Family time is learning time. Did you know that kids learn most of their vocabulary outside of school, through conversations with family and friends? Or that drawing pictures during play time lays the foundation for reading and writing, even for the youngest of learners?

Families have always been an active part of the teaching and learning process, and they became (and continue to be) even more crucial during the pandemic.

The following research-based ideas are intended to be manageable, interactive activities you and your child can engage in to help develop their reading and writing skills, motivation, and confidence. Some of these strategies target specific age groups or grade levels, while others apply to kids of all ages. You’ll see them categorized accordingly. Try out two or three of them and make them a part of your family’s other important routines, like brushing teeth.

General reading and writing improvement strategies that will help kids of all ages

No matter your kid’s age, several factors influence their reading and writing growth, including attitude, motivation, access, and exposure. Think of the following strategies as tips for developing internalized mindsets, behaviors, and habits.

Model good habits by reading and writing in front of your child

Adults’ attitudes toward reading and writing influence children’s perception of the value of these skills. Having your child observe you while reading a book or magazine and while writing a thank you note or email to a friend helps to establish a recognition that reading and writing are useful and positive parts of everyday life.

Be sure to explain why you are reading and writing to your child, for example, to learn about a topic you are interested in, entertain yourself with a funny story, or thank someone for their kindness. Kids need to understand the value and purpose of the actions of reading and writing; knowing the why helps them be more motivated to read and write themselves.

Make reading materials—ones they will truly care about—readily available for your child

Kids’ threshold for boredom has appeared to lower in recent decades, particularly with today’s access to social media and video streaming. If we want kids to engage in reading and writing, we need to make it the most attractive activity for them. Kids are more likely to read when they see the value in it, such as building their knowledge about something they find interesting.

Find out what your kid is interested in and get as many texts as possible related to that topic. These can be books, graphic novels, magazines, or online digital texts. You don’t need to spend a small fortune, either. Your local library or your child’s school library probably have plenty of options to choose from.

Remember, too, that while reading on grade level is important, so is reading a large volume of text and reading for pleasure. Some texts may be below grade level for your child, and that’s okay. Some might be above grade level. If a kid is interested in a topic, they’re more likely to engage with a challenging text on that topic. Plus, a text that’s above grade level provides a nice opportunity for joint reading with another member of the family.

Talk with your child…a lot

Children expand their vocabulary and understanding of sentence structures not only through reading but also through conversations with others.

Talk to your children about their day at school, about what they see in the neighborhood on a walk or drive, about their interests, about the movie you watched together, about the news, about anything, really. When possible, ask questions that will elicit more than a one-word response. A colleague loves asking about her children’s day using the popular Rose, Thorn, and Bud exercise, for example. Her kids share a rose, or a good thing about their day, then a thorn, a difficult thing. The bud prompt is for sharing something they’re looking forward to.

Give your child authentic writing tasks to help them find their voice and develop their sense of power

Kids are more motivated to write when they are writing for real purposes and real audiences and there is a potential for real impact.

Encourage your child to write for practical and useful purposes like helping create a grocery shopping list for the week; writing a get-well-soon card to a friend; writing an email to their teacher asking for clarification on an assignment; or writing a letter to an elected official calling for change. Heck, they can even follow the lead of adorable Dillon Helbig, an eight-year-old who wrote a book and self-published it by secretly stocking it on a shelf at his local library.

Writing can also have a huge psychological benefit for processing emotions. Encourage your child to keep a journal to work through and express their own thoughts and feelings. For young learners, this might be in the form of drawing pictures.

Literacy strategies for kids from birth through pre-K

Children in pre-K and younger are often called “preliterate.” This description is important because while they are not yet “literate,” they are engaging in many activities that establish a solid base for later independent reading and writing. Think of the following strategies as building blocks for future reading and writing success.

Read aloud to your child

Children’s understanding of language begins in the womb as they hear the rhythm of their mother’s speech. Infants mimic speech by making sounds, which are often effective communication tools to get them what they want. Toddlers start using words and pretty quickly they are stringing together complete sentences without ever having a single grammar lesson on sentence construction. By observing and interacting with adults and other kids, children learn to speak in full sentences before they can read individual words printed on the page.

Instill a bedtime story routine, maybe with those library books you got on your kid’s favorite topics. Read aloud environmental print, too, like store signs and street names. Through read alouds, children expand their vocabulary, their knowledge about a topic or idea, and their understanding of sentence structures.

Draw on the print-rich environment at home

Children aren’t born knowing what letters and words are. It’s a conceptual understanding (also known as print awareness) that they build over time with help from adults and more proficient readers.

One of the most obvious ways to build print awareness is to install a bookshelf in your kid’s bedroom and keep it stocked with books from the library. However, print exists in other forms besides books. Post your shopping or to-do list on the refrigerator for them to see. Use sticky notes to place labels on items in the child’s room and around the house. Get them a set of magnetic letters to rearrange on the fridge.

Surrounding kids with examples of printed texts sets the foundation for understanding the alphabetic principle.

Engage in art projects

Through drawing and painting, young kids develop the motor skills and physical stamina they need to eventually write words, sentences, and paragraphs. Having your kid practice drawing individual letters helps to establish the brain connections they need to later map sounds to letters and letter patterns when they are learning to read.

Make sure your child has access to materials like paper, crayons, and finger paints. You can also get fun (and messy) by having them use their fingers to draw letters in salt or even pudding (the reward is pudding for dessert). Let your and their imaginations run wild!

Strategies for kids in kindergarten through grade 2

Kids in these grades are actively learning how to read. They are developing their understanding of  phonemic awareness (the individual sounds in words) and are learning to match those sounds with specific letters and letter patterns (also known as phonics) through the act of decoding. Here are some easy activities to try at home.

Take turns reading aloud to each other

Students in this age group are likely bringing home decodable texts from school, which use the specific letter patterns they are learning at the time. Create a positive attitude toward reading by asking them to read these texts to you and praising them accordingly.

Continue to read above-grade-level books aloud to them, too. While kids this age may not be ready to read chapter books on their own, you can still build their understanding of vocabulary and language structures as well as strengthen their comprehension by reading more complex texts aloud to them.

Ask them questions about what you read together

Asking questions serves not only to measure kids’ understanding of a text but also to deepen their understanding by helping them think more carefully about what they are reading (or listening to).

Ask kids questions that start with “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “how,” and “why.” Ask them to predict what will happen next and what in the text makes them think that. These questions help kids become active readers who are able to make connections in a text.

Play word games

Kids this age are doing a lot of word study at school. They’re learning to isolate the individual sounds in words and to blend individual sounds to form new words. They are learning how base (root) words, prefixes, and suffixes can help them understand the meaning of unfamiliar words.

You can play rhyming games to support their learning of the connections between sounds and letters. You can have them dissect words for their different parts and associated meanings. You can introduce word construction games like Zingo Word Builder or sight word bingo.

Strategies for kids in grades 3 and above

For kids in this group, authenticity matters. They need to find real value in the reading and writing activities they’re engaging in. Also, if your kid is showing struggles with reading or writing, it’s important to reach out and stay in close contact with their teacher. They may need additional and targeted support with developing certain skills.

Listen to music, podcasts, and audiobooks together

While we might appreciate music, podcasts, and audiobooks through our sense of hearing, these formats all require a writer or team of writers to brainstorm, draft, and polish ideas in writing before hitting the record button. Share that information with your child, and enjoy these types of storytelling together.

Discuss and analyze the lyrics to some of their favorite songs. Songwriters make interesting word choices and use inventive sentence structures. These provide ripe opportunity to discuss how language can be used for stylistic effect and to build vocabulary.

It seems like there is a podcast for every area of interest. Listening to podcasts builds listening comprehension and oral language skills. It also might spark students to create their own podcasts, which involves a lot of reading and writing. Scroll down to my last tip for useful links on creating podcasts.

If students struggle with reading fluently, it can be helpful for them to follow along with a book while listening to the audio version.

Practice digital citizenship by evaluating the credibility of online information

In today’s world, readers are bombarded with misinformation, but it can be difficult to determine what information is credible. The organization Common Sense has a curated list of websites and apps that help kids develop their media literacy skills as responsible consumers and producers of content. News Literacy Project also offers resources for families.

Younger kids will often start with identifying the text genre (for example, fiction or poetry) and relating it to the author’s purpose (for example, to persuade, inform, or entertain) before moving on to distinguishing fact from opinion by examining key clues (for example, the use of “loaded” phrases). With ongoing instruction and practice, older kids become more skilled at evaluating sources.

If your child has a social media account, help them understand that they are participating in an authentic media environment and that their posts are examples of real writing that can have a real influence on others. Asking them to evaluate their own posts or reposts through the same critical lens as other online sources can help reinforce this understanding.

Encourage them to use digital tools to create new texts

“Real-world” writing today is digital writing. People use keyboards, computers, and other digital devices to translate their thoughts into sentences for an internet-connected audience to read. Your kids might already be using Google Docs on a regular basis to collaborate with their classmates. Technology also allows writers to embed multimodal elements to enhance their ideas, such as graphics, images, videos, audio clips, animation, and hyperlinks to other sources.

Ask your child to compose texts with digital tools so they can be better prepared for real-world writing and have the opportunity to geek out with technology they are drawn to. Check out this list of free multimedia tools your kid can tinker around with as they create new texts. Common Sense has another two lists of recommended websites and apps (with free and paid options), one specifically for making videos and animations and another for podcasting. Kids’ creative potential is truly limitless here. And they can “publish” these texts for real audiences. For example, NPR runs a yearly student podcast challenge with real prize money!

Putting these strategies into action

Reading and writing don’t take place only at school. They are essential activities in everyday life. And they involve skills that we develop over time with purposeful support from teachers.

Your official job title might not say “teacher,” but you are a huge influence in your child’s life—and that makes you a teacher. These family strategies for reading and writing don’t require special training, only that you and your child spend some quality time talking, reading, and writing together. You’ve got this!

To learn more, download How to support reading at home: A guide for families and visit our archive of articles on supporting families.

The post Parent strategies for improving their child’s reading and writing appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

Children know a lot about language before they even learn to read. From the moment they are born, kids are exposed to all kinds of spoken language that helps them understand and make connections to written language years later. All that language—spoken to them, sung to them, read to them—becomes deposits in their language bank that they can use as they grow.

My daughter is a great example of how children bank language. She loved to have stories read to her before she learned to read. Her dad and I started reading to her not long after we brought her home from the hospital. After several years of picture books, we also began to read her our favorite chapter books, such as Winnie-the-Pooh and Charlotte’s Web, for as long as she would sit still and was interested. Sometimes we read just five or 10 minutes, but other times, during exciting parts, she would sit for an entire chapter.

I knew my daughter understood these longer stories because she would ask questions about the characters. It was clear she was taking the ideas we read to her and creating the stories in her mind. One day in particular, after something in her four-year-old life had not gone right for her, she came to me upset and said, “Will you comfort me?” I was so surprised to hear her ask for a hug that way, in such an unusual but completely appropriate way. It reminded me of a book we had been reading together. She had taken language she had heard and applied it to solve a problem she was experiencing. And of course, she got a hug!

My daughter was exhibiting language comprehension, something you may have heard your child’s teachers talk about. Although it may seem like a simple concept on the surface, I’d like to explore it and why it is important for reading more deeply. I’ll begin by defining the term and close with some tips on how you can support language comprehension at home.

What is language comprehension?

Language comprehension is the ability to understand the different elements of spoken or written language, like the meaning of words and how words are put together to form sentences. Language comprehension is one of the building blocks of reading comprehension.

Why is language comprehension important for reading?

Imagine that a child’s language bank is full of vocabulary, knowledge of how words make sentences, and information about the world. When the child begins to read, they will be better able to connect the words on the page to all these things.

Imagine the ability to read as a pyramid, as illustrated below. Reading comprehension, or being able to understand what you read, is the topmost block, and language comprehension is one of the blocks underneath it that supports reading comprehension. Decoding is the other block that supports reading comprehension. Together, reading comprehension, language comprehension, and decoding make up the Simple View of Reading.

The simple view of reading

Without language comprehension and decoding, reading comprehension is more difficult.

When do kids start developing language comprehension?

From birth to about age six, children are considered prereaders. They are learning sounds, letters, words, phrases, and what all those things mean. They begin to learn about books, too: how to hold one the right way and how to turn the pages. They go places with adults and experience new things. Even commonplace things, such as shopping or taking the bus, provide new experiences for children, especially if the adults talk with the children about what is going on. For example, talking about what you have to do to take the bus, the colors of the packages at the store, or how you pay for something provides new information for children to deposit in their language bank.

By listening, children also learn about grammar, or how to put words together correctly into sentences, and vocabulary. They then bring what they know about the world, including topics like science or history, and use that information to make connections and understand what they read.

What does language comprehension look like in action?

Let’s say that a child, Anna, has been learning English as a first or additional language. One day, when she is in first grade, her older sister reads these sentences to Anna, which are at a grade 3–5 level: “The sky lit up with color as the sun descended below the horizon. A soft breeze drifted through the trees as day turned to night. The four friends were ready to embark on a new adventure.”

Although these sentences might have been written for an older student to read independently, Anna can understand their meaning when her sister reads them to her. Anna knows about sunsets because she and her grandfather like to watch the sky change colors when the sun sets. That experience helps Anna understand that the first sentence is talking about a sunset, and she might guess that the word “descended” means that the sun is sinking below the skyline. In other words, Anna’s knowledge helps her make meaning of the story and of new vocabulary she hears. The more knowledge and vocabulary students like Anna gain through interacting with adults and the world around them, the stronger the building blocks they have for reading.

Listening to these sentences also helps Anna understand how sentences work. Each sentence has a subject (“sky,” “breeze,” “friends”) followed by an action (“lit up,” “drifted,” “were ready”). Even though young readers might not be able to independently read long or hard sentences, they are developing the building blocks they need to do that eventually by listening to others and matching those sentence structures when speaking themselves. Even toddlers pick up on this sentence structure when they say things like “No, I don’t want that.”

What can I do to support reading at home? 

Here are three simple things you can do to support your child in developing language comprehension.

1. Interact with your child—about everything

Just as Anna’s grandfather helped her learn about sunsets, you are a great source of knowledge and language for your children. Find opportunities to interact with them and use language together every day. Read to them. Talk to them about what you do during the day or how your favorite sports teams are doing. Go for a walk around your neighborhood and talk about what you see. Take them on your errands and explain what you are doing and why.

You have so much experience to share, and kids have so much to learn about everything.

2. Help children find books they are interested in

Talk to your children, at any age, about what they are interested in and help them find books to read or be read to about those topics. Not sure where to start your book search? Try the Yale University Haskins Global Literacy Hub curated book list for suggestions on high-quality books you can look for at your local library. This website makes it easy to find books by age group. Read “7 websites with free audiobooks for kids (and where to start)” for information on getting free audiobooks.

3. Do language comprehension activities with your children

The following sites from Haskins can help you find activities to help your child with language comprehension: “Building vocabulary knowledge” and “Building background knowledge.” The Institute of Education Sciences also has a helpful handout titled “Talking and writing in the kitchen.”

Learn more

Just the fact that you are looking for ways to help your children improve their reading is important. Remember that helping your child improve their language comprehension is as easy as talking with them.

To learn more, download How to support reading at home: A guide for families and visit our archive of articles on supporting families.

