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Decoding is Not Enough: Connecting Word Reading to Meaning

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Decoding is Not Enough: Connecting Word Reading to Meaning

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Decoding Is Not Enough: Connecting Word Reading to Meaning in Early Literacy

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Researchers’ view: Early success with word reading does not always translate into later success with comprehension.

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Shared-Reading Read Aloud Videos of Children’s Illustrated Books and Children’s Literature by Maya from MaiStoryBook. ~NEW VIDEO EVERY FRIDAY~ This Channel provides the Read-Aloud video portion to the featured book-of-the week reading resources found on my blog, MaiStorybook. Goal of MaiStoryBook…

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Antiracist Reading Revolution [Grades K-8]

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Dr. Cherry-Paul offers six critical lenses that help educators to adopt an antiracist teaching stance, spotlighting the importance of instruction buil…

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Unearthing Joy | The Scholastic Teacher Store

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In this sequel to Cultivating Genius, Gholdy Muhammad adds a fifth pursuit-joy-to her groundbreaking framework. Dr. Muhammad shows how joy, which is rooted in the cultural and historical realities of Black students, can enhance our efforts to cultivate identity, skills, intellect, and criticality for ALL students, giving them a powerful purpose to learn and contribute to the world.

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Stolen Focus : Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again

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'I think this book is exactly what the world needs right now ... I hope everybody buys the book. I promise you it will be worth your time and certainly worth your focus.'

'If you want to get your attention and focus back, you need to read this remarkable book. All over the world, Johann Hari interviewed both the leading scientists investigating why we're losing our focus, and the people developing solutions. He has cracked the code of why we're in this crisis, and how to get out of it. We all need to hear this message.'

'A visionary, systemic, revolutionary and practical guide for creating the new world. Through tireless research and genius insight Johann Hari certainly snapped me to attention. A life changing book.'

'Johann Hari's superb STOLEN FOCUS is a beautifully researched and argued exploration of the breakdown of humankind's ability to pay attention. It's a story that so many of us have felt needs to be told, but whose cause and consequences are hard to capture and articulate without guesswork, prejudice or ideology. Hari not only achieves this and more, but he does so it with the pace, sparkle and energy of the best kind of thriller writer. I can't remember reading a book which made me shout out "yes! That's it!" quite so many times. The same brilliant voice that has made us rethink so convincingly the real solutions to the global epidemic of addiction and mental health (Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections) is not satisfied with hand-wringing or tub-thumping - Hari as ever also offers ways out, one which we would do well to ... to concentrate...'

'Stop whatever you're doing and read this book. A deeply researched, disturbing, and yet ultimately hopeful exploration of the primal crisis of our time: our diminishing ability to focus on what really matters.'

'I don't know anyone thinking more deeply, or more holistically, about the crisis of our collective attention than Johann Hari. And this is a crisis that we must address if we are to meet any of the other pressing emergencies we face as a species, whether ecological or social. Which means that this book could not be more vital. Please sit with it, and focus.'

'A brilliant book about one of the most important topics of our time'
'Johann Hari writes like a dream. He's both lyricist and storyteller - but also an indefatigable investigator of one of the world's greatest problems: the systematic destruction of our attention. Read this book to save your mind.'

'A gripping analysis of why we've lost the capacity to concentrate, and how we might find it again. STOLEN FOCUS won't just capture your attention-it will keep you thinking and rethinking long after you've finished it. Johann Hari is one of the most insightful critics of our modern malaise, and he's written the book the world needs to win the war on distraction.'

- ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

'A brilliant book about one of the most important topics of our time'

'Thanks to this brilliant book, I have got to know myself and my fellow humans better. It educates and entertains you - the stories will suck any reader in, and then slowly change your mind. Everyone should read it. It has changed my habits - way beyond just putting away my phone more. 'Stolen Focus' is a really important book.'

'In his unique voice, Johann Hari tackles the profound dangers facing humanity from information technology and rings the alarm bell for what all of us must do to protect ourselves, our children and our democracies.'

'An entirely necessary book, a miracle of clarity and depth, a resonant, deeply researched warning followed by a truly inspiring clarion-call to action. Read it and weep, then dry your eyes and join in.'

'In a world that in Johann Hari's deft phrase suffers from "mental jet lag," his new book is a highly original and wide-ranging investigation into the causes of our epidemic of flagging attention. Written with Hari's trademark incisive prose, indefatigable search for scientific evidence vividly presented, and illustrated with telling anecdotes, Stolen Focus is a bracing and necessary wake-up call to us all.'

'A bold, troubling and penetrating tour de force that lifts the lid on something parents, teachers, psychologists and doctors have been increasingly worried about. A fascinating journey into the mind and how it is being manipulated with devastating effects. Hari's subject is something that is affecting us all and this seminal work will be one of the defining books of our era. Johann Hari is quickly proving himself to become the chronicler of our time. We must all wake up and pay attention to this book's message. It is a clarion call for us to take back our focus. Get off social media, switch off the TV, put down your smart-phone and do one thing - read this book.'

'This mind-blowing book explains everything. Read it and be free.'

'If you read just one book about how the modern world is driving us crazy, read this one.'

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'I think this book is exactly what the world needs right now ... I hope everybody buys the book. I promise you it will be worth your time and certainly worth your focus.' 'If you want to get your attention and focus back, you need to read this remarkable book.

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Teaching Reading Across the Day, Grades K-8

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Research-based and classroom-tested lesson structures help K–8 teachers plan and deliver lessons that ensure students meet both reading and cont…

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Strategies and lessons for teaching writing in Kindergarten through elementary to seventh grade with differentiation and inquiry. Complete guide with ideas for small group guided, shared, and interactive writing. Improve engagement and independence though social support and teacher feedback.

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Hello there! This page has a few different categories. I plan on sharing as many of these as we have on hand (and time for) today! If you’re interested in any of these as a school purchase, send a note to me via sales@phoenixbooks.biz and we’ll work up a quote with our school discount. Always happy to help find other books for your particular needs - just reach out!

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Gain the foundational tools and skills to bring Transformational Coaching to your site.

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From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health-and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the *play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes-communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children-and ourselvesfrom the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

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The Anxious Generation is out March 26. Order the Book.

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From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health-and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood

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Cadow's debut novel portrays a challenging coming-of-age in rural Vermont with warmth, humor, and insight. Ian observes the turmoil that surrounds him with bewilderment and deadpan humor. . . . Cadow captures Ian's engaging naïveté, which is tempered by a survivor's unflappability and a blossoming sense of irony. . . . A heartfelt novel about the challenges of youth and the value of community.
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Cadow's first novel is, in a word, superb. The wonderfully empathic characters are fully realized, their reality enhanced by numerous flashbacks that provide context and dimensionality. The Vermont setting is deeply evocative, as is Ian's memorable voice, through which the captivating story is told. Arguably one of the finest novels of the year.
-Booklist (starred review)

Full of sensory images and descriptive notes. . . a great ride. . . . The ground constantly shifts in this extraordinary keyhole view of addiction and its ongoing aftermath; Cadow takes his time, but delivers a realistic and compelling novel.
-School Library Journal

Ian's genuine first-person narration-enriched by his penchant for pithy metaphors and similes-unveils a protagonist whose innate sense of justice and tentatively hopeful perspective buoy Cadow's sober debut.
-Publishers Weekly

Gather is a stunning debut by Kenneth M. Cadow. . . . Anyone who has endured what it's like to witness someone they love recover from addiction, struggled to afford necessities, or relied on public programs like school lunches will find themselves nodding in agreement as they absorb the words from each page. . . Cadow masterfully describes difficult experiences through melodic language I'll be thinking about for a very long time. Having grown up in a low-income household, I couldn't help but think of how much I would've appreciated this novel when I was in high school. I'm still grateful I have it now.
-Vox

This wandering but moving story of Ian's path to adulthood is full of humor and heart.
-The Star Tribune

This book, Gather, feels like one that will stay with me forever. . . seeing this depiction of extreme poverty, this depiction of parental neglect and an utter lack of resources is important. It's a story familiar to far too many kids. And it's a story that we adults, especially in education, need to remember. . . This well-written, moving story is one that will stick with me for a long time.
-Teen Librarian Toolbox, an SLJ Blog

There's a well-known belief in the world of education that books can act as mirrors that reflect a reader's own life and as windows that allow a peek into the lives of others. Gather is well positioned to be both.
-Seven Days

I loved Gather. The voice is fantastic. It is a wonderful novel by a wonderful writer.
-Kevin Brooks, author of The Bunker Diary and Born Scared

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Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow: 9781536231113 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A 2023 National Book Award Finalist A Michael L. Printz Honor Book "Arguably one of the finest novels of the year."-Booklist (starred review) A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles...

