# data[].attributes.body
Katie Vis

EKC Literacy Strategist

katie@erinkentconsulting.com

# data[].attributes.body
Unpacking ELA standards and more vertical alignment across grade levels

# data[].attributes.body
1. Get materials early so we have ample time to become experts in the new curriculum before teaching begins (curriculum, mentor texts, etc.)

2. Dedicated time in semester 2 of this year to read and digest the new information collaboratively with our teams.

# data[].attributes.body
-consistent use of Mondays and team planning time to read the curriculum, collaborate with each other, and modify slides to meet our needs.

-time to research and order materials

-look at our scope and sequence

-appreciate some clarity about keeping the reading and writing blocks separate so we can be most implactful

# data[].attributes.body
I'm still very used to Lucy Calkins teaching style. I will need a very thorough training including how to organize the lessons (reading, writing, phonics, and maybe stations?) and how to teach them effectively.

# data[].attributes.body
I feel the need for restructuring the ES schedule to adopt the new program efficiently. There are quite a lot of lost minutes throughout the day to align with MS and HS.

# data[].attributes.body
1. One lesson to be taught in 2 days.

2. Having centers that are differentiated for our students' needs and that would be able to cover different subjects.

# data[].attributes.body
-Collaboration time needed

-Learn to teach reading and writing standards in one lesson, and learning how to hit both standards effectively.

# data[].attributes.body
1. Literacy blocks every day. Time for Reading followed by Writing.

2. We need the resources and materials for each student.

3. We need time to look through materials and resources (not team-meeting time)

4. Culturally relevant resources

5. Look at our scope and sequence.

6. Watch demo-lessons and see how it is implemented realistically. Or look at different school's timetables to see how they implement lessons during a week.

# data[].attributes.body
Prioritizing lessons. How many reading, writing should we be teaching in 1 week? At the moment, 1 writing lesson for both EL and FT took 2 sessions (or more!)

Schedules and timetables - how often are people wanting/needing to teaching reading, writing, words their way, science, social studies etc? Realistically, what could the expectations be? Will we integrate lessons and be given the time to do that?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Copy of Adapted Fishtank ELA Unit Planner: TEMPLATE

# data[].attributes.headline
Adapted Fishtank ELA Unit Planner: Cinderella Around the World SAMPLE

# data[].attributes.subject
Adapted Fishtank ELA Unit Planner: Cinderella Around the World SAMPLE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Copy of Adapted Fishtank ELA Unit Planner: Cinderella Around the World SAMPLE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K-12 math and ELA curriculum.

# data[].attributes.headline
Fishtank ELA Grades 1-5 Parallel Scope & Sequence

# data[].attributes.subject
Fishtank ELA Grades 1-5 Parallel Scope & Sequence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1-5 Fishtank ELA Parallel Scope and Sequence

# data[].attributes.headline
Using Discourse to Respond to Key Questions

# data[].attributes.subject
Using Discourse to Respond to Key Questions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K–12 math and ELA curriculum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K-12 math and ELA curriculum.

# data[].attributes.headline
"About 70% of the variation in reading and writing abilities are shared."

# data[].attributes.subject
"About 70% of the variation in reading and writing abilities are shared."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on February 23, 2017 and was reposted on September 16, 2023. Currently our children are suffering the aftereffects of the COVID tragedy. School leaders are looking for ways to regain learning loss caused by a lack of teaching. One of the strategies often considered in times like these is to simplify the curriculum - strip away what may not be essential to allow a greater focus on what needs to be accomplished. In that context, I would not be surprised to see some schools jettisoning writing in favor of the much-tested reading. The tendency to go that way may even be worsened by the current heavy emphasis on a "science of reading." What is important to recognize - this blog entry originally included reference to a great deal of research on the topic, research supporting the value of teaching reading and writing together -- is that combining reading and writitng is part of the science of reading. Now, several years later, I can say that the research evidence has continued to accumulate - providing more and more reason for the combined teaching of reading and writing. If you want better reading scores, the science of reading says do not neglect writing, nor dispatch it to someplace else in the curriculum. When you feel especially pressured to improve reading achievement, that is the time to embrace more tightly the combination of reading and writing. So today I was conducting a workshop. I was told the teachers wanted information about reading/writing connections. Easy, right? Then I was told that they departmentalize K-6! At every grade they have a reading teacher and a different writing teacher. Any thoughts, comments, best practices, or research that would go against or support this practice? I know what I believe to be correct but would love to have your opinions in this conversation. Shanahan response:
For the past several years I've been complaining about how schools are organizing themselves regarding reading and writing. These days, the most common elementary school organization seems to be the 90-minute reading block, with writing taught some other time of the day (if at all). And, in middle schools and high schools many schools have readers' and writers' workshops-managed by different teachers.

