means look), while the real meaning is to be cautious, careful.
Introducing Morphology
One way to introduce word analysis skills is to teach students how words are made up of word parts, and how words can be related in word families, such as the word family below for the Latin root port (to carry).

Keys to Literacy trainers often see examples of teachers using word families when we visit classrooms. Here are some examples:

Another instructional strategy is to have students build word families by providing a main root and then prefixes and suffixes that can be combined with the root to generate words. Word Matrix boxes such as the examples below can be used for this purpose. For more examples, visit Peter Bowers' website
convoy, envoy, convoys, envoys, convoying, convoyed, voyage, voyages, voyaging, voyaged, voyager, voyagers retake, retakes, retaken, retaking, untaken, mistake, mistakes, mistakable, mistakably, mistaken, mistakenly, mistaking, intake, intakes, overtake, overtakes, overtaken, overtaking, undertake, undertakes, undertaker, undertaken, undertaking, undertakings, uptake, uptakes, breathtaking, caretaker, caretaking, takes, taker, taken, taking, takeaway, takeover Teaching Morphology
Here are two additional suggestions from our Key Vocabulary Routine professional development program:

Find opportunistic moments: Often, unplanned moments come up during content instruction to provide examples of word analysis. Words from content vocabulary lists may include common word parts, or an opportunity to make a connection between the root of a new word and a word previously covered in class may arise. Content teachers in particular are in a position to point out examples of words that contain roots, prefixes, and suffixes from content reading material.

School-wide focus: Most of the general academic words that students need to learn are derived words with word parts. A school-wide approach to teaching academic vocabulary involves teachers from different grades and subjects agreeing to focus on a few root words and their associated word families each week or two.

A 2015 piece posted by the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education's blog suggests these strategies for teaching morphology in the classroom based on research by Dr. Nonie Lesaux:

1. Morphology should be taught as a distinct component of a vocabulary improvement program throughout the upper elementary years.

2. Morphology should be taught as a cognitive strategy to be learned. In order to break a word down into morphemes, students must complete the following four steps:

Recognize that they don't know the word.

Analyze the word for recognizable morphemes, both in the roots and suffixes.

Think of a possible meaning based upon the parts of the word.

Check the meaning of the word against the context.

Students also need to understand the use of prefixes, suffixes, and roots, and how words get transformed.
Lists of Roots, Prefixes, Suffixes
There is a significant body of research indicating that instruction of prefixes is beneficial, and many vocabulary researchers recommend instruction of the most common prefixes as the first and best component of word analysis (Graves, 2004; Carlisle, 2007). White, Sowell, and Yanagihara (1989) found that 20 prefixes account for almost 97% of the 2,959 prefixed words that most frequently appear in school reading materials. Given how often these 20 prefixes occur, it makes sense to teach their meaning and use. To access a free list of these prefixes, visit the Keys to Literacy free resources page at our website, and go to the Vocabulary section. You will also find free lists of the following:

Common Numerical Prefixes

Common and Useful Suffixes

Common Greek and Latin Roots

References:
Carlisle, J.F. (2010). Effects of instruction on morphological awareness on literacy achievement: An integrative review. Reading Research Quarterly, 45 (4) 464-487.

Carlisle, J.F. (2007). Fostering morphological processing, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension. In R.K. Wagner, A.E., Muse, & K.R. Tannenbaum (Eds.). Vocabulary acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension. New York: Guilford Press.

Edwards, C.E., Font, G., Baumann, J.F., & Boland, E. (2004). Unlocking word meanings: Strategies and guidelines for teaching morphemic and contextual analysis. In James, R. Baumann & Edward J. Kame/ennui (Eds.). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice. New York: Guilford Press.

Graves, M.F. (2004). Teaching prefixes: As good as it gets? In James, R. Baumann & Edward J. Kame/ennui (Eds.). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice. New York: Guilford Press.

White, T.G., Sowell, J., & Yanagihara, A. (1989). Teaching elementary students to use word-part clues. The Reading Teacher, 42.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Using Morphology to Teach Vocabulary - Keys to Literacy

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Suggestions for teaching vocabulary by analyzing word parts.

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Advanced Word Study Guidance from Mississippi DOE

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Advanced Word Study Guidance from Mississippi DOE

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Heart Word Magic - Read and Spell High Frequency Words | Really Great Reading

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Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High-Frequency and Sight WordsHeart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words and sight words, particularly those that aren’t very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun, hands-on free Student Practice

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Lesson Resources

The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

Some of the companion lesson resources you will find below include:

Lesson slide decks (in PowerPoint and Google Slide formats)

Decodable passages

Homework sheets

Games and activities for additional practice

We have grouped the lessons into smaller units so you can access these resources more easily. Scroll down to use the buttons below to find the resources for each lesson or groups of lessons.

Please note that we are still building out these free resources, and we will be editing this page over the next few weeks. We wanted you to be able to access some materials as soon as possible, but be sure to come back later to see the rest!
New to UFLI Foundations? Learn about its development, check out a sample lesson plan, view the scope and sequence, and more.

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The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

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FL Center for Reading Research Resources

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FL Center for Reading Research Resources

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Parents and children visiting the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library System will find new resources awaiting them thanks to Book Nook Bundles provided by the Florida Center for Reading Research.

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One-Minute Oral Reading Fluency Assessment

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One-Minute Oral Reading Fluency Assessment

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Reading Fluently Does Not Mean Reading Fast

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Reading Fluently Does Not Mean Reading Fast

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How to Improve Text Fluency in the Middle Schools and High Schools by Tim Shanahan

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How to Improve Text Fluency in the Middle Schools and High Schools by Tim Shanahan

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How to Improve Text Fluency in the Middle Schools and High Schools

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Schools should provide students with up to 30 minutes a day of fluency instruction. But remember, this is across all classes and content areas. Get quick tips on paired reading, repeated reading, and other ways to improve reading fluency.

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Whisper Reading: What It Is and How It Works

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Lean in close and learn how whisper reading and whisper phones can help your child build reading skills. See how to make a DIY whisper phone.

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Adolescent Literacy Resources Compiled by The Reading League

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Adolescent Literacy Resources Compiled by The Reading League

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Discover resources and information for a schoolwide approach to instruction and intervention for older readers.

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Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L., & Burish, P. (2000). Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies: An Evidence-Based Practice to Promote Reading Achievement. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 15(2), 85-91.

Fuchs, L., Fuchs, D., & Kazdan, S. (1999). Effects of peer-assisted learning strategies on high school students with serious reading problems. Remedial and Special Education, 20(5), 309-318.

Saenz, L., Fuchs, L., & Fuchs, D. (2005) Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies for English Language Learners with Learning Disabilities. Exceptional Children, (71).

Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. (n.d.). Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies. Retrieved 2008, January 21, from http://kc.vanderbilt.edu/pals/

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Paragraph shrinking is an activity developed as part of the Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). The paragraph shrinking strategy allows each student to take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.

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ABC's and All Their Tricks -- resource to beef up your phonics knowledge

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Do you know why “scheme” is spelled with a “ch” instead of a “k” like “skill”? You will if you have this book! It’s a very complete reference for phonics and spelling. Arranged alphabetically, it’s easy to look up particular letter combinations. Helpful sections in the front of the book discuss letter names vs. sounds, variations in spelling, syllabication, roots and affixes, vowels, silent vowels, consonant sounds, hard and soft “c” and “g,” consonant teams and blends, silent letters, and homonyms. The main reference section contains spelling lists, samples, discussion of and counts for each letter and letter combination. For constructs that can make more than one sound, a separate page is devoted to each. With a little imagination, you could even create a phonics program around it! 342 pgs, pb.

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This book helps educators have a better grasp of how to teach English and provide learners with an in-depth understanding of the English language.

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Using data to inform Zach's intervention plan for vocabulary building

How/Why Vocabulary Affects Comprehension

7 Principles of Effective Vocabulary Instruction

More about Morphology

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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English | LDOCE

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Longman English Dictionary - the leading dictionary for learners of English of all levels: definitions, idioms, examples and more.

