Jesse Steif: Alright, so welcome. Thank you for coming here, and thank you for viewing if you’re watching this after the fact. My name is Jesse Steif. I am a literacy content manager here at the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center.

And we’ll talk a little bit about what the Lastinger Center is here, and I just want that in, but we want to introduce ourselves first. My background is as a teacher, a school psychologist and a district-level staff person at a large Florida district prior to joining the Lastinger Center.

​I have a special interest in adolescent literacy, as well as elementary literacy and intervention for students with literacy difficulties. And it’s fantastic to be here, and to get to spend some time talking about secondary literacy instruction, and then my co-host here is Danielle. Danielle, you want to introduce yourself?

Danielle McMaster: Hi, everyone! I’m so excited to be here with you today. My name is Danielle McMaster. I am a Literacy Content Coordinator here at UF Lastinger Center for Learning. I’ve been in education for almost 15 years, all in secondary education. I was a middle school teacher for almost 10 years, and then I moved into a coaching role for a little while before joining UF, where I am excited to continue to dig deep into what works in secondary classrooms and supporting secondary teachers across the state.

​Jesse Steif: All right. So yeah, we’re gonna talk about secondary literacy here today. As the Science of Reading has sort of come to the fore, that phrase, I’m sure most everyone has heard of, at this point, that phrase has been out there for many years now, and has kind of typically started at the elementary and even primary levels of school. 

Up until recently, secondary literacy has not gotten as much conversation in the science of reading conversation, which I think has been very unfortunate, but now, I think we’re starting to see quite a few more webinars and articles and other pieces that are starting to bring the knowledge that has always existed to a wider audience.

​One of the goals for today’s session is to expose everyone to all of the vast and wide number of resources that are out there for secondary educators. We do a lot of training and professional learning for secondary folks, and there’s always such a big appetite and hunger for good, evidence-based resources.

And it’s not for lack of them being out there. They are out there, and we will point you to them, and we’ll actually end off today’s session with a QR code where we have put several really high-quality teacher/practitioner-oriented guides to instruction. So stay tuned, keep with us for the whole time and we’ll give you access to that.

Okay, so, let’s talk a little bit, just a quick blurb about us as a center.

​The University of Florida Lastinger Center, we research, we develop and we bring to scale educational innovations and professional learning for teachers, educators, parents and students.

​So we support parents, teachers and students through a wide variety of professional services in early learning, literacy and mathematics.

​If you’re joining us from Florida, you might know us through the elementary and secondary micro-credentials, the reading endorsement, coursework that you may have taken with us, or if you’re a literacy coach, we offer literacy coaching endorsement, content, along with a wide variety of other things. So we are always really proud to partner with districts and other stakeholders.

​So let’s talk a little bit about our learning goals here today. We hope that everyone leaves here with an understanding of the sort of key skills that contribute to adolescent literacy, proficient reading in adolescent students and kind of zooming into some more specific instructional strategies. You’ll be able to explain why reading long words, multisyllabic words, is essential for supporting comprehension in secondary students.

​You’ll be able to apply research-based word-reading routines that we’ll go through, step by step. We’d like for you to be able to identify and apply these in practical classroom routines that support word reading accuracy and fluency building in students. And then, to understand the features of high-quality, evidence-based, classroom discussions. So we’ll focus a bit on word reading, kind of basic reading skills, and supporting students in that realm, as well as higher-order, kind of classroom-based discussion.

​So, let’s set a bit of context here about adolescent literacy before we spend most of our time talking about specific instructional strategies.

​As adolescent teachers of secondary students, you face a wide variety of challenges, of course. And, we’re sitting here at a time where we are facing sort of unprecedented difficulties in our students.

​According to the 2024 administration of the NAEP, it’s a nationwide assessment of student literacy and math skills, about 25%, so just a quarter of Florida eighth graders in 2024, were scored at or above this proficient level on the NAEP.

​And when we talk about proficiency in adolescent literacy, we’re talking about being able to make inferences and draw conclusions about literary elements and providing opinions that are supported by evidence from the text. When we’re reading about informational text, we’re talking about being able to understand the definition of more complex academic vocabulary, identifying sides of an argument, offering opinion and using evidence based on a text.

​So about a quarter of Florida eighth graders are really sitting at that level of literacy.

​This is not to say that this is a teacher’s or educator’s fault, right? Adolescent literacy is the result of both factors in school and out of school. Students are reading quite a bit less than they were even 10, certainly 20 years ago. They’re coming to school with many more difficulties than they were pre-COVID, but we have to understand that evidence-based literacy instruction is the primary lever that we have to pull at school to leverage positive outcomes for students. 

And it’s a really positive one, and it’s a really powerful one at that. So we might be fighting against external forces of all kinds, but we have lots of powerful tools at our fingertips here. So we want to present a sort of sobering statistic here, but not paint a picture of doom and gloom, of course, because there’s a lot that can be done for students in the secondary grades.

​So, we wanted to highlight what we are talking about when we talk about skilled reading development.

​And there are a wide variety of models of reading development out there, some of which are super complicated, some of which are much more simple. One that we think is pretty helpful, particularly for secondary teachers, is this model called the Active View of Reading.

It has been studied and researched by these researchers, Nell Duke and Cartwright, and it indicates that skilled reading here is the product of a wide variety of literacy skills, processes and cognitive skills.

So, up at the top there, we have kind of basic reading skills of word recognition, our ability to read words accurately and recognize words on the page.

​Which is a function of things like your phonological awareness and your phonics knowledge, your ability to recognize words accurately and automatically without even having to decode them or a word that is a sight word. In the red portion there, we have language comprehension, so taking out reading accuracy. Do students understand the language of the text that they’re reading? So, can they bring to bear their background knowledge that they have of the topic that they are reading about? Do they understand the vocabulary in the text?

​What sorts of content knowledge are they bringing to the text? What is their level of verbal reasoning? Their understanding of complex syntax or sentence structure, a wide variety of things. 

And then there are these bridging processes that kind of sit in between basic reading skills and higher-order language comprehension and influence both of them. So, something like reading fluency is a function of both your ability to read words accurately, but also the better you understand the language of the text, the more fluent you read for example.

There are also things like your morphological knowledge, or your morphological awareness, so your awareness of things like prefixes, suffixes and root meanings of words. We’ll consider it a bridging process between basic reading skills and language.

And then another key area, particularly for adolescent and secondary students, is this area of active self-regulation. 

​The motivation and engagement that you are bringing to the text and to the task. I mean, if you have any secondary students in front of you, you know how big of a role that motivation and engagement plays in how a student performs in literacy.

​Among things like executive functioning skills, like your ability to plan and organize a piece of writing, your ability to keep your mind focused on a piece and read deeply while thinking about what you’re reading as you’re reading it.

Executive functioning difficulties are certainly rampant in today’s secondary classrooms, particularly as students are spending more and more time on social media and on their phones, we’re starting to understand the sort of effect that has on executive function, focus, motivation and reading stamina.

​So, the active view of reading is a sort of really comprehensive model of all of these different skills that comprise skilled literacy development. And today, we’re going to talk a little bit about word recognition strategies and we’ll talk about language comprehension strategy, so we wanted to give you a broader cross-section of the skills.​

All of these skills are teachable to students, to one degree or another. So these are areas that we can influence for the positive, with strong, explicit and systematic instruction.​

Okay, so let’s talk about components of secondary literacy instruction. There are five essential practices, or buckets of instruction, that researchers have identified, so what we’re taking this from is a guide called an IES Practice Guide, the Institute of Educational Sciences. It’s the research-to-practice arm of the Federal Department of Education.​

And it’s one of the single best sources for research-based instructional guidance for teachers. They publish a wide variety of teacher and practitioner-oriented guides to instruction, and we’ll take a look at some of them in a little bit. But the effective secondary literacy instruction includes a couple of different, some practices that we want to make sure that we’re integrating for every student, every day.

​It starts with explicit vocabulary and word study instruction. So you cannot teach every single vocabulary term that’s important to students, but research is very much unequivocal about the power and the importance of daily vocabulary instruction and lots of opportunities to practice in reading, and in writing, and in speaking, the use of high, high-value academic vocabulary.​

Across contexts, whether it’s your English language arts course, your social studies, your science course or an intensive reading course across the day.

Direct and explicit comprehension strategy instruction. There’s a ton of different comprehension strategies out there. We don’t necessarily recommend a strategy a day for students, but rather picking a core group of high-value comprehension strategies that can be applied across content areas. 

Things like the ability to summarize or paraphrase a narrative or an informational text, asking oneself questions, questioning the author and using text structures, things like comparing and contrasting, description, sequence, the sort of skeletons that most informational and narrative texts use.