The post All about language comprehension: What it is and how it can help your child read appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

Get ready to flex your literacy muscles as Tiffany offers simulations of dyslexia, helpful metaphors, and essential myth-busting. At the end of this comprehensive hour, she spends time answering questions from the chat—which was hopping! I sat down with Tiffany after the webinar and (re-)asked her nine of the most common questions because, hey, the learning process includes unlearning and relearning, too.

1. What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is when a student has greater difficulty with learning to read words than their peers. A dyslexia diagnosis observes the three-criteria approach and occurs when A, B, and C are present:

1. Difficulty reading words accurately and/or fluently
2. A comparative lack of improvement amongst their peers when provided with generally effective support in these areas
3. The difficulty is not accounted for by something else, like an intellectual disability or the need for glasses

Quite simply, “dys” means “difficult,” and “lexia” means “word.” If a student has trouble reading the words off a page or spelling them, the scientific name for this is dyslexia.

2. What is dyslexia NOT?

Dyslexia is not a visual difficulty or disability. Dyslexia does not mean that a student’s eyes perceive words or letters backward or flipped. (In fact, many strong readers initially flip their letters!) Eye doctors cannot identify dyslexia. Colored lenses or overlays, eye-tracking exercises, or special fonts are not proven to help with dyslexia.

When we believe the misconception that dyslexia is a visual disability, we will fail our students as we treat it ineffectively. Read more about dyslexia myths in Tiffany’s article “Unraveling dyslexia: Dispelling myths and understanding early intervention.”

3. Why should dyslexia be identified in schools, rather than by outside specialists?

Because of the second criteria (low response to generally effective intervention), dyslexia is identifiable only in context of the lack of growth in targeted areas even though the intervention is generally effective for other students with similar difficulties. An outside specialist does not have the context over time that is needed to evaluate if a student has received targeted intervention and is still not showing the same growth as other students. Dyslexia doesn’t show up in an eye exam or a brain scan; it is a comparative diagnosis and needs more context than an outsider can provide.

Imagine this: Safi’s parents are worried he isn’t reading on grade level, so they take him to a specialist. The specialist agrees that, indeed, Safi cannot read the third-grade text provided. However, what the specialist doesn’t know is that Safi wasn’t provided with much explicit phonics instruction in the early grades, and he hasn’t been provided any additional instruction or targeted support yet because he just switched schools and the teacher has just noticed Safi is behind. Safi may not have dyslexia; he may simply need some extra help!

4. Can dyslexia show up later in students?

Not really, but it can be caught later. Because dyslexia is a difference in the brain, it’s likely present for a student’s entire life. Having it “show up later” most likely means that a student wasn’t identified as having dyslexia. This can be due to changing schools, educators having an incomplete reporting system to rely on, or any other factors that may have disenfranchised a student.

5. Conversely, can a student “overcome” dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a neurological difference in the brain that affects how information is processed and, thus, cannot be “cured” in the typical sense. However, dyslexia can be managed and skills improved with the right intervention and supports. Students can be supported in stocking their toolbox with reading strategies that will allow them to succeed academically.

6. What do we do with older students who we suspect of having dyslexia but were never formally diagnosed?

Unfortunately, many components can cause a late dyslexia diagnosis in an older student. Identification of dyslexia, more commonly referred to as an SLD (specific learning disability) in basic reading skills within public schools, will help them get the extra support they need to catch up to their peers.

Remember, a dyslexia diagnosis consists of three criteria: difficulty with reading and spelling, low response to intervention compared to their peers, and the consideration of exclusionary factors. It may be that this older student does need support, but if offered focused, targeted intervention, would recover quickly and thus evade a dyslexia identification.

If an older student does have dyslexia, the same interventions apply as in younger students.

7. What do I do about spelling tests and students with dyslexia?

Dyslexia is any difficulty in word-level reading difficulties. This includes phonics, spelling, and reading fluently. Students with this difficulty need both intervention and accommodations when it comes to reading words fluently and spelling, consistent with their school’s MTSS.

Since spelling (encoding) is the reciprocal of reading words (decoding), spelling will also be a challenge for students with dyslexia. For spelling tests in general, teachers should use that data to plan instruction formatively for the next week. Gone are the days of giving students a list of words on Monday and quizzing them Friday! The best practice is to teach students a specific phonics and spelling skill and use words Friday that include that skill to see if students have mastered the pattern. If so, move to the next skill with those students and hold them accountable for using this skill in their future writing. If not, ensure students continue to receive practice on that skill along with the next skill. In their writing, remind them and provide scaffolds for sounding out and spelling words. For older students, ensure they can show what they know on writing assignments without counting off for spelling patterns they are still working on mastering. Some students can also benefit from an accommodation, like speech to text, to help them show their skills in writing without spelling becoming a barrier.

8. What are the differences between dyslexia, dysgraphia, and developmental language disorder (DLD)?

Dyslexia and dysgraphia are both learning difficulties, but they affect different skills. Dyslexia is a difficulty that affects a student’s ability to read and decode words. Dysgraphia is a difficulty that impacts handwriting. Students can have both conditions, but one does not cause the other.

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is difficulty with understanding and using language. DLD can influence how a person comprehends what they hear and read. People with DLD might have trouble finding the right words, expressing themselves, understanding directions, engaging in conversation, organizing thoughts in writing, or answering questions. In the Simple View of Reading, DLD describes a difficulty with the language comprehension part of the equation while dyslexia describes a difficulty in the word recognition part of the equation.

It’s possible for a student to have dyslexia, dysgraphia, and DLD.

9. How does dyslexia manifest with ELL students and what are some steps I can take?

Dyslexia in multilingual learners (MLLs) is identified in the same way as for other students: greater difficulty learning to read and spell compared to peers with similar skill levels and language proficiency who receive the same interventions. This would manifest as a slower pace in learning to read and spell in both languages, if students are learning to read in both English and Spanish, for example. Differences in sound-spelling patterns, like the letter Arepresenting different sounds in Spanish and English, can add to the challenge and cause initial confusion.

To support MLLs with dyslexia:

• Provide explicit instruction in sound-spelling patterns with extensive opportunities to respond with positive and corrective feedback
• Incorporate visuals, gestures, and examples connecting English concepts to their home language
• Monitor progress with assessments in both languages, when possible, and evaluate growth compared to peers with similar language proficiency, intensifying the intervention dosage as needed
• Celebrate and integrate their cultural and linguistic background knowledge and point out similarities and differences with their home language

Dyslexia and assessment

If you’re interested in assessing early readers while also screening for dyslexia, MAP® Reading Fluency can help. Visit our website to learn more. You can also read the archive of posts about getting the most out of MAP Reading Fluency here on Teach. Learn. Grow.

The post 9 common questions about dyslexia, answered appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

“We talk a lot about the power and joy of writing. But these students live it!”

This statement, followed by this video, sent shivers down my spine. That’s my colleague and national literacy expert, Miah Daughtery. She’s talking to me about her work with 826DC, a writing lab in our nation’s capital that serves primarily students of color.

826 DC is much like the organization’s other eight chapters. It offers a free, high-quality writing program to students ages 6–18 from under-resourced communities and provides an inspiring space for them to write. (Imagine a secret writer’s room hidden behind a magic shop.)

826 National is the national arm of the organization. It’s a non-profit focused on strengthening the writing of students, and it leads the largest youth writing network in the country. Its flagship writing center is in San Francisco at 826 Valencia Street (hence the name 826). 826 National supports nine local chapters across the country, each with community-based writing labs and in-school programs that serve around 25,000 students annually. It publishes about 750 unique pieces of student writing a year, like these, and it equips educators and families with free resources at 826 Digital to help every student discover the power and joy of writing.

I recently sat down with Laura Brief, the CEO of 826 National, for a virtual chat over Zoom. We were joined by Miah Daughtery, vice president of academic advocacy for NWEA, and a board member of 826DC since 2017. What unfolded was an enlightening conversation about how to empower young writers and move the national conversation about writing forward. Note that my questions and their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a bit about how 826 got started. I’m especially interested in how the organization provides a third space for writing, a place outside of home and school.

Laura: 826 National began with a vision of being a unique writing resource that offers students personalized writing support. Both teachers and students have been at the heart of what we do from the very beginning. The organization was founded in 2002 by the author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle) and the educator Nínive Calegari, a former public school teacher with a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

There’s long been an understanding that students need a space where they can engage with writing in a meaningful way, outside of school or home environments. The founders wanted the space to be something that students immediately sensed was different. The space at 826 Valencia looks like the hull of a pirate ship, and the writing center is hidden behind this whimsical, pirate-themed storefront. Young people know right away this space is for them. It’s honest and weird and wacky. (The shop sells pirate-y merchandise, alongside books written by 826 students, all in support of the organization.) But the store is also a way to invite the community in.

Miah: 826 DC follows the same model. Our theme is “Writing is magic,” and the storefront is a magic shop. Students enter the lab through a small Alice-in-Wonderland-sized door, and they know they’re entering a different world with different rules. Once inside, they see a massive library of books, including our student anthologies.

What have you noticed about student motivation in the writing lab environment? What gets students most excited about writing there?

Laura: When students get to see the books they’ve published on a bookshelf next to books written by authors they admire, it creates tremendous pride…and agency.

When I first started working for 826 as a volunteer, I went to Everett Middle School, which offers a specialized English immersion program for newcomer students. (826 National directly serves 20,000 educators, extending its impact to an additional 750,000 students.) What impressed me most was how the 826 facilitators connected writing to students’ lives. They asked students to write a poem using a guided prompt (“I saw…and now I see…”). The students were sitting in small groups at tables with adult volunteers and staff. When they started writing, there was a palpable shift in the room. What was real for them was being brought to life in the classroom. Not only were they learning to write a poem, but the text of their lives was the source material.

In our writing labs, we let who the students are, and what they bring with them, be a guide for their writing. We also invite students to get curious and embrace the boundless possibility of their creativity. They can feel this the moment they come through the door.

Miah: I see students at 826DC being genuinely jazzed about writing. What makes the 826 writing lab compelling for students is that they have so much choice over what they write. We’re not trying to replicate school. But we do partner with schools. Our staff knows writing pedagogy. They know the research about how students learn to write. And they have an awareness of state standards.

I’ve heard that students and their siblings return to the 826 writing labs year after year. What advice can you give classroom teachers about building writing communities?

Laura: This scenario happens across all our chapters. The students become our best champions. After they finish school, they come back to volunteer, teach, and even become board members.

One aspect of our program that could be replicated in classrooms is building a writing community. This can start by giving students opportunities to collaborate with fellow writers through group inquiry or creative problem-solving. Then it’s important to model and normalize how peers can learn from each other. For every writing lesson, we build in time for reflection and dialogue, and we make peer editing an integral part of the writing process. We emphasize curiosity-driven feedback, asking students what they find interesting or what they want to know more about when reading a peer’s work.

We also create opportunities for students to show up in the collective writing space as their authentic selves. We do this through the way we scaffold the writing prompts and the writing process but also by putting in the work to create a brave space. We work hard to give students a sense of ownership over the space and a sense of agency over their writing projects. We may start by naming a goal for the project, but the students define how we reach that goal.

Miah: One reason we have so many families come back is that we literally and figuratively invite the community in. We have open houses, and we do projects that are for the DC community, like when our students read their work at the Kennedy Center. We also work hard to cultivate a safe, warm, and inviting space where students—and their families—want to be. We invite students into the conversation by asking, “What’s important to you?” We also invite in a bit of chaos, but in a positive way. We ask students to take that creative energy and funnel it into their writing.

How does 826 encourage students to talk about their writing and get feedback? How have you seen such collaboration help improve students’ writing?

Laura: One technique we use is a “grumpy editor,” an imaginary editor who taunts students but also gives positive feedback. At 826 Valencia, our grumpy editor is Captain Blue. I was at the writing center a couple of weeks ago, and some third-grade students came up to me. One said, “We heard no one has ever seen Captain Blue. Will we get to meet him?” I told them to wait and see. Then they hear a booming voice from above. “Kids can’t write books!” Captain Blue says, very grumpily. Now the kids are all atwitter. Captain Blue goes on to give one sentence of personalized feedback for each kid’s writing—emphasizing how wonderful it is—which is so motivating.

826 students also collaboratively write books, which gets them talking about writing from day one. The writing process often begins with verbal sharing to clarify intentions and get feedback before putting a pen to the page. From there, students must rely on one another for feedback, for coaching, for editing, and for cheerleading. Each chapter also creates a student editorial group that provides feedback to writers within the book. This mirrors the professional writing process in the real world and empowers students to see themselves as both authors and editors. One of the best things teachers can do in their classrooms is identify as writers themselves—go through the process of writing and getting feedback themselves—because it models this collaboration.

We also work hard to create spaces where students feel physically and psychologically safe. It shows up in how we teach writing and in what we praise about students’ writing. 826 students really understand that failure is a part of writing. That’s the beauty of editing. Writing is a process. And by editing, you are making adjustments to it, just like in life.

Miah: When students write, they are taking a piece of themselves and making it visible to other people. It is an act of vulnerability that requires both bravery and trust. Writing among individuals you feel safe around, those who give you a sense of community, builds that trust. So, I would encourage educators to reach out to the 826 network and collaborate on building a writing community because this is where 826 really excels with young writers.

Your writers have real audiences, through their published anthologies and public readings, often to large audiences. What can schools learn from 826’s approach to amplifying writers’ voices?

Laura: We are big believers in publishing. We produce a series of reports each year on the effectiveness of our programs, and our research shows that publishing student writing has benefits that go well beyond the pages of the book. Writing is a powerful tool that lets students grapple with their own stories and identities. When the element of a real audience is added, students gain a greater sense of pride in their writing. But they also begin to think about the impact of their words on the reader…and on the world.

A survey of educators who subscribed to our 826 Digital platform in 2021 revealed that only 18% printed a book of student writing and only 19% hosted an opportunity for students to read their writing. In an 826 survey of educators nationwide, 67% of respondents said they use student publications as writing models with their students. This tells us educators understand the value of student publications; they just aren’t able to publish student writing for reasons we can all guess.

For classroom teachers, we encourage finding times to really celebrate student writing—outside of the classroom, in unexpected ways, and in front of unexpected audiences. We also recommend making student writing as visible as possible—on school walls, in libraries, on billboards. Then honor student writing through a low-tech publishing method. Try partnering with the community, or other students, to develop art that frames the book to be as beautiful as the writing within it.

Miah: Real audiences raise the stakes of writing in a meaningful way. When students at 826DC know their writing will be published, they approach their writing as though it will be published. In 2019, Ron Charles, the book critic for TheWashington Post, reviewed that year’s anthology, This Time They Hear You, a collection of science-inspired fairy tales. This year, 826DC held the book release party at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown DC. Students read a selection of their writing to the community—friends and family, yes, but also whoever happened to be in the library that day. During the reading, what struck me most was how collegial the students were to each other. I saw middle schoolers cheering each other on, applauding each other’s work, and offering genuine praise. There was no teasing. No funny business—at all. Their writing was real, and they approached their opportunity to perform it seriously. At the end of the reading, Ron Charles sat down with the student-authors and interviewed them, just as he would any other published author. While every school writing assignment can’t have a real-world audience like this, even once a year would make a big difference.

Your website has a powerful banner about how writing changes lives, communities, and the future. How have you seen writing bring about such profound changes?

Laura: One way writing changes us is that it allows us to be ourselves. Writing can be a personal, internal tool for transformation. It can help you be yourself and understand yourself better. Writing can also be loud and powerful and public. It can help you to take that self and broadcast it into the world—to change lives through public change and civic engagement.