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A Reading Expert’s Case for Rethinking Fluency

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A Reading Expert’s Case for Rethinking Fluency

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Rethinking Fluency

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Fluency in Reading: 5 Powerful Strategies for Your Classroom

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Fluency in Reading: 5 Powerful Strategies for Your Classroom

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Fluency in Reading: 5 Powerful Strategies for Your Classroom

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Unlock the magic of reading fluency! Discover how accuracy, expression, and rhythm transform reading into a joyful, confident experience for young readers.

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The need to explicitly teach letter-sound relationships in U.S. classrooms is settled science. ¹ However, too often such instruction is not provided in the most efficient or effective way. These instructional missteps mean that fewer children will develop strong word-reading skills. In addition, ineffective phonics instruction is likely to require more class time and/or later compensatory intervention, taking time away from the growth of other important contributors to literacy development. We have encountered many dozens, if not hundreds, of phonics faux pas. In this article, we focus on seven in early reading instruction that deserve our serious attention.

1. Spending Too Little or Too Much Time on Phonics Instruction

Our field has long had a problem with teachers devoting an inadequate amount of time to phonics instruction. Although some children will pick up word reading with little instructional effort, many require considerable instruction to master the complex task of looking at a series of lines and curves to ascertain the spoken word they represent. In languages in which there is a relatively simple relationship between letters and sounds, such as Finnish and Spanish, by the middle of first grade, children are able to read real words and pseudo-words in the language accurately almost 100 percent of the time.* In languages in which the relationships are somewhat more complex, such as Danish and French, children are about 70 percent accurate by that time point. In English, in which the relationship between letters and sounds is extremely complex, children are about 40 percent accurate at that point. ² Put another way, English word reading requires a lot more effort to teach and learn than many other languages.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as too much phonics instruction. We have seen prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms in which the better part of the day is focused on letter-sound instruction (and often in a manner inconsistent with what research would recommend). This is problematic because it leaves insufficient time for many other important areas of development. For example, vocabulary and concept knowledge, which are strong predictors of long-term reading and writing success, also need attention. In fact, vocabulary knowledge affects word-reading development. We sometimes cannot even know whether we have read a word accurately unless we already have the word in our vocabulary. Is the word lemic pronounced with a short e, like lemon, or a long e, like lemur? Unless you already know this word, you aren't sure. For children trying to learn to read words with low vocabulary knowledge, such uncertainty is common.

Likely the question on your mind is, "How much is enough and not too much?" Unfortunately, research does not offer a decisive answer to this fundamental question. Typically, recommendations range from 30 to 60 minutes per day in grades K-2, with that time including a number of different activities we discuss below.

However, we suggest that the answer also varies by child and should be informed by simple diagnostic assessments. Some children are able to develop letter-sound knowledge more quickly and efficiently than others. This is one reason why differentiated phonics instruction is so well advised. Some instruction is provided to the whole class, but then it is reinforced and gaps are filled in as needed in a small-group context. Research has shown that reading achievement is supported when instruction is differentiated. ³ A number of researchers have developed systems by which assessments determine which letter-sound relationships each child has learned and not yet learned, and a systematic series of lessons are provided accordingly. ⁴ An important direction for our field is to work toward determining the most time-efficient approaches to ensuring each child in a class meets grade-level expectations in word reading each year.

2. Neglecting the Alphabetic Principle, Concept of Word in Print, and Other Concepts of Print

Imagine going to work for a shipbuilding company. You go to work the first day and are schooled in all the different types of bolts, screws, and nails. You learn their names, the different sizes, and the different types, but you never learn that their purpose is to join pieces of metal and that those pieces of metal are used to build ships! Although this situation is clearly ridiculous, it is actually analogous to what we see in some prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. Children are being taught to name letters or even identify the sounds that the letters represent, but they are unclear about why they are learning it. Letter-sound knowledge is being learned in a vacuum; the child has no context for how to use the information, no "big picture."

To understand the big picture, children must understand the alphabetic principle-how our English system of writing works. The alphabetic principle is simply that visual symbols (letters) represent speech sounds (phonemes). To write the spoken word "dog," you use alphabetic symbols to represent the speech sounds. We can combine and recombine letter symbols to form words. As odd as it may sound, children can learn letters and even letter sounds in very rote ways without understanding the alphabetic system. When children do not understand the alphabetic principle, they may do the following:

Write something but not know how to read it back because they are not using letter sounds.

Copy words but not be able to read them back.

Write letters without any match to sounds (e.g., I went to the store = bmlssmii).

Use letters they know to write all words, regardless of sounds.

Look to the teacher when they can't read a word.

Say the name of a letter when asked to read a word (e.g., no = "en").

To understand the big picture, children must understand other concepts of print as well. Concepts of print are the many understandings about how print works, including that print serves specific purposes (e.g., to help us remember or to entertain us); that print is language written down; and that, in English, we read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom. All of these and other "mechanics" about how print works are important to learn alongside letters and sounds.

In order to have a true understanding of the purpose and function of letters and letter sounds, children must understand how words are represented in print, or concept of word. ⁵ This means they know that words are collections of letters that represent a series of speech sounds that collectively represent a unit of meaning. They need to understand that each new word is signified by a space that does not contain any letters. They need to understand that you can see a word as well as say a word.

To understand concept of word in print, children need to watch others reading print and pointing to words. ⁶ In classrooms, this may be a teacher reading charts or big books to children and pointing to the words as they read. Teachers may also use pointers and sometimes ask children to point to words. In addition to watching others, children need to practice pointing to words themselves. A great way to do this is to allow children to point to words in a memorized line of print, in a dictated story of their own words, or in a simple book with short, repetitive sentences. Although it sounds like a really simple task, it is not. In fact, there are actually stages that occur as children learn to point to print. Specifically, they must gain control of multisyllabic words and show understanding that a word like elephant, with three syllables, is actually one unified word. When children cannot handle multisyllabic words, they will point to new words for each syllable in a word (e.g., if the text said "kittens cry," the child would point at the word "kittens" for the syllable kit and then point at the word "cry" for the syllable tens).

Essentially, whenever phonics is taught, there should be a very print-rich environment, with teachers and children interacting with print to acquire the alphabetic principle, concept of word, and other concepts of print. Without these instructional nonnegotiables, letter-sound knowledge will remain inert information.

3. Teaching Letter Names without Letter Sounds

From the alphabet song to children's toys, much of the messaging that young children receive about letters is focused on the names of letters. Although research does suggest the importance of teaching and learning letter names, also vitally important is teaching the sounds associated with the letters. A common faux pas is neglecting instruction in those sounds throughout prekindergarten and sometimes well into kindergarten.

Some people think that teaching letter names is essentially teaching their sounds, but unfortunately that is not the case in English. Some letter names don't have a sound commonly associated with the letter at all. Neither Hh, Ww, nor Yy has its commonly associated sound in its name (e.g., there is no /h/, as in happy, in the name of the letter Hh ("aych")). Knowing these letters' names definitely does not lead children to know their associated sounds. Some other letters' names contain one of the sounds commonly associated with the name but not the other. For example, Cc has one of its common sounds in its name (/s/) but not the other (/k/).

The primary vowels are like this as well. We would have been much better off if they were named by their short sounds (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, as in pat, pet, pit, pot, and putt), because those are more common in the words read by beginning readers than their long vowel sounds (the letters' names)-but no such luck. Letter names are also challenging for young readers because they aren't consistent in whether the commonly associated sound is at the beginning or end of the name. For example, in Mm/"em," the letter's target sound is at the end of the letter name, but in Jj/"jay," the target sound is at the beginning. That means for letter names to help children, they must memorize whether the target sound is at the beginning or end of the name.

The complexities of letter names in English might lead you to think we should not teach letter names at all, but research suggests that teaching letter names is still worthwhile ⁷-it just needs to be accompanied by lots of attention to the sound or sounds commonly associated with each letter and by a thorough understanding of the challenges posed by English letter names. A teacher with such knowledge would understand, for example, why a young child might spell the word daisy as WAZ. Why? Sometimes children write "W" for the /d/ sound because the letter name for Ww-"double-u"-begins with the /d/ sound. The next sound we hear in daisy is the letter name for Aa (the long a sound), and the third and fourth sounds in daisy are the name of the letter Zz ("zee").