I think both of those schemes are dopey and counterproductive.

But you've found a structure that is even worse!

These folks sound like the type of people that would separate Romeo and Juliet... Yin and Yang....Lennon and McCartney... love and marriage... Bert and Ernie...spaghetti and meatballs... You get the idea.

Reading and writing are related in many ways. And, though teachers can take advantage of these relationships in ways that can improve achievement, doing that would be very difficult and inefficient when taught separately as in your example.

The combination of reading and writing doesn't just change instruction-it can affect the curriculum itself. For instance, the Common Core State Standards require teachers to teach kids how to combine reading and writing for various purposes.

I wondered if this is a CCSS state? (your letter didn't specify). If so, that would be one of my big questions-how are they teaching kids to write about reading? Perhaps those goals can be accomplished within this odd organizational plan, but that would require a great deal of cross-classroom planning (the kind of planning that tends to impinge on teachers' personal time-and that rarely happens, no matter what the theory).

Admittedly, I'm aware of no studies that directly measure the impact of such organization, and the organizational studies that do exist suggest that organizational plans usually don't matter much in terms of learning. I guess I could praise this district at least for teaching writing-there are still too many places that haven't figured out the need for that yet.

However, a major purpose for teaching writing is its strong impact on reading achievement. Recently, some administrators who had been discouraging writing in their districts contacted me. Their concern was that writing took up a lot of time and their state was heavily stressing reading achievement. Time devoted to writing would "obviously" interfere with reaching their reading goals. They wanted to know why I was telling their teachers that writing was a must.

I explained to them that there were several reasons behind my urgings.

First, research shows that reading and writing are closely aligned. That is, reading and writing depend upon many of the same skills, strategies, and knowledge-though those are deployed in different ways in reading and writing. In fact, about 70% of the variation in reading and writing abilities are shared.

For example, to read one must decode words. That means being able to look at the word, recognize its elements (letters and letter combinations), retrieve associated pronunciations for those letters, and to blend those into a word pronunciation. For that to work, of course, you have to do that very quickly-and eventually with little conscious attention.

In contrast, to write one must spell words. That means being able to listen to the pronunciation of a word, to recognize its elements (phonemes-that is language sounds), to retrieve letters that match those sounds, and to recognize whether they are combining properly to make a well-formed word. And, again, fluency is essential.

Decoding is arguably easier than spelling, but learning to both pronounce and spell words simultaneously helps to increase decoding fluency. It provides a kind of overlearning that enhances one's ability. The same argument can be made concerning phonological awareness, and the use of vocabulary, grammar, text structure, tone, and other text elements-and the same kinds of connections exist between the routines one uses to pull up background knowledge, to set purposes, to predict, and so on.

Given the extensive overlaps, it should be evident that combined instruction would be a lot more efficient. When a school is trying to accomplish higher achievement that kind of efficiency and teaching power is indispensable.

Second, reading and writing are communicative processes, and there are cross-modal benefits to be derived from having students engage in each. Readers, who are writers, can end up with insights about what authors are up to and how they exert their effects, something of great value in text interpretation. Likewise, writers by being readers, can gain insights into the needs of other readers. Imagine how that can help one to write better.

This kind of insight sharing is unlikely without some teacher guidance-and making those kinds of connections across reading and writing experiences depends on sharing those experiences with the students. It would be hard for a teacher to know what came up in the various shared reading experiences that took place in the other class.

Third, reading and writing can be used in combination to accomplish goals. The Common Core emphasizes two goals for such combining: using writing to improve learning from text and using the reading of multiple texts to improve the writing of syntheses or reports.

Steve Graham and Michael Hebert (201) carried out a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies in which students wrote about text. They found that writing in various ways about what one had read improved comprehension and learning, and it did so better than reading alone, reading and rereading, or reading and discussing.