Extended tech-centered discussion. So, we want to make sure on a day-to-day basis that we are providing students with regular opportunities for sustained, ongoing and importantly, teacher-guided conversation that requires students to interpret and analyze complex text. Now, there’s a whole ton of ways that you can do that that are based in research. 

Danielle is gonna spend the latter half of today talking about discussion, but the research is pretty surprising. When researchers get into schools and school districts and measure the amount of time that the average classroom is spending in extended, sustained, guided discussion, it’s very, very little. Sometimes as little as, less than five minutes on an average day in many classrooms.

There’s a research-to-practice gap across all grade levels, so it’s not that we don’t know what effective literacy instruction looks like for adolescents; it’s often a matter of sustained professional learning for folks.

​And then to also provide motivation and engagement supports. So, I mean, with a wide variety of strategies, from the choice of text that you’re using to setting and tracking individual or group literacy goals for students.

The IES guides that we’ll show to you, in a bit will have a ton of practical, sort of, applications for these things.

And then intensive individualized interventions for struggling readers. We are not talking about providing intensive phonics instruction as a 10th grade English Language Arts teacher. There are certain domains of instruction, particularly on the basic literacy side of decoding words and very basic literacy things that are the purview of an intensive reading teacher or a special education teacher, but that those practices are in place at all schools and are using evidence-based instructional materials.

So, we’re only able to scratch the surface here, in a short little one-hour session, but we would be remiss to sort of not show everyone the wide range of really strong, good resources that are out there.

This is just an example of a couple of the guides that are out there that are these sort of compilations or syntheses of tons and tons of studies and pieces of research that translate that research into effective instructional practices for secondary educators. 

And they range from supporting writing, as we see here in the upper right-hand corner, that’s the IES Practice Guide on teaching secondary students to write effectively that has a small number of high-yield recommendations and how to implement them in classrooms to supporting reading comprehension, in the case of, say, reading next here in the bottom corner, on how to promote skilled reading comprehension in adolescent students. 

And so we have all of these behind a QR code here at the end of the session.

So the information is out there, and part of what we love doing so much is being able to take this and translate it to practice and disseminate it to folks.

So, let’s talk about word reading accuracy in the secondary grades. We sort of think about sometimes, about third grade or fourth grade as the transition point between learning to read and reading to learn, and that’s a bit of a misnomer. Word reading difficulties continue, they don’t just stop after third or fourth grade, if those difficulties aren’t remediated.

And even for typically developing or proficient readers after third grade, evidence-based instruction does include things like word study and supporting advanced word reading in the context of complex text.

So, let’s go into a little bit more depth about why it matters in secondary schools.

​Interestingly, we’re learning about this phenomenon that researchers have called the decoding threshold.

​And what the decoding threshold is, is a level of word-reading skill, below which, students show limited to no comprehension growth in later grades. And if your word-reading skill falls above this threshold, this cut point, word reading doesn’t constrain your comprehension growth.

So, below the decoding threshold, it’s really your ability to read the words accurately enough to glean meaning from it that’s really the constraint on growth of your reading comprehension. And there are tons and tons of kids who fall below this decoding threshold into middle school and high school. And these are students in both intensive reading classes and also general education courses.

So, word-reading instruction for students who need it, which are most students, continues to be important across grade levels.

And more than half of the unique words in third grade text have multiple syllables in them.

And that proportion increases the amount of meaning that multisyllabic words hold is really high. If you can only read words that have one syllable in them, and you really struggle to read anything with two, three, four, or five syllables, your comprehension is going to suffer, I would say, catastrophically.

And so, teaching students a routine for reading multi-syllable words, which we’ll do, becomes super important.

​The estimates say about 80% of students who score below proficient on the NAEP test that we talked about a couple slides ago struggle with reading unfamiliar multi-syllable words.

And so, comprehension difficulties are often not just comprehension difficulties in and of themselves. When you take a look under the hood of what’s going on, underneath comprehension, we very frequently find that it’s issues with word-reading accuracy and reading fluency that are contributing to the issue with comprehension.

​Comprehension interventions, teaching students comprehension strategies, like summarizing and paraphrasing are really important. Every student needs that instruction. But if we only provide comprehension intervention, we’re missing a huge piece of what a student’s comprehension problem is actually all about, if they, in fact, have issues with word reading.