A final point about letter-name knowledge: it is often noted that letter-name knowledge in preschool and kindergarten is a strong predictor of children's later literacy achievement. This is true, but it is not because letter-name knowledge is an even-close-to-sufficient contributor to actual reading or writing. It is helpful, but some children learn to read knowing only letter sounds-no letter names. The predictive power of letter names lies largely in the fact that it is a proxy for other things. Children who know letter names early are more likely to have experienced a substantial emphasis on print literacy in the home and to have attended a strong preschool, for example, which in turn increase the likelihood of higher later reading and writing achievement. Naming letters is only one facet of letter knowledge, and probably not even the most important one. It is the application of letter-sound knowledge that advances children's reading and spelling.

4. Using Inappropriate Alphabet Key Words

A common tool for teaching the alphabet is alphabet key words, such as Aa is for apple, Bb is for ball, and so on. The idea is to make alphabet learning easier by creating meaningful associations between the letter and a word that begins with that letter. Unfortunately, too often, alphabet key words are problematic, creating more confusion than clarity for young children. Good alphabet key words need to begin with one of the sounds commonly associated with that letter. For example, Oo is for octopus works-the first sound in octopus is the short o sound. However, Oo is for orange does not work. The o in orange is what we call an r-controlled vowel. It does not make its typical short or long vowel sound. Similarly, Tt is for thumb does not work because there is no /t/ sound in thumb-there is a th digraph (two letters representing one sound). Another pitfall to watch out for is an alphabet key word that begins with a letter name, which can be really confusing to children. For example, Ee is for elephant is confusing because it begins the letter name for Ll ("el"), and Cc is for cake is problematic because it begins with the letter name for Kk ("kay").

Alphabet key words also need to be depicted clearly in a photo or drawing, not easily confused with other items, and they should be words that are known to or can be readily learned by children. We recommend two alphabet key words for the letters c, g, a, e, i, o, and u-one for each of their two common sounds. Caution should be exercised in using children's names as key words, as some do not make a sound typically associated with the letter in English (e.g., Juan). In these cases, we suggest using the child's name to show the shape and name of the letter but to focus on a different alphabet key word for the sound.

For key words to do their job, children must be able to separate the first sound in the word from the rest of the word (e.g., to separate the /b/ from the /all/ in ball). Ideally, children develop this skill, called initial phoneme segmentation, during or before the prekindergarten year. However, not all children meet this expectation. Fortunately, you can work on this skill while teaching the alphabet, including alphabet key words. Research strongly suggests that phonemic awareness (conscious awareness of the individual sounds in spoken words-for example, recognizing that sheep has three sounds: /sh/, /ee/, and /p/), although an entirely oral skill, is actually best developed with accompanying letters. This initial phoneme segmentation issue is also why you should be judicious about using alphabet key words that begin with blends (two consonant letters pronounced in succession in a syllable, such as dr in drum); it is especially difficult for young children to separate the initial phoneme in a blend.

5. Lacking a Scope and Sequence

You can teach phonics in many different ways. You can use word or picture cards, magnetic letters, letter tiles, games, or even more traditional methods. However, if you want phonics instruction to be effective, you need to know the content (e.g., consonants, short vowels, digraphs) that you are teaching and the order in which children typically learn, and thus that you will teach, that content. We call this a scope and sequence. ⁸ Across decades, evidence has accumulated to suggest that systematic phonics instruction with a scope and sequence will produce better outcomes than instruction that does not follow a scope and sequence. ⁹

Historically, a range of less systematic approaches have been popular. Typically, these approaches do not have a clear scope or follow a sequence but instead address letter sounds only as they arise incidentally in interactions with children or are needed to read words within a specific text. So, if a teacher is reading the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, she will teach the ee sound because it is found in the word see. The problem with this kind of serendipitous approach as the driver of phonics instruction is that information is not presented logically to the child and information gets missed. Of course, children should read connected text as they are learning phonics, and teachers should point out words they are reading that match taught patterns. But the scope and sequence of phonics instruction should not be based primarily on opportune moments in text reading.

Scope and sequence is also important because it helps children to organize information into cognitive categories, or "file folders," that support better cognitive storage and retrieval of information. For example, if one teaches information without a scope and sequence, one might move from teaching the short a sound in a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern (e.g., bag), to teaching the vowel digraph oa (e.g., boat), to teaching ch (e.g., chip), to teaching i_e (e.g., bike). It would be a lot easier to remember these patterns if they were taught in groups: for example, teaching all the short vowel sounds ( a, e, i, o, and u), consonant digraphs that represent unique sounds ( th, sh, ch), all the CVC- e (silent e) patterns ( mate, Pete, bike, note, cute), and then both of the spelling patterns that represent the /oi/ sound (called a diphthong; oy and oi). If instruction follows a scope and sequence, the variations don't seem random but rather work to form a category (e.g., "Oh this th is kind of like the ch, two letters that make a new consonant sound").

6. Using a Problematic Approach to Teaching Sight Words

Often, even teachers who do devote considerable time to phonics instruction do not apply that instruction to teaching "sight words." Instead, they teach children to memorize sight words visually rather than to decode them. Research suggests that's the wrong approach. ¹⁰

Let's back up and talk about terminology. A sight word actually refers to any word that can be read by sight. Differentiation is a sight word for us-we recognize it essentially instantly when we see it. What many teachers call sight words are actually high-frequency words. Because a small number of high-frequency words have less regular patterns (e.g., was, the), some people call all high-frequency words sight words and think that they must be learned visually and holistically by sight.

In point of fact, letter-sound information amalgamates the word's units into memory better than any other process. When we teach high-frequency words, we need to fully analyze the letter-sound relationships within them, whether the word is comprised of expected letter-sound relationships, as in can (/k/, /a/, and /n/, just as we would expect); some expected and some unexpected letter-sound relationships, as in said (/s/ and /d/ are as expected, /ai/ would normally represent the long a, not the short e, sound); or entirely unexpected letter-sound relationships, such as of (/uv/). Nearly two-thirds of high-frequency words are actually very regular (e.g., at, in, it), but even with those that are not, we need to fully analyze the letter-sound relationships as well as read them accurately many times. We suggest studying each letter's association with each sound, relating the word to other words with the same letter-sound patterns when possible (e.g., no, go, so), and teaching high-frequency words alongside meaningful words (e.g., like with bike).

7. Missing Essential Elements of Phonics Instruction

We often observe phonics instruction that has some strengths but also some gaps. Effective phonics instruction is multifaceted. You've likely already heard about the need for explicit instruction. Explicit instruction is direct, precise, and unambiguous (e.g., telling children what sound the letters sh represent together, rather than making the connection indirectly or asking them to figure it out themselves). You probably also realize the need to apply general learning principles (e.g., specific feedback). Some other facets that must be present are:

Specific, Applicable Generalizations

Simplistic, broad generalizations or "rules" do not work. For example, if we say that silent e signals a long vowel sound all the time, then we have a lot of issues. But if the generalization is made more specific, it is more applicable. For example, the silent e pattern is consistent more than 75 percent of the time in a_e, i_e, o_e, and u_e, but only consistent 16 percent of the time with e_e.

Active Construction and Deconstruction of Words

Just explicitly teaching letter-sound relationships is not enough. If it were, we could just tell infants what each letter-sound relationship is and then they could read. Children need opportunities to move letter tiles to build and change words, listen to words and spell them by sound, and so on.

Opportunities for Application

The evidence is clear that young children benefit from opportunities to read text that emphasizes letter-sound relationships they have learned to date. ¹¹ This reinforces the value of their hard work and of using decoding to read words. Children's reading opportunities should not be restricted to decodable texts, or those with only letter sounds they have been taught, but such texts should be a regular part of the reading diet. TextProject.org is a great resource for texts, and information about texts, that support beginning readers to learn to decode, without being as boring or unnatural as some decodable texts are.

Responsiveness

Phonics instruction must be informed by our ongoing observation and assessment of children's phonics knowledge and word-reading skills. We should respond when we notice that a child is confused, is insecure with a particular skill, or has had a major breakthrough. If we are not responsive to our students, some students are likely to be left behind in their word-reading development.

