Christina Flake: Alright, let’s get started, because we have a lot of information we are excited to share with you today.

So, thank you for joining us.

Just a little bit about the Lastinger Center. So, our goal at the Lassinger Center is really to improve the quality of teaching and learning from birth to 12th grade by providing practical application of research in classrooms so that all learners can experience that lifelong success.

And before we get to the content that you all came here for, let me just do a quick introduction of the folks that are hosting you today. So, my name is Christina Flake, and I am joined by my colleague Brittany Duquesne, and we are both a part of the Literacy face-to-face implementation team here at the Lastinger Center, and we’re both very passionate about supporting teachers with the tools that you need to support all the students in your classroom.

And this topic today is one that we are both excited to dive into: comprehension.

So let’s get started because we have a lot we want to share, and ensure that you walk away from this session with practical ways to support your students with comprehension in the upcoming school year.

So, a little bit about what this session’s going to contain today. But before we get into that, I just want you to think and ask yourselves, have you ever asked your students questions after reading and realized they didn’t actually understand the text?

Or maybe they could answer, but only the literal questions. And they really struggled to make meaning of how all the pieces of that text fit together.

In our time today, we’re gonna unpack why that happens and what we can do differently. We’re gonna talk about some evidence-based reading comprehension instruction, and explore the factors of, like, what is reading comprehension, and what influences?

And then we’re going to dive into the why and how of structuring those lessons to ensure students, not teachers, are doing that heavy lifting of reading.

So, I want you to take just a moment and jot down what comes to mind when you think about what it means to comprehend text.

Brittany Duquaine: You can go ahead and put it in the chat, too.

Christina Flake: If you want to just throw it in the chat, that’ll actually be a really good record and idea of how our thinking about it has changed throughout our time together.

So, as we start thinking about comprehension, we think about the years of instruction that students have had.

Maybe not if you’re in kindergarten, but we hope that they have some pre-K experience. But as students are moving through the grades, many students still really struggle to summarize their ideas from text, to really understand the difference between the evidence that supports those ideas or that central idea, and how to integrate all the information that they get from the text to make inferences from it and then writing in response to reading.

Oof!

Sometimes that can be a struggle for students. So that really guides our thinking into  whether we are teaching comprehension in ways that actually improve students’ comprehension.

But we have to first start with a common understanding of what reading comprehension is before we can even begin to talk about instruction to improve it.

So, we often refer to reading comprehension as though it’s a single skill. Sometimes we ask questions like, did the student comprehend the passage? Did the student understand this text? What score did they get on that assessment?

However, reading comprehension is far more complex than a simple ability that students either possess or do not possess.

And the research gives us a really rich definition of that. You can see here, the RAND report from 2002 really helps us understand that reading comprehension is that process of extracting and constructing meaning from text.

It’s not a passive process.

Think for a moment, what does a reader need to know and be able to do to extract anything from text?

What do readers need to know and be able to do to construct meaning from what they’ve extracted from that text?

Students aren’t just receiving that information, they’re actively having to decode words, make sense of ideas, connect information, draw inferences, make sense of how the text is structured, integrating that new learning and what they already know.

Whew, that’s a lot.

And their ability to do all of those things is really dependent upon the reader’s knowledge and skills, the demands of that text and the demands of the task that we’re asking them to do.

And this framework is kind of one of the most important ideas that we’ll discuss today, because it’s important to understand that comprehension doesn’t just live solely within the reader. A student may comprehend one text successfully, but then struggle with another. And we’re going to look at why that is.

Reading comprehension depends upon this interaction between the reader, the text and the task.

And when reading comprehension breaks down, we need to investigate which of these factors may be contributing to that break, and then look deeper to understand why it’s breaking down and how this should inform our instruction.

So let’s start with looking at the factors impacting the reader when it comes to comprehension. What are the influences, and how should that inform our instruction?

So, you’ve likely seen Scarborough’s Reading Rope before, but today I want us to think about it a little differently. I want you to imagine an actual rope.

A rope becomes strong because of all of its many strands that are woven together. And if one of those strands is weak, frayed or loosened, maybe it sat out in the sun too long, that entire rope becomes less effective at carrying the load that it’s intended to.

The same is true for our students. Comprehension isn’t just a single skill, it’s the result of many skills developing and working together over time.

Word recognition, vocabulary, background knowledge, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge all contribute to a student’s ability to comprehend text.

And sometimes students develop most of these strands successfully, but one strand remains weaker than others. Maybe they have a strong vocabulary, but are struggling with their background knowledge decoding unfamiliar multisyllabic words.

