Because certainly there were times, my students were struggling with comprehension, and there were just times I'm like, why? Why are you struggling with this? And hindsight's what? Twenty twenty, they say? So I can look back and be like, oh, maybe that's the reason why.
Hi, and welcome to the smarter literacy podcast from ascend Smartter Intervention where our mission is simplify effective literacy instruction to make teaching literacy easier and more accessible for everyone.
We are your hosts, Lindsey, and Corey.
And in today's episode, our goals are to open up a conversation about the misconceptions we had around teaching explicit comprehension strategies, to share our experiences, teaching comprehension strategies to our students, and to share one thing you can do in your instructions, help incorporate more language comprehension skills into your lessons.
In our last full length episode, we chatted about our misconceptions about word recognition and decoding skills.
Just like we did in the episodes, we are gonna break down the truth about comprehension instruction and provide some tips and tricks you can use in your classroom as well.
If you've listened to our other episodes, you'll be familiar with what we call the familiarized phase.
This episode will once again resonate with anyone in that particular stage.
So if you have no idea what we're talking about when we say the familiarized phase, definitely give that last episode a listen, but we provided a framework to help simplify your literacy intervention starting with, familiarize yourself with the research, then move into systematize your instruction, Then you'll move into optimizing your instruction, and then finally you'll move into generalizing and helping your students generalize their skills.
So the idea here is to stay focused on the phase that you're in.
That being said, regardless of which phase of the journey you're currently in, we'd love to invite you to stick around for this conversation.
Alright, Corey.
What was one of your biggest misconceptions about teaching comprehension? There were many, as I said, with the word recognition and decoding skills, but I think when I first started teaching, I was really under the impression that comprehension didn't need explicit teaching.
Rather, comprehension was going to be a byproduct of effective word recognition skills.
So if you got those decoding skills down, you would have that effective word recognition skills, and then background knowledge on a subject.
So as long as you had those two things, you could have the word recognition skills, you could read the words, and you had background knowledge on the subject, you would just naturally have comprehension.
So you didn't necessarily need to teach comprehension at all.
So this idea that reading comprehension was an outcome Mhmm.
And it wasn't necessarily a skill that could be taught.
I've actually heard a lot of educators kind of had that same feeling at least once in their teaching journey as well.
My my experience was a little different because I did start out as a English teacher, seventh grade English teacher.
So my whole job felt like teaching comprehension, right, that and writing.
And so when I did move back to the literacy teaching sphere, basically, I I kinda got into it, and I was kinda like, where is the comprehension? How do I teach comprehension here? Because I've been teaching comprehension for all of my teaching career.
And how does it fit into literacy? And as I mentioned in, you know, the previous episode, my first year of kind of being back as a literacy specialist, I was just, again, trying to familiarize myself with how do I be a literacy teacher? So definitely my first year as a literacy specialist.
Comprehension fell to the wayside.
I was just like, I guess I don't do it as a literacy specialist.
So that was a little it was a difficult jump for me.
Well, and I think as an interventionist, I think we felt like, oh, we don't need to teach this because that's gonna be taught in the classroom.
So I think there was potentially a little bit of a disconnect because what I started to recognize was that many of my students, while we had worked through the word recognition, we made sure that they were talking about topics that they enjoyed, like, sports or science or things that they were really interested in, I started noticing that my students did not necessarily have the comprehension and that could have been from a number of different reasons.
Right.
Could have been because when the teacher was going through the comprehension skills, they were still struggling so much with the decoding, that they weren't taking those comprehension skills in at that time, or they just, again, weren't making the connection.
So same thing that we talked about last time where they weren't generalizing into different context.
So they just didn't notice that, oh, yeah, I should be using those strategies.
In this other space.
Right.
Yeah.
I actually, you know, I I do remember someone telling me the first time when I was, again, my first year is that literacy specialist, and I kinda asked, like, oh, when do I, like, again, about comprehension? How how much should I and someone did say to me? You know, oh, they're getting in the classroom.
And then I can't remember if it was that year or the year afterwards, but I had a conversation with an English teacher and she said, oh, but they're learning this in your classroom.
Right? And I said, oh, no.
There is definitely a disconnect here.
And I and like you said, I think there's a disconnect just for the students overall.
Yeah.
And so I think what that comes down to is the truth is that we can and should be teaching comprehension explicitly whether we are in the classroom, whether we are in an intervention setting, we do need to be in corporating that into our instruction.
And it's not necessarily just a byproduct.
It is a skill that we can teach and that we should be focusing on.
And so one of the things that we like to think about is a three part reading comprehension framework where we focus on before reading, during reading, and after reading strategies so that we can make sure that we are explicitly teaching students what they need to be doing in each of those different phases.
So for example, before reading, we could be focusing on what are the text features? What are the things that we have available to us? Do we know who the author is? What are some clues that we might have? And what is our background knowledge? So that we can start to pull that background knowledge that we have? And then we can start to move into that during reading phase where we can start to look at annotations.
So one of the things that we like to annotate are the five w.
So who, what, when, where, why? Mhmm.
But there might be other annotations that you could pull into, but just what are you noticing as you're reading? This is also a really good place where we're focusing on self monitoring, whether that's vocabulary knowledge or decoding that word recognition still coming in really important here.
And then finally, we can move into our after reading strategies, which start to look at What can we recall? So direct recall? How can we organize the information so thinking about sequencing and main idea? How can we make connections? So that might be text connections, compare and contrast, cause and effect, Then how do we make leaps with that information? So what kind of inferences or predictions can we make? And then finally, we wanna get into that analysis phase where we start to really think about what do I take away and really synthesizing the information and what are my next steps how does this align with everything I already know? But by following that three step process of before reading during reading and after reading, we can really actually give students explicit comprehension strategies.
I love that.
I love teaching kids that.
It's so much fun.
As we continue this conversation about teaching comprehension, you can kind of think of it in this way.
We're not gonna be giving you the fish, but we're gonna be teaching you how to fish.
However, you are still going to need the fish Kingrad.
And that could be your graphic organizers, your comp companions, all of that.
So as we continue the conversation, just kinda keep that in mind.
So, Corey, did you have any other misconceptions about comprehension instruction? Yeah.
For sure.
Originally, I came from a mindset that teaching comprehension strategies was ineffective.
So I had been exposed to some research.
So Daniel willingham from the University of Virginia.
He's searcher, a cognitive psychologist is fantastic.
He has a lot of really great information, and he did some studies and work around time allocations.
So, really, how much time are we spending on different strategies and different techniques as we're teaching reading And one of the things that he found was that far too much time was being spent on teaching comprehension strategies, and that that time would be better spent on teaching other skills.
And so for me, I took that to me and that teaching comprehension strategies was in effect So you just shouldn't do that because you're wasting time.
You should really be focusing on those word recognition skills and those other foundational skills.
But what I started to realize was that we do need to teach these skills.
So it's not that teaching comprehension strategies is ineffective, it's that if we only teach these strategies in isolation and we don't help students make that connection to their real life reading, that's where it starts to become ineffective.
So what we need to do is we need to make sure that we're still giving that explicit introduction.
So that might mean we are doing a strategy in isolation, but then we need to give them a framework so that they can start to see how does that fit into my everyday reading? Absolutely.
And we, you know, talked about that a little bit in our last episode when it was The word decoding.
Yep.
So, again, just kinda emphasizing that all of this, we were teaching kids how to use this in their other classes, but also the reading that they're doing on their own, and it's just so important.
And it's it's worthwhile to do.
Absolutely.
And I think a big piece of that too is, again, just giving them more of the framework that they can use those strategies in.
So, for example, if you just teach compare and contrast or you just teach main idea or you just teach all of those in isolation and they don't see how that comes together, that can be an issue.
And so I think that comes back what we were saying about the before reading, during reading, and after reading strategies is that if you can show them where those fit in, so much more effective for them.
And I have to say, you know, even reflecting back to when I was a seventh grade English teacher, so much of the time that I spent on comprehension was that analysis part.
Now I can look back and, you know, then heinz, I'm like, oh, yeah.
Maybe I didn't do enough of those other strategies to really make everything kinda come together for my students.
Because certainly there were times my students were struggling with comprehension, and there was just times I'm like, why? Why are you struggling with this? And hindsight's what? Twenty twenty, they say? So I can look back and be like, oh, maybe that's the reason why.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I think also there's this idea that, you know, when I originally got into the field, I thought comprehensions of by product.
So I also didn't see comprehension as discrete skills that students could learn.
So for example, I didn't think about comparing contrast or cause and effect.
I didn't think that students might be good at one area of comprehension and not as good at another.
And so, like you said, some students might be really good at analysis, and they're actually really good at doing that, but they're really terrible at direct recall.
And so I think that was helpful for me to recognize too is that we can start to break that down and figure out which areas of comprehension are students excelling in in which areas maybe are they not Yeah.
So that we can focus our instruction on those areas that are a little bit more difficult for them.
Absolutely.
Alright, Corey.
So what about teaching vocabulary specifically? Were there any misconceptions you had about vocabulary comprehension instruction? Yes.
This one this one's so interesting because I think my first exposure to teaching vocabulary really came from this idea that you give students ten to 15 vocabulary words, then you do activities around those words.
You memorize a dictionary definition, and then you're gonna be quizzed on it later.
And that probably came from, you know, SAT GR.
That came from my experience too of in school.
This is how you do it.
And so I think, you know, even seeing my kids as they went through education, that was really what they were being exposed to as well.
And so when I knew vocabulary is a really important piece of the literacy processing triangle of the five core components of reading, vocabulary needs to be included.
So this is what you do.
You give a list of words, you memorize them, you're quizzed on them, and then they're somehow locked into your mind for later.
We like to think it.
Yep.
Right.
Right.
Oh my gosh.
Uh, you sharing that reminds me of when I was in school and middle school and high school, specifically, I just remember, uh, all those vocabulary pockets that we'd be given.
And, you know, here's 10 words to memorize for the test that you'll be taking on Friday, and I just hated it.
And so I one thing I'd I declared when I when I was going in to be an English teacher was was not gonna give that kind of rote memorization of vocabulary.
Like, here's the definition memorize it, being able to put it on a test, and and that's a grade.
I was like, I'm not gonna do that.
And he just absolutely not.
And I achieved that goal.
I didn't do that as an English teacher.
However, Once again, looking back, I don't think I did much with vocabulary, not.
I think maybe at the time, I thought I was doing a good job with vocabulary, but I didn't teach vocabulary explicitly.
I didn't really again make that part of my comprehension instruction And when I moved into being a reading specialist at my school, and I did start looking at vocabulary with my kids more specifically.
That's when I was like, Okay.
So maybe what I've been doing the past several years as a ELA teacher wasn't quite right, but how and, like, it was kind of, like, again, how do I balance this? Like, how how do I how do I make vocabulary instruction work? Absolutely.
And I think I ran into the same thing because at first, it was like, great.
You've got ten, fifteen words.
This is what you do, but I started to see that that wasn't effective.
So I started to see that with my own kids going through school.
I remember my own experience of do I remember any of these words? I don't think I do.
And I started to see this isn't working for the students that I'm working with.
Right.
And so what I started to see at that point though was I started hearing from some experts in the field, some speech language pathologists that I really respected, that you don't need to worry about teaching specific vocabulary words at all.
So at that point, I was really confused.
I didn't know am I supposed to teach words? Am I not supposed to? I know vocabularies key piece of the research based instruction.
So what does this need to look like? And I think ultimately what it comes down to is it's not an either or.
We do need to teach vocabulary.
We do need to make sure that that's being included as part of our instruction.
But we don't need to use the rote memorization strategy.
Instead, what we can do is we can give students a framework to be able to recognize, hey, when are their words that I, um, or when are their times that I'm coming into words that I don't recognize as I'm reading? What what does that look like? What can I do when I notice that that is, in fact, the case? So for example, if I do notice, oh, I don't know what this word is, k, that means I need to really look at what category or group would this fit into.
Right? What is the function or purpose of this word? What is it sort of like? What is it not like? And maybe I need to look that up to be able to get to that or I need to ask somebody.
Mhmm.
But that's gonna be much more effective.
The other thing that's gonna be effective is to make sure that we're also focusing on words that are gonna be important for students' actual learning.
So so if if we're in science and we're introducing a new topic, we might want to pull specific words that are gonna be important that are gonna be coming up that it's important for them to know to be able to access this civic text.
Absolutely.
Yes.
So to keep this actionable, how can we effectively incorporate comprehension skills or strategies into our lessons across the grade levels, Corey? Yeah.
So I think the best thing that you can do is really just look at putting together a direct routine that you're gonna use with your students time and time again.
So we mentioned that we use a before reading, during reading, after reading framework, If that works for you, amazing, you can absolutely utilize that.
But, essentially, what you're looking for is just a checklist or something that students know we do this, and then we do this, and then we do this.
And if you can teach students, how to go through that process, that explicit teaching is going to make a world of difference.
It's really gonna support their executive functioning as well.
And so that's gonna be a really helpful strategy in your instruction.
Absolutely.
And as we we know structure is really important for our kids.
And so this is no exception.
Absolutely.
So try it out and let us know how it goes.
If you like extra support, we have a comprehension reading process trifold that can help solidify this process for you, and we'll share in our show notes so you know where you can grab it.
Or if you want extra support, we'd love to have you join us in our delivering smarter intervention program or five core components of literacy library where we have ongoing monthly coaching calls and can walk you through these strategies specific, to your setting and your students.
In our next episodes, we will share how these skills translate into writing skills for students.
So stay tuned.
Thanks for listening to this episode of a smarter literacy podcast.
Make sure to subscribe for more strategies and insights to make delivering effective literacy instruction easy, or at least easier.
And if you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend or leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts.
It really does help others find the show, and we are beyond grateful for your support.
Thanks for listening.
Until next time.
Happy teaching