For too long, much discourse around beginning reading instruction has focused on whether to teach phonics. It is time for greater attention to how-and how not-to do so. Universally high-quality phonics instruction-that avoids common missteps-should be our collective focus.
Nell K. Duke is a professor of language, literacy, and culture, and a professor in the combined program in education and psychology, at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on early literacy development, particularly among children living in poverty. Heidi Anne E. Mesmer is a professor of literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. A former third-grade teacher, her work focuses on beginning reading materials and text difficulty.
*Pseudo-words are words with letter-sound relationships that are plausible in a language but do not actually form a real word. ( back to article)

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Barbara Foorman et al., Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade, What Works Clearinghouse, NCEE 2016-4008 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

2. Philip H. K. Seymour, Mikko Aro, and Jane M. Erskine, in collaboration with COST Action A8, "Foundation Literacy Acquisition in European Orthographies," British Journal of Psychology 94, no. 2 (May 2003): 143-174.

3. See, for example, Carol McDonald Connor, Frederick J. Morrison, and Leslie E. Katch, "Beyond the Reading Wars: Exploring the Effect of Child-Instruction Interactions on Growth in Early Reading," Scientific Studies of Reading 8, no. 4 (2004): 305-336.

4. See, for example, Heidi Anne E. Mesmer, Letter Lessons and First Words (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, forthcoming); Donald R. Bear et al., Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (New York: Pearson, 2015); and Sharon Walpole and Michael C. McKenna, How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction (New York: Guilford Press, 2017).

5. Darrell Morris et al., "Developmental Steps in Learning to Read: A Longitudinal Study in Kindergarten and First Grade," Reading Research Quarterly 38, no. 3 (2003): 302-328.

6. See, for example, Laura M. Justice et al., "Print-Focused Read-Alouds in Preschool Classrooms: Intervention Effectiveness and Moderators of Child Outcomes," Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 41 (2010): 504-520.

7. Shayne B. Piasta, David J. Purpura, and Richard K. Wagner, "Fostering Alphabet Knowledge Development: A Comparison of Two Instructional Approaches," Reading & Writing Quarterly 23 (2010): 607-626.

8. Heidi Anne E. Mesmer and Priscilla L. Griffith, "Everybody's Selling It-but Just What Is Explicit, Systematic Phonics Instruction?," The Reading Teacher 59, no. 4 (2005): 366-376.

9. Sebastian P. Suggate, "A Meta-Analysis of the Long-Term Effects of Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension Interventions," Journal of Learning Disabilities 49, no. 1 (2016): 77-96.

10. Linnea C. Ehri, Eric Satlow, and Irene Gaskins, "Grapho-Phonemic Enrichment Strengthens Keyword Analogy Instruction for Struggling Young Readers," Reading & Writing Quarterly 25, no. 2-3 (2009): 162-191; and Linnea C. Ehri, "Learning to Read Words: Theory, Findings, and Issues," Scientific Studies of Reading 9, no. 2 (2005): 167-188.

11. Jennifer P. Cheatham and Jill H. Allor, "The Influence of Decodability in Early Reading Text on Reading Achievement: A Review of the Evidence," Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25, no. 9 (2012): 2223-2246.

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The need to explicitly teach letter-sound relationships in U.S. classrooms is settled science. 1 However, too often such instruction is not provided in the most efficient or effective way. These instructional missteps mean that fewer children will develop strong word-reading skills.

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Layers of Vocabulary Learning: A Slice of Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Discover effective vocabulary instruction with 4 proven strategies that help engage students in word learning and enhance comprehension.

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Vocabulary Talk Moves: Using Language to Promote Word Learning

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Vocabulary Talk Moves: Using Language to Promote Word Learning

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Practical Routines for Reading Multisyllabic Words

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Practical Routines for Reading Multisyllabic Words

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Practical Routines for Reading Multisyllabic Words

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Discover everything you need to know about teaching reading fluency—from simple routines to expert insights—all through 12 powerful podcast episodes designed for busy teachers.

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Balancing Phonics and Comprehension in Reading Instruction

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Balancing Phonics and Comprehension in Reading Instruction

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Balancing Phonics and Comprehension in Reading Instruction

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Explicit foundational skills instruction is improving reading outcomes, but are we overcorrecting? Learn how to strike the right balance in literacy instruction.

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It seems as if many of the major literacy programs in circulation today are focusing on reading almost to the detriment of writing. This is a mistake: teaching students how to write well not only helps them become better writers, it also helps them become better readers and helps them learn more and think more about what they are reading about . Writing needs to be taught in balance to reading-taught, not just assigned.

What's the difference between a writing assignment and writing instruction?

I have had a chance to review many literacy programs alongside my team of literacy specialists and with the educators with whom we all work. We've noticed a trend: what many programs label a writing lesson or even a writing strategy I would call a writing assignment. A writing assignment is the "what" a student is expected to produce. A response to their reading, a quick essay, a poem about colors, or a summary about an informational text.

Assignments alone will not help students become better writers.

Students need explicit instruction with strategies. A strategy is a process-clear, delineated steps that kids can take to generate an idea, organize their writing, or add details. Strategies make something a writer is attempting doable, actionable, and visible through a step-by-step procedure. In short, assignments are the what, strategies provide the how to.

Below, I touch on one strategy for each of three qualities of good writing-focusing on meaning, elaborating, and considering word choice.

What are some strategies for improving writing quality?
Focusing/Finding Meaning
One of the most common writing assignments suggested by literacy programs requires students to write about one of the most important aspects of an article or a key moment or idea in a story the class has just read. That's a writing assignment. In these instances, students often recount all the details from a story or all the information from an article. Narrowing their scope down to one scene or theme, or one concept or main idea can be challenging for most students. Strategies can help them focus their writing.

Strategy to share with students: Write a first fast draft, trying to write without judgement or delay. As you write, expect that you'll be thinking on the page, trying to discover your central meaning. Revisit your draft, rereading thinking, "What the main thing I'm trying to say?" Underline the line or lines that most clearly conveys your thinking. Then, write a new draft focused on that one underlined line.
Elaborating/Adding Details
Students may be asked to write their opinion about a character in a story, an idea in a persuasive text, or information from an article. If you read their writing and find they've got a clear idea, but their writing is overall brief and not too developed, you can teach them elaborate, or add details. With a goal of elaboration, I want to offer strategies to help students improve the quantity, quality, and variety of the details they include.

Strategy to share with students: Think of your idea/claim/thesis. Think, "What are my reasons for thinking that way? What details prove what I want to say?" Make a list of reasons and details that support your point.
Word Choice
Think about the last time a prompt in your literacy program asked students to review their work with an eye to selecting the best words and phrases-those that make the writing memorable and clear. That's a writing assignment. Did your students turn back in a piece that included few or no significant changes? That's because they weren't sure how to go about improving the piece. Students need strategies to help them write with greater clarity, richer voice, and real precision.

Strategy to share with students: Underline all the nouns in your writing. Look at each underlined word and determine if you can replace it with a more concrete, precise word. Think about the words an expert uses to talk about this topic-maybe even vocabulary you learned when reading about the topic.

There are dozens of strategies for each of these qualities of good writing, some that work across all grades and genres of writing, others that are designed for older students or work better with specific types of texts. For more information, check out The Writing Strategies Book and its partner The Writing Strategies Book Companion Charts . To learn more about the research around reading and writing reciprocity, check out my Episode 28 of the To the Classroom Podcast, my interview with Dr. Steve Graham .

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What does it mean to teach writing? | Jennifer Serravallo

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It seems as if many of the major literacy programs in circulation today are focusing on reading almost to the detriment of writing.

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Teach Vocabulary Strategies to Build Knowledge and Support Word Learning

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Teach Vocabulary Strategies to Build Knowledge and Support Word Learning

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How Do I Teach Vocabulary Strategies to Build Knowledge?<br/> | Jennifer Serravallo

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Most words are learned in context—through reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Students acquire vocabulary as they talk with others, explore interests, try hobbies, watch videos, and delve into new content. When students are armed with reading strategies that provide them with multiple ways to

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Teaching Academic Conversations in the Classroom

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Teaching Academic Conversations in the Classroom

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4 Reasons to Teach Academic Conversations in the Classroom | Jennifer Serravallo

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Discover how conversation lessons foster student engagement, build oral language skills, support reading comprehension, and improve writing.