Being able to tell your story and amplify your story is incredibly powerful. An 826 student once had the opportunity to introduce Barack Obama at the Obama Foundation Summit, and she said, “I didn’t know then that stories could change the world, let alone a story that I had written.”

Learn more

To learn more about the 826 National Youth Writing program, including how you can support their work, visit them online. To learn more about professional development on writing instruction, visit our website.

The post How students find the power and joy in writing appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

Dyslexia is a widely recognized learning difficulty, yet research shows misconceptions are widespread, not only among the general public but also among educators, school psychologists and reading specialists, and even college professors. This complicates the path to understanding the most widely identified learning disability and getting the right intervention and support to students.

As we observe Dyslexia Awareness Month, it’s essential to dispel these myths, offer clarity through research-backed models, and emphasize the importance of early screening and targeted intervention. By fostering a deeper understanding of what dyslexia is, educators and administrators can enable students to understand their difficulties and achieve their full potential.

Common misconceptions about dyslexia

While completing my doctorate, I researched how best to help dispel misconceptions about dyslexia among educators. Studies from the field of conceptual change, a subset of the field of learning science, show that dispelling misinformation can work better to improve long-term understanding than just giving people accurate information. To do this, we must first name and normalize myths before attempting to inform people about the facts.

Despite increased awareness, myths about dyslexia continue to thrive. One of the most common misconceptions is that dyslexia means people see letters or words backward. This myth has been perpetuated in pop culture, but dyslexia is not a visual problem; instead, most plainly, it’s an increased difficulty with learning to read and spell words.

Another myth is that dyslexia is tied to intelligence. Some assume that if a child is smart, they can’t possibly have dyslexia, or that struggling with reading equates to a lack of intelligence. Some people believe you have to find a discrepancy between intelligence scores and reading scores. Neither of these is true.

Dyslexia describes a difficulty with learning to decode words fluently and trouble with spelling. There is no need to find any discrepancies in intelligence, strengths, or weaknesses to identify a student with dyslexia. Instead, best practice for identification is a low response to generally effective reading intervention, combined with low achievement in reading that isn’t accounted for by other disabilities, like an intellectual disability or the need for glasses.

A path to clearer understanding: The Simple View of Reading

To understand dyslexia better, it’s helpful to look through the lens of the Simple View of Reading. According to this model, reading is composed of two essential components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. While both components are crucial for successful reading, when we use the term “dyslexia,” we are only referring to the word-recognition component, that is, we’re referring only to decoding.

This difficulty with word recognition is the defining factor of the term “dyslexia,” which the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) defines as “a specific learning disability…characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.”

This doesn’t mean students with dyslexia may also have a difficulty with language comprehension; as we know from research, about 50% of children with dyslexia also have developmental language disorder, or DLD. This fact helps educational leaders know to always assess both components separately, rather than just assessing reading comprehension, when doing a comprehensive assessment for dyslexia.

DLD and dyslexia: A connection through the Simple View of Reading

DLD can co-occur with dyslexia, further complicating reading and learning. While dyslexia affects word recognition, DLD impacts a child’s ability to understand and use language, influencing how they comprehend what they hear and read. For more on this, watch Tiffany Hogan, a leading researcher in dyslexia and DLD, as she emphasizes the importance of recognizing DLD as a significant factor in reading development.

Understanding DLD through the lens of the Simple View of Reading clarifies how both difficulties affect reading in unique ways: dyslexia impacts word recognition and DLD affects language comprehension. To learn more about DLD, visit DLDandMe.org for a wealth of resources. Understanding both dyslexia and DLD can help educators align interventions to student need and enable all students to learn to become readers.

Early screening for at-risk children

Given the overlap between dyslexia and DLD, early screening is crucial for identifying students who are at risk. Identifying which students are having the greatest difficulties allows educators to target word recognition, or decoding, skills for students at risk of later being identified with dyslexia; support language comprehension for those at risk of later being identified with DLD; and provide a double-dose of intervention for students who have difficulties in both areas. Early intervention is key to helping children succeed academically and avoid long-term struggles with reading.

Our K–5 reading assessment, MAP® Reading Fluency, can help with early identification of students in need of interventions, including those at-risk of later being identified with dyslexia and/or DLD. To learn more, download our MAP Reading Fluency Dyslexia Screener fact sheet and see our YouTube channel.

Early intervention: Aligning interventions with student needs

Remember, after screening identifies students who are at risk of not meeting grade-level reading benchmarks, the next step is not to identify students with dyslexia or DLD; it is to ensure that students who need intervention are given targeted lessons that are aligned with their specific areas of difficulty.

Dyslexia interventions should focus on word recognition—whether the student needs fluency with phonics skills, multisyllabic words, or passages of text—using structured approaches that are explicit and systematic. In the early grades, this may look like introducing a phonics skill, working with word chains, and reading decodable texts. In the later grades, this may look like teaching flexible division routines, morphology-based reading and spelling patterns, and text-level fluency work. 

For students with DLD, interventions should include strategies that focus on both vocabulary and morphology and reading comprehension. The key is that the interventions are tailored to the child’s individual difficulties, ensuring targeted support that meets the specific areas of need. If the child has more difficulty with learning new vocabulary and connecting concepts, pre-teaching science and social studies content could be impactful. Integrating writing should also be considered for students with DLD to connect explicitly taught skills in grammar, vocabulary, and content knowledge.

Practical tips for educators and administrators

Whether you’re a classroom teacher or school or district administrator, the following can help you serve the needs of students with dyslexia:

• Implement early screening. Identifying student difficulties early ensures interventions can begin before reading difficulties escalate. Prioritize universal screening for dyslexia and DLD during the early grades. Ensure your screener is brief and well-researched. MAP Reading Fluency is an excellent choice.
• Adopt evidence-based interventions. Use interventions grounded in research and tailored to address a targeted student need in either word recognition, language comprehension, or both.
• Invest in professional learning. Continuous professional learning is essential for educators to stay current with research and best practices for understanding and teaching students with dyslexia and DLD. Professional learning opportunities, whether virtual or in person, equip educators to implement effective interventions in their classrooms. Learn more about our offerings on our website.

Bonus: Watch the second part of our interview with Tiffany Hogan

To deepen your understanding of DLD and its connection to dyslexia, watch the second part of our interview with Tiffany Hogan. In this video, she shares valuable insights and strategies for supporting children at risk for or with DLD and dyslexia.

The post Unraveling dyslexia: Dispelling myths and understanding early intervention appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

Have you ever taken a piece of writing on your computer and dropped it wholesale into the recycle bin? Ever crumpled up a piece of paper full of writing and shot it at a trash can, hoping to make a basket? There’s something universally cathartic about being able to start over again—from scratch—with writing. Perhaps it’s because we learn something new as we write. And though our early failed efforts can be painful, they do point us in a new direction and get us closer to what we really want to say with our writing. When you give students feedback on their writing process, you can help them do just that.

Writing is a recursive process, not a linear one

Research shows that this idea of starting over with writing has merit. Writing is a recursive process, not a linear one. The recursive model was first proposed by Linda Flower and John Hayes in 1981, replacing the previous linear model I was taught in school, which involved outlining, completing a first draft, editing, completing a second draft, and so on, all in the same order each time.

In the recursive model, writers constantly move between cognitive processes, such as planning (setting goals, generating ideas, organizing ideas), drafting (putting a writing plan into action), and reviewing (evaluating, editing, revising). Writers move fluidly between these processes to accomplish specific, self-generated goals.

Writers change their goals based on what they learn through the act of writing

According to Flower and Hayes, writing goals change, and they are generated in one of two ways:

1. The writer establishes high-level goals and supporting sub-goals based on their purpose for writing.These goals are often set before writing begins. For example, a high-level goal for a student in elementary school might be, “I want to tell my school principal about how moving more during the day is good for us, so I can ask for PE class every day instead of every other day.”
2. The writer changes their writing goal, or creates a new goal, based on what they learn through the act of writing. For the same student, the evolution of their goal might look like this: “My research says that students need 60 minutes of physical activity a day, so my plan for PE class every day isn’t enough. I need to get creative. How can students move more throughout the day? If I start my letter with these ideas, I’ll really get my principal’s attention.” (Cue shot of crumpled-up piece of paper landing in trash can.)

Often, those tossed-out efforts are proof positive that we’re engaged in the writing process and, more importantly, learning from it!

Students and their teachers may learn more from feedback on the writing process than on the written product

Flower and Hayes also suggest that educators should give students feedback on their writing process—not just the written product—when they give students input. This is because it can provide more useful information for students and teachers than focusing on the written product alone. Here are five reasons why:

1. Proficient writing is closely linked to a writer’s ability to self-regulate

Self-regulation is the ability to manage your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to achieve your goals. In writing, self-regulation involves managing your environment, behaviors, and personal thoughts to effectively plan, draft, and review your work.

Educational psychologists describe these fundamental forms of self-regulation in writing as follows:

• Environmental processes are the external conditions and resources that writers use to facilitate their writing. This includes managing the physical environment (like finding a quiet place to write), seeking feedback from others, and using tools and resources (such as dictionaries or writing software) to enhance writing quality.
• Behavioral processes are the actions and strategies that writers employ to improve their writing. These include goal setting and generation tasks like outlining, drafting, and revising. But they also include self-reinforcement, such as rewarding ourselves when we meet a writing goal (like treating myself to a piece of dark chocolate when I finish writing this blog!).
• Personal processes are the internal cognitive and emotional mechanisms that influence writing. These include beliefs (confidence in one’s writing abilities), motivation (the desire to accomplish a goal with one’s writing), and cognitive strategies (like planning and organizing). They also include emotional regulation, such as how we manage stress and maintain focus while writing.

These three forms of self-regulation interact in a cyclic feedback loop—a loop that gives students many opportunities to self-monitor and adjust their strategies based on what’s going well (or not so well) in their writing.

Unfortunately, traditional feedback methods for student writing often deprive students of these opportunities to become self-regulated learners. In many cases, self-reflection and dialogue produce more relevant feedback for students, as my colleague Gina Wilmurth writes about in “Speak up! How getting students to talk more can improve writing.”

2. Multilingual learners engage in distinct writing processes and benefit from varied feedback

Researchers have found that multilingual learners use distinct writing strategies compared to monolingual learners. These processes aid multilingual learners in navigating the complexities of writing in English by leveraging their full linguistic repertoires. For example:

• Multilingual learners frequently rehearse phrases and words to ensure accuracy and fluency in their writing. This helps them internalize and produce language in English that aligns with their intended meaning.
• Multilingual learners often switch to their native language to retrieve a specific word or idea because it provides access to a broader range of vocabulary and concepts, which can then be translated into English.
• Multilingual learners may revert to their native language to review their writing for coherence, checking that writing is logically structured and ideas flow smoothly.

It’s important to remember that the language students learn first is the bedrock upon which all other languages develop. That’s why empowering multilingual learners to use translanguaging during their writing process is so effective.

When providing feedback on writing to multilingual learners, the type of feedback matters, too. In a meta-analysis of 25 studies on this topic, peer feedback was found to be more effective than teacher feedback for non-native speakers of English. Non-native speakers also benefitted from more varied feedback than native speakers, including oral, written, and computer-based feedback. Finally, the analysis revealed that coaching students on the revision process improved the content of their writing more than giving feedback on a specific written product. For example, providing general explanations about grammatical patterns was more effective than identifying specific errors.

3. Feedback that promotes a growth mindset is more effective than feedback that highlights errors

While feedback generally leads to writing gains for all students, all feedback is not equal. Based on the body of research, some feedback leads to significant gains in learning, some has no effect, and some has a negative effect. Formative feedback, which is given directly to students as part of everyday teaching and learning, is the most effective feedback for writing.

Feedback that promotes a growth mindset (i.e., using effort to increase learning and accepting that mistakes are an important part of the learning process) is also effective. This is particularly true for low-achieving students because it draws a clear connection between effort and achievement (“My writing improved because I worked hard”), which leads to higher expectations for future writing tasks and more attention to effort. Unfortunately, a student’s growth mindset is rendered useless whenever we include a grade with our comments. Repeated studies show that grades alone and grades with comments produce no learning gains. However, comments alone—as is typical in a formative feedback cycle—can result in large learning gains.

4. How we frame feedback to students makes a difference

While formative feedback can improve students’ learning and enhance teachers’ teaching, this is only true when students are receptive to the feedback and the feedback is on target.

In one study involving tenth-graders, students didn’t understand what the feedback was intended to achieve. A teacher’s feedback on word choice, for example, was perceived as a request to use “bigger words” that would impress the teacher. Another study with seventh-graders, however, produced a different result. Researchers placed a handwritten sticky note on some students’ essays that read, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” This simple reframing led to significant gains in writing quality, especially among African American students. Students who received these notes were 40% more likely than the control group to revise their essays and integrate the teacher’s feedback. Why? The sticky notes built trust between teachers and students.

Clearly, how we frame our feedback can make all the difference. That’s why well-known researchers Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey have a new framework for creating a positive culture of feedback in the classroom. Their “4 C’s of Feedback” focus on care, credibility, clarity, and communication. They also address many of the issues I’ve noted in this article, such as the importance of one’s environment, building trust, and self-regulation. To learn more, watch the free webinar How Feedback Works.

In the meantime, when you give students feedback on their writing process, follow these dos and don’ts.

5. Feedback about the writing process is more likely to transfer to future writing tasks

There are many ways to give students feedback on their writing process effectively. What’s most important is to start, because students are more likely to transfer this feedback to future writing tasks. For a more holistic view, gather input from students, their peers, and adults who observe them writing. Start simply by asking students to rate a series of “I statements” on a four-point scale (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree).

Here are 10 statements to get you started:

• I enjoy writing at school.
• I set goals when I am writing.
• It’s hard for me to come up with ideas when I write.
• I do not usually plan before I start writing.
• I can stay focused when I write.
• I like making changes to my writing.
• I do not like to share my writing with others.
• I write differently depending on who will read my writing.
• I know who I can go to for help with my writing.
• I believe writing is important in everyday life.

Students can revisit these statements throughout the year to track their growth as writers. Also, make sure that you take time during every writing conference to discuss a student’s writing process. During these conversations, you can suggest strategies that might help the student improve their process based on their specific needs (e.g., planning, staying focused, getting help).

And remember, there’s always room for improvement

The writing process first proposed by Flower and Hayes in 1981 was so influential that it spawned fourteen other models, including four revisions by Flower and Hayes to their original work. The lesson here is that there’s always room for improvement when it comes to teaching writing and supporting student writers. For example, more recent studies show that digital support for academic writing is most effective when it encourages students to self-monitor and develop their own writing strategies.

As an educator and writer, I’m excited about these new technologies that can aid us in writing. I’ll probably still feel compelled to toss out an early draft or two. But next time, I just might ask an AI chatbot what it thinks before I do.

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“Shhh.” “Quiet down.” “Please listen.” These are frequent refrains in the classroom as teachers deliver lessons and maintain an orderly environment. Quiet time is indeed an essential part of most school days. There are times, however, when encouraging students to talk is valuable, even essential. The writing process presents especially good opportunities for conversations.

I recall one year when I was teaching fourth grade and reading through students’ first drafts of fictional narratives. One draft that stood out belonged to a student I’ll call Jonathan. It was seemingly a jumble of ideas that didn’t come close to telling a coherent story. I thought Jonathan had either not understood the task or had given it minimal effort, and I was certain that this would come to light when I conferenced with him. I had learned the value of the social classroom and was eager to get Jonathan talking.