Maybe they can read the words accurately, but they lack that academic language and knowledge needed to make sense of complex tests.

Just as a snag or a weakness in any section of a rope affects the strength of the whole rope, a weakness in one strand of reading can affect a student’s ability to fully comprehend and learn from text.

The important implication for us is that when a student struggles, we shouldn’t immediately assume that they can’t comprehend or aren’t trying. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, which strand might be creating this challenge? Because once we identify the strand, we can provide the instructional support needed to strengthen it.

Now that we have a kind of a big picture of the many skills that a reader needs to be able to comprehend text, and in understanding that, we can use that knowledge to inform the instruction we provide them, let’s think about the role that the text plays in comprehension.

When students struggle with the text, the challenge might not be immediately obvious. But if we take some time to look more closely at the text, we’ll see there are many hidden demands that can create significant barriers for many students.

Some of those demands are that word-reading difficulty. So, not just being able to comprehend itself, but that slow, effortful decoding can limit access to meeting.

And then we have knowledge demands, and these can stem from a lot of authors often assuming that readers already possess relevant knowledge and experiences that they may not have. And when students lack this background knowledge, the comprehension might break down despite having accurate word reading.

Then we have those vocabulary and those language demands.

Texts often contain unfamiliar academic vocabulary and varying sentence structures that increase that cognitive load for students.

Students may decode the words, but not really understand the meaning of them.

And then we have genre and text structure.

Not all texts within a given genre are equal. If I think about historical fiction compared to fantasy, they’re both narrative texts, but the way they structure the text will vary greatly.

Many students are less familiar with varying types of informational and expository texts than narrative texts.

And most elementary students that leveled text there just kind of sticks to one text structure throughout the text. But then students get to that secondary level, where that typically transitions between different text structures, different connective language and it puts more of a cognitive demand on students as they try to actively track meaning across text.

And then we have text density. So, as students are moving through the grades, text is becoming increasingly more challenging, because it contains many interconnected ideas in just a small amount of text. It might have abstract concepts, figurative language or layered arguments that require students to sustain attention and hold information in their working memory.

By looking at the text we’re expecting students to read ahead of time, it allows us to identify some of these hidden demands, and then build in ways that we will support students during our explicit instruction that supports them while they read.

So let’s take a look at what this process might sound like, as if I were preparing, you’re going to hear me talk about the Watsons Go to Birmingham throughout this webinar today. And so, that is kind of the anchor text. And as I preview this text, I’m asking myself, what could make comprehension challenging for my student?

So I look first and think about the word-reading perspective. Most of the text is accessible, but students are going to encounter some multisyllabic words that they are less familiar with, so I need to make note of those and kind of prepare to support them.

And then those knowledge demands: students might not know much about life in the 1960s or what life was like for a Black American family during that time period, and they really probably need some historical context surrounding that story.

And then as I think about the vocabulary and the language demands, I see that the author uses humor, sarcasm and some figurative language that I have to know that my students might not quite understand. So, I’m gonna need to prepare to help them interpret that beyond just the literal meaning that is there.

And then thinking about the genre and the text structure of this text.

This is historical fiction, and the story kind of unfolds through a series of family experiences, rather than kind of what younger students are used to, that problem-solution structure.

So, students are going to need to track characters and relationships and events across the chapters of this text.

So I’m going to need to think about how I am going to support them with tracking that information across text.

And then finally, I looked at the text density, and notice that there are long sections of dialogue, multiple speakers and many ideas that are implied instead of explicitly stated, so that requires my students to make inferences.

So, once I’ve identified these hidden demands by looking through the text, I have to think about how those demands influence the task we’re asking students to complete.

So when I think about the skills of the reader and the hidden demands of this complex text, I need to understand how we might need to plan that task in a way that supports students.

So there are a few things to consider when thinking about that task.

First, we need to think about, why are students even reading this text? What do I want them to be able to do? And finally, how am I going to support their success with this task?

So, let’s look deeper at that “why”.

Setting a purpose for reading signals to the brain what information is most important and guides the reader’s attention to help them make meaningful engagement with the text.

And if I build knowledge on a specific topic or concept, do I want them to do a critical analysis? Do I want them to read this just to gather information? Or do I want them to either compare and contrast within the text? Maybe I’m going to have them read multiple texts that I want them to compare and contrast across texts.

And then I need to decide what I want them to do with that information that I just focused their attention to. So, I may want them to use a venn diagram to compare and contrast two texts that they just read.

I might want them to use evidence that they gathered to write an argumentative essay, build a historical timeline of events or discuss characters’ pers- perspectives during a Socratic seminar.