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Writing About Reading: The Power of the Pencil

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Writing About Reading: The Power of the Pencil

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Writing about Reading: The Power of the Pencil — Jennifer Serravallo Author & Consulting

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This blog by bestselling author JENNIFER SERRAVALLO explores strategies and teaching structures for teaching students to annotate and write to explore ideas to support their comprehension and composition abilities.

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Amplifying Students’ Voices | Jennifer Serravallo

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This To the Classroom Podcast Culturally Responsive Teaching Series wrap up focuses on elevating students’ voices in the classroom, centered on interviews with Drs. Edmund Adjapong, Caitlin Law Ryan, Jill Hermann Wilmarth, and Debbie Reese.

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Less than two percent of children's books published in the US depict Native characters, but WNDB is striving to change that. Our website Indigenous Reads Risingshines a spotlight on Native children's literature and includes resources for educators.We're also proud to partner with Heartdrum, an imprint at HarperCollins that focuses on publishing Native Books by Native authors.

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Less than two percent of children's books published in the US depict Native characters, but WNDB is striving to change that. Our website Indigenous Reads Rising shines a spotlight on Native children's literature and includes resources for educators.We're also proud to partner with Heartdrum , an imprint at HarperCollins that focuses on publishing Native Books by Native authors.

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Include Students in the Learning Process

Landmark's Sixth Teaching Principle encourages teachers to create opportunities to include students in the learning process, and this allows students to become aware of how they learn and why certain skills benefit them. As a result, students are more motivated and more likely to apply those skills when working independently. In short, an included student becomes an invested student who is eager to learn. At its core, this principle asks students to engage in metacognition. Metacognition can be defined as "the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner" (Chick, 2013).

Metacognitive practices should be a cornerstone of a language-based classroom. Explicit instruction in metacognition allows students to make deep connections between what they are reading and previously learned material. It also helps them to make sense of what they are reading and learning to determine when material does not make sense and to decide which strategies to employ to help overcome obstacles. Encouraging this type of critical reflection helps students to become flexible learners and enables them to examine their performance on an academic task and ultimately creates a deeper understanding of content. When students know what they know, know what they don't know, and are explicitly taught to apply strategies, they will be more likely to "actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 67).

To help students establish awareness of their own thinking and learning, teachers can work with students using the below flow chart:

When students can reflect on their learning to assess their personal understanding and the effectiveness of their approach, they are more able to adjust how they learn and adjust the strategies they've chosen.

Strategies to Support Metacognition During Reading

To help students achieve this level of self-reflection and understanding of how they learn, it is important to explicitly teach active reading strategies to support metacognition and comprehension. Showing the connections between ideas and concepts is an important part of the metacognitive process. When previewing an upcoming reading, concept mapping (Ritchart, Church, & Morrison, 2011) is a great tool to start students thinking about a concept. For example, having students focus on how a single vocabulary word can be connected to an overarching theme. Prior to reading a short story about a rivalry between two friends, creating a concept map of the word rivalry can be an excellent pre-reading activity that can show the layers of meaning in a single word and how that word can define an essential question or theme within the text.

After reading, discussions are also an effective forum for collaborative learning and for reflecting on what students understand or do not understand. Ritchart, Church, and Morrison (2011) suggest that engaging in reflective dialogue can help students self-assess what they know or don't know about a reading. Consider the following when structuring discussion:

Ask students to identify one main concept from the reading and support that thinking with a piece of evidence or a core idea. Students can be asked to summarize a main point, to paraphrase a passage from the reading, or to locate direct text evidence to support their thinking.

Ask students to write down their questions about the reading.

Ask students to make a connection from the reading to previous background knowledge or information learned earlier in the unit.

Ask students to draw the concepts they are learning.

Another popular reading strategy that encourages students to organize their thinking and understanding of the form and structure of texts is Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review or SQ3R. Developed by Francis P. Robinson in 1946, SQ3R provides a step-by-step process for tackling reading assignments and gives a framework for students to process a large amount of new information.

SQ3R Step Actions

S urvey

Read the title of the section

Skim the introduction or the first few paragraphs

Read any headings and the first sentence that follows them

Look at the visuals and read the captions

Notice how many pages are in the chapter

Notice any vocabulary words and read them

Check for end-of-chapter questions and read them

Check for a summary and read it

Notice any other unique things about the chapter

Q uestion

Turn chapter titles (and headings) into questions using these cue words: who, what, when, where, why, how

For example: "Adoptive Mother Releases Ducklings in the Wild" might become, " why did the mother release the ducklings?"

This step is easier when the reading has a heading for sections

R ead

Read the text actively by looking for and highlighting the answers to the questions crafted in the question step

R ecite

Answer the questions from the question step, plus any questions at the end of the text
Ideally, students should not quote the text to answer the questions; an accurate paraphrase indicates a stronger comprehension

Teachers should create opportunities for students to apply their newly acquired knowledge and skills to novel situations

R eview

Summarize the reading assignment, making sure to include all the main ideas

Explicitly teaching active reading strategies is crucial for bolstering both metacognitive abilities and comprehension skills. W hen teachers include students in the learning process, it can foster students' awareness of their own learning and which strategies work best for them.

References:

Bransford, John D., Brown Ann L., and Cocking Rodney R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved March, 2024 from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/ .

Ritchhart, Ron; Church, Mark; Morrison, Karin. (2011). Making Thinking Visible. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.

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Metacognition and Reading Comprehension | Landmark Outreach

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Understating metacognition allows students to make sense of what they read as well as determine when material is unclear and how to address those issues.

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Targeted Exercises That Develop Students’ Revision Skills

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Targeted Exercises That Develop Students’ Revision Skills

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Targeted Exercises That Develop Students’ Revision Skills

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Across grades 3–12, students often struggle to revise their writing. Having them focus on one issue at a time helps them develop this invaluable skill.

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Just Like Phonics, Comprehension Requires Explicit Teaching

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Just Like Phonics, Comprehension Requires Explicit Teaching

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Just Like Phonics, Comprehension Requires Explicit Teaching

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Once students can decode, they need ongoing and thoughtful instruction to understand, interpret, and engage with what they read.

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What is Cognitive Load Theory? A Reading Comprehension Lens

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What is Cognitive Load Theory? A Reading Comprehension Lens

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What Is Cognitive Load Theory? A Reading Comprehension Lens

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Reading comprehension is more than recall—it’s building meaning, word by word. Learn how mental models shape understanding as we read.

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Helping Students Access Complex, Knowledge-Rich Texts

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Helping Students Access Complex, Knowledge-Rich Texts

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This is the third in a series of four articles on how educators can support literacy by bringing knowledge-building into their classrooms (read the , , and posts). Our group of 14 scholars has distilled a rich body of research into 10 practical recommendations for educators. In this article, we discuss recommendations 4- 6, how quality texts can be accessed to build knowledge.

Complex, knowledge-rich texts that feature unfamiliar vocabulary and new ideas are a powerful gateway for building knowledge. How can students access such texts? Simply putting a complex book in a child's hands isn't enough-they must be taught to read texts fluently and must be able to comprehend what they are reading. There are core sense-making skills that capable readers deploy to understand and learn from the texts they are reading. The recommendations below focus on instructional strategies that build students' reading comprehension and expand their access to knowledge-building.

Read-alouds are a powerful tool for teachers to foster literacy development . Read-alouds expose students to vocabulary, syntax, and content that is more sophisticated than what they can read on their own. Even books written for preschoolers expose children to vocabulary that is rarer, and more varied, than the vocabulary found in everyday conversation , and can be more syntactically complex as well . Read-alouds also turn the typically solitary act of reading into a group activity, with students listening, talking, and learning together. When students dialog about a text during a reading, they are developing their ability to engage in conversations about a text. Furthermore, read-alouds can be joyful and motivational for young children and older students alike.

The polar bear lives in the Arctic, the area that surrounds the North Pole. Part of the Arctic is frozen, treeless land called tundra. Most of the Arctic is ocean. Ice covers the water most of the year. (Holiday House, 2002)

Read-alouds like this can build knowledge of things most children are unlikely to experience firsthand, such as the Arctic, and can similarly help to address inequities in children's opportunities to build knowledge due to lack of prior exposure.

Engaging in discussion about a text before, during, and after reading, can help build students' knowledge and support critical thinking skills. Examples of questions a teacher might ask include:

Read-alouds also provide opportunities for teachers to explicitly explain and to what goes on in a reader's mind as they read, which is part of effective comprehension instruction. The power of interactive read-alouds doesn't stop at the end of elementary school. Interactive read-alouds can contribute to knowledge-building well into adolescence and beyond.