Getting students talking

Positive interactions are part of a supportive classroom environment, which is recognized by experts in the field as essential to writing development. Positive interactions during the writing process, between teachers and students or among students, help build a supportive writing environment.

The writing conference between teacher and student in particular can serve as a useful formative assessment tool, helping to reveal areas of strength and needed support, thereby informing instruction. We recognize the value of student discourse as formative assessment. Just as important for the student, though, is the role of the writing conference as a catalyst for reflection. Research supports reflection as a practice for improving not just a particular writing piece but also students’ ability to generalize effective strategies and apply them in the future. What a great reason to get students talking about their writing!

A few months ago, my colleague Julie Richardson introduced us to the Big Ideas for Growing Writers. Framed as five easy-to-remember questions, these Big Ideas are available in a handout for teachers and another for students. (If you haven’t downloaded those yet, please take the time to do so now. They’re free!) The questions are as follows:

1. Why am I writing?
2. Who are my readers?
3. What am I writing?
4. How am I presenting my ideas in writing?
5. How am I using the writing process?

The Big Ideas are formative conversation starters: they can serve as springboards for conversations with students about their writing and writing process.

What follows are some critical points to consider as you prepare to have these formative conversations with students during whole- or small-group instruction, during one-on-one writing conferences, or with peer feedback groups.

How can I find time for these conversations?

Each formative question in the handouts is designed to take place within a five- to fifteen-minute time frame. You may begin by conferencing with a small group of students while others work independently or with peers.

Once students start to become familiar and comfortable with the process, encourage them to use these questions with one another during peer discussions while you conference with others one-on-one or in small groups. Even a few minutes of one-on-one discussion with the teacher can be impactful for students.

How do I group students?

When creating small groups, use data, such as previous conversations and other formative assessment measures, to group students around specific goals, for example, the goal of considering the needs of the audience or integrating evidence to develop ideas. Groups should be flexible and short term; adjust as students demonstrate progress or the need for more or less intense support.

When creating peer groups, make sure students have clear roles that capitalize on their strengths and that provide opportunities for growth. For instance, students who enjoy playing with language and word use may be grouped together to share ideas and further their repertoire of words and phrases. A student who is writing for a particular audience, such as their peers who enjoy gaming, could grow in audience awareness by conferencing with students who are part of that audience group.

How do I focus the conversations?

The five Big Ideas are designed to provide a measure of focus for each conversation. It will often be necessary, of course, to narrow the conversation further, but avoid the urge to try to address multiple areas of focus in a single conversation. Establish the protocol of brief, focused student conferences for maximum impact.

How do I make peer discussions meaningful?

It’s important to establish practices and expectations for making peer writing conferences effective. Many best practices for assisting peer writing conferences are the same as those you’d likely implement for any type of peer work.

Whether peers are working in small groups or pairs, ensure that everyone knows their role in the conversation and what that role entails. These will include at least one writer and one facilitator, and perhaps a recorder and one or more listeners. Ensure that students rotate roles, of course, but note that they might not need to rotate within every session; it may be more effective and practical to rotate roles on different days.

Ensure that students have the materials they need to support peer conversations. This will likely include the student-friendly version of the Big Ideas linked above. Other resources may include frameworks you’ve developed for capturing feedback, a note-catcher form, general group-work protocols, student-friendly rubrics, and graphic organizers and mnemonic prompts.

How do I prompt reluctant students?

Before initiating writing conversations, it is important to have established a supportive classroom environment, as described above, and to have begun forming positive personal connections with students. Still, you’ll find that some students are eager to talk about their writing process and products, but many will need additional prompting. Be prepared to ask follow-up questions as needed to generate thoughtful dialogue, such as:

• Can you tell me more about that?
• It seems like you’re really thinking about this. What are you thinking?
• How did you arrive at that conclusion?
• Is there another way to approach this goal?

These kinds of follow-up questions are useful for guiding discussions between students as well. Include them in the materials you provide to support peer writing conferences, as they can support both the writer and the listener in generating conversation.

Remember to provide adequate think time to allow students to respond and avoid jumping in with immediate comments and feedback.

In closing

Back in that fourth-grade classroom, I sat with Jonathan for a one-on-one discussion about his narrative. I asked him to explain the story to me, and he launched into a detailed, excited description of the tale he was attempting to tell.

When I realized that he did indeed have a well-developed narrative in his mind, I explained to him that much of the story was in his head but not on paper and that his audience would need more details to be able to follow along. I asked many pointed questions to uncover specific details about the story. A few conversations with Jonathan made a world of difference for him, helping him fill in the missing parts of his story and ultimately end up with a piece he was proud of. He later added illustrations and turned the story into a picture book! I’m glad I was able to get Jonathan talking about his writing.

This school year, don’t forget to ask all your students to speak up!

The post Speak up! How getting students to talk more can improve their writing and writing process appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

We all agree time spent practicing reading is crucial for young students, but which types of texts should we use, and for whom? When are decodable texts appropriate? And when should we provide students time with a wider variety of leveled texts? I’m here to help you understand the strengths and drawbacks of decodable and leveled texts—and when to use each.

What is a decodable text?

Although many texts are marketed as decodable texts, not all are created equal. “Decodability” is a term that refers to the number of words in a given text that students have been taught with corresponding phonics patterns and irregular words. If a text set is marketed as decodable text, you should ensure the order in which the set introduces phonics patterns and high-frequency words matches the scope and sequence of your phonics curriculum. If there is a mismatch, the decodable text set will not be decodable for your students.

For example, if a student has learned all short vowels and most common consonant sounds, the sentence “Sam lifts a big bag and fills it to the brim with grain” should be mostly decodable. However, the “ai” in “grain” and the words “a,” “to,” “the,” and “with” would not be, as they include phonics patterns that likely have not been taught, like the /oo/ in “to” and the /th/ in “with.” That’s because neither is a short vowel or common consonant sound. These high-frequency words and the phonics pattern “ai” spelling long A would need to be pre-taught to make this text 100% decodable. If none of these were pre-taught, this text would be only 61% decodable and most likely not as helpful for highly successful practice opportunity.

Why and when are decodable texts helpful for instruction?

Decodable texts are a perfect tool for reinforcing a taught phonics skill or pattern. They are necessary for fluency and application opportunities for students who have been introduced to a new phonics skill in whole-group or small-group instruction or during an intervention.

After you introduce a new phonics skill and provide practice opportunities to read and spell words in isolation, a decodable text is a logical and appropriate next step. Using a longer text with sentences or paragraphs that include a high proportion of practice opportunities with the new phonics skill can help your students build fluency with their new learning in the context of a connected text.

For example, if I am in the fall of kindergarten and have introduced the most common sounds for the letters S, A, D, P, I, N, and C, following my scope and sequence, my next lesson is /t/ spelled with the letter T. I will begin by practicing reading and spelling words like “at,” “sat,” “pat,” “pit,” and “tap.”

Students will stretch each word, write blanks for sounds, then fill in each with the letter that spells the sound. I will then have similar CVC words with /t/ and previous sounds they have learned, one at a time, on the board for students to sound out and blend together. Finally, I will provide my students with more practice, so they not only remember the sounds associated with the letters, but also become more fluent with those sounds in a short, aligned, and highly-decodable text. This may be a book with the sentences “Sam taps. Pat taps. Sam and Pat tap, tap, tap! Pat and Sam spin and spin!” and an illustration showing two friends tap dancing on a stage. Alternatively, I could ask students to read with partners after they read with me initially, and I could provide a blank space instead of the illustration for students to draw what they pictured while reading the text.

Note: Some programs teach consonant blends, such as “sp” or “bl,” as separate lessons. However, if students have learned both sounds in a blend, they can sound and blend together to form the spoken sounds /sp/ as in “spin” or /bl/ as in “blot.” Therefore, there is no need to waste precious instructional time on the many combinations of consonant blends in separate lessons. Consonant diagraphs, on the other hand, are two letters that combine to form a different consonant sound than they do separately, such as C and H in /ch/ or P and H in /ph/. These would need to be taught explicitly for students to understand the new, unexpected sound that is formed.

What is a leveled text?

Any trade book or text can be leveled. There are different leveling systems that use features of the text— such as word and sentence length, unique words, or other factors—to assign a “level.” Most of the time, as levels get higher in number or letter, texts are more challenging to both decode and comprehend.

Leveled texts aren’t inherently aligned to a particular phonics skill. Instead, they contain an amalgamation of phonics skills that are typically increasing in complexity as the levels increase. Some leveled texts that are part of a comprehensive literacy curriculum include certain focus words, such as high-frequency words and/or vocabulary words, that have been previously introduced in the whole group lesson to reinforce these concepts in connected text.

Why and when are leveled texts helpful?

Decodable and leveled texts are not the same. Leveled texts do not have the same purpose as decodable texts. They are not meant to practice a specific phonics skill. Instead, leveled texts can be useful to practice generalizing phonics skills already taught, high-frequency words previously introduced, and specific vocabulary from prior lessons.

Recent research indicates teachers using leveled texts should preview the text to ensure students have a base of knowledge of the phonics patterns included, meaning that they can read the text with about 93–97% accuracy to maximize student growth in reading fluency. Leveled readers should be chosen purposefully to align with the generalization stage of learning to read (so, after students have acquired a base level of knowledge of phonics included in the texts, as shown by reading with 93–97% accuracy). Consider also aligning with the content focus to help students generalize new vocabulary, high-frequency words, and/or knowledge across subjects and throughout the school day.

Please note that the information on leveled texts presented here does not apply to leveled texts that are predictable texts. Predictable, or repetitive, texts are typically found in the first few levels of most organized leveling systems, for example, Levels A–D in Guided Reading levels. These texts are not appropriate for students to learn to acquire new phonics skills or practice generalizing phonics patterns to new words. Because the texts at this stage have predictable and repetitive sentence stems, they can encourage students to use the picture, first letter(s), or context to guess at some words without looking closely at the letters within the word to confirm or change these predictions. Instead, these predictable texts may be more appropriate for shared reading, modeling rhyming during a poetry unit, or making inferences or predictions about the text. For more information, check out Spelfabet, a demonstration by Australian speech pathologist Alison Clarke.

A benefit to using leveled texts, rather than high-controlled decodable texts, is that students begin to learn to utilize their set for variability. That’s a term researchers use for a student’s ability to flex the pronunciation of a word they have decoded into one they recognize in their oral vocabulary. For example, if a student hasn’t yet learned that the letter A following a W typically spells the sound /ŏ/, they may first decode the word “wasp” in the sentence “The wasp stings the pig” as rhyming with the word “clasp.” However, if they know that a wasp is a stinging insect, they may use their set for variability to flex the pronunciation to the real word, “wasp.” Encouraging students to flex sounds during reading, and providing a range of texts to read, not just highly controlled decodable texts, can allow students to grow their phonics flexing muscles, thus jumpstarting their self-teaching abilities.

It is important to ensure students have a base of foundational phonics knowledge before asking them to generalize their skills to build fluency in leveled texts. However, without wide and varied text practice, students may not be exposed to enough word types to jumpstart this self-teaching and phonics flexing muscles. Be aware of that during your lesson planning.

The graphic above on instructional hierarchy was created by NWEA and adapted from Norris Haring and Marie Eaton’s “Systematic instructional procedures: An instructional hierarchy” in The Fourth R: Research in the Classroom. It illustrates different student learning needs and aligned teacher actions at each stage.

Decodable texts would fit well during the acquisition stage of learning and bring students into the fluency stage. Since the goal is to move through the generalization stage and into future literacy independence, leveled texts are an appropriate and necessary part of an early reader’s literacy learning journey.

Recommendations and next steps for teachers

If you’re a teacher, I encourage you to take inventory of your texts for teaching phonics skills. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What types of texts am I using to support this acquisition of introduced phonics skills and assist students in building fluency with those phonics skills?
• Do I have decodable texts for students to practice the specific phonics skills aligned with my phonics scope and sequence?

Next, take inventory of your library for students to practice reading a wide variety texts. Ask yourself:

• What types of texts am I using to support generalization and improve my students’ ability to flex sounds?
• Do I have other text types, such as leveled texts, that align to my students’ reading accuracy of 93–97%?

Finally, ensure students have ample opportunity to read a variety of texts every day. Ask yourself:

• At what point today did students read texts with teacher guidance to practice and receive feedback on new skills or challenging texts?
• At what point today did students read texts with peer feedback to build fluency and understanding?
• At what point today did students read texts independently to extend fluency practice on previously introduced texts or practice their skills?

Recommendations and next steps for leaders

If you’re a school leader, there’s a lot you can do to support your reading teachers in using decodable and leveled texts appropriately.

First, ensure your teachers have the following types of texts for optimizing student literacy success:

• Decodable texts that align with their adopted phonics scope and sequence
• Leveled texts that align with their content topics or ELA high-frequency words and new vocabulary

It’s important that you ensure predictable texts are not part of early literacy word recognition instruction.

Next, I encourage you to check out our evidence-aligned professional learning offerings on Early Word Recognition, Advanced Word Recognition, and Building Fluent Readers for more extended learning opportunities for your entire school staff.

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Who has better reading comprehension of a text, the student with “advanced reading skills” or the one who has a wealth of knowledge about the topic?

If you’re familiar with the Baseball Study, then you know this is a simple question with a complex answer—and important implications for how we understand learning and literacy. This study, conducted in 1987, found that having more background knowledge in a specific topic can be more predictive of a student’s success in comprehending a written text on that topic than having a high score on an overall reading comprehension test.

In the academic setting, we often call background knowledge a “shared academic vocabulary,” and it’s such a critical component of reading comprehension—and learning overall—that NWEA included the teaching of academic vocabulary as one of the Transformative Ten strategies that can be found in some of our nation’s highest-performing schools. These strategies emerged from High Growth for All, an NWEA research project that examined instructional practices in a handful of the country’s highest-performing schools.

Here are a few tips for making better use of the simple but powerful practice of teaching academic vocabulary to improve reading comprehension and achievement.

1. Keep word lists front and center

To succeed with grade-level content, students need a basic set of tools for approaching and understanding the curriculum in front of them—and this includes subject-specific academic vocabulary that helps them feel informed, up to speed, and ready to learn. Whether you’re teaching literature or mathematics, creating word lists and making them readily available to your students will greatly increase their preparedness for new material.

And it’s not just students who benefit from word lists. You, too, can use them as reminders to use the terms regularly yourself and avoid taking your own background knowledge for granted. We all fall back on our own speaking patterns, which may or may not be helpful to students as they work toward specific learning goals. By creating—and continuously referring back to—word lists that are explicitly connected to the concepts you’re teaching, you can help put your students on a level playing field where it’s your efforts to build a shared academic vocabulary, rather than students’ individual background knowledge, that determines their outcomes and growth.

2. Embrace teachable moments

In the High Growth for All project, NWEA researchers found that the most effective teachers make a habit of creating specific opportunities for students to learn new vocabulary terms. In humanities and mathematics alike, these teachers regularly focus on introducing new words that will allow students to actively participate in all the conversations and academic exercises to follow.

Whether you’re teaching literature or mathematics, creating word lists and making them readily available to your students will greatly increase their preparedness for new material.