So once I kind of know what I want them to do, then I need to determine how my instruction is going to support the goals for this lesson that’s going to allow for students to be successful. Thinking about what topic or vocabulary knowledge they need to know about this task to be able to complete it. What do they need to know about a venn diagram, about each space and what it represents, how to use it? Do they know the components of an argumentative essay?

I need to think about how students will gather the information as they read. Will they annotate or highlight the text? Will they use two-column notes? Do they know how to annotate or highlight a text? Or take notes while they’re reading?

And then I can think about if there’s an anchor chart, a handout or an example that students can refer to if they get stuck? Or maybe a graphic organizer that will support them throughout the process, such as a pre-made blank timeline where they only have to focus on filling in the dates or events into that, or maybe a blank outline of an argumentative essay to help them think through it.

Brittany Duquaine: Alright. It’s my section.

Hi guys, my name is Brittany Duquaine, I am the other facilitator at the Lastinger Center. Christina really set the tone for us on some background information about comprehension, but one thing that we want to talk about is what’s currently happening in our classrooms. Now, I can say that Christina or I, we have not been in your classrooms to say this is what you’re doing in your classrooms.

However, we can tell you about some research studies, and what some researchers have found.

And so, in the 1970s, which, bear with me, I know that was a while ago, that Dolores Durkin, she went in and she was wondering, what is happening right now with comprehension instruction? And so, it’s really important to know that she didn’t tell the teachers what she was going in to observe, she just went in to observe their practice.

And what she found was that teachers were doing a lot of reading, and then they would ask questions and the students would answer and then they would just move on.

And the reason that that’s really important is there wasn’t a lot of instruction that was happening. That’s a lot of comprehension assessment, where we’re reading, then we’re asking questions, they’re answering and then we’re just moving on.

And so, if we fast forward 50 years, another group of researchers more recently wanted to see, have things improved? Like, that study was a while ago, have things improved when it comes to comprehension instruction?

What they found is that while a lot of practices have improved, there are practices with comprehension that still remained, and it was the same thing that was found.

When they observed these 60 studies that they did in classrooms and teachers, they found that the teachers still read something, they asked questions about it, the students answered and then they evaluated if it was a right or a wrong answer.

Now, the problem with this is that it is more assessment than it is instruction. And so what this tells us is that in our classrooms right now, we’re not giving a lot of explicit instruction. I really think that this is coming from a good place, that teachers are trying to build comprehension, but what it’s resulting in is I’m just asking a lot of questions, my students are answering a lot of questions, but we’re never really focused on building knowledge and fostering the students to learn new things.

And so, from that study, the research team described another pattern that they’re noticing, and that’s that the teacher’s reading the text, the teacher’s explaining the concepts, the teacher’s paraphrasing the content, and the teacher’s summarizing the content. That’s a lot of teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher.

That’s a lot of teacher talk. Well, we know whoever’s doing the talking is also doing a lot of the thinking and the processing and the learning. And so we can’t have that be the majority of that as the teacher. We need that to shift onto the students.

And so we need to shift who’s talking, who’s thinking, who’s discussing and explaining reasoning onto our students. And that’s what this visual shows us, is that what often happens in our classrooms, and for those of you who are in my sessions, we talked about this the last few days, is that it’s a lot of teacher talk. Like, 80% of the classroom conversation is that teacher talk, and we really need to shift it onto the students.

I’m gonna move us into this next section, and I want you just to reflect, you’re not gonna have to put it in the chat or do any kind of, like, oh, that’s me, but think about your own practice and what you do with your comprehension instruction.

Is it more like the orange column, where you’re delivering instruction, you’re reading aloud, then you’re asking a bunch of questions, the students answer, then maybe they elaborate, or you get them to elaborate a little and then they complete a task.

Or are you more like the green column, where you’re modeling for the students, and then the students read, the students discuss, the students reread, the students reason and the students are able to write?

And so, think for just a moment on what you do in your classrooms. Am I more of that voice that’s constantly doing the work, or am I more of the person who’s just facilitating my students doing the work, having the discussion and doing the thinking?

And we really need to shift that. Because the person you see at the bottom that’s doing all of that cognitive work, the person that’s having to use their brain, is the person that’s also doing the learning. And so we need to engage our students with reading. We need them to be thinking, discussing, explaining, re-reading the text, writing about it, because when they write about it, they have to take all of the information that they learn and put it together and synthesize it, which is a lot of work.

And so, we know that what we’re doing may be a little teacher-talk heavy, and so how can we make that look different?

Now, this is (and I love the title of this slide, a better framework) how we can support our students with their comprehension.