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Choosing Words to Teach by Beck, McKeown, & Kucan

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Choosing Words to Teach by Beck, McKeown, & Kucan

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Teaching vocabulary is complex. What words are important for a child to know and in what context? In this excerpt from Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, the authors consider what principles might be used for selecting which words to explicitly teach.

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Five Things Every Teacher Should Know about Vocabulary Instruction

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What’s the best way to teach and have students master vocabulary?

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Effective Vocabulary Instruction by Joan Sedita

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Effective Vocabulary Instruction by Joan Sedita

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Creating a Word Conscious Classroom - Keys to Literacy

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Want to motivate students to read and build their vocabulary? Ignite word learning in your classroom.

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Provides several activities to build word consciousness

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Developing a Love of Words — Literacy Junkie

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Education has over 100 years of studies showing students having difficulties with word knowledge and word relationships beginning with Thorndike (1917) and Davis (1944). In 1950, Kottmyer wrote about teachers having “vexing problems” with vocabulary instruction.

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This adapted article includes many of the most common examples.

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You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words. This adapted article includes many of the most common examples.

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Using data to inform Zach's intervention plan for comprehension building

What Research Says about Comprehension Instruction

Before, During, & After Framework

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Chapter 7  & 8_ Comprehension & Writing.pptx

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Anyone who's ever scratched their head over their car manual or struggled to parse a website's terms of service knows: It's hard to read about a topic you don't really understand.

It's a common-sense statement that's backed by research. Studies have shown that readers use their background knowledge-vocabulary, facts, and conceptual understanding-to comprehend the text they read.

In recent years, a growing number of parents, teachers, and reading researchers have called for changes to early literacy instruction, to bring it more in line with the evidence base around how children learn to read. Often, schools weren't taking research-based approaches to teaching students a crucial building block of reading-how to sound out words. If kids can't get the words off the page, they can't extract meaning from text.

Over the past three years, about two dozen states have passed laws mandating that students are taught these skills in an explicit, systematic way.

At the same time, though, some science of reading advocates have said that foundational skills instruction isn't the only piece of literacy learning that needs an overhaul. They argue that schools also don't do enough to support students' background knowledge-a key factor in their understanding of any text. That's the issue explored in The Knowledge Gap, a book that's made its way onto district leaders' reading lists and into teacher professional learning groups.

Over the past few decades, reading comprehension instruction has become "content agnostic," focused on skill practice, to the detriment of learning about science, history, and other disciplines, said Sonia Cabell, an associate professor at Florida State University's College of Education.

"In the No Child Left Behind era, and the Reading First era, reading became the main focus. Reading blocks were lengthened. This pushed out the science and social studies instruction," Cabell said, referring to the 2002 federal law and a $1 billion-a-year reading program it created.

Cabell and other researchers who study the integration of content knowledge and literacy instruction say the focus on "knowledge building" holds promise. But they also say there are a lot of unanswered questions about how these approaches should be designed, and how much they can actually improve reading achievement.

Here's what experts and research say about what a greater focus on content knowledge could mean for reading instruction.

What role does background knowledge play in reading comprehension?

This may seem like an obvious finding: Of course, kids can understand a book or an article better if they already know a bit of what it's about. It's likely easier to read a text about paleontologists, for example, if you already know the words "fossil" and "extinction," and you know that animal species that used to exist have since died out.

This applies even for children who are otherwise poor readers. One example of this is what's often referred to as "the baseball study."

They found that the baseball lovers who scored low on a general reading test could understand and recall the text better than the higher-scoring kids who didn't know as much about the game.

So, background knowledge about a specific topic is helpful in understanding text on that topic. But what about in general? Does knowing more about the world lead to better reading comprehension overall?

A large body of research shows a correlation: Children who score higher on tests of general knowledge are better readers. These kids also tend to grow more than their peers in reading comprehension over time, said Gina Cervetti, an associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Education, who studies the connections between literacy and content-area learning.

But other factors could play a role, too.

"Those kinds of correlations are tricky, because there are a lot of other things that are going on," said Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago. People who score higher on tests of general knowledge also tend to have greater language ability, and tend to be from higher-income backgrounds.

If background knowledge is linked to reading ability, does teaching knowledge help kids become better readers?

It can. But there are some caveats.

There are a few different ways that teachers can connect content knowledge and literacy instruction in the elementary school day. One option is to merge the two-to embed literacy instruction into social studies and science, teaching students cognitive strategies to help them engage with the content.

These students also did better on standardized tests of reading comprehension. The integrated approach not only made them better readers of the content they were learning, it made them better readers overall.

This method has shown more mixed results.

Most studies of this approach find that it has a positive effect on students' knowledge of the subject in question-for example, teaching a 4th grader about the American Revolution will likely mean that they know more about the American Revolution. But only some of these approaches lead to higher scores on tests of general reading comprehension.

One that does is the Model of Reading Engagement, or MORE. It was developed by Harvard education professor James Kim and his colleagues.

The approach aims to build students' science content knowledge through literacy lessons. But it's not just focused on acquiring facts. The researchers designed the lessons with the goal of helping kids to build a schema-a mental model that they could then apply to understand new, related concepts.

Kim's study, and others that have shown general effects on reading comprehension, hold something in common, said Cervetti.

"These programs weren't teaching kids a bunch of knowledge at a superficial level. It wasn't knowledge as a set of facts to be learned," she said. "These kids were learning deeply about a set of concepts."

Still, in Kim's study, there was a limit to how far kids could transfer the knowledge that they learned. Generally, the new texts had to include explicit connections to the words and concepts they'd learned. If the familiar concepts were missing, students couldn't make the connections themselves.

If kids can't make connections between related topics, "it's a signal to teachers of what they need to go back and discuss," Kim said.

How should schools decide what kids should read and write about? What knowledge should be the focus?

This question has dogged the American education system for decades-if not centuries.

It's the debate at the heart of many decisions about teaching and learning. The conversation is particularly volatile now, as parents' groups and Republican legislators seek to limit what students can read and discuss in the classroom.

Studies' insight on this topic is limited. Evidence would suggest that students' curiosity should play a role, Cervetti said. There's a large body of work demonstrating that student interest and motivation have a strong impact on academic achievement.

But outside of that, things are more fuzzy. What's the right balance of depth versus breadth in topics? What knowledge will best prepare students for their lives outside of school? Researchers don't know.

Hirsch popularized the idea that students needed to learn about something in order to read well. I n his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Hirsch outlined a list of essential figures, events, and concepts. He tried to identify the background knowledge that would comprise a sort of cultural canon-the information that most writers and speakers would assume their audience shared.

Its contents provided the framework for Core Knowledge Language Arts, an ELA curriculum. But Hirsch's work also saw a swift and strong backlash from critics who said his list was Eurocentric and elitist.

Still, the question of whose knowledge matters-what's important for children to know and who gets to decide-is far from settled.

Some more recent efforts have used Hirsch as inspiration. The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy has created Knowledge Maps, tools it uses in work with districts looking to evaluate how and where their curricula build knowledge.

The Knowledge Maps are based on Hirsch's core knowledge guidelines with some additions and changes-such as added criteria around diversity, equity, and inclusion, said Ashley Berner, the director of the institute.

Other programs have taken different approaches. In the MORE intervention, Kim and his co-authors tried to choose content that was "timely and timeless." Timely, in that it aligned to current state standards in science. And timeless: It has shown up consistently in state standards over the past two decades, and science professors think that it's relevant and accurate.

Of course, these are still subjective decisions-an inevitability in choosing knowledge, said Shanahan. "When it comes to certain aspects of the arts, and science, and social studies, what content do we want kids to know? Those are value judgments," he said.

Is knowledge the only factor in reading comprehension ability?

Far from it. Children don't just need to learn information. They also need to know how to organize it in their minds, use it, and apply it in new contexts.

Teaching comprehension strategies can help students become skilled at these tasks. Decades of research have shown that explicitly teaching students how to use these strategies-like summarizing, visualizing, creating graphic organizers, and asking questions about their understanding-makes them better readers.

Teaching students about how different types of text are structured has also been shown to improve reading comprehension.

"This is a clear case in our field of a 'both-and,' not an 'either or,' said Nell Duke, the executive director of the Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand for Children.

In fact, most of the knowledge-building interventions that show positive effects in the research literature have combined content-area instruction with these kinds of strategies for metacognition, said Cervetti.

Cervetti thinks it's likely that deep content area knowledge and students' ability to use comprehension strategies reinforce each other.

"Imagine being a kid who has read lots of texts, but every text you encounter is unfamiliar ideas and unfamiliar words," she said. "You get through the text and you walk away having understood something about that text. But probably not enough to be a better comprehender."

With these topically disconnected texts, the student doesn't have the chance to practice the strategies that good readers use, Cervetti said, like making connections or asking questions prompted by prior knowledge. But if the texts work together to build a bigger conceptual understanding, they do present those opportunities. Knowledge, she hypothesized, "builds momentum" for kids to practice the comprehension strategies that research shows are powerful tools.

What do all of these findings mean for classroom practice?

The main takeaway is that reading instruction should be engaging students in deep, substantive ideas, said Cervetti.

Yes, learning about something-having clearly defined topics-is important. But these topics need to help students build a broader, conceptual understanding.

That means that instead of learning about "oceans"-an umbrella that could encompass everything from reading news articles about microplastics to studying Moby Dick -a unit might be centered around a theme, such as, "we have one connected water system."

Some English/language arts curricula attempt to structure units this way, developing them around social studies and science ideas. But Duke cautioned that these ELA programs shouldn't be seen as a substitute for instruction in other subject areas.

Science and social studies don't just teach content; they also teach discipline-specific practices-like developing a hypothesis or analyzing a primary source. "That kind of information, in my perception, doesn't tend to make it into ELA curricula," she said.

"I think an increasing segment of the field is picking up on the idea that content-rich English/language arts instruction is better for kids," Duke added. "But it has not fully tackled the question of, when in our day is there space left for science and social studies? And [there's] little attention to, how do we coordinate that across the school day?"

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What Is Background Knowledge, and How Does It Fit Into the Science of Reading?

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What a greater focus on content could mean for reading instruction.

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Does Your Comprehension Strategy Instruction Have this Key Element? by Tim Shanahan

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Does Your Comprehension Strategy Instruction Have this Key Element? by Tim Shanahan

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I was observing writing instruction in an 8 th grade suburban classroom. The experienced teacher was quite skilled and he both managed his classroom well and was sophisticated in his ability to interpret literary text and to engage students in reading that penetrated deeply into the meaning of the text.

On this day his lesson focused providing students with tools that would overcome writing blocks. His students often struggled to figure out what to write about; they agonized when given a writing assignment. He demonstrated his strategy and directed the students to give it a try.

One especially bright young man towards the back of the room was being a pain and I was trying to get him engaged. He was refusing to do as the teacher asked and was being confrontational about it.

But as I listened to his complaint, I came to see he was right. He knew what he was talking about. The day's lesson plan wasn't terrible, it had just missed the mark in an important way.

As I thought about it, it became clear to me that strategy lessons were often ruined by the same omission. Although this lesson was on writing, it could have easily been reading comprehension strategy instruction. No wonder so few kids actually use the strategies we teach.

What is a strategy?

According to the International Literacy Association, a strategy is a "systematic plan, consciously adopted, adapted, and monitored, to improve one's performance in learning." That's pretty good. Their notion of metacognition, a related idea, also seems to be on point: "Awareness and knowledge of one's mental processes that allow one to monitor, regulate, and direct self to a desired end."

One key part of these definitions is the idea that strategies are always goal directed. That's what the "improve one's learning performance" or "desired end" are about. If we are trying to understand something or trying to communicate something and we want to succeed, we should take steps towards those goals. Strategies are goal directed efforts.

Sometimes that goal-directed bit is where strategy instruction goes bust - though that was not the problem raised by my obstreperous middle schooler.

Students may blow them off strategy use because they either aren't goal directed or they simply have different goals. The student's real goal might be something like, "I want to get this assignment done as fast as possible." If higher comprehension isn't their goal, then they won't use strategies aimed at slowing them down and making them think.

Another key feature of strategies is their intentional quality ("consciously adopted," "awareness and knowledge of one's mental processes"). Strategies aren't automatic. We have a goal we want to accomplish, so we come up a plan for accomplishing it. There is a plethora of strategies, so strategy use requires intentional choice.

In this middle school class, the teacher had the kids identify a couple of words (I came up with "hair" and "lake"). Then they were to brainstorm ideas that were connected to each word and to do this until they saw a connection between the two original words. I ended up remembering an event in my life where I had to shampoo my hair in Lake Michigan (brrrrr!). Another possibility that I often use when I'm stuck is not to write the piece I'm trying to write, but to write a letter to someone that explains what I'm trying to write. Hemingway was known to engage in non-stop writing, just doing a brain dump on paper until he found his way.

You want to write something, and you can't get going, any those strategies can be quite successful... and yetl Mr. I'm Not Going to Do It wouldn't play along.

Why not?

Because he didn't need the strategy.

Remember, strategies are about intentionally trying to accomplish goals.

If you can accomplish your goal satisfactorily without a strategy, then why bother?

That was what that middle-schooler explained to me: "I think about what I want to write about. Then I make up two words. I brainstorm other words for a few minutes until I connect them so I can write about what I already decided to write about."

Strategies help us to surmount barriers. He was a prolific youngster and had no problem coming up with a writing idea. Pretending to have a problem so he could practice solving it seemed dumb to him and he didn't want to do that. He wanted to write.

You might think that is a rare circumstance, but it isn't.

Most reading programs recommend placing students in texts that they can read with 75-89% comprehension - a level of success good enough for most circumstances (including for showing the teacher that you understood the text by answering her questions). The students - by design - are able to read these texts with comprehension. But these are what are used for strategy teaching.

Most kids won't buck the order of the day by refusing to pretend to use the strategies.

They'll go through the motions, doing the required activity, but it won't be connected to accomplishing any goal - since the strategy wasn't actually necessary.

Strategy use only makes sense when success isn't certain.

Teaching students to use strategies with relatively easy texts neither lets them see how to use the strategy nor reveals to them the power that it can provide.

Many times, I've heard P. David Pearson talk about starting strategy off with an easy text that students can already read well... it allows the teacher to demonstrate the steps of the strategy clearly. I have no problem with that. At that point, strategy lessons should focus not on texts that students can read well, but on texts that they can't.

Strategy instruction is one of those scaffolds that we teach to enable students to read complex text. Let's stop pretending, and place students in reading situations in which strategies can really help.

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Comprehension Strategy Key Element | Shanahan on Literacy

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I was observing writing instruction in an 8 th grade suburban classroom. The experienced teacher was quite skilled and he both managed his classroom well and was sophisticated in his ability to interpret literary text and to engage students in reading that penetrated deeply into the meaning of the text.

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Helping students make meaning from texts is critical to their success, and reading comprehension is one of the oldest lines of inquiry in education. Way back in the early 20th century, Thorndike noted that comprehension requires "a cooperation of many forces" (1917, p. 232). Following a thorough review of research, Snow (2002) later clarified those forces and noted that comprehension is dependent on four variables: (1) reader variables (age, ability, affect, knowledge base, and motivation); (2) text variables (genre, format, features, and considerateness); (3) educational-context variables (environment, task, social grouping, and purpose); and (4) teacher variables (knowledge, experience, attitude, and pedagogical approach).

Unfortunately, however, models for helping teachers develop students' comprehension have not kept pace with the knowledge about what comprehension is. While there are strategies, such as modeling or reciprocal teaching, a unifying framework for reading comprehension instruction remains elusive. The education field needs a structured approach to comprehension instruction.

Hattie and Donoghue (2016) suggested instructional strategies could be organized along a continuum of skill, will, and thrill, which sparked our thinking about reading. These three phases also apply to students' improved reading comprehension. When students do all of these, they come to see the instructional experiences their teachers provide them as purposeful. Importantly, they begin to accept responsibility for their learning and understand that struggle is a natural part of the process.

In this first phase of instruction, teachers focus on the component parts of reading-oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and fluency. These components are formulated according to the age and needs of students, with the need fading for some skills instruction as students master them. However, neglecting any one of these processes will very likely result in compromised comprehension. If a student is laboring over individual words, whether because she can't decode them or because she doesn't know what they mean, meaning making is harder and sometimes impossible. When students read laboriously, they rarely pay attention to the meaning and often forget what they read at the start of the sentence or paragraph. Comprehension suffers.