We've all heard the adage that children first learn to read, and then they read to learn. Yet decades of research show that this is a false dichotomy. As described in previous articles in this series and in the preceding section, from the very beginning, children can build knowledge of the natural and social world through read-alouds and visual and experiential learning. They can also build knowledge through texts that they are learning to read themselves. As children are developing literacy foundational skills-concepts of print, phonological awareness, phonics, spelling, and fluency-they can be simultaneously building vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. As children develop as readers, they are able to read increasingly complex texts themselves and build more and more knowledge through that process.

Teachers do not need to choose between instruction that builds knowledge and that which teaches literacy foundational skills. They can occur in tandem and complement each other across a rich literacy curriculum.

It is obvious that developing literacy foundational skills is essential to children being able to read texts that build knowledge. However, the reverse is also true. Building content knowledge can contribute to word-reading development.

Content knowledge, in particular knowledge of concepts and the words that label them, supports . Orthographic mapping involves connecting and storing three types of information about a word: the word's phonology, or pronunciation; its orthography, or the way the word is written; and its semantics, or the meaning of the word. Orthographic mapping cannot occur without children developing vocabulary knowledge, which comes in significant part from building content knowledge. When children understand that a kit is a baby fox, they can more readily remember the sound, spelling, and meaning of the word "kit" and put that information to use when encountering new texts.

Content knowledge also helps children recognize when they've misread a word. For example, consider the sentence: "Most fish hatch from eggs." An early reader who does not yet know the tch trigraph might read this aloud as: "Most fish hath from eggs." or "Most fish hatkh from eggs." Content knowledge (or knowing that many animals hatch from eggs) leads the reader to recognize that those readings don't make sense, which signals them to go back and try decoding the word again.

Cross-checking to ensure that the word as they have decoded it is especially crucial in the busy world of a classroom. It may not be possible for teachers to alert each one of their students every time they misread a word. But increasing children's world knowledge will improve the likelihood that they will recognize a misread word on their own. For multilingual learners, building language and knowledge in the language(s) they are reading is crucial to support cross-checking their decoding while also supporting their language development . By ensuring students are building knowledge, engaging with knowledge-rich texts, and monitoring their comprehension of those texts, teachers can provide students with important tools to recognize misread words and try again to read them on their own.

Building knowledge from texts requires being able to read the words in the text and comprehend them. Proficient comprehenders are quite active as they read, engaging in mental moves to support their comprehension, particularly when they're finding the text to be difficult. These sense-making strategies can be taught within instruction that is focused on knowledge-building. Teaching students how to use these tools to access text and building knowledge are not in conflict. For example, research has demonstrated that elementary-school instruction that teaches text structures and builds knowledge improves reading outcomes compared to instruction that focuses on knowledge-building alone, without any detrimental effect on knowledge development.

Sense-making strategies are especially helpful for developing readers who struggle with comprehension. Research has long-identified a significant subgroup of children who have grade-level word-reading skills yet struggle to comprehend text. There also are many children who need considerable support with both word reading and comprehension development.

One valuable tool for readers to better understand, and therefore build knowledge from what they read, is by attending to the way the author has organized the text, for example presenting a problem and then potential solutions, or conveyed similarities and differences between two entities. Explicitly teaching children to pay attention to how texts are structured and common organizational patterns that authors use has been shown in many studies to support informational text comprehension .

It helps students access texts when teachers provide them with explicit instruction on strategies they can use as they are preparing to read. Teachers can instruct students to set goals for reading by considering their purposes for reading (e.g., what they want to learn or gain from the text). Students also benefit from learning how to preview a text. This includes assessing what they already know and don't know about the content, articulating what they might learn by reading and attending to the text's structure, and introducing key vocabulary and concepts. Deeper preview, aided by, for example, read-alouds or videos, is helpful toward preparing students' interest and understanding of texts with topics that might otherwise be too unfamiliar or difficult for students to grasp on their own.

Students benefit from explicit instruction in comprehension monitoring, in which they monitor their success in understanding and learning from text while they read. For example, students can be taught to ask questions and pay attention to whether they can answer them.

Students can be taught to stop and rereadportions of the text so that they can make connections, put the pieces together, and understand the text from various angles. Also effective is instruction in getting the gist -teaching students to ascertain the key points an author intends to convey by paraphrasing, clarifying, explaining, or summarizing small portions of the text. Strategies designed to support comprehension should be invoked in service of understanding the text at hand; there is a lack of evidence for isolated comprehension strategies instruction that does not ask students to reflect on the content of the text.

Asking students to ask and answer questionsposed before or during reading is shown to increase both memory and comprehension of what they've read. Similarly, students benefit from summarizing their texts and from pulling together key points that the author has aimed to communicate across larger portions of the text. While discussion is invaluable, the impact of having children write about what they've read is tremendous. When students are regularly engaged in writing about their reading, it is shown to boost not only the quality of their writing but also their and overall . This finding applies to English learners as well as to students already proficient in English. Finally, instruction that includes a "balance" of reading and writing produces better outcomes in both.

Important practices for helping students access and therefore build knowledge with texts include reading aloud material too difficult for students to access on their own; developing foundational skills that enable students to fluently read increasingly complex texts; and explicitly teaching text structures and comprehension. Included in the next article will be a discussion of the nature and diversity of those texts.

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Helping Students Access Complex, Knowledge-Rich Texts

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Three key text-related strategies that support reading comprehension.

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For the most part, students aren't good at picking the best learning strategies-in study after study, they opt for the path of least resistance, selecting the strategies that provide an immediate sense of accomplishment.

In a 2018 study, researchers pinpointed the crux of the problem: "Students want to see rapid gains when they are studying," and they will pick whatever strategy they think will prepare them for tests or exams the quickest, even if it results in surface-level understanding. Speed is valued over comprehension, the researchers found, and while it may result in short-term gains, they tend to be fleeting.

Durable learning-the kind that sticks around and can become the foundation of a growing body of internalized knowledge-comes from hard work and even some degree of cognitive resistance. To get there, students need to tear down and rebuild learned material, breaking problems apart, identifying the most salient points, evaluating the relevance of each idea, and then elaborating on or even excavating novel insights from the original material.

We scoured the research to find five relatively simple classroom strategies-selecting paper-and-pencil activities, for example, over activities that might require more setup-that will push students to the next level of comprehension.

Strategy 1: The Power of Summary (With No Cutting-and-Pasting)

It doesn't sound like much, but summarizing vastly outperforms activities like rereading. In a 2021 study, students first learned about greenhouse gases and then either wrote a short summary of what they had just learned, read a summary provided by the teacher, or simply reviewed each slide with no additional activity. On a follow-up test, the students who summarized scored 34 percent higher than the students who read a summary and a full 86 percent higher than the students who simply reviewed the original slides.

Why is summarizing so beneficial? The researchers explain that it taps into key cognitive processes that encode learning more deeply: Students not only pay more attention to the information but also "mentally organize it into a coherent structure" and then integrate the information into existing knowledge networks, creating more durable memories.

When teaching your students how to summarize, instruct them to avoid verbatim or copy-and-paste approaches. Have students recapitulate a concept with computers and books closed, for instance, and emphasize that doing so will test their actual knowledge more effectively, because "verbatim transcription may actually hinder learning by preventing the learners from engaging with the material more meaningfully," researchers write in a 2018 study.

Strategy 2: Yes, Sketchnotes Work

Making visual sense of a challenging concept is often a richer exercise than traditional note-taking-or you can use it as a productive follow-on activity. Recent studies confirm what teachers know: When kids create concept maps, flow charts, or graphic organizers, they visually reorganize and make sense of learned material while highlighting the relationships between key concepts. When such artifacts are hand-drawn, they have the additional benefits conferred by deep, sensorimotor networks.

In a 2017 meta-analysis encompassing 142 studies and 11,814 students, researchers discovered that learning by creating concept maps-similar to sketchnotes or flowcharts-was significantly more effective than "learning through discussion or lecture-based treatment conditions" and "moderately more effective than creating or studying outlines or lists." They concluded that concept maps are a way to step back and look for overarching patterns, revealing the "macrostructure of a body of information." Similarly, a 2021 study found that students who filled in their own graphic organizers improved academic performance by 40 percent on a test of factual recall and 155 percent on a test of deeper comprehension.