​And we can figure that out through a wide variety of sort of quick, informal assessments, everything from having students read from a passage for one minute and determining the percentage of words that they’re able to read. Anything under about 95% would probably indicate the need for at least fluency-building instruction, and if not accuracy.

​There are phonics surveys that are out there that take just a couple of minutes for a student, where we can kind of diagnose and pinpoint specific decoding skills or word-reading skills that are not present.

So, before we go into what this multi-syllable word reading routine actually looks like, let’s talk about the kind of component skills that students need first, before they’re able to sort of tackle this multi-syllable word reading. And a ton of students with multi-syllable word reading difficulties do actually have the prerequisite skills in place, but have maybe never actually gotten instruction on how to break a long word down into chunks and attack it systematically through word study.

​Because it’s, in and of itself, something that requires explicit instruction for tons of students.

​So, but the prerequisite skill, students generally need knowledge of common vowel spelling, so short and long vowel representation, silent E, vowel digraphs. It’s kind of beyond the scope of a one-hour sort of session to kind of go into any one of these things individually.

​But we wanted to highlight the, the, the prerequisites. An awareness of common prefixes and suffixes. The best practices would indicate that instruction in prefixes, suffixes, Greek and Latin roots happen starting in elementary school. That’s not the case in many areas.

​But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very powerful aid to comprehension, even if it’s coming a little bit late in middle school and high school. So, instruction in morphology, so these meaningful word parts, prefixes, suffixes, roots, can be a powerful aid and powerful instruction no matter when it happens for students.

​The phonological ability to blend parts of a word into a whole word.

​And that’s kind of it. So we wanted to have a couple of notes here for everyone.

​The expectation should not be, nor are we insinuating that, English Language Arts or science or Social Studies or math teachers, you’re not expected to teach basic phonics skills. If students are lacking, these skills of basic phonics, basic vowel representations, the ability to blend parts of a word into a whole word, that’s the territory of an intensive reading course, or specially designed instruction if your student has an IEP. That’s not the job of a gen ed, secondary teacher.

​Got ahead of myself there.

​But what you can certainly do is teach and reinforce this advanced word reading routine using the challenging words that already appear in the text that you’re using to teach.

​So, after we go over the routine here, we’ll talk about where we can use this routine with complex text that you’re already using. We’re always really careful not to add on additional things onto your already overloaded plates, and to focus on strategies that you can integrate with your existing curricular materials.

​So what does this routine look like? We explicitly teach students to do these things. I’ve seen anchor charts that have this sort of step-by-step process. Hopefully students don’t necessarily need one eventually (an anchor chart) but we’re explicitly teaching these steps. 

We look for the prefixes and suffixes in words, or we explicitly point those out in the words that we’re teaching. Students can circle them, or more sort of covertly, just kind of take a mental note of them.

​Then we teach them to underline or look for the vowels in the remaining part of the word.

​So it’s really important to know, and it’s very helpful for students to know, that every syllable has a vowel sound. And the number of vowels in a word will almost always correspond to the number of syllables in that word.

​I’ve taught this reading routine to students, who have actually gotten a little mad and when I asked them, like, “hey, what’s going on?” And they were mad that no one actually ever told them that this is how words work. These are students who are in 10th grade, reading at a second or third grade level, and really struggling to read multi-syllable words.

​And when you go through this routine, it kind of lifts a lot of the mystique or the misconceptions that they may have about how words work.

​So there’s a power in giving students agency, by just kind of giving them a look under the hood of how words work.

​Once they’ve identified the vowels, we teach them to break the words into parts. So, a combination of the prefixes and suffixes that they may have identified, and the vast majority of multi-syllable words have at least one prefix or suffix, often will have multiple.

​And the number of syllables. And then we just simply blend the parts together, and then adjust the sounds to make a familiar word that makes sense. So sometimes the first kind of attempt at reading a multi-syllable word won’t result in exactly the right pronunciation. Sometimes if there’s a schwa sound or a long vowel sound, that doesn’t quite play by the rules.

​And so we teach students to sort of make a last little fix to make it sound like a word that they know, or a word that might make sense in context. And we’ll show you what this looks like with a couple of examples.

​So let’s take a look at this word, a word that many secondary students might encounter in social studies if they’re reading about post-Civil War history, or there’s a wide variety of contexts that you might encounter the word ‘reconstruction.’

​So, the first thing that we do is identify the prefixes or suffixes.

​So we have Re, and we have tion, or ‘Shun.’

​So that we’ve kind of peeled those off and identified them. And again, explicit instruction in high-frequency prefixes and suffixes is a really good, strong evidence-based practice that has positive effects on both word-reading accuracy, but also reading comprehension, because these things have meaning.

​Then we underline, or we look for the vowels, so there are two, the O and the U, so I know that this remaining part of the word has two syllables, so I’m going to need to separate it into two different chunks.

​There are lots of instructional programs out there that teach students kind of, ornate, or, lots of different sorts of rules for where you, where you divide a word into chunks.

​For a lot of students, that’s really challenging to do, and they’re spending a lot of time thinking about where to actually break up a word, rather than actually thinking about how to read the word itself. So we would say, pick a place that makes the most sense that results in syllables that sort of look like real words, or chunks of words.

​You can always make some changes, as you go. So I’m going to break it up here between the N and the S.

I wouldn’t correct a student if they broke it up as C-O-N-S, and T-R-U-C. That matters a lot less to me, especially if it doesn’t hinder them from arriving at the right pronunciation of the word.

So here, we’ve taken this big, long, very intimidating-looking word for a struggling reader, or even for a lot of students, and kind of broken it up into a couple of much shorter, much less intimidating words.

​So we have these chunks, and we want to have students read the chunks and blend them together.

​Re. Con. Struc. Tion (shun).

Right? And a student might read it as reconstruction, and say, reconstruction? And for a lot of students, that’s actually going to trip them up a little bit, because they might go, oh, recon, like, as a short for reconnaissance, where it might trigger something, a word in them that actually isn’t the correct one.

​Which is why we want to provide a little bit of instruction around, well, if it doesn’t sound like a word, or if it doesn’t sound quite right, a lot of the time, we need to flex the vowel, or try a different vowel sound.

​Most multi-syllable words have a schwa, which is kind of like a reduced vowel sound, so it’s not reconstruction, it’s reconstruction. Reconstruction. And it happens in this, in the syllable that is unstressed. So, we don’t say reconstruction, we say reconstruction. That ‘con…’ we don’t stress it as much because English is a very kind of rhythmic language in how we pronounce a lot of words.

​There are some strategies out there for students that advise them to say, if you’re really struggling with vowel sounds, try every single vowel as a schwa, and kind of see if that triggers a word in your mind that might make sense.

​And that’s a pretty solid piece of instructional advice, particularly for students who really struggle with vowel sounds.

​So we want to teach them to try a short vowel, a long vowel, a schwa, if the way that they blend a word isn’t resulting in a word that sort of makes sense to them.

​So, let’s try it here as an audience. I’m gonna give you a little bit of time to take a look at this word. You might definitely encounter this word if you’re reading an anatomy or physiology textbook, or, there’s a wide variety of places that you might encounter this.

​So take a look and first identify any prefixes and suffixes that are in the word, in the remaining part of the word. Note the number of vowels, and that will tell you the number of syllables.

​Break it up where you think might make sense, and then blend the parts together.

​And then make a switch if there are any vowel sounds that are a little tricky.

​Alright, how have we done so far?

​Good. Right, so we’ve identified the prefix D, the suffix… Iv. We have 3 vowel sounds so there are 3 syllables in the remaining part. So I might break it up here.

​Which leads us to De, gen, er, a, tiv.

So, the E and the A may trip students up. They may say D, gen, er. Active, or ativ. Degen er ativ.

​And here’s where we can teach them, again, to flex that vowel sound. We know that in most multi-syllable words, the correct pronunciation has at least one schwa sound, depending on how you pronounce a word, depending on where you’re from, or what area of the country that you might live in.

​Some people might pronounce this one degenerative, some people might pronounce it as degenerative.

​I think there’s not really a correct pronunciation of this word. But to me, what matters a lot more is your ability to recognize that as a prefix, that means the opposite of, or in reverse.

​And that A is what might trip a lot of students up, but we can prompt them to use the short vowel, the long version of the A, or a, or a schwa to get to degenerative.

​Where can we use this routine? There are a lot of ways to sort of tuck this in.

​Let’s see here… Okay. I’m gonna go quickly through this.

​We can either pre-teach words that we know students are going to have difficulties with in our content area text, taking a couple of minutes beforehand to pick out three to five challenging words. Or we can use a repeated reading routine to help students with word reading and fluency difficulties.

​For the sake of time, I’m going to go right into the repeated reading routine and move quickly through it. But this can work with any text. We divide the text into chunks, one to three paragraphs that are cohesive in some way. We assign partners to work with one another, and you could do that in a number of ways.

​Students read the first chunk independently, and the key here is that they underline any word that they can’t read, and they’ll be underlining probably a lot of the multi-syllable words. We circulate as a teacher and then see which words students are struggling with, for the most part. Then we choose about five that many students are underlining.

​We use that multi-syllable routine, give a quick definition or example and some quick instruction on the prefixes, suffixes or roots within the word. Then we put the students back in the text to read the chunk a second time out loud with a partner, taking turns.

​And then the key here is that we provide a different context for reading the passage, right? A text-dependent question, we want to have them summarize or paraphrase it or annotate it in some way, but it’s a comprehension-based purpose. 

Then after reading that chunk, the partners discuss the text, they tell their paraphrasings or summarize, or summarizations to one another, then the whole class gets back together, they’ll have a discussion based on the purpose that you gave them.

​Then you repeat the procedure with the remaining chunks.

​So, now Danielle is gonna talk to us about supporting language comprehension through discussion.

Danielle McMaster: Hey, everyone! Thank you so much. I’m just pulling up my screen really quick.

I lost everybody. Hold on, where did everybody go?

​So I’m just going to take just a few moments to talk to you about how we can support language comprehension through meaningful discussion. As we know, adolescents are highly social, and talk is one of the natural ways that they learn, but one of the challenges can sometimes be getting that conversation to focus on what they are learning.

​So, what I want to kind of talk to you about today are a couple ways that you can create a classroom environment that will encourage students to engage in that meaningful, productive and thoughtful conversation with their peers around the text that you are learning.

​I do want to take just a quick minute and kind of go back to that active view of reading. Jesse, if you could hit the next slide, thank you. And just like how Jesse was, Gabe shared that decoding routine with us that really supports that word recognition and some of those bridging processes.

I’m going to really focus on how discussion can support language comprehension skills. How can we use discussion as a vehicle for strengthening our students’ verbal reasoning skills? How can it help them to navigate the complex language structures that are in these complex texts that they’re exposing? How can we use discussion as motivation and engagement? Because really, discussion really does kind of bring all of these pieces together and give students opportunities to make that thinking visible.

​So why does discussion matter, right? Well, discussion essentially is like a student’s think-aloud. It’s how they practice thinking out loud. Just like we model and we think out loud, discussion allows them to engage in that same kind of process, right? 

And so, by thinking aloud, we, in engaging in that discussion, we are helping students to accomplish that key goal, which is to comprehend complex texts. We really want that discussion to push them beyond recall and basic comprehension, develop those critical thinking skills and then essentially be able to transfer those skills across conversations and other content areas as well.

​Now, another thing that research tells us is that the quality of talk is really important. So, how students are engaging and discussing the purpose– is it related to the text, right? Are they having opportunities to explain their thinking, right? So the quality of discussion is really important, maybe even more so than how much they talk, but the downside to that is that what research shows us is that students aren’t getting enough opportunities to engage in those quality discussions. 

Actually, there is a startling fact from another body of research that we looked at that showed that in an average 60-minute classroom, that the amount of sustained discussion time that was going on is actually only about 1.7 minutes and 60 minutes. You and I cannot have a quality conversation in a minute and a half, right? So, while the quality is important, we as teachers have to look for opportunities to also engage that quantity and how often they are engaging in that conversation.

​And last but not least, the research overwhelmingly shows that engaging in discussion in multiple approaches overall strengthens their ability to comprehend text, because discussion allows them to eventually internalize the processes that they need to do to get through a complex text independently.

​So there are some factors of high quality discussions that really make them high- quality. So what is it, right? What makes a discussion high-quality? Well, the first thing is that we’re focusing on meaning and interpretation, so students are explaining things in their own words, they’re sharing ideas and connecting to prior knowledge. 

Another thing that makes discussions high quality is that we use them in multiple settings and across all content areas. We want them to engage in discussions in every class with partners, whole group, small group and have those opportunities to engage in that.

​We also know that high-quality discussions provide students the opportunity to explore meaning through multiple avenues, whether it’s the author’s purpose, whether it’s looking at claims and arguments, whether they’re sharing ideas or defending ideas, discussion is a vehicle for exploration, right? And it gives many students many different ways to explore what could be a really challenging text.