And we know comprehension, it’s not a single skill, and so we cannot reduce it down to just asking a question and having our students answer that question. We have to really facilitate and support our students in building knowledge, because when they understand or they comprehend, then our students have good knowledge, and they’re building knowledge as they go and engage with different texts.

Now, we have to do this, though, before reading, we have to do it during reading and we have to do it after reading. It can’t just be something that we read through the text, we get done with it and then we ask questions at the end. It has to be something that we facilitate all throughout, and we also have support along the way that is going to help support our students in being successful for them to be able to engage with the text.

And so, we’re gonna go through each of these, and then we’re also gonna have that Birmingham example follow us throughout the rest of our day that we’re gonna talk about this.

But what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna just give you a brief little overview of each of these, and then we’ll go through them in more depth.

And so, before reading, we know we have to prepare our students to read. We have to prepare them to understand the text. That’s different than front-loading or just dumping a bunch of information on our students. We want to be really intentional, we want to keep it kind of brief, but be intentional.

Setting a purpose for reading, maybe building a few essential vocabulary words that they need to have and building any kind of background knowledge that they need.

Then we have during-reading. We have to support our students, and you’ll notice the word they is bolded. They, the students, are the ones that have to be engaged in the text, engaged in the discussion and engaged in that analysis. I see a lot of you guys are agreeing, I see your reactions.

The students have to be engaged. Now, we as the teachers need to shift into supporting the students and helping them organize their thinking. Maybe that’s with a graphic organizer, or taking notes and then adding to it. We have to support their thinking along the way. We can’t expect them just to be able to do that independently, but we need to really kind of take that step back and put ourselves in the position of, I’m going to be supporting my students in their thinking, guiding them and prompting them.

I want us to think about questions in a little bit of a different way. Questions are no longer used to just check for understanding, but they’re used to build our students’ knowledge.

Then we also have after reading, and that’s gonna be where we’re asking our students to take everything that they’ve learned and consolidate it together and synthesize it and think about what have I learned about this topic, what’s the knowledge that I’ve gained and how am I going to put that all together and be able to express it, or to be able to provide an understanding of what I just gained and what I learned?

And so, we’re gonna start with preparing to read. Now, this is not front-loading information for our students and just dumping on them everything that they need to know.

We have to prepare them. It’s not pre-teaching, and we’ll see that at the bottom, and they are different things. They sound similar, but they are very different.

And we have to think about when we have our before reading, we have to make sure that we’re setting them up for success.

So we have to think about, what is it that I want my students to learn from this? So I have to have that end in mind when I’m thinking about what is that comprehension task that they’re going to have to complete. I’m going to then set a purpose so that my students know before they even engage in the text, that they’re going to be reading for this purpose, or to complete this task, or to do this activity, and have this discussion, and that way, when they engage in the text, they know I’m going to monitor for this all throughout my reading.

We also want to introduce key vocabulary. That’s not going to be every single challenging vocabulary word that they encounter, because that could be a lot of words that your students are going to encounter. But it’s just the words that are really essential to understanding the text.

We also want to build background knowledge that’s going to be relevant for our students to understand the text.

And then we also have to be motivated and get our students curious about what it is they’re reading. If you think about when you read something, (I’m working on my doctorate right now.) There’s things I read, I’m gonna be honest, I’m not interested in. And my comprehension, it’s not there for it, because I’m not interested in it. And I think if you think about your own interaction with text, the things you love, or the things you’re really interested in, your comprehension is greater. 

Now, is every text we set in front of our students something they’re going to be interested in? No. But they also feed off of what you’re putting out there for them, and so if you get them motivated, or you get them curious about it in certain ways, that’s going to motivate them to be able to be engaged with it and be excited about it.

Now, the other piece we have to think about is building knowledge over time. And so, there is a large base of research that shows that building knowledge over time is so beneficial to our students.

I can think about myself. If I learn something and it’s really brief that I learned about it, maybe I could talk about it, but just at the surface level. I couldn’t write about it in depth, I couldn’t discuss it in depth and I couldn’t really have a really well-thought-out conversation with it. The same is true with our students. When we’re asking them to deepen their thinking or express themselves in a deeper way in their writing, they have to have more knowledge that they can pull upon when we’re asking them to do that.

That’s why it’s really critical that when we’re thinking about our text and how we’re structuring what we’re introducing and the topics we’re doing, that we’re considering the knowledge that we’re building over time.