Seventh-grade social studies teacher Carla Marschall uses concept maps to "nudge students beyond the learning of facts and skills to uncover concepts-transferable ideas that transcend time, place, and situation." When teaching her students about the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for example, she helps them make connections between concepts such as "nonviolent protest" and "civil rights," allowing them to "zoom out to see the big picture of their learning."

Strategy 3: Asking Good-and Then Better-Questions

Getting students to craft high-quality questions of their own might be a better test of student comprehension than any quiz you can devise, a 2020 study suggests.

In the study, researchers discovered that students who studied a lesson and then wrote their own questions outperformed students who simply restudied the material by 33 percent. "Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content," says Mirjam Ebersbach, a professor of psychology at the University of Kassel. "One has to reflect what one has learned" and then extrapolate "how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge."

While getting kids to pose simple questions-like yes/no, multiple-choice, or short-answer prompts-can lead to better retention, the deepest learning will require your students to ask tougher questions. Other studies have shown that "students performed better in recall tests when they were trained to generate cognitively challenging questions."

Work with students to identify crucial themes or insights, and model how to write more complex, open-ended questions that start with explain, why, or how. These simple question starters will encourage students to think about the material more deeply, shifting from the details of a lesson to the bigger-picture concepts that help drive deeper learning.

Strategy 4: Even Bad Drawing Is Perfectly Good

In a 2018 study, researchers asked students to study lists of common words, such as trumpet or sailboat, and then either write them down or draw them. When asked to recall those words, students were twice as likely to remember words they had drawn.

Importantly, the quality of the drawing is largely irrelevant, and students of all ages and skill levels will benefit from even rudimentary sketches: "The benefit one can achieve from drawing during encoding applies regardless of one's artistic talent," the researchers asserted.

Why does it work so well? "Drawing improves memory by encouraging a seamless integration of elaborative, motoric, and pictorial components of a memory trace," the researchers write. Unlike more passive forms of learning, like listening to a lecture or reading text, drawing weaves multiple memory strands together: The visual memory of the image, the kinesthetic memory of the hand drawing the image, and the semantic memory of the concept being learned.

For Jill Fletcher, a middle school teacher in Hawaii, student-created drawings aren't just an engaging way for them to learn the material more deeply-they're also useful windows into how well the students understand the material. She uses " one-pagers," a single sheet of paper that students can use to draw pictures that relate to the concepts they're learning about. "It's important to emphasize that you're not assessing the one-pager based on appearances-what matters is that they show their understanding," writes Fletcher.

Strategy 5: Teach Your Children Well

Parents sometimes complain that they don't want their child "wasting time" by passing their own knowledge on to a peer. But a 2014 study revealed that when elementary students taught math concepts to their peers, they significantly outperformed students who had studied similar materials more conventionally. That's because good teaching requires you to check for gaps in your own understanding, and students who teach, according to researchers, put more effort into learning the material, do a better job organizing information, and feel a greater sense of purpose.

There are numerous ways to create peer teaching relationships:

Think-pair-share: Have students learn about an issue, pair up with another student to discuss it in detail, and then share their thinking with the class.

Three before me: Encourage students to ask three of their classmates for help before asking the teacher.

Jigsaw groups: In small groups, students are assigned different sections of a lesson or topic to study-for example, each student is told to learn about a different organelle in a cell. Students then discuss their area of expertise with other students who were assigned the same organelle before rejoining their original group to convey what they know.

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5 Indispensable Ways to Deepen Student Comprehension

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For the most part, students aren't good at picking the best learning strategies-in study after study, they opt for the path of least resistance, selecting the strategies that provide an immediate sense of accomplishment.

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By choosing the right lesson type and focusing on skills progressions, teachers can create lessons that match the needs of their students.

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The Benefits of Teaching Morphology in the Early Elementary Grades

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Showing young learners how to break words down into their smallest parts strengthens vocabulary, comprehension, and decoding.

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What Children Can Learn About Morphology From Reading for Fun

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What Children Can Learn About Morphology From Reading for Fun

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What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun?

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A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built - that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made up of two parts: un- and happy, and the word unhappiness includes both of these parts as well as a third part, -ness.

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A Teacher’s Guide to Vocabulary Development Across the Day

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Science of Reading in Practice: 15-Minute Routines

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Science of Reading in Practice: 15-Minute Routines

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With Dr. Julia Lindsey

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Presented by Dr. Amanda Alexander, Chief Academic Officer, Scholastic Education Solutions; Dr. Julia B. Lindsey, Early Literacy Expert and Consultant; and Katharine Noonan, Instructional Coach, Garrison Elementary School (Washington, D.C.)

Sponsored by Scholastic Education Solutions
Watch the Recording Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Research tells us how children best learn to read, but what does this actually look like in classroom practice? In this edWebinar, Dr. Julia B. Lindsey, an expert in early literacy development, curriculum, and instruction, shares teacher-approved "essential instructional swaps" backed by the Science of Reading that you can implement right away to help children on their ways to becoming proficient readers. These routines can be implemented in 15 minutes or less to help students decode words efficiently and effectively, so they can spend more energy on comprehending-and enjoying-what they read!

The session is followed by a discussion with Dr. Lindsey and Katharine Noonan, an ELA instructional coach, moderated by Dr. Amanda Alexander, Chief Academic Officer of Scholastic.

This edWebinar is of interest to PreK-5 teachers, librarians, and school and district leaders.
About the Presenters
Dr. Amanda Alexander is Scholastic's Chief Academic Officer and brings more than 20 years of progressive leadership experience in the field of education. Dr. Alexander began her career as a kindergarten teacher and has served as an assistant principal in the New York City Department of Education and as a principal in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). She later joined the DCPS central office in a variety of roles with an emphasis on principal supervision. Over the course of her time as a central office administrator, Dr. Alexander also led literacy initiatives and a districtwide task force to identify and implement evidence-based practices in reading and learning to improve student performance.

Julia B. Lindsey, Ph.D., a former kindergarten and first-grade teacher and self-proclaimed "phonics nerd," has worked with teachers, district personnel, curriculum developers, and others to translate reading research into practice. While completing her doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, she developed a free decodables book program in collaboration with Boston Public Schools. She is the author of Reading Above the Fray: Reliable, Research-Based Routines for Developing Decoding Skills.
Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Katharine Noonan is a K-5 ELA instructional coach and National LETRS Professional Learning Facilitator. She is a passionate literacy coach and educator with 12 years of leadership experience and results. Skilled at developing teachers' literacy content expertise and pedagogy through coaching, high-quality professional development, and relationship building, Katharine has previously worked with Dr. Julia B. Lindsey to implement research-based instruction to increase student achievement.

Join the Teaching Reading and Writing community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, and receive invitations to upcoming edLeader Panels.

Scholastic Education Solutions provides teachers, families, and communities with the tools they need to support each and every child with print and technology-based learning programs for pre-K to grade 12, expert professional development, family and community engagement, and learning supports.

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Science of Reading in Practice: 15-Minute Routines - edWeb

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Presented by Dr. Amanda Alexander, Chief Academic Officer, Scholastic Education Solutions; Dr. Julia B. Lindsey, Early Literacy Expert and Consultant; and Katharine Noonan, Instructional Coach, Garrison Elementary School (Washington, D.C.) Sponsored by Scholastic Education Solutions Watch the Recording Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.

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6 Surprising Truths About Reading Comprehension Strategies

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6 Surprising Truths About Reading Comprehension Strategies

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6 Surprising Truths About Reading Comprehension Strategies

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Uncover 6 evidence-based truths about strategy instruction. Debunk misconceptions and enhance reading comprehension with practical, research-backed insights.

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The 6 Most Important Comprehension Strategies

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The 6 Most Important Comprehension Strategies

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It's discouraging to work hard and continue to see some students struggle to comprehend despite hours and hours of strategy instruction year after year after year.

You might wonder:

Am I missing something?
Am I teaching the "right strategies"?
Are there some strategies that matter more than others?
What makes a strategy a strategy, anyway?

These and many other questions about teaching children to comprehend were on our minds as we dug into the research about strategy instruction. We were admittedly surprised at some of what we found along the way.
What are reading comprehension strategies, anyway? Comprehension Strategies are the essential, in-the-brain processes that proficient comprehenders engage automatically.
This may seem pretty obvious, but comprehension strategies are essential for reading comprehension. That means comprehension doesn't happen without them. These strategies happen inside the brain and are automatic for proficient readers.

