When I first started, I mean, I was asking kids to annotate way too much. And then they would come in with these annotations, and they'd be like, well, what do we do with it now? And I'm like, great question because now you've got fifty Post it notes. I'm like, okay. So this system is not working.
Hi. And welcome back to the smarter literacy podcast from Ascend Smarter Intervention, where we simplify effective literacy instructions so every student gets what they need and every educator gets to breathe a little easier. I'm Lindsey. And I'm Corey. And today we're gonna dive into reading comprehension instruction.
Now I have to admit when I first started in literacy intervention, comprehension was not really something I touched at all, honestly, for two reasons. One, I thought that as long as students could decode, they would automatically be able to comprehend. So I really just focused fully on decoding instruction in my role. And then also, it felt super overwhelming. I just honestly had no idea where to start.
See, that's interesting. When I started my literacy journey, of course, I was coming off being a seventh grade English teacher. Comprehension was like everything I did.
I really wanted to incorporate comprehension instruction into my lessons, but I did not know how.
I also just felt like, oh, well, this isn't actually part of literacy instruction.
This is something completely different, so we're just not going to touch this.
Absolutely. I think even when I was in my first setting where I was supporting literacy intervention, that was something that came up in our kind of PLC or professional learning community meetings. We didn't call them PLCs, but basically that's what it was. And the question came up of, well, we don't need to teach this as literacy interventionists because this is happening in the classroom.
So because it's happening in the classroom and we have such small amount of time with our students, we don't hit that. That's just not something that we need. And I remember that was the conversation that we were having as interventionists. And our mentor at the time was like, well, I don't know about that.
And she had this very beautiful way of kind of being like, I don't know about that. And not that it wasn't happening in the classroom, it was. But really what she was saying when she said, I don't know about that was, I don't know if that's really something that you should be avoiding as a literacy interventionist. And I was like, oh, but what does that mean?
And what am I supposed to do? Right.
So I think really traditionally when we think about the way that comprehension has been taught, I think that's potentially this idea of I'm going to really focus on main idea and we're gonna teach that. We're gonna teach main idea lessons and we're gonna hit that for a week. And then we're gonna move on to inferences. And then we'll talk about author's purpose and then we'll talk about text structure.
Maybe we'll have a lesson on compare and contrast. We'll use different texts to be able to do each of these. Right? And I think what I started to realize was that I started trying to do that.
I started trying to be like, okay, well, this week we'll hit this strategy and the next week we'll hit that strategy.
And then we would get to our passage. And I like, yeah. But remember last week when we talked about the compare and contrast? And they're like, but we're not doing that today.
Right. And I was like, yeah. But but that's still kind of like a part of it, though. We can do both.
And they were like, well, do you want me to do compare and contrast? Or do you want me to talk about the text features here? Like, what are we doing?
And I was like, I don't know what we're doing. Right?
No, it's funny that you say that because I even remember being kind of taught that way where it's very much you're working on this kind of specific skill, you master it for a quiz. You might see it on the final, the test again, therefore as you're studying for the final, you go back to your notes and reacquaint yourself, but only until the test is over. And there's just so much of education that is kind of piecemeal like that, where we teach skills in isolation one at a time for a certain reason, and then we don't come back to it. That's where even kind of like I'm thinking when we have instructions like the worksheet skill rotation, where we're just working on this in a worksheet today, or even just kind of like a read and discuss just one time, and we're not practicing that over and over again, or we're not coming back to Remember when we talked about this with this article, we did this strategy?
It's just when we teach things in isolation, like you said, our kids and ourselves, we're putting it all together. So if we kind of teach in this approach, especially when it comes to comprehension, we're really telling kids, just need to know the skill or strategy for this one lesson, we're gonna move on, and then it's not resonating. Nothing's resonating. And we can't blame the kids for that because, again, thinking back to my own learning, really, think it only kind of came together for me because I was the kind of person who was very inquisitive and very curious and kind of thinking like, oh, I remember when we talked about an author's purpose, and now I'm noticing I'm not really agreeing with this author, but that really came from my own practice even outside of school because I was doing so much reading on my own. So, yeah, we need to make sure we're hitting all of that with our kids.