And this is something that, not just in the state of Florida, but the country as a whole, that we really need to be mindful of when we’re looking at our curriculum or our pacing guides, and what we’re introducing to our students that we’re building students’ knowledge over time. So we have here as our examples that in week one, we could talk about weather. We’re going to build vocabulary for our students. They’re going to be exposed to different types of weather. But then when they go to read about storm systems in week two, they’re going to pull all of that knowledge that they had in week one about weather, the vocabulary, all of that background information and that kind of ground knowledge that you said.

They’re gonna then be able to think about storm systems in a deeper way, a more meaningful way, because they’re going to have those connections that they can make. That by the time they get to week four with climate impacts, that’s a heavy topic if you were to just throw it out to your students, but if you built their knowledge and their vocabulary over time, they’re going to be able to really have a comprehensive understanding of the topic that they can engage in a really deep and meaningful way, and you also built their knowledge over time as well.

And so, we have to think about before reading, and what we can do for our students. And this is a way you can structure it. It’s an example of kind of a before reading routine that you can do.

And so, we set the purpose, and in order to do that, we have to think about what is that essential thing that I need my students to get out of this? What is the learning objective, or maybe an essential question, that I want my students to learn or gain as a result of doing this work or reading this text?

Then we want to preview some key vocabulary. Now, when you get, because I know we have K-12 here, potentially, like, all different grade levels, you can get into some more academic text that has bolded words and all these kinds of vocabulary words that you need to teach your students.

Before reading is not the time to do that. We just want to pick a few essential words that are going to impair the student’s ability to comprehend the text. But again, preparing to read is not front-loading information and just dumping a bunch of vocabulary words on them. Just think about what are going to be a couple really essential words that are critical to the student’s ability to comprehend, and then during reading, as they engage with those other vocabulary words, there’s gonna be other tools that they can use to be able to figure out the meanings of those words.

And then, we also want to build knowledge. Our students come to us with all different types of knowledge that they have from different cultures, situations and life experiences. We want to think about, what are my students coming into reading this text with? What do I have to build for my students?

And we want to keep it brief, but we also want to engage our students with it, and so you might do that through a little discussion with your students, you might show them a little video clip or even a quick little text that you could read with them just to build any kind of essential background knowledge that they need in order to understand what it is that they’re about to engage with.

And so, Christina’s gonna walk us through this before-reading example with the text, and then we’ll talk about what happens during reading.

Christina Flake: So, as I mentioned earlier, we were going to use the Watsons Go to Birmingham as kind of our anchor text. And so, as I thought about and knew that I wanted students to explore multiple perspectives, and I really wanted them to explore multiple text types, too.

And the Watsons Go to Birmingham really just provides, like, one perspective on courage and change.

And so, I looked through the best text list and thought, oh, I can talk about the I Am Malala, and Paul Revere’s ride, and this is really going to help expand my students’ understanding of how different individuals from different historical time periods and different cultures either use their voices or actions to make an impact.

And I realized that an added benefit to this was that they were going to be able to be exposed to different text types. So I’ve got historical fiction, a memoir and some poetry. All of these together are really going to allow them to, like, build that knowledge that they need across the genre and topics.

And so, as you look across these texts, you’ll notice that each of them kind of contributes something different to students’ understanding of courage, how they’ve enacted courage and what action they take to enact change. Together, they really help build that knowledge that students need for deeper comprehension.

Once I kind of had an understanding of the text that I wanted to be in this unit and understanding, I knew I wanted them to explore multiple perspectives about how events impacted individuals really influence change.

And I wanted students to understand that they’re not just reading these disconnected stories, but instead are, like, building an understanding around a larger idea.

So I decided to use an essential question to really establish that coherence across text.

And then I thought, well, I also want to provide a learning objective, because I really want them to have a clear outcome, so that they know where this learning is headed. And they could really use that to guide the evidence and the knowledge that they’re gathering from each of these texts so that they will eventually be able to answer this essential question, and really explain how individuals have demonstrated courage during times of crisis.

And this is really important, because purpose really influences attention, and when students know why they’re reading, they’re more likely to focus on those ideas that really matter.

And then, let’s zoom in. So that was the unit level, but at the text level, when students are going to begin reading the Watsons go to Birmingham, I don’t want them to simply just read the chapters, to answer some questions. I really want them to gain, like, a specific understanding from this text.

So, I decided to set a learning objective specifically for this text to really focus students’ attention to the critical elements that will eventually help them answer that essential question, but it will not only support their understanding of this text.

It will just eventually be that culminating unit.

And so then, I next needed to think about the vocabulary.

And identify words and ideas that were going to be critical, both across the unit and within the specific text.

And I decided that I wanted to use a cumulative vocabulary log, because I felt like that would really help students not only understand the text and ideas, but also be able to track how these words are applied across text to really support that essential question that I’m wanting them to engage with.