And last but not least, we know that high-quality discussions integrate all the things that you are already doing in your classroom. Discussion helps connect what they’ve read to what they’re going to write. Discussion helps to facilitate strategy instruction. Discussion requires the use of multiple scaffolds to help get that thinking to that higher order thinking. And we use protocols to provide structure so that discussion can be productive.

​Now, when we look into our practice guide, one of the ones that Jesse shared with us earlier that you’ll have the QR to, shared that there are four essential practices for high-quality discussion, and when we look at these practices, these are educator practices. These are things that we can do as teachers to try to create and prepare our students for a meaningful discussion.

First and foremost, we have to prepare for the discussion. Select engaging texts, developed questions that prompt critical thinking, right? And really think about how we are going to create the opportunity for discussion, which is often done through the next essential practice, which is providing a clear discussion task or a format. So clearly explaining to our students, like, hey, this is the framework in which I want you to discuss, this is how I want you to stay on task and engaged in this discussion. Here’s your role, here’s your purpose, right? And now we’re holding all students accountable. 

And another essential practice that we can use are protocols, and we’ll dive into those a little bit more, but protocols are essentially a framework that guides student talk, keeps discussions focused, and really supports collaboration with our students. 

And our last essential practice is using follow-up questions. And not just us as teachers using follow-up questions, but thinking about how we can empower our students to follow up questions with each other  and to probe each other and prompt each other’s thinking to dig deeper into the text that they are reading.

​I am going to dig a little bit deeper into each of these practices as quickly as I can, but I did want to kind of relate everything that we’re learning to a complex text.

​I’m gonna kind of go back and forth between the practices, and relate it to a letter from Birmingham Jail from Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963. It’s a ninth grade Bex text. It’s a historical letter and an argument. He wrote it when he was in jail, to his critics.

​And if I were a ninth grade teacher, and I was going to teach this classroom, I would have a very clear purpose for reading, and this purpose would guide my planning for discussion. So my purpose would be to analyze how Dr. King uses rhetorical appeals to determine how those appeals strengthen his overall argument. Okay, so now that you know our focus, I’m going to ground those four strategies and what this might look like, in a ninth grade classroom.

​So, the first thing that we need to do is plan, right? We know how important planning is. We want to select engaging texts that spark curiosity and encourage our students to ask questions and think why. We want to select texts that have multiple interpretations that can be understood in different ways. There’s no one way to look at this.

​We want to select texts that encourage that critical thinking and connect to their prior knowledge, right? We want to push them to analyze, to make assumptions and to justify their ideas. 

And last but not least, selecting engaging text helps to build comprehension of complex text, right? So discussion, like I’ve said before, really is a tool that can help students to navigate challenging vocabulary, complex sentence structures, abstract concepts, and then together, they can discuss and build the meaning of that text.

​So if I was going to apply this to a letter from Birmingham Jail, why is this an engaging text for ninth grade students? Well, it is chock-full of rhetorical appeals. Like, they can focus on the purpose, and there’s lots of opportunity for discussion. It invites itself for discussion. Where students can compare and debate about which appeals he’s using, and how he’s using them, and how effective they are. They’re gonna have to go into the text and back up that conversation with text evidence, and there’s lots of ways that they could do that.

​And this is an engaging text, because I can connect this to every student. By ninth grade, they’ve either heard about Dr. Martin Luther King or they’ve heard about the Civil Rights Movement, so there’s multiple entry points for me to connect this learning to students, and they can build on that together in their conversations.

​We also know that we need to plan high-quality questions that are open-ended, ask them to support what they’re thinking with evidence to justify that reasoning and include those follow-up prompts like we’ve been talking about.

​Okay, so what might this look like with a Letter to Birmingham Jail? Well, I would want to create questions that scaffold students’ thinking from identifying rhetorical appeals to analyzing how he uses them in context. So I could plan questions that help take them from that identification to the analysis of the appeal. 

That purpose helps me know these are the kinds of questions I need to create. I can then create questions that encourage students to explain the how of these things, and then I might even push their critical thinking further and create questions that ask them to tell me, well, why is this one better than that one? Why was this one more effective? 

And so, when I know my purpose and when I know what my goal is, I can create questions that can help them to get to those purposes. And here’s an example of some questions I might start with.

​So the next essential practice is to provide a discussion task, or a format. Essentially, we want to tell students what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Even as an adult, when I know what I need to do and why I’m doing it, I’m much more successful in completing that task, and same with our students.

​So, when we use a discussion format, we are thinking about what do we want them to do that’s going to allow them to apply the strategies they’re learning, that’s going to take them back to the text over and over again to pull out that reasoning, to pull out that evidence.

And when we use tasks and formats, we are setting up all students for success. Everybody is responsible, everybody knows what to do, everybody knows what to expect, which can also build that confidence, that motivation and that engagement, because if I’m a struggling reader, but I know exactly what my teacher wants me to do, X, Y and Z, and how to get there, I have a better chance of being successful in the conversation that day.

​So what might this look like with a Letter to Birmingham Jail? My task might tell them to identify appeal, analyze how it’s used, and then determine how it supports his argument. They might use tools like a graphic organizer or some shared prompts to help them with that task.

And the format in which they’re going to discuss this text: maybe one research-based option is to use roles so that they can really focus in. This letter is really long, there’s so much information to dissect, but if I know that I’m going in with one role, like, okay, my job is to connect what he’s saying to other things that I’ve learned, or my job is to clarify what this means. 

I go in with a purpose, and then we all work together to share what we found in our roles, and build and construct that meeting through that dialogue and that conversation.​

Why do discussion tasks and formats work? Because when we give students clearly defined roles in an explicit task, we’re ensuring that they’re all actively participating, we’re ensuring that they’re all focused on what it is that they need to do and how they’re going to get there.​

All right, so our third essential practice is to use the protocols. And again, a protocol provides structure. There’s often steps in a protocol. You do A, B, C, D, right, and then you’ll get to your end result. Protocols help us to explain our positions and our reasoning. They help students to verbalize their thinking, respond to others and expand on their peers’ ideas.

Protocols often invite different interpretations of the text.  But one of the things that I really love about protocols are these last two points, which is where it acknowledges the strong reasoning. So when we’re engaging in the protocol, and my students are just talking, I’m like, yes, that’s awesome, great job. Good job finding that text evidence. It kind of promotes that environment for that positive feedback on what they’re doing and how they’re thinking about the text is great.

And then I love that they do protocols without consensus. I don’t have to agree with you that ethos was more strongly used than pathos, but we can talk about it, we can agree to disagree, and then we can use our collective knowledge to go back and do whatever it is we need to do next with that text.​

So here’s some familiar protocols that you know. I’m not gonna go through them because these are pretty common, and for time, we’re almost done. And then the next is here were some examples of how I might use that protocol with this text, how I might use a Socratic Seminar or Four Corners, read an excerpt of the text, tell me which rhetorical appeal was best used in this, and then they can four corners it and kind of debate it out amongst each other, and we could repeat that for multiple excerpts across the text.​

And last but not least, follow-up questions. I’ve talked a lot about questions. Questions are a big part of discussion because they help to clarify reasoning, prompt deeper thinking of what it is that you are discussing, help to connect ideas across, text to world, text to self, text to text, all those good connections that we like students to make and they let students do that in a collaborative way.​

Now, the point I want to make about follow-up questions before I finish up, and this is my last point, is that follow-up questions are not owned by just the teacher. I think we have this misconception sometimes that we have to go to everybody and be responsible for all of those follow-up questions, and while, yes, we do, we want to monitor, and we want to probe thinking when questions have stalled or when we need to redirect them back to the text.​

But another side of this that I really want us to think about is how can we empower our students in these discussions to engage with each other? And so, by giving them these sentence stems, these question stems, and encouraging them to respond to peers with the questions, we’re empowering them to take ownership, we’re empowering them to not just hold the information, but to seek more.​

And eventually, over time, they will learn to facilitate that back-and-forth conversation without me necessarily needing to be there to prompt everything along. So, follow-up questions serve multiple purposes and can be done by everyone in the class.​

And that was a discussion in a nutshell for you all today.

Jesse Steif: All right, thank you, thank you, Danielle. Before we go into Q&A and discussion, because I know we’re just about time here, I wanted to throw up the QR code here and give everyone access to the document.​

In here, you’ll have a Google Doc where you’ll find all of the relevant IES practice guides, along with a wide variety of the other ones that we showed a little earlier in the presentation.​

Everyone who registered for the session, which, if you’re here and you’re watching us live, you’ll get a copy of the recording.

​And so, if you’re scrambling to get your phone out, or if it’s in the other room and you just can’t get to it, you’ll have it here.