Students should not just be writing about text, they should be learning how to write about text effectively: how to write to text models, how to write summaries, how to write extended critiques and analyses, and how to write syntheses.

So, my reading of the research says: Teach kids to write and use this instruction to improve reading achievement. Do it separately and you are leaving achievement points on the table. No question this could be accomplished by two different teachers, but what a complicated mess that makes of it. Simplify.

(Pass the popcorn and butter, I'm going to watch some Laurel and Hardy. Some things just go together).
References
Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence of how writing can improve reading. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Shanahan, T. (2004). Overcoming the dominance of communication: Writing to think and learn. In T. L. Jetton and J. A. Dole (Eds.), Adolescent literacy research and practice. New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2008). Relations among oral language, reading, and writing development. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, and J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 171-186). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2015). Relationships between reading and writing development. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, and J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2nd ed., pp. 194-210). New York: The Guilford Press.

Tierney, R. J., and Shanahan, T. (1991). Research on the reading-writing relationship: Interactions, transactions, and outcomes. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, and P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 246-280). New York: Longman.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Should We Combine Reading and Writing?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the past several years I've been complaining about how schools are organizing themselves with regard to reading and writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Read TWR's statement on racial justice and equity in education here.

Our Mission

The Writing Revolution transforms instruction across the curriculum through a proven, coherent method that enables all students, and especially those from low-income families, to develop the literacy and critical thinking skills they need to engage productively in society. We train and support teachers and school leaders in implementing the Hochman Method, an explicit set of evidence-based strategies for teaching writing. Our approach builds from sentences to compositions and is embedded in curriculum across all content areas and grade levels.

Our Vision

The Writing Revolution envisions a day when all students acquire well-developed writing skills and the ability to think critically so that they have the opportunity to succeed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read TWR's statement on racial justice and equity in education here. Our Mission The Writing Revolution transforms instruction across the curriculum through a proven, coherent method that enables all students, and especially those from low-income families, to develop the literacy and critical thinking skills they need to engage productively in society.

# data[].attributes.headline
“Never do with a small group what you could do just as well with whole class teaching.”

# data[].attributes.subject
“Never do with a small group what you could do just as well with whole class teaching.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Should Reading Be Taught Whole Class or Small Group? | Shanahan on Literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This blog entry explores the benefits of teaching reading to small groups rather than delivering a single lesson to a whole class. Surprisingly, it turns out research does not find a clear benefit for small group teaching, and it identifies some problems.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Blast from the Past: One last thing: this updated entry sources the idea of teaching with grade level texts to the Common Core standards. Over the past 15 years, many states have replaced those standards. Nevertheless, for the most part, they retained the Common Core's text level requirements which means this entry is as relevant to today as it was then. This blog first appeared as a series of articles (June 29-August 21, 2011), and this updated version was issued August 23, 2025. The original blogs were among the first to promote the idea of teaching reading with challenging text rather than "instructional level" text. At the time, this was new territory for me. As a teacher I taught with instructional level texts and as a professor I prepared teachers to do the same. In 2011, there was a paucity of research on the issue, but that is no longer the case. On September 12, my new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives (Harvard Education Press, 2025) will officially be published. It provides a comprehensive treatment of this issue, showing in detail that the instructional level doesn't work as claimed, and explaining why it couldn't possibly work. It offers substantial guidance in how teachers may successfully teach reading with grade level text (as well as how reading can be guided successfully with such texts in content classes).
In 2010, the Common Core State Standards were issued (National Governors Association & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). These educational goals, that were soon adopted by most states, differed from previous standards in several important ways. Probably no ox was gored more impressively by these standards than the widely held claim that texts of a particular level of difficulty had to be used if learning was to be accomplished.

Reading educators (including me) since the 1930s, have championed the idea that there is an "instructional level." Basically, the claim has been that students make the greatest learning gains when taught with books matched to the students' learning needs in terms of the level of difficulty that they present. Teachers were to teach from texts neither too hard (incomprehensible) or too easy (nothing left to learn in these).

These days the biggest instructional level proponents have been Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, at The Ohio State University. Their "guided reading" approach has been widely adopted. The basic premises of guided reading include the notion that children learn to read by reading, that they benefit from a small amount of teacher guidance and support during this reading, and -- most fundamentally - that this reading should be done with texts at just the right difficulty level. A major concern of these guided-readingistas has been the fear that "children are reading texts that are too difficult for them."