And I’m really hoping that this will support them as they are writing the summaries from this text at the end of their unit.

And so something that helped me really narrow the words that I selected so that I wasn’t trying to pre-teach every unfamiliar word that students may encounter was to ask myself, can students understand the important ideas of this unit, or this text, without understanding this word?

And then finally, I really needed to think about, like, what knowledge students needed to support their understanding. I was gonna chunk this text into chapters so that I can do the other two companion texts throughout this also, but I really felt like students might benefit from understanding, like what family life may have been like in the early 1960s. 

If students haven’t traveled that much outside of the state that they’re in, maybe they needed an understanding of, like, where Flint, Michigan is, and then where Birmingham, Alabama is, and kind of track that journey to have an understanding, because if there’s some Florida kids that might not be familiar when we’re talking about the setting in Flint, Michigan, of, like, where that is, and that it gets really cold there, the snow and so some of those elements within the text that they might not be familiar with.

They’ve never been in snow, stuck their tongue on a cold pole or a car mirror like what happens in the story.

I really wanted to find a way to engage my students with what they needed to know for these first three chapters in a fun, easy way, instead of feeling like I was just dumping all of this knowledge.

And so, we’ve got our before setting a purpose, identifying that critical vocabulary and then building just enough knowledge to support understanding.

And now we’re going to shift our attention to what happens while students are actually engaging with the text, because that’s where much of the comprehension work should occur.

Brittany Duquaine: I’m originally from Wisconsin, and we do not do those things in the Midwest, guys. Yes, we know better.

Alright, so we’re gonna shift to during reading, and this is something where we kind of need to make the biggest shift with our instruction. So if we think back to what I had started my section with about how teachers are doing a lot of talking, students are doing just a lot of listening and being passive in the classroom and passively listening and not really engaging, that’s typically what’s happening during this instruction, or during this reading time.

And so, we need to think about how we can shift that to the teacher being the listener. They’re the ones just sitting back, providing support as they listen, and as they see, oh, my students need some support here and there, or maybe I need to guide their thinking in this way, and then I allow them to go back in the text and I pull my voice back.

And we really need to think about how we can shift that responsibility onto our students, because we need the students’ reading. We need them to monitor their understanding and take all of these strategies that they have and be able to apply them and use them and receive corrective feedback on how they’re using them.

We also need students to be the ones so engaged with the text that they’re asking questions about things that they don’t understand from the text. So they have wonderings. They’re not just going through and reading it, because my teacher told me to, but they’re truly so engaged that they’re asking questions. They want to have discussions with peers about what they’re learning and noticing that’s supporting that essential question, or what they were reading for.

We also want students to be able to revisit or look back and think about, okay, I realized this in this section, but maybe I need to refine my thinking about that, because it wasn’t quite what I was thinking now that I’ve gathered more information throughout the text.

So, one thing we can do during reading that will facilitate this is we might want to have students do some kind of note-taking through a graphic organizer or annotated notes.

Now, I say that while keeping in mind that we don’t want just a task that’s gonna go away and be more like an assessment, where we never revisit it, we don’t bring it into discussion and we don’t have them actively engage with it or add to it throughout our lesson. But instead, we’re gonna shift, and I think you’re gonna see as we go throughout the rest of our session today that it’s not just an assessment that I’m using this graphic organizer, or having them take notes so that I can be like, yeah, they participated, and then move on. But they’re using that graphic organizer to add to it continuously, to support their thinking, to add evidence and pull from it, so that when they have a discussion, that’s a support that they have right there that they can use to have deeper conversations or to expand thoughts that they’re having.

And so, we have a graphic organizer, an example here with that Birmingham text that as they read chapters one through three, they’re gonna fill in these sections below. And like I said, that’s okay. Have them engage, have them fill out that graphic organizer and have them add to that thinking. They need to have an understanding of some of these more literal things so that they can eventually have deeper conversations and engage later on. You’ll see how they’re going to add to it as they have conversations or they grab new information from their peers that they’re having conversations with.

And so, one thing I want to talk about is the difference between literal thinking and deeper thinking. Literal thinking gets a really bad rap.

And I’m not saying that in our classrooms, all we need to ask is literal, right there, recall questions. However, there is no way to answer a deeper thinking question, like, “why did that happen,” if you don’t even know what happened.

And we have to keep that in mind, because as our students are trying to answer some questions, sometimes we can get so stuck in, “oh yeah, I need my students to be analyzing this and making inferences and explaining this,” and we skip past, “do my students even have this literal, right-there understanding of what happened in the text, who was involved or where this took place?

And they need that in place in order to move into having that deeper thinking and being able to take it one step further and expand it. And so, I say that because that literal thinking, that right there kind of question, it’s good to have. It’s good to make sure, oh, do my students have this basic understanding of what was in the text?

However, we can’t live there. We then have to take it that step further and move into that deeper thinking, where we check, do they have that literal understanding? And then I’m going to ask them that deeper thinking question. 

So I might ask them what happened. After I make sure they know what happened, then I ask them, well, why did that happen? And I get them to think about it a little bit deeper. So taking that basic understanding, that step further, to get them to analyze it, to really make inferences and explain it.

And so, when we’re having discussions with our students, these are going to be really critical to make sure that we’re engaging our students and they’re active participants as we’re having discussions. And these are also going to be something that we can’t just pull out on a whim and just wing it. We have to really intentionally plan and think about how I am going to engage my students.

How am I going to get them to discuss this? How am I going to get what I want them to learn from this? And so, these are sort of some considerations that you can use to kind of get that discussion time started with your students.

And keep in mind, again, that we can have supports there for our students. And so, some students, they’re talkers, and they’re going to be able to just talk about the tags and engage, and they’re going to actively do that. But for some other students, they might not feel as confident to engage, okay? So we can have those graphic organizers that they use throughout the reading and added information to, we can have them there as a support.

Or maybe we can have some sentence stems for our students to kind of get them started to be able to participate and engage in the conversation.

But we have to think about what is the purpose for our discussion? What is going to be the thing that I had my students reading for? What do I want my students to get out of this discussion? We have to be really purposeful with that. That’ll take us past just kind of those literal right-there thinking questions that are not really leading to much discussion from our students.

We have to plan a few questions that are going to require that deeper thinking and can get that discussion started. So that might be, like, how does the event change the character, or why do you think the author included this particular detail? So, getting our students thinking, giving them some discussion that they can have.

We also want to remind our students and just make it normal practice for our students to use sentence stems. Make it normal for them to use their graphic organizers and always have them right there as that support or that tool. Because if we’re honest, even that talker in the classroom who could talk and talk and talk, their conversation and their contribution to our discussion is going to be that much deeper, that much richer, if they’re actually going back to their graphic organizer and pulling in evidence and adding to it.

And so, on this next slide we have some different kinds of ways, questions and discussions with sentence stems on ways that you can use it, (and so I’ve seen some people that have their cameras on, have been snapping pictures of some screens. You might want to take one of this.)

I think I saw a question come through the chat on if you’re gonna get a copy of the recording, you will get a copy of the recording, and it’ll be on the same website that you registered. And so you’ll be able to see it again, but if you want to grab a picture, grab a picture of this slide.

But there’s some different ideas on ways that you can support discussions with your students, so can you tell me more about why you think that? Or I got confused when the author said blank, what do you think the author meant by that?

There’s nothing wrong with sentence stems. In fact, it’s just there to kind of support the students to get that conversation started, or to think about, how can I get this thought that I have inside of me, how am I going to get it out and verbalize it? Just ways that we can really value everyone in the classroom to make sure that they can be active participants in the conversation and equally contribute to the conversation.

And the other thing is, and I told you I was gonna revisit it, is that we don’t want that graphic organizer to just be, I write it, I finish it and I turn it in and it’s done. No, we want, during this conversation, for our students to be able to add to this graphic organizer, because that is gonna bring to our students the understanding that there is rich discussion happening. There is still learning happening through this discussion of the text that I’m having with my peers.

And so, yes, I may have taken notes on the characters, or the setting or the conflict, but after I heard my peer share this about the setting, I realized, oh, I missed that, and then I’m gonna add that in here. And so, we can encourage our students to continuously add to this graphic organizer, because they’re gonna use this when they go and try to write and synthesize their understanding of the text.

And so we don’t want it just to be, I wrote this down, and now that’s all it’s gonna say, but no, when we have this discussion, continue to add to it, continue to engage with this graphic organizer so it’s not just that assessment. It’s really something that I’m gonna use to build my knowledge over time, and then I’m gonna also use it when I get into my after-reading.

Which is where I have to take everything I read, everything I discussed and all that new information, and I have to sit, and I have to grapple with it. I have to think about, how can I write something that is gonna connect all of these ideas, all of these concepts, and all of this knowledge that I just learned? How am I gonna organize that, and I’m going to integrate it into something that is coherent and able to be understood?

And that’s difficult for our students, to be able to organize their thinking in that way, to use evidence to support their thinking and to try to make meaning out of what it is that they just learned, because it’s new information to them. And so, we really want to make sure that we are helping our students, we’re fostering their involvement with the text, we’re getting them to make connections throughout, engaging them and then we’re also supporting them in after-reading with deepening their understanding. 

Now, we do have that writing piece here, and I’m curious in the chat if you guys want to put in, how many of you engage your student in writing after reading?

You’ll see the benefits as you start to. Sometimes. Yeah.

I mean, I know that I wasn’t always the best of it. I think writing is something that, if I’m honest, I avoided like the plague when I was in the classroom, because it’s hard for students to write, and so we have to think about how we can support our students.

Because if we are not engaging our students in that writing, well, then our students aren’t going to practice it, and they’re not going to do it on their own, probably. And so, we are going to need to support our students in that, and one of the best ways to take all of this information and build an understanding is when we encourage them to write, grapple with the information, sit with it, think about it and actually have to engage with it.

And so, that’s gonna be that writing piece at the end, and we have our…

Christina Flake: Brittany, something I wanted to mention about writing. I know that, like, when I was in the classroom and my administrator set up my schedule, it was always that I had a reading block. And I had a writing block, and so they were kind of just disjointed and separate. 

And so we really, with this, want to challenge that thinking and make sure that writing is incorporated as a part of the reading in response to that reading to deepen the understanding. And it doesn’t have to be something like a long writing task. It can be a summarizing of the text.

And they have the discussion and this graphic organizer that’s really going to help support that and deepen their understanding. And really, that, like, summary writing, research has found that to be the most effective, for both elementary and secondary students.

Brittany Duquaine: I love what someone put in the chat, they said, “read, inhale, write, exhale.”

I love that. It’ll calm us down in the classroom, and it’ll also remind us of reading and writing, the importance.

Alright, so like Christina said, we want to make sure that we are using that graphic organizer to write our summary, because we want to make sure that our students are pulling from all of this information that they’ve gathered, they’ve gotten from their discussion and they’re using that as a tool as they write their summary.

And so, to wrap up everything that we covered, and again, I know we can only meaningfully consume so much information at one time, but you will get a recording, is that we want to make sure we’re engaging our students before, during, and after reading. And so that’s going to be setting that purpose for our students before reading, making sure that they understand what they’re going in, what they’re reading for.

We want to introduce a few essential vocabulary words for our students and we want to build any background knowledge that we have, that they’re going to need, or that, if they don’t have, is going to impair their comprehension.

Then during reading, we want to make sure that we’re shifting from the teacher doing all of the talking, and we want to shift it onto the students to make sure that they are doing all of the talking, or most of the talking. And then we as the teachers, are just shifting more into that place of having to discuss with the students, or maybe prompt them or encourage them to go deeper.

Then, afterwards, we want to make sure that we are having our students write. They’re having to synthesize everything that they’ve learned, and really take everything that they’ve learned and do that summary, like Christina was saying. We have to summarize and think about what it is, and how am I going to put all of this together? And then as a result of that, the outcome is comprehension.

We also want to keep in mind what Christina was saying, that we have to keep in mind that across all of these, we have to keep in mind that it’s going to change depending upon the reader that I’m working with, and the specific needs that that reader has. The demands of each text is going to change and the supports that I’m going to have to provide my students is going to change.

And then also the demands of the task are gonna change as well.

And so, with that, we remember that purposeful instruction leads to powerful understanding.

And so, to summarize everything that we’ve said, if we were to put it in two sentences.

It is that comprehension is not a skill to be taught in isolation. It is the result of successful reading, thinking, discussing, writing and learning. Our role as educators is not to try to teach comprehension directly, but to try to create conditions that allow comprehension and knowledge to be developed over time.

And so, we have just a few minutes left.

I know we’re at this weird point to kind of have a webinar, I want us to think about what is something that I learned today that I want to be really intentional about in this upcoming school year? What’s one shift I can make that will increase my students’ thinking? And so I want you to take a moment to think about that.

You can jot it down on, like, a post-it, or somewhere that you know, I’m gonna remember this, and I’m gonna try to be intentional with this in this next upcoming school year.

With that, I also want to put up our information. So today, you had Jesse in the chat, and we probably should mention, Jesse is from the Lastinger Center. He is not just someone who loves research articles and puts them in the chat, which he does love research.

But he is putting some resources in the chat. I see that he’s been doing and answering some questions, but you also have Christina and myself on the call, and we have our emails right here. So our job is truly to support educators, and so if you have any questions, please reach out to either of us. We would love to answer any questions, and we really appreciate you all being on the call with us today.