For example, noticing connections between ideas in a text-analyzing the text's structure-is an essential strategic process for comprehension. On the other hand, highlighting words that indicate that a paragraph is comparing two things-same as, different, in comparison, like, etc.-is not practicing a comprehension strategy, even though it may be an important study skill or scaffold for learning to pay more attention to a text's structure. This is because highlighting is not essential for comprehension (hence, not a strategy). However, tuning in to the relationships and connections between words, sentences, phrases, and paragraphs in a text-the organizational structure-is super ESSENTIAL, so it's a strategy!

Confusing, right? Because of this and other confusion around the term strategy, we refer to these larger, strategic processes-which are essential for comprehension-as thinking moves, rather than as strategies.
Which reading comprehension strategies, or thinking moves, are most important?
Research reveals that readers don't engage in a whole bunch of thinking moves; a mere handful gets the job done. In fact, researchers consistently identify a small number of these overarching processes essential for comprehension, which we refer to as the Strategic Six Thinking Moves. We wrote about the Strategic Six in the second Shifting the Balance book, co-authored with Katie Egan Cunningham.

Meet The Strategic Six Thinking Moves: The Essential Strategic Processes for Reading Comprehension
Strategic Thinking Move #1: Switch on What You Know (Activating Background Knowledge)
Switching on what you know involves activating knowledge before, during, and after reading. This includes connecting ideas as they accumulate, noticing gaps in your knowledge, and filling in those gaps as you read. This is more than learning some vocabulary before reading. It is about activating semantic networks and then accessing them throughout reading. To read a book about fossils, you will need to access what you know about digging, dirt, rocks, dinosaurs, time, and much more
Strategic Thinking Move #2: Map the Text (Noticing Text Structures)
Mapping the text is about noticing and understanding the many levels of connection between words, phrases, and sentences across a text. This is more than noticing that a text describes sequential steps in a process, such as how to bathe a dog. It also involves knowing when "it" in the passage refers to the dog shampoo, the temperature of the water, or the matte in Rocky's ear. And it is understanding the nesting dolls of text construction-how words contribute to sentences, sentences contribute to paragraphs, paragraphs contribute to sections, and more.
Strategic Thinking Move #3: Keep a Close Eye on Comprehension (Monitoring Comprehension)
Keeping a close eye on comprehension is about paying attention as you are reading and building (and revising) understanding as you connect new information to what you have already read. This constant thinking enables you to notice when something doesn't make sense. The ongoing, internal process of monitoring understanding is what helps you notice when you incorrectly read, "She had a really big house, so it could run for a long time," and then reread the sentence correctly with the correct word, horse.
Strategic Thinking Move #4: Dig Below the Surface (Ask and Answer Questions)
Digging below the surface is about thinking deeply as you read. It involves engaging with the ideas in the text and asking and answering your own questions as they arise. Digging below the surface is also about more than answering comprehension questions at the end of a text; rather, it includes the constant questioning, searching, and thinking that makes reading active. It's about REALLY engaging with a text, so much so that you notice your own curiosity, connect ideas, reflect, arrive at new insights, and stretch or even change your thinking.
Strategic Thinking Move #5: Filling in the Missing Pieces (Inferring)
Filling in the missing pieces is about understanding what the author doesn't explicitly say in the text. It's about filling in any information that has been left out for the sake of efficiency and brevity. Filling in the missing pieces is more than occasionally stopping to notice an obvious leap in ideas in the text; we fill in missing pieces constantly. These inferences help you understand that a recipe that tells you to "cook on high" is suggesting that you turn on the stove rather than hold the pot high in the air. You understand that when the text describes the winner of the race as "on fire," the figurative language doesn't imply an emergency.
Strategic Thinking Move #6: Sum Up What You Know (Summarizing Along the Way)
Summing up what you know is about constantly processing, connecting, and reflecting while reading. It involves saying to yourself over and over, "Here's what I know so far." Additionally, you should end the reading experience by understanding the big ideas and overall essence of the story or topic. Summing up what you know is not about writing a formal summary at the end of reading. Rather, it is about the informal, cumulative work of building a mental model, expanding and revising as new information is added with each new word, phrase, or sentence. Summing up also requires making lots of on-the-run decisions about which details to prioritize and which to let go. It is a dynamic, ongoing, and recursive process.

Together, these six thinking moves comprise the strategic actions that students must master to become proficient comprehenders of text. You can download a free one-pager of the Strategic Six Thinking Moves here.

And if you're ready to consider a shift in your approach to reading strategy instruction, we invite you to check out Shifting the Balance: Bringing the Science of Reading into the Upper Elementary Classroom (co-authored with Katie Egan Cunningham) and the corresponding asynchronous, online class. Both give a thorough explanation of the Strategic 6 Thinking Moves, including examples.

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Are You Teaching the Key Comprehension Strategies Students Really Need - The Six Shifts

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It's discouraging to work hard and continue to see some students struggle to comprehend despite hours and hours of strategy instruction year after year after year. You might wonder: Am I missing something? Am I teaching the "right strategies"? Are there some strategies that matter more than others?

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Rethink Text Structure and Going Beyond the Basics

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Rethink Text Structure and Going Beyond the Basics

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After reading this paragraph, you understand that these are ordered directions for cooking a dish using the ingredients listed on the opposite page. As for the text structure, or paragraph structure in this case (and in many cases), this is undoubtedly a sequential text.

Yes, surprisingly, this paragraph has none of the usual cue words we might teach children to count on to identify a sequence, not a single one! So, how do you know that this is a sequential paragraph?

Furthermore, your background knowledge, vocabulary, and knowledge of language structure likely set you up to make the inferences this text requires of you. And the sum of this paragraph's inferences is that these are related actions that must be taken sequentially. After all, you can't exactly separate the eggs before you crack them and can't pour the mixture until you beat it to a pourable consistency. All these subtleties of the text's structure keep your brain busy, and without them, the text really wouldn't be comprehensible.

But that's not all.

On the word, phrase, and sentence levels, there is still a lot more to understand. For example, the very first word of the paragraph is "Take." This particular word relies on the upcoming words-the eggs-to communicate an idea. Structurally speaking, your brain knows that the word "Take" will need partners to become meaningful, and your brain immediately begins looking for those companion words in the upcoming text. This relationship between words is called a cataphoric reference. Sometimes, the words that support each other are right next to each other-as in "Take the eggs"-and sometimes they are far apart so that your brain has to suspend understanding for longer.

You have to understand this text well enough to translate it into action that results in something edible, hopefully even delicious. So, after you've read "Take the eggs," you have to infer that " the eggs" means to them in your hand or pick them up. "Take" doesn't mean them from the chickens in the coop or them from the refrigerator, or them on an outing in the park. And "crack the eggs" doesn't just mean put a fine fracture in them and set them back down or to tell them a joke that makes them crack up. No, "crack the eggs" means break them open and dump out their contents.

For you, connecting the individual elements of this paragraph's structure is probably easy, even obvious. But zooming in on the internal structure of a paragraph requires quite a bit of working memory, background knowledge, vocabulary, and knowledge of language structure-which most of us tend to take for granted.

Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S.T.M., Evers-Vermeul, J., & van den Bergh, H. (2020). "A meta-analysis on the effects of text structure instruction on reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades." Reading Research Quarterly, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.311 .

Hebert, M., Bohaty, J.J., Nelson, J.R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609-629.

Meyer, B.J.F., & Ray, M.N. (2011). Structure strategy interventions: Increasing reading comprehension of expository text. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 4(1), 127-152.

Pyle, N., Vasquez, A., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Gillam, S., Reutzel, D., Olszewski, A., . . . Pyle, D. (2017). "Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta-analysis." Reading Research Quarterly, 52(4), 469- 501.

Shanahan, T. (2020, February 8). "Does text structure instruction improve reading comprehension?" *Shanahan on Literacy*. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/does-text-structure-instruction-improve-reading-comprehension.

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Rethink Text Structure and Going Beyond the Basics

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Go beyond five basic text structures! Learn actionable strategies to deepen comprehension, improve reading skills, and tackle complex texts in your classroom.

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Attention is Not a Trait - It's a Teachable Skill

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Attention is Not a Trait - It's a Teachable Skill

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Attention Is Not a Trait—It’s a Teachable Skill

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Teachers can use these six strategies to boost students’ ability to work with sustained focus for increasing amounts of time.

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Building Bridges: Five Sociocultural Practices forReading Comprehension

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Building Bridges: Five Sociocultural Practices forReading Comprehension