Over the decades experts proposed a plethora of methods for determining students' reading levels and text difficulty levels, along with schemes for matching books and kids. Instructional programs as varied as basal readers, units of study, technology-based instruction, and guided reading have all depended on such approaches.

Common Core Standards are based on a different premise. They reject the idea of an optimum student-text match that facilitates learning. Nor are they as smitten with the idea that students learn to read mainly from reading with minimal teacher support. They expect students to take on challenging texts with whatever amount of scaffolding may be needed to accomplish learning. By design, Common Core discourages much out-of-grade-level teaching or the use of high readability texts. It champions teaching methods that run counter to current practice.

Why make such a big deal out of grade-level text?

One persuasive piece of evidence was a report, " Reading Between the Lines," published by American College Testing (ACT, 2006). It showed the primacy of text in reading comprehension and the educational value of having students reading challenging text in the upper grades.

Virtually every reading comprehension test and instructional program makes a big deal out of the types of questions asked about text. In our zeal to improve test performance, it is common practice to analyze test performance by question types and then to give students lots of practice with the types of questions they erred on. There are even commercial programs that offer practice with specific question types.

That ACT report reveals a problem with those schemes: they don't work. They can't work. Students' reading performance can't be differentiated in any meaningful way by type of question. Students perform no differently with literal recall or inferential items (nor with other question types like main idea). If students read a hard passage, they answer fewer questions correctly, no matter the types of questions. They do better with easier texts of course, but that improvement is not accompanied by gains with any particular kind of question.

ACT concluded that, based on data drawn from 563,000 students, "performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not" (p. 16-17).

Reading comprehension standards tend to be presented in numbered lists of cognitive processes or question types. Standards require students "to quote accurately from text," to "determine two or more main ideas of a text," or to "explain how main ideas are supported by key details," and so on. But if question types (or standards) don't distinguish reading performance and text difficulty does, then standards should make the ability to interpret challenging texts a central requirement.

That is exactly what Common Core did. They made the ability to comprehend texts of specified levels of difficulty a central requirement of what students must accomplish.

The ACT report describes text features that contribute to challenge, including the complexity of the relationships among characters and ideas, amount and sophistication of the information detailed in the text, how the information is organized, the author's style and tone, the vocabulary, and author's purpose. Obviously, if we want higher reading achievement we should teach students how to deal with these kinds of text features during reading, rather than practicing with different question types.

These data suggest that students are likely to learn more from working with challenging texts than from the "low readability, high interest" books that have become an education staple. This is an approach more akin to that taken by athletes: To get stronger, you must experience more physical resistance than your muscles are accustomed to.

The counterargument to this is the widespread belief that there is an optimum difficulty level for texts used to teach reading. According to instructional level theory, when texts are too difficult, students become frustrated and learn little. Accordingly, text challenge need be avoided.

Evidence supporting this "easy book" idea is anemic... the best of it is correlational. Such a dearth of empirical support is surprising given the wide acceptance of this theory in practice.

I must admit that as a teacher I thought the approach was commonsensical and bought into it big time, testing each of my students with informal reading inventories and juggling multiple groups of kids who were reading different grade level texts.

When I worked on my PhD, I studied with the late Jack Pikulski. Jack had a great clinical sense, and he was skeptical of my faith in the instructional level. He recognized the limitations in those tests, and he was equally charry about the readability estimates. For Jack, the combination of two such rough guestimates was rather iffy stuff. I preferred the seeming certainty of the approach and clung to it until my own clinical sense grew more sophisticated.

Early in my scholarly career, I read the source of this independent/instructional/frustration level system, the textbook, Foundations of Reading Instruction. In it, Emmett Betts (1946) attributed how he identified these levels to a doctoral study conducted by P. A. Kilgallon, one of his students.

I managed to get a copy of that study - it had never been published - and to my dismay it included no evidence showing that teaching at an instructional level gave students any learning advantage. Essentially, the instructional level was just made up, something I wrote about at the time (Shanahan, 1983).

A later set of studies aimed at validating this idea (e.g., Powell, 1968) concluded that the instructional level was placing students in books too easy to promote optimum learning. Unfortunately, these studies suffered from the same problems as the original Kilgallon investigation.

It took more than 50 years after the appearance of Betts' book for someone to study the problem experimentally - that means trying it out to see if it worked (Morgan, Wilcox, & Eldredge, 2000). That study - and others that followed (e.g., Brown, 2018, O'Connor, Swanson, & Geraghty, 2010) - concluded that kids made greater progress when taught reading with more challenging books.

We have placed way too much confidence in what was an untested theory, and now which is a failed one. The model of learning underlying this plan is simplistic and our ability to implement it with maximum learning gains is impossible.

Learning depends not only on the learner's interactions with text, but on the teacher's input to those interactions. Instructional level theory limits the role of the teacher by focusing on texts selected purposefully to require little such support, and it ignores that such text placements necessarily impose an upper bound limit - a low upper bound limit - on what students can learn from them.
References
Instead of maximizing student learning, it minimizes teaching. That is probably why recent research has found that the schools with the greatest achievement gains teach with grade level texts, rather than continually dropping back to the kids' purported levels (TNTP, 2024).

ACT. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City, IA: American College Testing.

Betts, E. A. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. New York: American Book Company.

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B. R., & Eldredge, J. L. (2000). Effect of difficulty levels on second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Educational Research, 94, 113-119.

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: Authors.

O'Connor, R. E., Swanson, H. L., & Geraghty, C. (2010). Improvement in reading rate under independent and difficult text levels: Influences on word and comprehension skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 1-19.

Pinnell, G. S., & Fountas, I. C. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Powell, W. R. (1968). Reappraising the criteria for interpreting informal inventories. Washington, DC: ERIC 5194164.

Shanahan, T. (1983). The informal reading inventory and the instructional level: The study that never took place. In L. Gentile, M. L. Kamil, & J. Blanchard (Eds.), Reading research revisited, (pp. 577-580). Columbus, OH: Merrill.

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Reader Comments on Earlier Version More Reader Common on Earlier Version
The New Teacher Project (TNTP). Paths of opportunity: What it will take for all young people to thrive. TNTP, August 8, 2024, https://tntp.org/publication/paths-of-opportunity/.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This blog entry challenges the idea of leveled reading, exploring the research that shows that teaching kids at their reading levels does more to hold them back than to promote their learning.

# data[].attributes.body
*Adapted from Disciplinary Literacy in Action by Releah Cossett Lent & Marsha McCracken Voigt

# data[].attributes.body
One place I could use a sentence routine in my class this week is...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Whole Faculty Monday Meeting Writing Focus-2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K–12 math and ELA curriculum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K-12 math and ELA curriculum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K–12 math and ELA curriculum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Writing Revolution: The Six Principles

# data[].attributes.headline
7 Teaching Principles for Effective Writing Instruction

# data[].attributes.subject
7 Teaching Principles for Effective Writing Instruction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Teaching Principles for Effective Writing Instruction - Brookes Blog.pdf

# data[].attributes.body
One place I could use a sentence routine is in 2nd grade math class to have students explain their thinking on math problems. When students are solving story problems they can use some of these strategies to explain their reasoning and answers. For example, explaining why an answer is reasonable or not or which answer is correct while using these prompts. Students could create their own math problems using subtraction from 200 using real world situations and answer questions about the reasonableness for their answer, use a character or symbol to represent an unknown, etc.

# data[].attributes.body
Justify your reasoning for your answer. Explain your steps.

# data[].attributes.body
In Grade 1, Math class, during measurement unit, we can use conjunctions such as because, but, so activity. For example, we could ask students to create a conjunction sentence, "The crayon is shorter than the paintbrush because/but/so...."

# data[].attributes.headline
S.S.- Colonization Writing Routine Examples

# data[].attributes.subject
S.S.- Colonization Writing Routine Examples

# data[].attributes.body
Because/But/So:

Colonization happened all around the world

because...

but...

so...

Fragments to Sentences:

Colonization is not

Cultural assimilation often

Autonomy matters since

Empires are created when

# data[].attributes.headline
Progress Monitoring and Assessment with Fishtank

# data[].attributes.subject
Progress Monitoring and Assessment with Fishtank

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fishtank Learning helps teachers engage, challenge and inspire their students with free, high-quality K–12 math and ELA curriculum.