Sometimes, however, learning opportunities arise outside of the structured spaces planned by teachers. When students come across a word they don’t know—whether they bring this to your attention themselves or you simply intuit that there’s something they’re not grasping—take a minute to pause and assess. Take these gaps in understanding seriously, as even a single word could be critical in helping students successfully interpret a text or complete an activity. You might be on a roll with your lesson plan, but these little interruptions represent teachable moments that you can use to your advantage by discussing a word’s meaning and adding to your prominently displayed word list.

3. Make the most of morphemes

Because it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of words in the English language, breaking them down into their functional and meaningful parts—or morphemes—can help make vocabulary instruction a more manageable process with plenty of “aha” moments.

For example, a student may never have seen the word “intractable,” but if they learn that the morpheme “tract” means “to pull,” then they can infer the meaning of “intractable” to mean, roughly, “you can’t pull it.” In this way, understanding morphemes can help open a lot of doors for students who may not be familiar with certain words but know where to look for clues as to the words’ meaning.

As Margaret McKeown, senior scientist and professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, explains in a short video on early vocabulary development, “Morphology is one of those resources where if you’re familiar with word parts, whether they’re prefixes, suffixes, or roots … those can help you either infer the meaning of a word, or they might help you figure out the pronunciation of a word that you might realize, once you’ve said it to yourself, you actually know! But you just didn’t recognize it in print.”

4. Encourage curiosity about words

One of your best assets in the effort to expand the way you teach academic vocabulary is the natural curiosity that kids bring to everything they do. You can tap into this curiosity and get kids interested in—even excited about—the new words they encounter as they approach new subject material.

Along these lines, I highly recommend keeping a tab open for the Online Etymology Dictionary, a website that’s a lot more fun and engaging than its name might suggest. Simply type in any word, and you’ll get a solid explanation of where the word originated, why it’s spelled the way it is, and what other words it’s related to.

It’s not always easy to make sense of the English language (consider the different pronunciations of “though,” “through,” “cough,” and “rough”), but the goal here is not to solve every mystery but, rather, to encourage and reward curiosity. Research suggests that nurturing curiosity in this way can have a major impact on what students are able to comprehend. And with the right resource at your fingertips, you can always respond to students’ questions about particular words with, “I don’t know. Let’s look it up together and find out.”

It starts with you

Because we can’t expect students to understand words that we don’t actually use ourselves, the critical first step in teaching academic vocabulary is simply to model the vocabulary we need them to know. Your students might think you put that big word list on the wall for them, but it can be just as valuable a resource for you. And with these vocabulary terms front and center, you can then tap into professional development resources to strengthen your pedagogical practice.

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There are times I look back on my adventures as a classroom teacher and pat myself on the back. And there are other times I look back and wish I had a redo.

To be honest, I always felt like I was swimming upstream as an educator: lesson planning, participating in professional learning communities, conforming to the district’s focus on test preparation (redo, please!), addressing parent questions and student conflicts. I was busy.

Research on ways to improve my practice sat perpetually on the back burner. The closest I got was checking out the school library’s copy of The Reading Teacher magazine, and even then, I mostly focused on the classroom activities. Now that I’m in a different role in education and have time to avail myself of research, I’ve discovered that teaching reading and writing in a connected manner was one of those things I should pat myself on the back for. Writing and reading skills both stand to benefit when we have students write about what they read.

Reading and writing go hand in hand

Steve Graham, a prominent researcher who focuses on writing instruction, has written extensively about “the reciprocal relation that exists between reading and writing.” In an article from 2020, he explains that when students receive and apply writing instruction, their reading ability improves, and as students become more fluent and comprehending readers, their writing ability also improves.

This claim is well substantiated: Graham and some of his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examined 47 literacy programs that balanced reading with writing, meaning both were taught about equally, with neither exceeding 60% of instructional time. The researchers wanted to learn whether those programs with a dual focus on reading and writing improved students’ reading and writing performance overall. And guess what? They did.

Even though I was unaware of any research on the subject when I was in the classroom, there were many reasons I chose to have students write about what they read. And now I know from the work of Graham and his colleagues that these practices were sound.

The benefits of integrating writing and reading instruction

One of my favorite ways to pair reading and writing instruction in my classroom was to invite students to write about assigned reading. I would do this for both fiction and non-fiction reading we’d done—and for pieces of varying lengths, too. Here is why I found this practice to be so beneficial:

• Writing about published works facilitates reading comprehension and reveals text connections. Having students write about what they read gave me insight into what they understood about a text, how it impacted them, and how they connected to it. Even in elementary grades, kids were eager to share their thoughts with me and with their peers, and writing gave them a way to do that.
• Published works can become mentor texts. Opportunities to have students write about what they read let me see if students were able to model good writing that had been evident in a book or article we had focused on. If the author used similes or metaphors, for example, we discussed those when we read. We talked about why authors used figurative language and how it impacted the text and the reader. If the text was informational, we discussed important academic language, what each word meant, and why authors used “big words” when discussing a subject. Then, when students wrote about those texts, I got to observe them following the model of the author, which helped them understand things like an author’s purpose, an author’s craft, genre, and text structure.
• Professional writing can model sound grammar and syntax. When students wrote about what they read, I could even see how they noticed grammar and syntax that had been modeled by the author. I would then encourage the use of those elements of writing and have them practice using them the way the author did, or in new and creative ways.
• Other people’s writing can generate ideas for student writing. The mental blocks so commonly prevalent with students seemed to lessen when they didn’t have to grab something out of thin air to write about. Writing about reading gave them something to glom onto.
• Writing about what we read can improve engagement while reading. I strived to get to know my students, as my colleague Kayla McLaughlin describes in “4 ways to get students excited about writing.” I would choose highly engaging books my kids would be interested in. Does this mean the only writing they ever did was text based? No. There are many types of writing, and students must be able to approach them all with confidence. But it does mean that almost every text had accompanying writing work and that the texts were designed to appeal to my students.

When to incorporate writing tasks

Deciding when to incorporate writing is an important part of your lesson planning. There are great opportunities for writing before your students read a text and during and after, too.

• Prereading: Ask students to write about a topic you will be getting ready to read about. My students loved the book Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. The historical context of the Dust Bowl encouraged thinking about human consequences on the environment, the verse invited discussions about form, and the themes of hope and perseverance got us thinking about empathy. I posed different questions for students to answer prior to reading depending on what aspects I wanted to focus on. For example, if I wanted to focus on the science in the book with my fifth-graders, I would ask them to share things humans have done that have harmed the planet in their writing log. If I wanted to teach the difference between poetry, narrative, and informational texts with my fourth-graders, I would ask them to write descriptions of each of those forms. In both cases, writing before we did our reading gave me a good sense for our starting point ahead of my lessons.
• During reading: Quick writes can be effective during reading to help students reflect and give you insight into current understanding. These can be in response to guided questions, such as “Which character do you like best so far and why?” They can be answered in just a couple of sentences to help build student confidence and comfort with writing.
• After reading: Most of the time, I would give students prompts after reading, but sometimes, they were so fired up they just wanted to get some thoughts on paper. I found it useful when they were extra passionate about something to allow them to discuss it with a partner first; otherwise, the writing could be all over the place. I encouraged them to use evidence from the text to support their main points, rather than relying on their emotional reactions only, which they quickly realized strengthened their writing.

Support a sound writing process with our free resource

Informal and quick writes are valuable and have their place in your classroom. We also know from research that the process behind writing is as important as the product created. An intentional, formal process encourages deep analysis and critical thinking. Researchers David Galbraith and Veerle Baaigen refer to writing as a “knowledge-transforming” process because it activates our recently acquired knowledge and helps encode that knowledge into our memory. That’s why we have designed guidance to support you in encouraging students to think not only about what they focus on when they write but also how a sound process can help them achieve their goals. NWEA calls this guidance a writing plan, and we have outlined expectations specific to grade bands: K–1, 2–5, 6–8.

Regardless of which grade band document you open, you’ll see questions that guide students to think about purpose, audience, type of writing, organization, and the writing process. The K–1 band keeps things basic so students can better understand what to think about before writing. As we move to the 2–5 and 6–8 bands, more detail is given, especially regarding the writing process. So, for example, K–1 students will focus on keeping calm, which we know is important for beginning writers who are fearful that they don’t have enough of a grasp of spelling and grammar to get their points across. Then, in grades 6–8, students are encouraged to advance to thinking about who their writing community includes and the more exacting steps they may take as part of the process (e.g., setting daily goals, avoiding distractions, reading a draft aloud to catch typos).

The consistent focus across K–8 in our writing plan tools emphasizes that process writing can—and should—be a part of the curriculum at all grades. The changing level of sophistication across K–8 shows that the writing process should always remain developmentally appropriate.

Another thing to note: Our writing plan tools don’t just apply to the ELA classroom. Several studies, including by Graham, have shown the benefits of writing in other disciplines, like science, history, and math, because that writing deepens students’ learning of the specific content being taught. Regardless of your content area, we encourage you to explore how you can use our writing plan tools in your classroom.

A note on writing and assessment

If your school uses MAP® Growth, you might be wondering how an interim assessment like MAP Growth fits in. While MAP Growth doesn’t assess writing, it does assess reading.

MAP Growth provides a RIT score for the reading domain. Knowing a student’s reading RIT score is lower than the proficiency norms for their grade level would be helpful when you think about what their writing scores might look like on your state summative. If the score is low, I encourage you to use formative assessment to further determine how best to differentiate instruction and build those reading and writing connections. For example, if your Class Profile report shows students’ RIT scores are low in vocabulary, choose books rich in academic language or that include figurative language in meaningful ways. Spend instructional time talking about the meaning of those words and the impact of the words on the text. Then have students write using the academic language or using figurative language to make their points.

MAP Growth also includes a language usage test that will give you insight into students’ strengths with grammar and conventions.

In closing

If you currently teach reading and writing separately, there’s no better time to reflect on how to have students write about what they read. That way, you won’t have to look back later and wish you, too, could have a redo.

I encourage you to explore opportunities for writing before, during, and after reading a text and to turn to our writing plan tools for support, including beyond the ELA classroom. Together, formative and interim assessment can help you get a good understanding for where students are in their growth as writers, and they’ll give you the information to course correct as needed.

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In the 2003 film Love Actually, the ever-rumpled Hugh Grant informs the audience that “Love, actually, is all around.” As someone who loves to write and always strives to be better at it, bear with me as I take that quote and attempt to spin it in my own way: A writing community is, actually, all around. We can help young writers create a classroom writing community and then help them expand it ever outward to support their growth in a manner that is warm, flexible, and readily available.

It is often tempting to take an overly formal approach to writing. While the writing process is a critical tool for developing writers, there is no need to instill in them the idea that they need to send a formal invitation, written in calligraphy, to ask someone to provide feedback about their writing.

What, after all, is the goal of having a writing community? At its best, the community will support every writer by providing suggestions for improvement, ideas about new approaches, and even refinement of the topic or specific wording choices. This support can take many forms and can be approached in a variety of ways.

Lead by example

A powerful way for educators to nurture young writers is to provide ample opportunities for writing, but also for them to show themselves as writers. In the 2019 article “Changing how writing is taught,” Steve Graham advocates for teachers to see themselves as writers and to model their own active engagement in the writing process. He notes that this requires a level of vulnerability, but that it is also a tool to show students that it takes practice and thoughtfulness to hone the craft, a craft in which there is always room for more growth.

How can a teacher open the door to allow students the opportunity to understand the teacher’s thinking as the teacher writes? Using a “think aloud” is a great way to do this. Consider a history teacher who needs to explain different types of governments the class will be studying over the course of a year. That teacher may begin by saying something along the lines of, “I listed this type of government first because it is at the center of what we are studying this year, though it is not what we will encounter first chronologically.” This is a way of demystifying a lesson plan and inviting students in.

Remind students that everyone has a writing voice and a writing identity that are worth sharing and developing.

If a teacher is vulnerable and open, it creates a stronger sense of safety for students who may be hesitant to share their own writing. It also makes writing seem a bit less formal and scary. As educators, we likely share our own written words regularly with our class. Why not pull back the curtain? Doing so shows our students that even a sentence or a list on a board is an act of writing worthy of note and examination.

Use peer feedback

When we think of a writing community in the school setting, we likely picture a teacher-organized peer review activity. The teacher pairs students or organizes them into groups, and they take turns reading or listening to each other’s works. Then they share their thoughts, and the more earnest (or perhaps punitive) peers will whip out their metaphorical red pens and share feedback.

Students may need help starting and continuing these dialogues. Consider providing conversation starters for them to use. Even something as simple as, “One part of my writing that seemed to go more slowly than other parts was…” or “I think my opening paragraph could be more….” If an exchange does not flow smoothly, students can turn back to these conversation starters to continue their collaboration.

Be sure to add in prompts that force students to focus on points of pride, for example, “I was so happy when I…” or “I really liked the sentence where I….” This allows them to remember successes and to also illuminate accomplishments that may help their peers consider their own work. Peer feedback has benefits for all involved but has also proven to be particularly valuable for students learning a second language—even more valuable than teacher feedback.

To provide more structure and guidance, a teacher can assign a particular area of focus for any peer review work. “Review each other’s work and provide feedback” is likely far too broad an instruction, particularly if the class is only 45 or 50 minutes. Give students more guidance, or weed out elements that are not going to yield helpful results. If you want student discussion to have greater depth and meaning, ask them to focus on structure or tone, for example. Consider giving them conversation starters such as, “The type of structure I used for this essay was…. I chose this because….”

This is not to say that they cannot give each other feedback on grammar and mechanics, but these young writers will benefit more from feedback about the arguments they are making or the organization of their work. It helps the receiver as well as the provider to think about writing at this level rather than about input that can come from spelling and grammar check tools available in word processing programs.

Another way you can guide peer review sessions is by building student awareness of mentor texts. When students are exposed to clear, effective, and powerful writing, they can start to learn by example. I promise that I am not being paid by the estate of Ray Bradbury when I say that when I attempt to craft figurative language, I think about his stunning writing in Something Wicked This Way Comes. While I will never have his gifts, I have a lofty target at which to aim. I was lucky enough to read this work at a young age and to see how powerfully a writer can manipulate words and pages. If students read the same mentor texts, they start to build a shared vocabulary around writing they can use when “coaching” each other.

It is vital to monitor how students are providing feedback, of course. As I mentioned earlier, sharing your writing is an act of vulnerability. If we want students to become more comfortable doing this, we have to make sure the experience is as positive and productive as we can make it. Especially if the feedback comes early in the writing process, students likely are not sharing Pulitzer Prize–ready work. Remind students to frame feedback in clear but gentle ways, and model this for them consistently. “Your sentences are a hot mess” is likely to damage a young writer; “I’m not sure I quite understand what you mean in your second sentence” is gentler while still guiding the writer to reflect and revise.

Embrace an audience of more than one

When a student thinks about their writing community, the person they probably think of first is their teacher. While teachers can and do provide valuable insight, there is a danger of inadvertently leading students to think that the only audience for their writing is the teacher. This can stifle student voice and growth if the student forgets that generally, when we write, we hope to reach more than one person.

And what if that one person has a narrow idea of what constitutes “good” or “acceptable” writing? In life beyond school, we sometimes write to an audience of just one, but students need coaching about considering broader audiences. If you want them to write particularly to your preferences, establish that via a rubric or a structured document of that nature. Bear in mind, though, that your preferences may not serve them well with future teachers. Not all teachers love humor in writing, or a distinct voice. Help your students think more broadly, which means you will have to think broadly as well.

It is also important to remind students that writing is not only the act of sitting in a classroom writing an essay or responding to a text-dependent analysis question.