We want students to evolve from strategic readers to skilled ones. As Afflerbach, Pearson, and Paris (2008) note, "Reading skills operate without the reader's deliberate control or conscious awareness ... [t]his has important, positive consequences for each reader's limited working memory" (p. 368).

Strategies, on the other hand, are "effortful and deliberate" and occur during initial learning, and when the text becomes more difficult for the reader to understand (p. 369). At the skill level, specific comprehension strategies can be introduced, such as monitoring, predicting, summarizing, questioning, and inferring. Noticing when meaning is lost is a useful skill, especially when the reader has fix-up strategies such as rereading, revisiting the purpose for reading, using context clues, talking with others, or formulating questions. Similarly, summarizing information in a text, asking questions during reading, and making inferences will likely improve a reader's comprehension of a text.

Notably, comprehension strategies cannot compensate for lack of background knowledge or vocabulary. Imagine trying to predict or visualize while reading the following sentence from a physics textbook: "Plane potential flow supplemented by the inclusion of circulation is of considerable practical importance" (Joos, 1986, p. 207). You can probably decode all the words and read it fluently. You likely even know the general meaning of the vocabulary. But without the knowledge of the discipline, true meaning is elusive, and not even a whole host of comprehension strategies will help.

Two effective instructional approaches that can help with this background knowledge and vocabulary issue are direct instruction and teacher modeling. Despite some negative perceptions about direct instruction, there is evidence of its influence on learning (Hattie, 2012). Direct instruction is not simply telling students what to do or think but rather is an explicit approach to guiding student thinking. For example, the teacher might directly teach the meaning of key vocabulary terms and have students practice those word meanings. The technique requires that teachers provide students with input and then guide their practice, check for understanding, and have students practice independently.

Teacher modeling using a think-aloud process is another effective instructional approach for developing students' skills (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2011). Teachers verbalize their expert thinking such that students can imitate similar cognitive and metacognitive actions. It is an apprenticeship technique in which students learn to approximate the actions of another more skilled person. For example, a teacher might say:

I've noticed that I'm not really understanding this paragraph. I think that I'll go back to reread because it might be that I lost focus and wasn't paying attention. If that doesn't work, then I think I'll focus on the words that are confusing to me.

The teacher then proceeds to demonstrate exactly that. In turn, students apply the same strategies to a similarly complex text to support their own understanding.

Unfortunately, many students are left at the skill level of learning. Reading comprehension appears to them as a set of skills they must mobilize to understand a text. However, we argue that the skills alone are insufficient. To develop strong readers who choose to read and learn from texts, skill must be coupled with will.

The will level of reading comprehension focuses on students' mind-sets about reading. These approaches invite students to engage more fully with texts and attempt to create the mental attitude, inclination, habit, or disposition that predetermines their willingness to engage in reading. In other words, the will of comprehension relates to student engagement and motivation to read and understand.

Far too often, students abandon reading when the text is complex. A common misconception is that reading should always be easy, and struggle must be avoided. In fact, productive failure is widely understood as a necessary component of the problem-solving process. And reading is problem solving. There are times when we grapple with ideas and persevere to make sense. That is not to say that 1st graders should be reading War and Peace, but rather that struggle should be seen as natural, and that sometimes the texts we read are challenging. Overcoming appropriately challenging tasks fuels a sense of pride and accomplishment, important ingredients in motivation.

Challenge is crucial for goal setting, which is itself a powerful influence on learning. But all goals are not created equally. Mastery goals are focused on increasing competence ("I want to learn to speak Mandarin"), whereas performance goals are focused on the grade for the assessment ("I want to get an A in my Mandarin course"). Performance goals are much less motivating, whereas helping students establish mastery goals can positively impact their will. For example, getting a good grade on an essay (a performance goal) is not likely to increase a student's will to read, but writing a clear and coherent essay that persuades others might serve to increase motivation and engagement (it is also likely to result in a good grade). We have seen students set mastery goals to understand an Emily Brontë novel ("My goal is to understand the ways the author uses the unreliable narrator device in Wuthering Heights") and with science texts ("My goal is to use the information in the main part of the article with what's listed in the diagrams"). But students don't independently generate mastery goals like these-they are the product of success criteria developed by the teacher. Mastery goals that illustrate the criteria for success in the lesson illuminate the incremental progress students are making in their learning.

Another dimension of will in reading comprehension is providing choice. There is nothing wrong with studying particular texts in class, but if you can increase students' choice about which texts to read, you will increase the number of students who actually do the reading. Instead of sending students home to read the whole-class novel, focus on a genre, topic, or theme and create a list of 10 titles that will allow students to master the standards. Then have them select the one they are most interested in. Book clubs and literature circles also work well. Students can choose from a list of possible titles and meet regularly in small groups with fellow readers to discuss their selected book. Students are more likely to engage in the reading if they know that they will have opportunities to talk with peers during class about the text.

Finally, to increase will, ensure that students' learning is relevant. When students understand why they are reading something (and accept the challenge of learning), they are more likely to put forth the effort. Teachers should make connections between the content and the ways that students will use the information inside and outside the classroom. For example, the students in Brandy Ziegler's middle school science class knew that they would use the information they were reading in in their English class to write letters to elected officials about water pollution. In addition, teachers can increase relevance by ensuring that the texts they select honor the range of life experiences, interests, and aspirations of students.

The final phase of our framework focuses on the excitement that students should experience when they comprehend a text. Thrill in this context refers to the ways that students can use the information or the experience of reading and comprehending in service of something else. We discovered this phase when we started asking students, "What does the text inspire you to do?"

Consider the group of kindergarten students who read The Day the Crayons Quit (Daywalt, 2013) with their teacher. This picture book follows the perspectives of different characters, all crayons. Following several readings of the text over the week, the teacher asked the students what they were inspired to do or what they were curious about after finishing the book. One group of students decided to search the internet to figure out the correct color of the Sun (the picture book includes a debate about this). Another group wanted to know if the author had written other books (he had not at the time) and went on a search for additional books about crayons specifically and art in general. Still another group decided to write their own books about what their crayons would say. And one student wrote a book about what her shoes might argue about. Each student was inspired, but not in the same way as their peers. This served to reinforce the idea that reading allows you to do something with the ideas that you gain from the experience.

Students need to experience the thrill of comprehension if they are to accept the challenge of developing their skills and putting forth the will to understand. Richard Anderson, a pioneer in reading research, recently argued that we needed new metaphors for the purpose, or thrill, of reading. He said that students should be speaking, thinking, and taking action and argued that the new roles might be of storyteller, explainer, or arguer.

Imagine the power of writing reviews rather than book reports. Or the impact of presenting information to others and seeing something change. Or debating ideas or engaging in a Socratic seminar. There are many ways that students can be invited into the thrill of comprehension. But all of them involve students becoming producers and sharing their thinking with others.

Simply comprehending a text is not the point of comprehension instruction. Too often, educators seem to be stuck at the skill level, working very hard to develop students' strengths in this area and forgetting to introduce joy, curiosity, and purpose into the experience. A more comprehensive framework for comprehension instruction recognizes that skills are not enough. Ultimately, we must show students that reading, and reading comprehension, are not passive experiences. The point of this work is to do something with the information. When the skill, will, and thrill of reading are all developed together, educators can radically change students' learning from texts.

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The Skill, Will, and Thrill of Reading Comprehension

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A three-pronged framework can help students not only learn meaning of texts, but also gain motivation and purpose from them.

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There's been a lot of concern about phonics instruction in recent months, sparked by an illuminating new audio documentary. But there's another aspect of reading-comprehension-that is equally crucial, and teacher training in that area is even more problematic.

As the documentary details, many teachers-and professors of education-are unfamiliar with the overwhelming evidence that systematic phonics is the most effective way to teach children how to decode written language. While there's been some pushback, quite a few teachers who have listened to the documentary or an accompanying piece on NPR-or read the New York Times op-ed by the documentary's producer, Emily Hanford- have expressed dismay that they were never given this information as part of their training.