And I think, you know, one of the ways that I started to think about this was just I like to try and think about math instruction and how there's parallels there. And so in our last podcast episode, we were talking a lot about how the proficiency standards and those individual skills are so important. So if we look at the proficiency standards around comprehension, there are a lot of them. And it's good because there should be a lot of them. We really do want to be able to get deep into text. Especially as kids get older, there become more and more of those comprehension or reading for informative text or reading for literature and really being able to think about that. And so I think that that's really important that we continue to hit compare and contrast or author's purpose, all of those individual pieces.
But I almost think about it as that's similar to teaching addition Yes. And subtraction and multiplication and division and fractions and each of those individual skills. But ultimately, what we want students to start to do, think about long division.
And within long division, you're going to have to use all of those skills together. And you need to have a process to know, Okay, well, when am I multiplying? When am I dividing? When am I subtracting?
When am I bringing it up? And really what we wanna do for comprehension is we want to provide that process similar to what we would do for long division. As to say, okay. Great.
Now you have all of these skills. You've been working on this. Or even if you don't have all of the skills yet, that's the beautiful thing about literacy instruction where we can sort of fill in some of those pieces as we go, as we start to notice, oh, let's spend a little bit more time here. If we can give a little bit more of that process or that way in which we're thinking about it, that's more of what we're doing.
So we don't want to just focus on each of the individual isolated skills. Those are important. But we want to also then focus on, but where does this fit in the bigger picture? How do I put this all together?
Yes.
So again, it's more about a way of thinking. I like to think about comprehension this way. And I tell students, this is true for reading comprehension. This is true for listening comprehension.
But what we can do is we can start to put routines in place. And so we talked about this in the last episode too of how do we create a container for each of those skills. So instead of viewing it as, oh, this is how you teach author's purpose or, oh, this is how you teach compare and contrast, Let's have students really start to think about this. And so for us, one of the routines that we use for comprehension call three across and five deep.
So three across meaning that we have certain things that we do before reading, during reading, after reading. So we've got three things, before, during, after.
And really, what we're thinking about is that process. So before reading, what am I doing? This is where I'm going to start to kind of activate and start thinking about what we already know. This is where we can start thinking about text features, author, illustrator. What information is that giving to us that we can use to start building that background knowledge that we know is going to be so critical.
Then we can move into, okay, great. That's what I did before I was reading. So those are the isolated skills or the things that happen before I'm reading. Then what do I do while I'm reading?
Okay, while I'm reading, I want to be monitoring myself for understanding. Did I even know how to read that word? Do I even know what that means? That's when I think about myself as a reader.
That's what I'm doing. I'm pausing when I feel like, oh, man, that is a word I do not know. I don't know if I said it wrong or if I just don't actually know what it means.
But I should probably pause and stop and think about it, especially if it's blocking me from understanding the sentence or the larger context of the page, which can certainly happen and also a way for me to be like, oh, you didn't just read for five minutes and have no idea what was happening because you're also looking for key details.
And so we're thinking about what are the strategies that we can use to help students identify those key details. And then finally, after reading, that's when we can start to go through our five deep process. And I think this is something that originally when I was trying to teach comprehension, I felt like all these things needed to happen while students were reading. But what I actually realized was, well, no, we need to pause the actual act of reading.
Because when we're just reading the text, we're doing the decoding. We're self monitoring a little bit, but we can't be doing all of the comprehension in the same moment. Right. Our brain is very brilliant, but it also needs a little bit of space, a little bit of a pause.
And when we do that pause, that's when we can get into that five deep where we really start to think about, all right, let me recall my key details that I found. Now let me start to organize that information. Let me start to connect that information to my background knowledge. Let me make some leaps, some inferences, some predictions with that information, and then let me analyze that.
Does this align? Does this make sense? Do I have takeaway from this? Do I agree with the author?
Do I think that was their purpose? Those are all things that can happen after. And that doesn't mean you have to read the whole book to do that or the whole page even. Right.
There can be a pause at any point in there, each paragraph, and you can decide where that makes sense. But it can't actually happen while you're reading. And I remember when my kids were younger, there were so many annotation strategies. And it was all of these super complicated annotation strategies, to be honest.
I was like, wait, I don't remember the acronym. And I can't remember what this signal means and what that signal means. And I'm supposed to make all these little symbols inside, and I I don't know what the star means or the question anymore. I'm not sure.
And I think a lot of that was because all of that was supposed to happen while you were reading. Yeah. It's just a lot of executive functioning ask. So much.
I mean, you are the English teacher, so I'll let you know.
Because I especially when I first started, I mean, I was asking kids to annotate way too much, way too much. And then they would come into these annotations, and they'd be like, well, what do we do with it now? And I'm like, Great question because now you've got fifty Post it notes. And I'm like, Okay, so this system is not working. Because again, I wanted them to do that pausing, but like you said, the annotation strategies, when they're over complicated, it's not helping.
It's not helping. Mean, and again, I think it comes from a good place. We want students thinking. We don't want them just cruising through text, which when I first started in my literacy intervention work, they were just cruising through text.
And I just assumed you are reading this. You sound nice when you're reading this. The decoding, the word recognition skills are there. So you've got it.
Nice job. So I'm glad that you weren't doing that, that you were having them pause and stop. But I think that's where it started to become, hold on, but is this something that they're going to do forever? Is this specific annotation strategy going to be the strategy that takes them into the next grade and the next grade?
And is there consistency right there across grade levels? And think that's what a lot of us are looking for.
Yeah, and just kind of even thinking about these skills and strategies, again, kind like we were talking about in our last episode, going back to that big picture, because we do want to teach them the annotate, we do want to teach them the pause, but we want to teach them the skills that are going be most useful for them. And so we really want to Again, like you said, we're kind of breaking it down into a before reading, a during reading, an after reading, and be able to teach our kids the skills, what do you need to do in the before reading? What do you need to do during reading and what do you need to do after reading? And just having those routines ready to go so they know exactly what's expected of them and it's not cognitive overload where you were just talking about, it felt like you're supposed to be doing all of it during reading, but you can't. You can't possibly be doing all of that information while you're just trying to take in the information.
It really helps give them that, okay, I can do this one step at a time, that deep breath, because comprehension is hard and it's hard for our kids, and it's really hard as they get older and we're starting to ask them, okay, go a little deeper, ask a few more questions, really look at the text versus just basically what happened to read in the story, which we still want them to know. And so this is where when students know the pattern, the routine, those individual skills that we teach them in the poor reading, the during reading, the after reading, they stop feeling random.
And they're starting to understand, okay, I'm gonna pause after this paragraph, and I'm gonna take a quick annotation of just who did what, if there is, when, where, why, just so I have okay. This is what happened. Great. Now I'm gonna move on to the next paragraph.
Do the same thing just so I'm checking in with that comprehension, just making sure I'm actually understanding what's happening in each paragraph. I don't know. If I can't answer those questions, like you said, okay, now I gotta go back and, like, pay a little bit closer attention. Maybe my mind was wandering when I was actually reading.
And, you know, I even have a student right now. These are the skills that we are really trying to hone in because now he's older, and so he can answer some some of those questions on his own. But I'm even asking why when we're in the before reading. Why are we doing this?
Like, why is it so important to do these routines before we read? And of course, in the beginning he did not know, right? He's like, I don't know. He's like, I'm just doing what you're telling me to do, and it's like, okay, yeah, great.
Thank you for doing that.
Glad you're listening. It's good, I guess.
But I'm like, there is a very specific reason why I'm having you do this. So that's actually every single time when we get to our comprehension section and we get to the fore reading. My first question is, why are we doing this?
Why are we looking at the author? Why are we looking at text features? Why are we doing all the stuff beforehand? So he can start getting into, I'm doing these routines because.
Yeah, which is so important. And honestly, that's where you're going to get that generalization, that skill transfer where they're going to be able to use it outside of one particular lesson. Or in our last podcast, were even talking about some of these literacy scores are just not moving. And I think sometimes it's because we change the context and all of a sudden it looks different and they don't know how and when to apply some of the skills that they did learn.
And you're like, I did teach you this. I don't know why it didn't show up when you went to take the assessment. And I think a lot of that is because we just haven't created kind of the routine or routinized it enough to where we can internalize it. And so I always think about it.
It's like, oh, we all love to have our morning routine and our evening routine and our workout routine and just all the routines, right? And I think it's because it's making that cognitive process feel easier, right? It's like when you have that routine, you're like, oh, okay. Yes.
Like as part of that, I brush my teeth. Like, okay, cool. Of course, I was gonna do that, but I didn't have to think of it separately. That was just part of what I do.
And so when you can do that, then the brain is able to go deeper because it didn't have to think about all of the individual isolated skills.
Oh, yes. Have more cognitive capacity now to do like you were saying, to dig deeper as I'm getting more advanced. And so that's what we're looking for, for students to be able to do that. And I love how you pointed out too that by the time you get to the end of a page, if I always know that I was looking for who, what, when, where, why, maybe how, then if I didn't get something and I feel like, oh, you know what?
I maybe should have gotten that, I'm going to go back. And it's a self monitoring strategy where we realize, you know what? There's maybe some questions here. Or maybe that wasn't answered, and that's Okay.
But I think with a lot of the annotation strategies that my kids were trying to use earlier on, it was just, oh, this was something I found interesting. Or there wasn't necessarily something that you had to be on the lookout for. It was just like, oh, if this comes to me, then that's interesting to me. And it wasn't necessarily this is the information that I'm on the lookout for.
And the reason that I'm on the lookout for that particular information is because that's what's going to help me to put together a summary, a main idea. That's where I'm going to start to be able to sequence that into its correct order. And I even look at what this looks like. My oldest is just wrapping up his AP Human Geo, and I had him start using that strategy.
His teacher's wonderful and has him do a lot of annotations, but he was like, I just don't know what to do in the notes. And he even had a background with Cornell notes and all of that, but it was like the things that he was writing. And I was like, that is not really the key takeaway here. Let's just start by looking for this key information.
Then you can start working through this process. And so this isn't something that just happens when kids are just learning to read. Yeah.
This is something that they're taking with them all the way through.
Yeah. And that scaffold of like those skills, I'm thinking of another gym analogy where you know you go for a workout routine. You don't start by lifting the heaviest weight. You're going to hurt yourself one, but two again, you should be starting with warm ups right then.
Like you should be doing some gentle exercises or those smaller weights or whatever you need to be able to eventually get to that more intense exercise. Because if you just kind of do it all randomly, you're doing stretching and then you move to the elliptical and then but then you're then you're like, it's just so complicated and you're like, I don't actually understand what I'm targeting, what I'm doing and how I'm getting stronger, faster, healthier. I'm just I'm just doing random things in the gym and it's like, no, you need to have a plan. Yeah.
And when you have that plan, like you said, for everything in life, it just becomes that manageable routine where you don't have to think about it. So then you have the brain space to be able to think about the things you need to do. And I think all of us can relate to that. Just even if you yourself have a big project that is due, you need to break it down first and then build your way up.
Just make it bite sized, manageable chunks.
Absolutely. It's so funny that you say that because I actually think about, you know, the workout analogy specifically. I do a lot of my strength training on Peloton, and they have great strength workouts. And part of the reason that I love them so much is that so many of their coaches will tell you, oh, right now, we are doing this specific body weight exercise because it is an activation for what I'm going to be asking you to do next. And so what I don't want you to be doing is stepping straight into your single leg deadlifts with your heavy weights without having activated first. And so they'll tell you, and they'll say, this is why we're doing it.
And I think having that understanding has made me recognize, oh, it's important that we do things in a systematic way and that, yes, I can go to the gym and, like you said, just start kind of running around and doing the things.
However, yeah, this might be setting myself up for injury. And I think we just need to be able to view reading comprehension in the same way, not that we're setting kids up for injury. Certainly, that's not the case. But we're doing certain things as activation, and we are following a specific process for this is what we do before.
And the reason that we are thinking about the author is because, oh, have I ever read anything else from this author? Let me start thinking about what I might be able to make some predictions about just because I've read something else from this author or, oh, this is a national health article. Okay, I better be ready for some higher level vocabulary. Right?
Or I'm just priming myself. And so it's it's that. And then it's okay. And this is what we're focusing on.
And so really what we're doing here is we're just creating an executive functioning strategy around comprehension that makes it more repeatable so that students can access it on their own.
It's kind of like the whole idea of, oh, instead of bringing them the fish, we're teaching them how to fish on their And I think sometimes when we get stuck in the isolated skills, it sort of feels like we're not we're almost bringing it to you as opposed to you recognizing, oh, this is when I need to use this or this is how it connects.
And so that's why you'll see skills that it's like, I taught this. I know I taught this.
And every single teacher, especially I remember being a seventh grade English teacher, the kids would literally go on to the next school year, never failed, and they'd be like, yeah, and their current teacher would like, so you did this last year like, no, we never learned that and like you as a previous teacher like, yes, I did. I'll show you the lesson plan. We did it so much and it's like yes and no because we did learn that, and maybe we hit it three times throughout the year because we came back to Author's Purpose three major times, but we didn't teach it consistently. Yes. So it never registered with the kids of being like, Oh, that's what Yeah, and I'm doing it now here in eighth grade too.
If you think kids are going to see the connection, no.
No, they don't.
We got to show them the way.
Give them a flashlight and get all the things because they're never gonna find it on their own.
Yeah. I think that was my biggest mistake was just assuming, okay, like, yes, we've given you all the pieces. So now it's your job to put it together. And I think one of the things that I've started using as another analogy is we are giving them all of the pieces, but they aren't seeing the outside of the box.
Yeah. So if they can't see the outside of the box, they don't know how it fits together. So they're there holding all of the pieces and they don't know, all right, but what is it supposed to look like when it comes together? So it's not that we need to do more.
We don't need to hand them more pieces. Yes. We don't need to change the pieces that we're handing them and say, oh, we need a different curriculum or we needed this or we needed that. No.
We just need to look at are we showing them to your point of how the pieces connect because they're they're not doing it. They need to see the outside of the box. And as a puzzle maker, I'm terrible with puzzles. I can, like, do the outside just because the outside is easier.
But as soon as I get to the inside if you do not have a box for me to look at the outside of the box, I'm not putting that together. I'm I know some people can do it, and they're like wizards at it. That is not me.
I only get it if the pieces are already connected in the box.
I'm like, oh, I love when that happens. I love when that happens. You're like, oh, excellent. I win. I did it.
Oh, my goodness. So I think all that being said, I think we just want to come back to this idea that as educators, we don't need to be adding more pieces. We don't need to be adding more skills. We don't need to be what we're already doing is good. That does not need to change at all. I think the only thing that we need to consider is how does it fit together?
How does that look? And so again, we have routines that we've put together that I feel like have worked so well for our students. It allows them to be able to see, oh, this is what I'm doing. This is where I'm doing that and to be able to follow that roadmap, if you will, until it's internalized for themselves.
And so we have an example of what our three across and five deep reading comprehension routine looks like at smarter intervention dot com forward slash guide. So definitely take a look at that and just think about, alright, from the reading comprehension skills that I am teaching, how does that kind of fit into this routine? Does it fit into a before reading, during reading, after reading? That honestly could be a huge first step is just the skills I'm teaching, where do they fit into this process?
And just take a look at ours and see for the ones that you're teaching, where do they go? Where do they fit inside of that map?
And in our next episode, we will be sharing more about what these routines look like for writing, so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss it. Again, we can't wait to hear your thoughts on how these routines can start shifting some of these isolated skills into something even bigger for your students.
Yes. Can't wait until next time.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the 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.