Over the course of a year, students should also have opportunities to experiment with different styles of writing and to consider different audiences. Help them think about what this means and brainstorm together (once again, modeling vulnerability) what successful writing might look like for the audience in question. Even better: Find members of that audience and ask them what appeals to them in writing. Those people then become members of the writing community, too, providing insight and guidance that young writers can carry with them as they progress with their craft.

Think creatively about the writing community

While teachers and classmates can provide valuable feedback, a gift we can give young writers is to help them realize that a writing community can take many forms. If I turn and ask a colleague to review an email I wrote to see if it makes sense, I have brought them into my writing community. If I do a “think aloud” about an essay I have to write about character growth in a play, the person listening to me ramble has become a part of my community. If I read aloud to my dog, who is surely just waiting to hear the words “treat” or “walkies,” I could even say I have brought him into my writing community. (Okay, sure, this is really just me talking to myself, but humor me.) Students should be encouraged to engage others in providing feedback to their writing. Siblings, friends, invested adults—these can all become part of our writing communities.

I think something offputting, or at least intimidating, about creating a writing community is the idea that it means you hand over your work, either in physical or electronic form, and you wait for the recipient to read and critique it. While this mode of feedback can be extremely helpful, it requires a level of formality that is not always necessary. Support your students in being creative about when and how they ask for feedback from their writing community. Does one sentence of an essay feel clunky to them? Have them ask someone if it makes sense. Are they struggling to clarify the argument they are trying to make? Encourage them to bounce it off someone else and ask them if they can explain what the writer believes or is postulating. Students don’t have to have every person engage in a thorough analysis of an entire piece of writing.

I also encourage you to support your students in asking others what they think makes them good writers. Perhaps one student has a good ear for dialogue and can help their peers with that at some point. Perhaps citations come easily to someone else who is willing to review those. We all have different strengths and interests in writing; pulling in people with a wide range of skills makes a writing community diverse and flexible.

Shaping a writing identity

A teacher—I would argue almost every teacher—has an opportunity to play a pivotal role in the development of a student’s identity as a writer. Many students may be resistant to this idea, thinking they can only deserve the title of “writer” if they reach the pantheon of famous writers who dominate bookshelves and pedestals within the canon.

We can make the title of “writer” less intimidating and remind students that everyone has a writing voice and a writing identity that are worth sharing and developing. It is also important to remind students that writing is not only the act of sitting in a classroom writing an essay or responding to a text-dependent analysis question. We write more than we think we do: when we send emails, when we post to social media, when we send text messages, or even when we jot down reminders to ourselves. With everything we write, we are expressing something of ourselves. What could be more worthwhile for educators to nurture?

So, forget Hugh Grant. Forget your latent rage toward Alan Rickman and how he treated Emma Thompson’s character in that movie. A writing community is, actually, all around. We all have a voice and identity as a writer, even if we have not yet pinpointed it. Help your students embrace that writing identity, and use their writing community to help them allow it to shine through in all of their work. Model this as an educator and your young writers will, whether they thank you or not, benefit from it.

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Do you wonder how to help students build their reading fluency? We recently spoke with Jan Hasbrouck, a researcher, author, leading expert in reading fluency, and co-developer, with Gerald Tindal, of the oral reading fluency norms. Our goal was to better understand important nuances and distinctions when thinking about reading fluency and building fluent readers.

“Fluency is not fast reading. Fluency is fluent reading,” Jan told us. “The biggest misconception around fluency is that we want students to read faster and faster.” But speed for speed’s sake isn’t a worthwhile goal. “We should think about getting students to the point where their reading mirrors spoken language,” Jan explained. “That’s what our brains understand. And that facilitates comprehension.”

To hear more about building fluent readers from Jan, watch our video below.

What is reading fluency?

Reading fluency is comprised of three parts: accuracy, rate, and expression (sometimes referred to as prosody). Although all three components can be measured, most oral reading fluency assessments focus on the predictive skill of automaticity. Automaticity, in turn, is made up of the most predictive two components correlated with later reading success: reading accuracy (the percentage of words read correctly out of the amount of total words attempted) and reading rate (the number of words correct per minute).

An oral reading fluency assessment, such as the oral reading fluency measure in MAP® Reading Fluency, is the quickest way to screen students to determine if immediate intervention is needed. Without early intervention in place, research suggests student phonics and fluency gaps will continue to widen and students will continue to fall behind grade-level expectations.

How do I use oral reading fluency data?

If a student is low in accuracy while reading an on-grade-level passage, this signals that the student needs acquisition-level instruction and has difficulty with decoding words. A brief screening with an oral reading fluency measure can help you determine if any students are below grade level in accuracy when reading a grade-level text. After the screening, you can assess phonics patterns not yet known and group students accordingly to effectively intervene and teach specific phonics skills.

Here is a list of common actions teachers may need to take, followed by tips on how to go about them:

1. Identify students with word recognition needs. Use a universal screener that delineates between word recognition and language comprehension difficulties, such as MAP Reading Fluency.
2. Assess student knowledge of phonics patterns. Use a phonics and/or spelling diagnostic survey to assess phonics skills that students have and have not yet mastered.
3. Group students for intervention based on data. Form groups of 3–5 students who have similar phonics needs.
4. Begin intervention at the first commonly missing phonics skill. Align student needs with the phonics scope and sequence of your intervention program.
5. Monitor progress. If students are not making expected progress, adjust the intensity of the intervention. Ensure groups are flexible and aligned to student needs.

If a student is low in reading rate but not in reading accuracy, this signals the student needs fluency-level instruction and requires more guided practice with reading connected text. One way to provide this is to do a first read and to scaffold learning anytime the student misreads a word. The feedback provided should be the least amount of prompting needed for optimal student learning. For example, if a student misreads “wage” as “wag” and does not self-correct, the teacher may use a series of prompts, as shown here:

If at any point the student reads the word correctly, you do not need to provide the more extensive level of support and feedback. This way, the student is prompted to do the hard work of decoding and can gain the experience needed to increase their chances of applying this pattern to other words. If the student is given the word as a whole, they may be less likely to think about the unfamiliar pattern within the word and assimilate it into their understanding of how words work. You may then have the student start at the beginning of the sentence and read the word again in the context of the story.

If the word is a Tier 2 vocabulary word or a concept the student may not be familiar with, you may follow up with a student-friendly definition or example, such as “A wage is money you earn for doing work. If you work at a job, you are paid a (wage).” This may be done while keeping in mind the time constraints, the amount of context explaining the word within the text being read, and the importance of understanding the target word to the passage.

What should I do now?

In your journey of learning, growing, and shifting practices to align with research, remember to give yourself grace. Choose one thing to focus on at a time and partner with trusted colleagues to collaborate and seek feedback. Leveraging oral reading fluency data can help to tailor interventions to accelerate student progress. Rather than asking kids to laboriously sound out words or expend precious effort to read at an appropriate rate, prioritize improving their phonics and fluency skills, as this allows them to focus on, understand, and ultimately enjoy what they read.

Here’s a quick summary of what you can do when building fluent readers, whether you’re a teacher or a school leader.

Recommendations for teachers:

• Use oral reading fluency screening data to identify students in need of word recognition intervention. If students score low in accuracy (regardless of their score on rate), place students in a phonics-focused intervention group aligned with a phonics scope and sequence. If students score low in rate (and on or above level in accuracy), place students in a fluency-focused intervention group.
• Use least-to-most prompting and feedback to help students acquire skills faster.
• Monitor student progress and adjust intervention intensity as needed.

Recommendations for administrators:

• Ensure teachers screen students with an oral reading fluency measure three times a year, starting by the winter of first grade.
• Provide time for teachers to have high-quality, practical, and embedded professional learning in teaching word recognition and reading fluency aligned to the science of reading.
• Encourage collaboration by scheduling data meetings for teachers to discuss students’ data, needs, and progress toward goals.

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Many of our earliest memories of school are about learning to read. Do you remember what your experience was like? Did you have a fairly smooth journey? Or did your “literacy story” include a lot of struggles along the way?

We know many students (including many adults) have faced major challenges when learning to read. The encouraging news is that teachers can now draw from the science of reading as they are helping students create their own literacy stories. But for school leaders, the science of reading may be just the beginning of an answer. They are often left with many questions and not a lot of support.

“Oftentimes, I feel like leaders have been left out,” says Beth Praska, senior professional learning consultant at NWEA. “Districts only have so much money, so they train the teachers. But leaders also need support.”

The essence of leading

NWEA hosted a webinar, The science of reading for leaders: Helping your teachers shift instructional practice, last year that answered many of the big questions leaders are asking. You’ll find a lot of the main takeaways below, but the whole webinar is absolutely worth watching. I also spent some time chatting with one of the hosts from the webinar, Luke Bell (NWEA’s manager of professional learning content design), as well as Beth. They have both been working directly with school and district leaders and provided a lot of great insights into how leaders can respond to these new challenges.

Let’s take a look at some of the main questions leaders are asking about the science of reading.

• What is the science of reading? We define the science of reading as the converging evidence of what matters and what works in literacy instruction, organized around models that describe how and why. “It’s not about a philosophy, and it’s not about a political perspective,” says Luke. “It’s about the emerging and essential evidence.”
• Where can I learn about the evidence? The What Works Clearinghouse publishes practice guides that not only distill the evidence but also take the crucial next step of offering specific recommendations based on the evidence. They are incredibly helpful, free to download, and a great resource for teachers to use in learning communities.
• What should I be looking for when reviewing instruction based on the science of reading? The simple view of reading is a model used by reading researchers all over the world. It’s a very concise equation stating that reading comprehension (RC) is the product of decoding (D) and language comprehension (LC), or RC = D x LC. All decoding/word recognition (D) instruction based on the science of reading should have an emphasis on sounds within words, a scope and sequence for taught phonics, and an application to connected texts.Language comprehension (LC) instruction should include complex texts for all students, support for students to actively develop language skills, and support for students to learn content knowledge and vocabulary.
• How do I know if it’s working? Part of building a culture of evidence-based practices is creating a culture that embraces data. Many of our partners rely on MAP® Reading Fluency to monitor progress in oral reading fluency, phonics and word recognition, and phonological awareness. Why these areas? The science of reading tells us that progress in these content areas matters for getting students to the goal of reading comprehension.

Creating better literacy stories

The shift to the science of reading is challenging work. But, as Luke says, we don’t need to “abandon everything we know about what matters and what works in literacy instruction to bring the science of reading to life.” It’s more about having conversations and changing one problematic instructional practice at a time. A helpful tool for leaders as they look forward is the 5Essentials® framework developed by the University of Chicago. It’s a research-based school improvement system that identifies the five key areas that matter most for school improvement. This is a great tool for helping leaders identify where to focus their literacy efforts:

• Effective Leaders who have a clear vision for literacy and rally others around that vision
• Collaborative Teachers who plan together to implement what works and what matters in literacy instruction
• Involved Families who become engaged through open communication and stories of student success with the science of reading
• Supportive Environment where every teacher has the tools they need to be successful in this shift to the science of reading
• Ambitious Instruction that challenges and inspires students to reach their full potential as fluent readers and successful writers

“There are so many things that the leader has to bring in, like clarity of a vision and a mission,” says Beth. Other initiatives may need to be reconsidered as the science of reading becomes the focus, and leaders must be ready to listen and respond to the real needs of teachers. Remember: The national story about literacy outcomes has been decades in the making. Current fourth-grade reading scores have not changed a lot since 1998. It’ll take some hard work to fully rewrite that story.

Partnering to help all kids learn

That’s our mission here at NWEA, and we’ve seen measurable results many times in our partner districts. MAP Reading Fluency and MAP® Growth can be game-changers, connecting precise student data to instructional next steps. And we know teachers thrive when they are supported in learning research-based practices within a connected system of professional learning, coaching, and data consultation. Ultimately, getting students to the goal of reading comprehension is not about just a product or a tool—it’s about the people in your buildings doing the work, every day. That’s why we’ve introduced a two-part addition to our early literacy suite called “Early Word Recognition.” The sessions go far beyond theory and into actionable, day-to-day insights that teachers can use long after they’ve completed the workshop. “Right now we have a lot of new teachers . . .  and it’s even more the onus of a leader to support these young teachers, especially in some of our states with teachers who aren’t even fully finished with their degrees yet,” says Beth.

Make sure to download the webinar resources—you’ll find a lesson-planning tool to support teachers in designing and planning phonics lessons and a learning-walk tool leaders can use to identify trends at the classroom, school, or district level.

The bright road ahead

“It is possible to teach the vast majority of students to read if we start early and follow the significant body of research showing which practices are the most effective,” says Luke. “Researchers now estimate that 95% of all children can be taught to read by the end of first grade.” That is a lot of literacy stories with wonderfully happy endings.

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It can be difficult to get students excited about writing.

Growing up, I liked to write. More specifically, though, I liked to write about things I liked. While I could crank out a decent enough essay like the best of them, my real passion was in creative writing. Buried in the depths of my office closet is a box holding over a dozen spiral-bound notebooks and hundreds of loose pieces of paper (all adorned with my middle-to-high-school handwriting) spinning elaborate tales of drama and adventure, mostly inspired by my favorite fantasy novels.

A few pieces, though, stand out. There’s the short story I wrote for my honors English class in tenth grade, when we were studying the works of Edgar Allan Poe. My teacher gave us the option to either write an essay comparing the themes in multiple examples of Poe’s work or to demonstrate our understanding of the class material by writing an original short story mimicking Poe’s style. I chose the latter. And I got an A.

Looking back at my high school career, I realize how extremely fortunate I was to have English teachers who understood the importance of “leaning in” and getting to know me as a person. The Poe assignment was one of many in which my teachers found ways to tailor writing tasks so that they felt more interesting and relevant. It was their ability to create buy-in on my part that resulted in my not only wanting to write for school but also in my learning to see myself as a writer both inside and outside of the classroom.

There’s a great deal of focus in writing instruction on making sure students consider their audience. Just as we want students to know their audience, however, we, as teachers, need to also know our students so that we can empower them to use their writing voices. Here are four tips on how to go about this in your classroom.

1. Assign authentic writing tasks

My colleague Julie Richardson recently wrote about engaging student interest with authentic writing tasks. Namely, she calls out the importance of having students consider what they want to accomplish with a particular piece of writing, in addition to what their teacher wants. This callout is in keeping with research by scholars including Steve Graham and Sarah Freedman, among others, that demonstrates the importance of considering what sorts of writing tasks students might engage in outside the classroom. Authenticity is an excellent way to get students excited about writing.

By integrating authentic writing tasks into your curriculum, you can help your students see the value in school-based writing. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Making a thank-you card for a friend or family member
• Using picture books to write simple stories
• Creating comic books or graphic novels
• Summarizing and critiquing movies or episodes of TV shows
• Documenting a family story or recipe
• Reporting on the unexpected origins of an everyday item
• Leaving effective online reviews for products
• Writing a cover letter for a potential job
• Drafting requests to state and local representatives

2. Get to know your students

To get started identifying authentic writing tasks for your students, ask yourself: who are my students? What drives and motivates them? What are their strengths? What are their opportunities for growth? Why should knowing how to write—and to write well—matter to them?

One simple way to start the getting-to-know-you process is by asking students to complete a writer reflection survey. This not only allows you, as the teacher, to learn more about how your students view and approach writing, but it also gives them a chance to self-reflect and consider, perhaps for the first time, how they view and approach writing.

To gauge shifts in students’ perspectives, I recommend administering your survey multiple times (e.g., once at the beginning of the year and once at the end, or between major writing assignments). Some examples of potential statements you might include, asking students to indicate their level of agreement from strongly disagree to strongly agree, are:

• I can stay focused when I write.
• It’s hard for me to remember how to spell words.
• I write differently depending on who will read my writing.
• I like adding extra features to my writing, like illustrations or labels.
• I know who I can go to for help with my writing.
• I usually understand the directions in school writing assignments.
• I see myself as a writer.
• I believe writing is important in everyday life.

For younger students, consider adapting your survey into a classroom activity that gets students up and moving around the room. Designate certain parts of the classroom as “response areas,” then read each statement aloud and ask students to walk to the response area that best matches how they feel about the statement. For example, students who strongly agree with the statement “I can stay focused when I write” might go stand by the back wall, while those who strongly disagree might go stand up front by the whiteboard, while those somewhere in between could stand in the middle of the classroom.

Note, however, that a survey such as the one described here is simply the beginning of an ongoing conversation you’ll need to have with your students as you discover more about who they are and how you can help them feel more confident as writers.

To keep the conversation going, consider asking students to keep a writing journal that they regularly share with you and in which you can provide feedback and answer questions. You might also incorporate peer review sessions into your lessons, as these sessions allow students to hone their writing skills and share their work with peers. Both of these approaches can get students excited about writing and help them begin to see themselves as writers who understand and appreciate the value of writing in their everyday lives.

3. Prioritize an asset-based approach

When getting to know your students, take particular care to use an asset-based approach; that is, do not mistake difference for “less than.” For example, you may have students in your classroom who are more comfortable and fluent expressing themselves in a language other than English. You might have students with disabilities like dyslexia, which can make accurate spelling a challenge. You might have students with ADHD for whom the act of sitting down and quietly drafting a paper is difficult. Does that mean these students have less potential as writers than their peers? Of course not! It simply means that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to writing instruction.

Multilingual students, for whom weaving together words from two or more languages can be as natural as breathing, should be allowed and encouraged to incorporate translanguaging into their writing process. Students with dyslexia or for whom spelling is otherwise a challenge should be provided access to accommodations like spell check and speech-to-text, which research shows can lead to improved writing outcomes. Students with ADHD, meanwhile, may benefit from more explicit guidance on what is expected, prewriting activities such as mind mapping, and having a larger writing task broken down into smaller micro-assignments, as noted by educator Tracy Collins on Edutopia.

The importance of an asset-based approach can’t be overstated and is an invaluable way to get students excited about writing.

4. Aim for inclusivity

Consider that you may also have students whose lived experiences are such that they don’t find some popular assigned prompts relevant. For example, a student who spent their summer at home or working to help support their family probably isn’t going to feel particularly seen if asked to write about what sort of vacation they took while school was out. A student with same-sex parents, if tasked with writing about their family, may wonder if the instructor has considered the possibility that not everyone’s family includes a mom and a dad and whether it’s safe (or even allowed) to talk about their home life at school. Similarly, a female student of color might roll her eyes at being assigned an essay on yet another book written by a white male author who lived in England hundreds of years ago and who never had to deal with the intersection of racism and sexism she faces on a daily basis, or to consider how living at that intersection shapes one’s lived experiences.

Once you’re aware of the multitude of identities in your classroom, you can tailor your writing assignments appropriately. For example, instead of asking students to write about where they may (or may not) have gone on summer vacation, you can ask them to write about the ideal summer vacation, that is, what would they like to do? Where would they like to go, and why? Similarly, if asking students to write about their families, make sure you’ve established that your classroom is a safe space in which diverse family structures are celebrated and are well-represented in the books or other written texts you analyze with your class. Finally, do an author audit of the books assigned as part of your curriculum. Are they all (or mostly all) white male authors? If so, look into alternative books that you could use instead that might be more interesting and relevant for your students. Not sure where to start? Try your school librarian, who will more likely than not be happy to help!

In closing

It can be challenging to get students excited about writing. But as those delivering and differentiating the curriculum, it’s vital that teachers consider the needs, interests, and identities of their students. It is only by knowing them well that you can assign truly authentic writing tasks.

When choosing prompts and designing assignments, I encourage you to make a habit of asking yourself, how can I make this something my students want to write about? How can I cultivate a sense of community in my classroom so that each student-writer can show up comfortably and confidently as their whole, authentic self?

You may also wish to read through NWEA’s stances on writing, which contain a wealth of research-backed information demonstrating what effective, equitable writing instruction looks like.

As noted at the beginning of this article, it can be difficult to get students excited about writing. But if you’ve ever seen that spark in a student’s eyes the moment they realize they’re a writer, then you know it’s well worth the effort to try.

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In many discussions on the science of reading, phonics is featured on the main stage. This is most likely because, unlike language comprehension, word recognition is a constrained skill—one with a limit—that can be mastered, typically within a few years of initial teaching. However, if we don’t pay attention to the bigger beast of language comprehension from the earliest grades, students without this opportunity will fall further and further behind their peers. We need to rethink our approach to teaching reading comprehension.

We think about reading comprehension as the product of word recognition and language comprehension. Nationally, we’ve done a great job getting the word out on the importance of phonics. This is, arguably, the easiest part of the equation to get right. However, that’s not all that needs to happen in the early years so students are successful readers later on.

Two pathways to teaching reading comprehension

We at NWEA recently spoke with Natalie Wexler, an education writer and author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It. Natalie reminds us that “We really have to see literacy developing along two pathways that are going to be, to some extent, pretty separate in the early years.”

These pathways are word recognition and language comprehension. While phonics has a mound of intervention research on how to effectively get students to reading fluency, cognitive science tells us that students need to acquire plenty of knowledge to be able to understand the texts they encounter, and that this must start early on. Otherwise, the opportunity gaps between kids with experiences to gain background knowledge and kids without will only grow wider.

Natalie highlights how students “are going to be acquiring those foundational skills [of phonics and decoding] through decodable readers and practicing fluency.” But she adds, “That’s not how they’re going to be acquiring new knowledge and vocabulary of a new topic… That’s really going to come through this other pathway, which is reading aloud text that’s probably more complex than they can read themselves and engaging them in discussion of that content.”

In the early years, these pathways to becoming a reader are largely separate. Younger students or older readers with decoding difficulties won’t yet be able to read texts that are building their vocabulary and knowledge. They need to have these rich and complex texts read aloud to them. What does this mean for educators? Both paths need to be effectively taught for the best chance of literacy success in the upper elementary grades and later in life. One doesn’t come before the other—decoding and comprehension both must be valued in the early grades—and both must have adequate instructional time devoted.

What is reading comprehension?

Natalie says, “we have to think of reading comprehension as a process.” Sometimes you may hear teachers asking comprehension questions about a text to students. This is thinking of comprehension as a product, not a process. Assessing students’ comprehension of a text by asking them questions is not the same as teaching students to comprehend.

Comprehension is a metacognitive skill, one that is developed through purposely choosing text sets to build knowledge and leveraging specific reading comprehension strategies to help students acquire this knowledge and apply these metacognitive skills on their own.

So how do we go about building knowledge?

Reading strategies should not be the focus of teaching reading comprehension. Instead, they should be used in service of teaching students new content. The most recent research suggests we use three strategies to help students learn the content of the texts they are reading. Specifically, when combined with instruction in vocabulary and background knowledge, these strategies are most helpful in building student knowledge and understanding. We can teach students to:

1. Identify the text structure
2. Using the text structure, identify the main idea
3. Summarize a text by expanding on the main idea

If students can summarize a text, they now have a situation model to work from. Think of it like helping them build a web of Velcro that all the details in the text can stick to. Teaching students to use these steps will help them build the metacognitive muscles they’ll need to do this type of understanding on their own. By helping students arrive at a coherent understanding, teachers position readers to do the deep work of making inferences, generating questions, and making connections.

Imagine, for example, a class of first-grade students learning about animals and their habitats in science. They read an informational text about owls. Their teacher may then plan to use the book Owl Moon by Jane Yolen to help students step into the role of the child protagonist who is going owling for the first time. Their teacher may refer to what the students learned about owls’ eyesight and sleeping patterns from the informational text. With these goals in mind, the teacher may use various reading strategies and activities to help students understand what they are reading and gain knowledge about animals and their habitats.

Before reading, the teacher may activate students’ background knowledge from the earlier lesson by asking questions like, “What are the ‘special powers’ we learned about owls yesterday?” and “What are owls’ sleeping patterns like?” Activating these concepts will help students make connections during the narrative story. The teacher may also focus students on a problem–solution sentence stem or a narrative story map to help them better understand the plot. The work could be displayed on an anchor chart in a student-friendly format so the class can take notes together. This could transition to students taking brief notes on a graphic organizer or dry-erase board once they are more independent spellers, typically toward the middle of the year.

During reading, the teacher may ask connecting questions to help solidify knowledge, such as, “When did this happen?” and “Why do you think Pa chose to take them owling so late?” The teacher may also highlight the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary that is related to understanding the content, such as “pine trees,” “meadow,” or “clearing.” The teacher can list these words on index cards so students can refer to them and use them in their writing throughout the unit. As they encounter a plot element, they can record it together on their graphic organizer.

After reading, the class could talk about the plot structure and use the completed graphic organizer or sentence stems to summarize the story. The teacher could also have students add descriptive words about the owl’s habitat to their science journal. This could be extended to a few sentences to explain why it was so difficult to find an owl. Students may also be guided to use a graphic organizer to compare their learning about the owl habitat to the habitat of a field mouse they explored while reading Frederick by Leo Lionni.

Notice that each of the strategies and activities—from recognizing a story’s structure, to summarizing, to eliciting details and answering questions, to comparing and contrasting—are all in service of learning content related to the science unit on animals and their habitats. The focus of reading a new text is not on learning a certain strategy but using the strategies to learn the content.

Natalie notes, “There is evidence that teaching kids comprehension strategies, or at least certain kinds of comprehension strategies, does boost their comprehension. But we’ve been trying to do this in the abstract… What really will work better is teaching a topic and bringing in whatever strategy or skill is appropriate to help kids think deeply about that topic and understand that text for that topic.”

Recommendations for teachers

When teaching reading comprehension, I encourage teachers to avoid choosing texts to focus on a particular comprehension skill or strategy. Choose texts instead based on the content focus. Here are some suggestions for how to align your instructional focus with best practices in reading science:

• Plan to use texts that revolve around a specific science or social studies topic. These can be both narrative and informational texts, as in the narrative example I shared earlier. Using texts around a common topic enables students to build a rich and enduring web of knowledge.
• Teach students to identify the text structure and generate a main idea statement. This enables students to understand and summarize what they are reading more easily. When students understand the main idea of a text, it empowers them to move into higher levels of understanding.
• Explicitly teach and review new vocabulary that relates back to the science or social studies topic. Help students understand how these words relate to one another and the topic at hand. Research in cognitive science suggests using distributed practice enables students to learn more words and, therefore, understand more concepts.

Recommendations for school administrators

If you’re a school administrator, here are some ways to support your teachers in this work of shifting from a strategy focus to a content focus when teaching reading comprehension:

• Provide teachers with high-quality text sets for read-alouds related to your grade-level science and social studies standards. In second grade and up, also provide multiple copies of chapter books around these topics for students to discuss in small groups or as a whole-class book study.
• Provide teachers high-quality professional learning and time to plan. Teachers need to be able to think deeply with one another about the vocabulary to highlight and strategies to use to help students acquire information and learn new concepts. Use practitioner articles to guide PLCs in integrating new practices into your existing curricula.
• Create a culture of collaboration. Give time for art, music, PE, and other shared-subjects teachers to plan lessons around the topic of study. Students are more likely to learn deeply when they are building common knowledge across class periods.

Learn more

To hear more from Natalie on the importance effectively teaching reading comprehension, watch our interview with her.

For additional ideas and tips on literacy instruction from Teach. Learn. Grow. authors, browse our archive of ELA posts.

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Writing, like teaching, is an art form. You often learn what works best from doing the work itself. When I was a new teacher, I made several newbie mistakes when it came to writing instruction. And when I saw what my students were writing, I knew right away I needed to change my approach.

Years later, when one of my journalism students won a Los Angeles Times award for news writing, I thought more deeply about the instructional changes I had made. I also thought about the social and emotional factors that likely enabled this once-timid reporter to tackle tough issues and blossom into an adept writer. What I realized from this exercise is that many of my instructional shifts had more to do with “leaning in” and getting to know my student as a writer, along with “letting go” of some outdated notions about what good writing is.

These are the three most important lessons I learned that I’d like to pass along.

Lesson #1: Writing instruction begins with a shared language for talking about writing and a shared understanding of the purposes for writing

Anchoring your instruction in a few big ideas that students can remember helps simplify the experience for everyone—and writing is always an experience.

As a new English language arts teacher, I often made writing more complicated than it needed to be. In my journalism classes, things were simple: we focused on the 5Ws and H (who? What? When? Where? Why? How?). It was easy for every student to remember and internalize these guiding questions.

If only there were a similar list of questions I could apply to other writing tasks! Over time, I found that there was. And at NWEA, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with current and former teachers to hone that list of essential questions down to the following five.

If anchoring your instruction in big ideas students can remember resonates with you, like it did for me, I encourage you to try incorporating these five essential questions into your writing curriculum.

We’ve even compiled these big ideas for growing writers into a free resource aimed at building a shared language for talking about writing with students. To that end, we’ve created a student version, too.

1. Why am I writing?

This question encourages students to ponder their purpose for writing. Often, their immediate response to this question is, “I’m writing because my teacher assigned me this essay/report/research paper.”

If we can get students to push past the idea of writing as an assignment and toward writing as a form of communication, we may see a dramatic increase in their motivation and writing quality. “What do you want to accomplish with this piece of writing?” becomes the question, not “What kind of writing does your teacher want from you?”

Writing is always the intellectual product of the writer, and the more we can encourage students to see themselves as writers and to take ownership of their writing, the better the results. Before students write, it’s critical they know and understand their purpose for writing, as this purpose informs so many other choices they will make.

2. Who are my readers?

This question forces students to consider their audience. When writers can anticipate the needs of their audience, they increase the effectiveness of their communication.

If the only audience a student ever has for their writing is a teacher, they lose the opportunity to make writerly decisions based on different audiences, such as considering their unique feelings and opinions about a topic, their different vocabularies (e.g., familiarity with code switching, idioms, or jargon), and their varying degrees of background knowledge. This is why giving students authentic writing tasks is so important. Authentic writing engages students in the same cognitive processes they use to write for real-world situations, such as applying for a job, taking civic action, or even communicating with family and friends.

3. What am I writing?

This question gets students to think more deeply about the task, genre, and form for their writing. While some of this information is likely included in the writing assignment, it’s still important for students to work through the task details on their own.

Students will make more informed writing decisions when they are able to clearly articulate the expectations and success criteria for a writing task. The writing genre provides another framework for students to think about their purpose for writing. Each genre’s unique features have developed over time through socially agreed-upon conventions, and experienced writers understand how to use these features to communicate more clearly with their audiences. Finally, form—or format—describes the type of text to be produced, and today’s writers have more forms to choose from—both analog and digital—than ever before.

When students put time and thought into their purpose, audience, and task, they have a greater command over their writing and what they want it to accomplish. And that’s when we get to see students’ communication skills and creativity truly shine through.

4. How am I presenting ideas in my writing?

This question addresses the myriad of choices a writer must make when they embark on a task, including decisions about writing development, organization, style, and conventions. Too often, this is where we ask students to start, and it can be overwhelming to make all these decisions before a student has wrapped their head around what they plan to write and why. In addition, while these writerly decisions are important, we may place too great an emphasis on a student’s final written product when a focus on their writing process may have more instructional utility.

My advice to students is, “Don’t sweat the small stuff when it comes to presenting ideas in your writing.” The ideas themselves are what’s most important. They’ll have numerous opportunities to practice and hone their writing development, organization, style, and conventions with every piece they write and over an entire lifetime.

5. How am I using the writing process?

This question reminds students that writing is both a product and a process. And the writing process is where much of the learning and critical thinking takes place.

Though writing is often taught as a sequence of forward-moving steps, the writing process is recursive and iterative, not linear. For example, writers go back and forth between planning, drafting, translating, reviewing, and revising to meet their writing goals, and writing goals can be self-generated or revised at any time during the writing process.

Writing itself is a work in progress that includes collaboration, self-regulation, and self-evaluation in addition to the other steps students typically learn. The more frequently students engage in and reflect on their own writing process, the more likely they are to develop productive and efficient writing habits, as well as growth mindsets that can help them overcome writing challenges in their school, career, and personal lives.

Lesson #2: Writing instruction is most impactful when it extends through professional learning communities (PLC) that offer students school-wide support for writing

As students move from grade to grade, a strong and coordinated PLC can help them build on what they already know about writing and focus on becoming even more expressive and effective writers.

In my first year of teaching, a colleague and I had an opportunity to attend a professional learning summit on writing. One session led by Harry Noden taught us how his Image Grammar could help students expand, vary, and improve their sentence structures. The majority of our student population was multilingual learners, and we rightly suspected that focused practice on writing, even at the sentence level, could increase language development in English. In part, this is because writing has a slower pace, provides a permanent record, and calls for greater precision in word choice.

We accurately assumed that sentence writing would benefit all our students, too. And once we were satisfied with the results, we leveraged our PLC to encourage a school-wide adoption of teaching grammar with Noden’s “brushstrokes.” We saw students quickly embrace the concept of “brushstrokes” because it positioned them as “artists” painting with words. This artistry was reinforced by the quality of their sentence writing. Often shared aloud, these sentences could be chill inducing they were so beautiful. For many students, this was their first proof they could be excellent writers, once they learned how.

Lesson #3: Writing outcomes can be improved through the use of common assessments and common rubrics at the school, district, or even state level

Common assessments and common rubrics help educators develop a shared understanding of how to evaluate writing. This includes providing students with meaningful feedback and grading writing more consistently across a school, district, or even state.

Coordination among teachers can help establish a school-wide writing community that all students can tap into for peer review. It can also lead to greater consistency in writing instruction and evaluation. Such consistency builds trust between students and teachers, which in turn can strengthen students’ view of themselves as learners and increase their motivation to learn.

When students don’t have to figure out individual teacher preferences for writing—and they feel confident every teacher will grade their writing for substance not style—they can focus their mental energy on becoming better writers. This includes developing their own sense of how to use language(s) effectively for personal, academic, and civic purposes.

One way to foster student-teacher collaboration is to encourage students to enter writing contests. Student writing contests can range from local to national, and it’s worth some extra effort to find ones that are a good fit for your students. Once my journalism students began entering (and winning!) writing contests, these events became an annual tradition. My students also became more willing to work on their digital portfolios throughout the year.

At the district level, common assessments and common rubrics can help leaders identify schools that need more support, such as more professional learning for educators or more high-dosage tutoring for students. They can also identify schools that have model instruction and can serve as resources for others. If you’re looking for a place to start in your district, the Literacy Design Collaborative offers common analytic rubrics for several writing genres, and the New York Performance Standards Consortium provides a robust set of performance-based assessments and rubrics.

Districts that use state rubrics in their common writing assessments help ensure all educators have similar expectations of student writing. If your state assesses writing, check the state department of education website for newly released writing assessments and their accompanying rubrics. And if your state doesn’t assess writing, they may still offer writing materials for teachers to use.

Finally, NWEA is often asked about the connection between MAP® Growth and writing. MAP Growth does not include writing prompts, so it can’t take the place of high-quality formative assessment in the classroom; it simply wasn’t designed to assess students’ writing. But MAP Growth can provide insights into students’ strengths and opportunities for growth, and these insights are especially helpful when educators use an integrated approach to reading and writing instruction.

The MAP Growth instructional areas for reading, for example, offer some information about how well students understand literary text, informational text, and vocabulary. Students who are performing below grade-level for vocabulary would likely benefit from more explicit vocabulary instruction, including more strategic exposure to roots and affixes. This expanded vocabulary knowledge can later be applied to students’ writing. One approach is to have students “speak in synonyms,” a kind of oral rehearsal that can be done with peers or small groups and then integrated into a piece of student writing. Meanwhile, students who struggle to comprehend informational text might benefit from a self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) approach to writing. This method teaches students to recognize, internalize, and utilize important genre features in writing. And since reading and writing are related, SRSD can help improve students’ comprehension of informational texts, too.

A recap of lessons learned

Writing is hard, and teaching writing may be harder still. As educators, we continually learn new lessons about how to help our students (and ourselves) become better writers. I hope the three lessons I’ve shared here are helpful to you and bring you closer to having every student see themselves as a capable writer or, better yet, an artist painting with words.

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Many people have been talking about the need for phonics instruction, but most of these conversations come to a screeching halt after talking about instruction in basic decoding skills. Instruction in multisyllabic word reading, or teaching students to read words with more than one syllable, is a crucial bridge between basic phonics and fluent word reading. It is also a major stumbling block for older readers who are still working on foundational reading skills. How to practically teach students to read long words has also been largely left out of the national conversation on the science of reading.

Marissa Filderman and Jessica Toste, two university professors who research multisyllabic word reading interventions, joined us to discuss what we know about teaching students to read long words. Marissa is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and researches literacy interventions for students with and at risk for learning disabilities, with an emphasis on data-based decision-making. Jessica is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on effective interventions for students with and at risk for reading disabilities, as well as how to intensify interventions through data-based instruction.

Misconceptions in multisyllabic reading

As Marissa and Jessica note, there are several misconceptions about multisyllabic reading and how to approach teaching young children how to read longer, more difficult words.

The first misconception is that instruction should center primarily on syllables. Marissa recommends not getting too hung up on syllable rules because many of them “are very rigid and they don’t always apply.” For example, teaching students to divide a word with a VCV pattern (like pilot or travel) before the first consonant and pronouncing the first vowel as a long vowel only works about half the time, according to research on the usefulness of syllable division patterns by Devin Kearns. “It can be more confusing for a reader who already has a lot of difficulty with just decoding in general to also think about those rules,” Marissa adds.

“There’s also often a misconception that foundational reading instruction and knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondence and decoding skills translate automatically into multisyllabic word reading,” Jessica says. But a young reader having a good grasp of the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes isn’t enough.

Foundational reading skills, including phonics and word recognition, are critical but they are not enough on their own. Jessica explains that kids need to be helped in taking decoding to the next level: “Students really need to be taught, and students who struggle especially need to be taught—explicitly—how those skills scale up. They’ve been effective for them before. Now how can they use those skills to move from identifying and pronouncing individual letter sounds to identifying and pronouncing word parts to read more complex words? Students need this continued instruction as the words they are being exposed to become more complex and don’t always follow the rules they’ve been practicing in previous instruction.”

Another misconception is that foundational skills never need revisiting. That may be true for some students, but definitely not all. “There’s a careful balance we have to find with ongoing foundational skills instruction,” Jessica explains. For some students, “we need to continue to review vowel patterns and practice flexing vowel sounds while supporting students in decoding multisyllabic words. They need continued practice with those grapheme–phoneme correspondences so that they can apply them fluently and automatically every time they’re reading a word.”

Finally, there is sometimes confusion about the role of reading longer texts, as opposed to reading multisyllabic words in isolation. “It’s important to always read connected text in reading instruction, to always move from isolated word reading to connected text, even if you only have time for a few sentences to read at the end of a lesson,” Jessica advises.

6 ways to help kids with multisyllabic word reading

The following six strategies can help you approach multisyllabic word reading with your students:

1. Ensure students have prerequisite skills. The first step in approaching multisyllabic words with your students is to confirm they’re ready for the added level of complexity. “Make sure students have prerequisite skills, that they know vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and that they can recognize most grapheme correspondences,” Marissa says.
2. Focus on affixes. Marissa recommends explicitly teaching the pronunciation and meaning of affixes. “And continue to review all the affixes you’ve taught regularly,” she adds. Teaching students to quickly identify and “peel off” prefixes and suffixes within words can help students begin to recognize both pronunciation and meaning of larger chunks as they encounter more unfamiliar words.
3. Practice chunking. Because syllable rules can be inconsistent and confusing, Marissa recommends chunking, either by using the vowel in a word or the morpheme. “Students might use the short or the long form of that vowel sound to read the word,” Marissa says. Teachers can also help students chunk by using morphemes and affixes. “One of the most important things when focusing on multisyllabic words is really building morphological knowledge through breaking words into meaningful parts to make them easier to read,” Marissa explains. The “peel off” strategy is useful when chunking, too.
4. Make a game of reading multisyllabic words. It’s easy for multisyllabic reading instruction to get a little dry, so Marissa recommends getting playful. “After having structured practice with assembling and blending word parts to read multisyllabic words, I like to gamify this,” she says. “Students can play with the words in a sort of game format that’s fun, fast paced, and engaging. […] Introduce a select number of base words you think might work in your particular instructional context. Have students attach or build onto those base words with prefixes or suffixes. Have them point and say each word part and then blend the word parts and say the whole word.”
5. Move on to fluency when kids are ready. “For word reading fluency practice,” Marissa advises, “I like to use targeted word lists until students get really comfortable. I recommend you focus on certain patterns that you want to work with in those word lists, or certain affixes. Your word list can become more complex as you go.” Some of that playful approach she mentioned earlier can work well with fluency, too. “There can be a timed component of this practice as well, if that’s helpful to students. Or you can have a tracking component where they track their own performance every time they read a word list and see if their fluency is improving over time.”
6. Practice words in context. Just as Jessica noted, students need time to practice reading more than just isolated words. “Just like with any foundational skills instruction lesson, we always move from reading practice with words in isolation to words in connected text, and doing a lot of practice with connected text,” Marissa says. “This can look like sentences where the affixes you’re learning appear and multisyllabic words that you’ve been practicing move into passages as well.”

Serving students well

The crucial bridge for students from basic phonics to fluent word reading often goes overlooked. Consider reaching out to your leaders for any additional support you might need for your students. I recommend the following:

• Ensure your school has materials to help students read long words. The lessons Jessica uses in her research are available for free online, and they have been shown to be effective for older students who need more instruction in advanced word reading.
• Request professional learning opportunities around advanced word reading, and job-embedded coaching to answer ongoing questions and help you strengthen your practice. NWEA offers a professional learning workshop titled “Grades K–5: Building Fluent Readers” that’s a great place to start.
• Explore assessment options. If older students are not meeting benchmarks on your school’s reading comprehension assessment, consider using a follow-up assessment, like MAP® Reading Fluency, that can help you better understand if students are struggling with word recognition or language comprehension. If students are having difficulty with word recognition in the upper grades, make sure their intervention addresses this in a systematic way.

Reading long words fluently opens the doors to a limitless world of learning opportunities through rich and complex texts for students. To hear more from Marissa and Jessica, watch our videos.

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For years now, the early literacy education community has been talking about the need to reform our practice to align to the science of reading. But what is the science of reading? And how can it improve our practice so kids become better readers?

What is the science of reading?

The science of reading is the converging evidence of what matters and what works in literacy instruction, organized around models that describe how and why.

One research study does not make a science. In early literacy alone, tens of thousands of studies have been published, and some even show results that are at odds with one another. For educators to be able to consume research meaningfully, we need to look for a convergence of evidence. When many well-designed studies point to a similar result, we should pay attention.

How does it help us make sense of reading?

An important model in early reading research is the simple view of reading. It says that reading comprehension (RC) is the product of decoding (D) and language comprehension (LC), or RC = D x LC.

RC = D x LC

Learning to read for understanding requires sounding out and recognizing words—decoding—but it also requires making meaning of the words and sentences we hear—language comprehension. While taking a microscope to any one aspect of reading reveals more complexity, the simple view continues to be supported as a strong core model in reading development, as it has been for decades.

What guidance does the science of reading offer?

Research is clear about what matters to teach in early literacy instruction: phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, fluency, vocabulary and oral language comprehension, and text comprehension. For each of these, a convergence of evidence tells us what works, in practice.

• Phonological awareness: Teach students to recognize and manipulate the sounds within words. Move from syllables to the individual sounds, or phonemes. Explicitly connect phonemes to letters to more effectively support word decoding.
• Phonics and word recognition: Teach letter sounds and sound-spelling patterns explicitly and systematically. Practices that include both reading and writing of words in isolation and in text are most supportive of taught phonics.
• Fluency: Include frequent chances for students to read and re-read orally from connected text—sentences, paragraphs, and passages. Focus on the development of both automatic word recognition and fluent expression, keeping understanding of the text as the central goal.
• Vocabulary and oral language comprehension: Include high-quality, language-rich interactions in instruction. With read-aloud texts, unpack academic and inferential language. Explicitly build students’ recognition of shared morphemes (e.g., root words, affixes) across words, both in oral and written language.
• Text comprehension: Even before young students can read on their own, teach from rich texts via read-alouds and scaffolded reading. Teach students to use metacognitive strategies like setting a purpose, monitoring for meaning, and building inferences while reading. Discuss texts, including focusing on their organizational structures.

What could a science-of-reading classroom be like?

To align more closely to what the science tells us, we should start seeing and hearing some change. We should stop seeing only incidental teaching of sound-spelling patterns. Instead of just happening to notice a silent E on the page we have open—aha! Teachable moment!—we should teach decoding skills systematically. We should see a dedicated portion of the literacy block where phonics is taught clearly and sequentially from an identifiable curriculum. When kids learn from our planned sequence how that silent E works, we should see engaging practice—word work, often masquerading as play—followed by both reading and writing practice that applies those silent E skills purposefully.

The science of reading is the converging evidence of what matters and what works in literacy instruction.

We should also stop seeing comprehension taught via leveled reading groups, where each group visits the teacher for round-robin reading through a new text “at the right level.” Instead, we should see use of a rich, complex text for all the students in a class. We should hear multiple reads of the same text, beginning with teacher modeling and moving to student practice. We should see partnering for repeated readings to develop fluency. We should hear the voices of students and the teacher in high-quality conversations about the text that focus on language, structure, and deepened understanding.

Where can we learn more?

Lots of good materials have been produced to get this research into practice, much of it paid for by our tax dollars.

• The renowned Florida Center for Reading Research has printable research-to-practice student center activities for pre-kindergarten to fifth grade. Many could be used at home, too.
• The Institute of Education Sciences has developed a website for families called Supporting Your Child’s Reading at Home. It is packed with information, activities, and video examples for supporting children in kindergarten through third grade. Their What Works Clearinghouse has two teacher guides for early literacy: one focuses on foundational skills and the other on reading comprehension.

These excellent research-to-practice materials can only help if we actually use them. Commit to building a learning community around one or more of these materials, beginning by downloading and reading as a group. