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From Shifting the Balance

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Multi-Year Morphology Plan Example - The Six Shifts    .pdf

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You can use this resource, or your students can use this resource to learn more about the etymology of words.

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A series of read alouds with free downloadable activities for studying words.

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A bit of advice from the EKC community

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Analyzing sentence and text structure, writing about reading. Tips for connecting reading and writing to enhance both.

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From Shifting the Balance

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3-5 Download_Template for Planning Interactive Text Experience.pdf

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Shanahan blog

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Blast from the past: Teacher question: Shanahan response:
I teach 4th-grade general education. I have read several of your articles the last few days because I have a growing frustration regarding guided reading. I believe a lot of your ideas about what does not work are correct, but I don't understand what you believe we SHOULD be doing. I am confused about how to give students difficult textbooks to read without reading it to them. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I do not know how to scaffold science or social studies text for students that are 2 years behind without reading it to them. I also feel pressure in these subjects to read it to them because I thought it was more important for them to understand the information thoroughly by reading the text aloud, having thoughtful discussions, and follow up activities. Every time I think I know what I should be doing, I read another article and realize that I am doing that wrong too. So, please give me guidance on how to best to teach nonfiction and fiction text to my class whole group. What strategies and types of activities are the best? Originally posted February 2, 2013; re-issued October 12, 2024. Over the past 15 years, I have issued several blogs concerning the value of teaching students to read more challenging texts than we have used in instruction in the past. Despite a growing body of evidence showing that teaching students at their "instructional reading level" provides no learning benefits - and that sometimes it limits learning - most teachers continue to avoid challenging text by moving kids to easier text, reading texts to the students, or replacing texts with other sources of information (e.g., videos, teacher presentations). Given that I thought it would be a good idea to reissue this one. Oh, and by the way, I just completed writing a book on this topic. It will be published by Harvard Education Press early in 2025.
I feel your pain. What would it look like to scaffold a fourth-grade lesson from a social studies book with children who are reading at second-grade level? There are several possibilities.

First, I would "level" (pun intended) with the kids. I would not try to hide from them that I was going to ask them to read a book that in the past we would have avoided. The point here is motivation. People like a challenge and kids are people. When you ask them to take on something hard, let them in on the secret so they can take on the challenge with the right mindset and so they can be proud of themselves when they manage to meet the challenge - and we will make sure that they meet the challenge.

Second, it is essential that the teacher read the chapter before the kids do. We need to identify the linguistic, conceptual, and textual features that may be the source of their difficulty. Look out for ideas that you think will be especially complicated, subtle, or abstract, assumptions of background knowledge that you think your students lack, unknown vocabulary, complicated sentences, cohesive links that might be hard to track, organizational structure that students might ignore, and so on. Basically, you are trying to figure out what might make this text hard for your students to comprehend.

I'm willing to head off or avoid a problem if I think the students cannot surmount it. For instance, if there is a word that I think the students will not know and the author doesn't define it, the context doesn't reveal its meaning, or it can't be figured out from morphology, then I am willing to familiarize the kids with it prior to reading. However, if it is possible to gain its meaning from the text, I will not try to avoid the problem. I'd rather that they miss it, which will allow me to teach kids how to take it on successfully. Teachers must decide which problems to solve for the kids and which to guide them to fix themselves. The real learning will come from the latter.
References
Third, the scaffolding described above will likely require some rereading-either of the whole chapter (fourth-grade science and social studies chapters can be surprisingly short, so rereading the entire chapter is usually not that big a deal). Thus, they try to read it; I question them and help them work through the problems; and then they reread it (perhaps more than once), to see if they can figure it out the second or third time.

Fourth, if your kids' reading levels are more than a year or two below the level of the book that you are trying to teach, consider starting with fluency work. Have those students read the text aloud, once or twice before the lesson aimed at comprehension of the text. This can be done many ways (e.g., having partners practice reading the social studies text during their ELA fluency time, getting parents involved, including this kind of practice in a Tier 2 intervention). The point of the fluency work is to reduce the amount of basic reading struggle - the reading of the words - that these students may face. Once they have engaged in the fluency practice, these students should read the text along with the rest of the class. They will benefit from the same comprehension scaffolds noted above.

What you are trying to do with this encouragement, fluency work, and comprehension scaffolding is to enable the students to read the text that they are sure to struggle with. You can monitor their learning by how much improvement you see in their reading of each text. But remember your goal is not to avoid difficulty but to enable students to surmount difficulty. That means that you don't shift kids to texts at their supposed levels, you don't read the texts to the kids, and you don't go around the text by telling them what it says.

Shanahan, T. (In press). Leveled Readers, Leveled Lives. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

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How Can I Teach with Books that are Two Years Above Student Reading Levels? | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog explains how teachers can teach students to read with books that are at the students’ supposed “instructional level.”

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The research behind leveled readers

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Differentiating with the Science of Reading: Moving Away from Leveled Readers

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What are Lexile Student Measures by Grade?A research study was conducted to describe Lexile ranges for each grade. Data for these national student norms came from a sample of over 3 million students across the United States and the Virgin Islands who were administered tests that reported Lexile measures from 2010 to 2019.

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Here are some favorite websites for finding grade level texts connected to classroom learning:

ReadWorks

Dirigible balloon (poetry)

Wonderopolis

Commonlit

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"About 70% of the variation in reading and writing abilities are shared."

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"About 70% of the variation in reading and writing abilities are shared."

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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.

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How Should We Combine Reading and Writing?

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For the past several years I've been complaining about how schools are organizing themselves with regard to reading and writing.

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A good overview here

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The Writing Revolution - Empower teachers to help students

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By training educators in The Hochman Method©, The Writing Revolution (TWR) aims to help all students become proficient writers, readers, and critical thinkers.

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w/ Anita Archer--see her book here

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Her Hands That Held the Stars G4 Fantasy

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Her Hands That Held the Stars G4 Fantasy

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Full student text here.

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Background & Vocab Example

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Based on resource from Dan Feigelson and Carl Anderson

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UFLI Passages
The Measured Mom-Fiction  Nonfiction
Core Knowledge Student Readers
Beyond Decodables
Speld Phonic Books
Open Source Phonics (Passages)
Flyleaf Publishing
Starfall

Other decodable books to purchase