But there's been little discussion of the even more widespread problems with training in comprehension instruction. True, compared to phonics, teacher-education programs are more likely to say they cover reading comprehension. But what prospective teachers learn about comprehension in those courses is dangerously inaccurate.

One reason is the influential 2001 report of the National Reading Panel. The report endorsed five "pillars" of reading instruction, including phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, and vocabulary. The fifth pillar was instruction in strategies designed to boost comprehension, such as learning to summarize or make a graphic representation of a text. While many educators challenged the report's findings on phonics, they embraced its endorsement of comprehension strategies. In 2006, only 15% of teacher-training programs taught comprehension. Ten years later that figure to 75%. In contrast, only 62% said they covered phonics, and only 37% appear to cover all five "pillars."

What the report failed to mention was the strong evidence showing that the most important factor in comprehension isn't mastering strategies: it's how much knowledge a reader has of the topic. In one widely replicated experiment, students who scored poorly on a reading test but knew a lot about baseball outperformed "good readers" who knew little about baseball-when the reading passage was about baseball. In fact, the comprehension strategies endorsed by the panel all rely on activating prior knowledge-which means they only work if a reader has enough background knowledge to understand the text in the first place. But that's one of many things prospective teachers never learn.

In a typical comprehension lesson, a teacher focuses on a supposed skill or strategy, like making inferences or determining an author's purpose. But most of the things teachers spend hours on every week were never endorsed by the National Reading Panel and have little or no data behind them. As reading expert Tim Shanahan has observed, teaching such "skills" is like pushing the elevator button twice: it might make you feel better, but it won't make the elevator come any faster.

Even when teachers focus on a strategy that is backed by evidence, they don't implement it in the way supported by research. Rather than putting a difficult text in the foreground and modeling whatever strategies might help students extract its meaning, teachers put a strategy in the foreground and choose simple texts that lend themselves to demonstrating it, without regard to their topics. And they teach comprehension day after day, year after year-sometimes through high school. But studies have shown that after only two weeks of strategy instruction, students stop getting benefits.

After the teacher explains a comprehension "skill," students go off to practice it on books at their supposed individual reading levels-easy enough for them to read on their own or with minimal help. But there's no evidence that this system of leveled reading boosts comprehension, and studies have found that kids can learn more from a text above their supposed level-if a teacher helps them understand it. Plus, leveled reading does little to build knowledge, a process that generally requires staying on the same topic for at least a couple of weeks. As with the texts teachers use to model "skills," the books children use to practice them aren't organized by topic.

Another pervasive and dangerous misconception is the belief that students need to learn to read before they can "read to learn"-that is, before they can start acquiring knowledge of the world, through their own reading. As a result of this assumption, the elementary curriculum has long been heavily weighted toward reading. That has become even more true in recent decades, due to the advent of high-stakes testing in reading and math. Especially in schools where test scores are low, subjects like history, science, and the arts have been squeezed out of the curriculum, sometimes through middle school.

But the idea that kids don't need to acquire knowledge until after they've learned to read ignores the fact that gaining knowledge is part of learning to read-or learning to understand what you read. Even while they're learning to decode, children need to listen to adults reading aloud from sophisticated, knowledge-rich text. Otherwise, they'll lack the knowledge and vocabulary that will equip them to understand that kind of text once they're able to decode it themselves. As any parent knows, children can take in far more sophisticated concepts and language through listening than through their own reading. That remains true, on average, through middle school. And the longer we wait to start building kids' knowledge, the harder it becomes to close gaps between those lucky enough to acquire knowledge outside school and their less fortunate peers.

In most places, the advent of the Common Core State Standards has only made things worse. Previously, elementary students got a steady diet of fiction. In an effort to build knowledge, the standards have called for at least 50% of their reading to be nonfiction. Most teachers, however, have continued to focus on skills, adding new "nonfiction skills" like identifying different "text structures." But nonfiction assumes more background knowledge than fiction. It's one thing to make an inference about a fictional character's thoughts, based on your knowledge of human nature. It's quite another to make an inference about, say, Brazil if you've never even heard of the place.

Still, there are signs things are changing. Just a few years ago, there were no elementary literacy curricula designed to build students' knowledge. Now there are several-and two large urban districts, and , have each started implementing one, while the state of Louisiana has been encouraging their adoption.

Ideally, prospective teachers will start getting accurate information about reading comprehension during their training. But that may not happen anytime soon. Education schools have historically been disconnected from scientific research on the learning process; their lack of interest in or familiarity with phonics is only one example. The good news is that even once they're on the job, teachers can learn how to provide students not only with the skills they need to decode words but also with the knowledge that can unlock their meaning.

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Why We're Teaching Reading Comprehension In A Way That Doesn't Work

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There's been a lot of concern about phonics instruction in recent months, sparked by an illuminating new audio documentary. But there's another aspect of reading-comprehension-that is equally crucial, and teacher training in that area is even more problematic.

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One of my colleagues told us that we should not be teaching guided reading lessons or comprehension skills or strategies. We're using a core reading program that includes those kinds of things. He says that the science of reading proves that we would get higher reading achievement by teaching more social studies and science (he's our science teacher) and dropping the comprehension instruction that we are providing. He's really vocal about this. Can you help us shut him up? RELATED: Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era Shanahan response:
Your colleague is partly right. Knowledge about the world is a valuable commodity in reading comprehension. Education should both nurture curiosity and provide the means to fulfilling it - increasing what kids know about science and social studies (and literature and the arts, too.

He goes wrong, however, when he suggests that doing that should take the place of reading instruction. Such instruction can provide your students with a lifetime ability to increase their knowledge independently. Research does not support the idea of simply increasing knowledge about the world results in some automatic improvements in reading ability. There are types of reading comprehension instruction that can provide those kinds of results. Basically, your colleague is very unscientifically going beyond the empirical evidence and overstating his case.

Comprehension instruction is complicated and multivariate - there isn't a single type of skill or approach that is likely to be sufficient. I can't possibly, in the space available here, provide a complete map to what can be included profitably in a reading program.

Research shows that explicit vocabulary and morphology teaching make a difference. We should commit some of the comprehension real estate to increasing what children know about word meanings and how words express those meanings.

Likewise, instruction in how to recognize and use the organizational structure of texts has been well researched, with lots of positive outcomes. Including that is a no brainer.

Strategy instruction - that is, teaching students to execute certain actions before, during, and after reading that can increase their understanding and recall - works too, though admittedly that can be overdone. Such teaching is beneficial, but the regimens of instruction that have been evaluated have tended to be brief and focused on a narrow range of behaviors. But they work.

Not long ago I devoted a blog to the idea of teaching students to read sentences because of the need to makes sense of syntax or sentence grammar. While the general teaching of formal grammar hasn't been found to hold water when it comes to building comprehension, teaching students to make sense of sentences certainly has.

And, what about literature? I haven't gotten into that but hope to soon. Too often those who are promoting knowledge leave that out of the equation, as if nothing of value is gained from commerce with fictional stories and novels, poetry, and drama.

Yeah, all those things deserve instructional time, attention not likely to be provided in social studies or your colleague's science classes.

Let me give one more example of what we need to teach in reading comprehension. Its inclusion is advocated by many of the top researchers in the field - and they have the data to prove it. I haven't written here about this topic before, but it is one that is well worth exploring: cohesion.

Authors try to convey a coherent message through their writing. They do that with several linguistic devices and communications conventions. Readers then try to convert this information into a mental representation of that message. Readers don't put the text itself into their memory (we're not computers). No, we translate what we read, and that translation requires recognition and use of those devices the author put into the text.

For example, here is a brief passage used in a study of cohesion instruction (Baumann, 1986):

Michael got the chicken pox. Then Tom did too.

Michael said, "Wasn't that a terrible sickness?"

"It sure was," Tom said. "Were you as sick as I was?"

To comprehend this text the reader has to make a number of connections. It is necessary to recognize that "did too" refers to "got the chicken pox," and that "sickness" and "It" stand for chicken pox, and that "you" is Michael, and "I" was Tom. Readers who fail to make those connections aren't going to understand what this text is about.

Prior knowledge - the knowledge the reader started with - can help a bit; it is likely helpful to know when you start out that chicken pox is a form of sickness, though this text is simple enough I suspect someone could make the right connections in this case strictly based alone on the linguistic information the author has provided. That might be harder to do if the text was much longer and the distance between the links were greater or if there were more possible choices.

Not surprisingly, younger readers are more likely than older readers to have difficulty with those seemingly straightforward pronoun references - like you for Michael. Or, that older readers who can make those kinds of links might struggle to make causal connections in a science text such as in the following example (Best, Rowe, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2005):

"Plants lack a nervous system. They cannot make quick responses to stimuli."

One would hope that a reader, if asked "why can't plants make a quick response to stimuli?" would answer, "Because they don't have a nervous system" even though the text didn't explicitly say this, but only implied this connection by arraying these sentences in this fashion.

Of course, nobody's perfect. An author may provide a text that allows readers to easily recapture the intended coherence, while others may seemingly be more cavalier - perhaps they expected their readers to have knowledge that they didn't.

One might assume that all readers would be best served by the authors who produce texts with the highest degree of coherence. That would appear to provide the best support for readers. Let's face it, if the author is explicit about connections within a text, then more of us should be able to recognize and use those connections.

It turns out, according to research, that some readers earn more from relatively low coherence texts (e.g., McNamara, 2010; Ozuru, Dempsey, & McNamara, 2009). The more knowledgeable and better readers usually learn more when they are forced, by the text, to engage in more mental processing - generating more inferences and the like. Such readers may give high coherence texts a more superficial once over since it is so easy for them to understand, that they end up with lower comprehension and learning. Alternately, when reading more coherent texts the poorer and less knowledgeable readers tend to do better with comprehension. When reading less explicitly coherent texts, these readers may fail to make the necessary connections or fill the gaps that such texts require, so comprehension suffers.

What that points out is that readers need to learn to negotiate a range of texts - texts that differ in coherence, and, consequently, in their challenge level. Increasing one's knowledge can help with that - at least, if the knowledge and the subject of the text match - but research has found that it is possible to teach students to negotiate the cohesive ties and connections that the author's build into their texts. It is this kind of negotiation that needs to be taught in our reading comprehension lessons.

One of the problems with the research on this topic is that it goes under a variety of titles. Some researchers focus on cohesion and cohesive ties - the linguistic repetitions and links themselves, while others categorize it as a kind of inferencing, the mental action that cohesive elements require. Still others might emphasize specific types of cohesion (e.g., referential, causal, temporal, anaphora, cataphora), or relegate this kind of thing to a superordinate category like Executive Function. I might recommend cohesion training, while a colleague may tout inferencing instruction - when we mean the same thing.

In any event, linguists have done a fine job of identifying and categorizing the many forms of cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), psychologists have developed innovative techniques for measuring the degree of unity or cohesiveness in texts (e.g., Graesser, McNamara, Cai, Conley, Li, & Pennebaker, 2014; Sheehan, 2013), and there are scads of studies showing the correlation of ability to interpret cohesion ties and reading comprehension (e.g., Duran, McCarthy, Graesser, & McNamara, 2007; Gasparinatou & Grigoriadou, 2013; Hall, et al., 2015; MacLean & Chapman, 1989; Schmitz, et al., 2017). Such studies have found these relations with a variety of text types (including science texts) and with students across a wide range of ages and abilities.

Most importantly, there are a number of studies showing that it is possible to raise reading comprehension by explicitly teaching such skills (e.g., Bauman, 1986; Best, Rowe, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2005). Elleman, 2017; Gallini, Spires, Terry, & Gleaton, 1993; Garcia-Madruga, et al., 2013). This kind of teaching has been effective with a wide range of ages and abilities - but has been especially powerful with low performing readers.

This kind of instruction should explain this aspect of language, providing many examples. Then teachers should provide direct instruction in how to deal with these kinds of connections through a text. This could include both modeling (showing students how to connect the ideas across sentences, paragraphs, and longer expanses of text), and guided reading (having students try to make these connections with explanations). This might be followed by exercises that give students more practice. These might take the form of worksheets, with the students trying to find the references for particular words or phrases or fill-in-the-blank pages. Or, another possibility, is to have students read a text and answer wh-questions about the passages.
Teachers should also raise these kinds of questions during regular group or class shared or guided reading activities. These kinds of activities should take place with a variety of texts.

Along with those earlier mentioned areas of comprehension instruction, this kind of work can have a positive impact on students' reading ability.

Tell that to your colleague - but then also make sure that your kids are learning plenty of content, both in his science classes and in your reading lessons. Every reading assignment is an opportunity to expose children to information about their world. With a little diligent attention and effort, that information can become knowledge available to support future reading. The lessons in vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, and text structure should increase students' ability to gain that information in future reading.
READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs References
Baumann, J. F. (1986). Teaching third-grade students to comprehend anaphoric relationships: The application of a direct instruction model. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(1), 70-90. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747961

Best, R. M. , Rowe, M. , Ozuru, Y. & McNamara, D. S. (2005). Deep-Level Comprehension of Science Texts. Topics in Language Disorders, 25 (1), 65-83.

Cox, B. E., Shanahan, T., & Sulzby, E. (1990). Good and poor elementary readers' use of cohesion in writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 25(1), 47-65. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747987

Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Using temporal cohesion to predict temporal coherence in narrative and expository texts. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 212-223. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193150

Elleman, A.M. (2017). Examining the impact of inference instruction on the literal and inferential comprehension of skilled and less skilled readers: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 761-781. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu00 00180

Gallini, J. K., Spires, H. A., Terry, S., & Gleaton, J. (1993). The influence o macro and micro-level cognitive strategies training on text learning. Journal of Research & Development in Education, 26(3), 164-178.

García?Madruga, J. A., Elosúa, M. R., Gil, L., Gómez?Veiga, I., Vila, J. Ó., Orjales, I., . . . Duque, G. (2013). Reading comprehension and working memory's executive processes: An intervention study in primary school students. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(2), 155-174. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.44

Gasparinatou, A., & Grigoriadou, M. (2013). Exploring the effect of background knowledge and text cohesion on learning from texts in computer science. Educational Psychology, 33(6), 645-670. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.790309

Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., Cai, Z., Conley, M., Li, H., & Pennebaker, J. (2014). Coh-metrix measures text characteristics at multiple levels of language and discourse. Elementary School Journal, 115(2), 210-229. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/678293

Halliday, M. A., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Routledge.

Hall, S. S., Kowalski, R., Paterson, K. B., Basran, J., Filik, R., & Maltby, J. (2015). Local text cohesion, reading ability and individual science aspirations: Key factors influencing comprehension in science classes. British Educational Research Journal, 41(1), 122-142. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3134

MacLean, M., & Chapman, L. J. (1989). The processing of cohesion in fiction and non-fiction by good and poor readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 12(1), 13-28. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1989.tb00300.x

McNamara, D. S. (2010). Strategies to read and learn: Overcoming learning by consumption. Medical Education, 44(4), 340-346. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03550.x

McNamara, D. S., Crossley, S. A., & McCarthy, P. M. (2010). Linguistic features of writing quality. Written Communication, 27(1), 57-86. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088309351547

Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 228-242. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2008.04.003

Schmitz, A., Gräsel, C., & Rothstein, B. (2017). Students' genre expectations and the effects of text cohesion on reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30(5), 1115-1135. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9714-0

Sheehan, K. M. (2013). Measuring cohesion: An approach that accounts for differences in the degree of integration challenge presented by different types of sentences. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 32(4), 28-37. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12017

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Comprehension Instruction that Really Helps | Teaching Cohesion | Shanahan on Literacy

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Shanahan on Literacy article explains that it is possible to improve student's reading comprehension through explicit instruction in language and how it works. Read here comprehension instruction that really helps - teaching cohesion!

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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."

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.

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.

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 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.

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 knowledge that 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

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No, Teachers Don't Have to Choose Between Knowledge and Strategies

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The question isn't whether to teach comprehension strategies, but when and how.

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How are two or more concepts or words connected? Concept maps make the web of connections between words and ideas come into focus by visually representing their relationship with one another. Better yet, they are easy to use across disciplines as a way to organizing students' growing knowledge.

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Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA)

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The Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) is a strategy that guides students in asking questions about a text, making predictions, and then reading to confirm or refute their predictions. The DRTA process encourages students to be active and thoughtful readers, enhancing their comprehension.

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Provides explicit directions for how to teach sentence combining

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Provides explicit directions for how to teach sentence combining

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Background

Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them. It is a technique that enables students to focus on key words and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering.

Benefits

Summarizing builds comprehension by helping to reduce confusion. Teachers train students to process the information they read with the goal of breaking down content into succinct pieces. This strategy can be used with the whole class, small groups, or as an individual assignment. Summarizing text by using writing activities builds on prior knowledge, helps improve writing, and strengthens vocabulary skills.

Create and use the strategy

Pre-select and introduce the text to be used in the Summarizing technique. Decide whether to have students use this strategy within one section, on one page, or with the entire book. Then, model the process of sifting out extra verbiage and extraneous examples within the passage. Give your students ample time and opportunities to practice.

1. Begin by reading OR have students listen to the text selection.

2. Ask students to write a summary of the target text based on the following framework questions:

1. What are the main ideas?

2. What are the crucial details necessary for supporting the ideas?

3. What information is irrelevant or unnecessary?

3. Guide students throughout the summary writing process. Have them use key words or phrases to identify the main points from the text.

4. Encourage students to write successively shorter summaries, constantly refining their written piece until only the most essential and relevant information remains.

What it looks like:

* To view this file, you'll need a copy of Acrobat Reader. Most computers already have it installed. If yours does not, you can download it now.

References

Jones, R. (2007). Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Summarizing. Retrieved 2008, January 29, from http://www.readingquest.org/strat/summarize.html.

Guthrie, J. T. (2003). Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction: Practices of Teaching Reading for Understanding. In C. Snow & A. Sweet (Eds.), Reading for Understanding: Implications of RAND Report for Education (pp. 115-140). New York: Guilford.

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Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them.

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A Guide to Teaching Effective Note-Taking

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A Guide to Teaching Effective Note-Taking

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A Guide to Teaching Effective Note-Taking

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Teachers often expect older students to know how to take notes, but most need explicit instruction to develop this skill.

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Taking notes in class is a standard expectation: Beginning in middle school, or earlier in some schools, students are expected to record information from a text or direct instruction and use that information for another purpose-to write a paper, create a presentation, take an exam, etc. Some students take to the process easily, some need some support, and others struggle.

And note-taking can be hard for some students because the process is really complex. As Paige E. Northern and colleagues write, good note-taking "involves multiple decisions, including determining which and how much information should be included... [as well as ensuring] the completeness and correctness of ideas."

The complexity of this process becomes even clearer when viewed through the lens of cognitive load theory, which says (essentially) that the brain doesn't multitask well, so expecting students to listen, understand, analyze, and synthesize all at the same time is a big ask. Students need to copy slides or information ( What did the teacher say?), understand ( What does this mean?), apply ( What does this mean in context?), analyze ( What ideas make up this idea?), evaluate ( Which of these ideas are important enough to record?), and create meaning or synthesize ( How do I represent these ideas in a way that will allow me to remember them?).

Finally, if students find that their note-taking efforts don't result in improved grades, they may feel that the task isn't worth the effort, decreasing what's known as the task value: Their intrinsic motivation to take notes drops with a perceived lack of results, leading to lower engagement and less effort, experience, and skill with note-taking. Ultimately they will have less confidence in their ability to take notes at all.

Sharing the Workload

Given these difficulties, it's clear that students need to be taught explicitly how to take notes-but teachers have another avenue for scaffolding this task, which is to have students work together.

Collaborative note-taking provides a way to decrease complexity, share the cognitive load, and increase the task value of the process. Unlike teacher-scaffolded notes, in which students are provided with outlines, slides, or study guides to fill in during the lecture, collaborative note-taking allows for opportunities for students to share their individual notes with a partner, a group, or the whole class, either during or immediately following the lecture, in order to check for understanding and revise, extend, or correct their notes.

3 Ways to Have Students Work Together on Note-Taking

1. Cocreated notes. In this option, the teacher and students work together to draft the notes, writes Rachel Jorgensen. "As the teacher delivers content, they utilize questioning and discussion to elicit connections and synthesis from the students," Jorgensen explains. "For example, rather than simply presenting a new vocabulary word, the teacher may ask students to share any background knowledge they may have as to the word's meaning and include a student-generated definition in the shared notes."

Asking all students to work together in one document is messy, but it allows students to ask questions as they arise. You can use one of the G-Suite options-Docs, Slides, or Jamboard-with everyone working in the same space. Mural, Lucidchart, and OneNote offer similar formats.

If the entire class works together to create a single document in real time, you'll be able to not only monitor the choices they make but also correct misunderstandings as they work. This strategy is an excellent way to scaffold collaborative note-taking and can be very useful in short bursts. It's also a great way to teach a specific note-taking strategy such as Cornell notes.

2. A trusted set of notes as backup to individual note-taking. With this strategy, Nikole D. Patson writes in Faculty Focus, students take individual notes, and two or three students are assigned to create a set of notes that are reviewed by the teacher and shared with the class. Have the assigned students take notes in a Google Doc that you create-that way, you can check students' understanding of the material while you're teaching.

3. Breaking things up. " Pause and partner" is a great way to use collaborative note-taking to break up a lecture. This updated approach to the familiar turn-and-talk and think-pair-share strategies provides opportunities mid-lecture-every 15 to 20 minutes-for students to compare and revise their notes. Pro tip: Provide a framing prompt like "Compare your notes about this concept, and highlight the differences in what you wrote down" to get students started.

As we noted in the Edutopia newsletter The Research Is In, "After confirming the previous finding that revising notes can boost student achievement, the researchers conducted tests to find the optimal revision strategy. That turned out to be having students revise their notes with a partner during a pause in instruction-the researchers found 'a modest partner effect-those revising with partners recorded more original notes than those revising alone.'"

Collaborative note-taking requires that students be willing to work together and know how to do so, which requires a strong learning community. Luckily, nothing builds community like meaningful work, so collaborative note-taking can be both an outcome and a supporter of a strong learning community.

To get started, assess your students' current note-taking skills and preferences, and engage in some reflection on what's working and what isn't. Next, talk to your students-present the ideas above and see what seems interesting to them. Try something, reflect together, and then make adjustments. Ultimately, you'll be teaching your students not just academic content but also how to collaborate on important work, a skill they'll use for a lifetime.

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3 Collaborative Strategies to Build Up Students' Note-Taking Skills

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Learning how to take notes can be difficult, so these strategies guide students to work and learn together, easing the way.

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Instructions & Template for Implementation Plan

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Instructions & Template for Implementation Plan

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Submit your completed implementation plan here

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Submit your completed implementation plan here

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Access Google Forms with a personal Google account or Google Workspace account (for business use).

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Chapters 9 & 10: Engagement & Supporting Reading throughout the Day

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Chapters 9 & 10: Engagement & Supporting Reading throughout the Day

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From Surviving to Thriving: Four Research-Based Principles to Build Students’ Reading Interest

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From Surviving to Thriving: Four Research-Based Principles to Build Students’ Reading Interest

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Enter your email address below. If your address has been previously registered, you will receive an email with instructions on how to reset your password. If you don't receive an email, you should register as a new user

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Encouraging Secondary Students to Read from Edutopia

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Encouraging Secondary Students to Read from Edutopia

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When students are reading below their grade level, these different approaches can motivate them to engage with texts and improve their literacy skills.

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Webinar: “Developing Deep Knowledge with Complex Texts and Tasks” by Naomi Watkins 

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Webinar: “Developing Deep Knowledge with Complex Texts and Tasks” by Naomi Watkins 

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Ways to make reading more authentic and purposeful to students

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By Naomi Watkins, Ph.D., Jason Stephenson

In this post, two state-level ELA leaders share their insights after working with the Student Achievement Partners (SAP) team to design the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets project. Download the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets.

Over the past 7 months, the SAP team joined forces with state-level literacy leaders to develop a guidance resource that supports educators in creating impactful secondary text sets. Rooted in the principles of academic growth, community and connection, expanding perspective, together with agency and autonomy, the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets provide opportunities for students to explore themselves, others, and the world around them through literacy.

Below Naomi Watkins and Jason Stephenson share their reflections on the inspiration and purpose of this work.

What inspired you to commit to co-designing the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets?

JS: After I heard a virtual presentation from SAP about some of their work in English language arts, I was reminded of their helpful resources. I scoured their website and printed numerous SAP handouts. My colleague from Utah, Naomi, said she was interested in working together on a project with them, so the plan easily formed from there. Also, in my state, I have pushed for more literature circles at the secondary level, so implementing text sets seemed like a natural next step.

NW: Background knowledge about the world is so essential to reading comprehension, and many students do not have the background knowledge to adequately comprehend the texts that they are assigned to read in their content area classes. I view World Knowledge Companion Text Sets as a powerful tool to support students in building this essential knowledge.

What opportunities do the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets create for the teaching and learning experiences in middle and high school classrooms?

JS: This guidance creates numerous student-centered opportunities for reading and writing. Teachers work in advance to curate a cohesive text set about a relevant topic. Students then get to explore the topic through multiple perspectives and genres, thus building their background knowledge. Whether there are required reads in the text set, or students have total freedom as to which texts to read, students can deepen their comprehension of the topic, which can lead to authentic writing and research. The shorter and more accessible texts that comprise a text set invite all students to read about and analyze the topic-even those students whose stamina is low when reading longer texts.

NW: Traditionally, secondary ELA educators organize their instruction around singular novels. When asked what they are teaching, they may respond with, "I'm teaching Hamlet or The Outsiders," but state standards rarely, if ever, mention specific titles of novels or texts that need to be taught. Standards can really be taught with almost any text, which is one of the many things I love about ELA!

As ELA educators, I believe our charge is to help our students understand why we read, why we write, why we communicate-and then, we must support students in developing and fine-tuning these skills, so that they are able to access, interact with, and create knowledge on their own. However, when we organize instruction solely around novels, we often miss the opportunity to explicitly show students why we read and how this reading connects them to the larger world. They may think we read to answer test questions or write essays or because the teacher assigned it. Instead, when instruction is organized around essential questions about the world, and texts are selected that respond to these questions, students then are brought into the greater community of world engagers and knowledge builders. This interaction is how we as adults use reading in our daily lives. We usually are seeking to answer questions: How much of this film is actually based on real-life events? How do I file my taxes? How can I better communicate with my boss? Why is there continued conflict in the Middle East? We must show students this real-life application, and that begins with how we structure our instruction.

What is something you would want educators to know when considering the use of text sets in their planning and instruction?

JS: Using text sets will allow students to more deeply explore a topic on their own terms since they choose the modes and genres they find most appealing. Since you as the teacher have curated the list of high-quality and varied options, anything that students select will be informative, relevant, and engaging. Building an effective text set can take time, so plan to add just one per semester or school year. If you work on a large team, perhaps you could each take turns building a text set throughout the school year. Eventually, you will have multiple text sets to use with each novel study or literature circle. Text sets have the power to help students build their world knowledge, so students will have greater comprehension of other texts after the text set experience.

NW: I hear from educators that they are frustrated by their secondary students who are not engaged in reading. Often, these educators struggle with showing students the relevance of what they are reading.

While planning instruction around essential questions and text sets may be a big lift at the beginning in regards to planning and implementation, I can guarantee that the payoff will be great since less time will be spent on trying to convince students and more time will be spent on student engagement and deep learning.

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World Knowledge Companion Text Sets: Empowering educators and inspiring students through literacy - Student Achievement Partners

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In this post, two state-level ELA leaders share their insights after working with the Student Achievement Partners (SAP) team to design the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets project. Download the World Knowledge Companion Text Sets. Over the past ...

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One of the great quandaries of secondary instruction is how we give students more voice and choice in their learning while still covering standards, deepening students' understanding, and sharpening their critical analysis skills. Taking a text set approach for your English literature or content area classes may be the solution you have been looking for.

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Teachers can encourage critical thinking by giving students reading assignments that build their knowledge gradually.

Maskot / Alamy Stock Photo

As teachers, our goal is to see every student succeed. Students enter our classrooms with a wide range of reading skills, and it's our responsibility to use teaching methods that meet their needs. I've found a strategy called rolling text sets to be very effective for all of my middle school students-and particularly those who may need extra reading support.

Rolling text sets allow students to build deep knowledge while keeping the cognitive load manageable for them. Many readers who do not feel confident in vocabulary and background knowledge are intimidated by long, complex texts. Mary Ann Cappiello, a professor of language and literacy, explains that text sets make "texts at higher reading levels more accessible for all students" because they intentionally build student vocabulary and background knowledge before introducing students to more complex texts that stretch students to think critically about a topic.

Develop Comprehension and Vocabulary Incrementally

Rolling text sets are a short series of articles that allow students to build content knowledge and vocabulary in a way that is very attainable. Essentially, a rolling text set contains five to 10 articles that are taught during a one-to-two-week unit and that sequentially increase in length and complexity. The articles in the beginning of a rolling text set are very short. Cappiello says that "shorter texts have the greatest potential for building prior knowledge on a topic so that students can later tackle longer, more complex texts." At the end of a text set, students are reading very complex, high-level articles.

Text sets can be adapted to fit any grade level or for any topic. Here is an example of a rolling text set I use with my sixth-grade social studies students.
Courtesy of Christine Boatman
Start Small to Maintain Knowledge Retention

In class, we study Oregon tribes. During this unit, we explore tribal sovereignty, treaties, and Celilo Falls. The first text I give students is a one-paragraph piece that I wrote to introduce the big ideas to be studied, as well as the vocabulary. The reading is purposefully short. Studies show that students' retention of knowledge and ability to transfer the knowledge into long-term memory is greater when students read short passages. When I gave this short reading to one of my students who typically has difficulty with complex texts, he looked at me, confused, and said, "That's it? This is easy!"

While that student was encouraged and felt successful, my students with advanced reading skills were engaged because they were learning new complex vocabulary. In a formative assessment the day after we read the short article, 94 percent of my students were able to define tribal sovereignty and treaties accurately.

On the second and third days of the unit, I provide students with a half-page article about Celilo Falls and a half-page article about tribal sovereignty and treaties, both written by me. These articles were written with the intention of reinforcing the big ideas about Celilo Falls, reusing the vocabulary that students learned the previous day, introducing more vocabulary, and beginning the critical-thinking process.

Provide Challenging Material to Encourage Deeper Thinking

After reading the articles and completing short activities based on the content, my students began making deeper connections on the subject.

Discussing the article with peers, writing a 140-character "tweet" with the main idea of the article,

Drawing the most important thing they learned from the article (quick, less than five minutes),

Working with peers to create an idea web displaying the most important information from the article,

Writing lists of questions they are still wondering about after reading the article,

Creating their own sentences using the vocabulary words from the article and sharing their sentences with a partner, and

Developing their own questions based on the article and quizzing a classmate.

Examples of activities that I have students complete after reading an article include:

On the fourth day, they read a full-page article about tribal sovereignty and its connection to Celilo Falls, and my students were able to have insightful conversations using information from the texts. The next day, I gave them a longer, challenging two-page article from the Oregon Historical Society about the history of Celilo. On the following day, they read a challenging high-level text by Oregon Public Broadcasting about fishing rights and legal cases surrounding tribal law.

Although the two longer texts are far above a sixth-grade reading level, all of my students were able to make phenomenal connections and use very high-level critical-thinking skills as they debated some of these challenging topics.

I rarely give students more than one article in a day. In this unit, I give only one article a day because these concepts are complex and students need time to process the information and interact with it. If the time is not given for processing and interacting with the material, the learning is not meaningful for students.

The greatest thing about using rolling text sets is that they systematically prepare all students to use high-level critical thinking when they read complex articles and encourage growth in their vocabulary knowledge. With the support of rolling text sets, my students who read below grade level are able to fully grasp the concepts presented in the complex articles as a result of the slow, rolling introduction and the scaffolded lead-in to complex articles, and they have made great gains on their summative assessment scores.

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Rolling Text Sets Make Content Accessible for All Students

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Teachers can encourage critical thinking by giving students reading assignments that build their knowledge gradually.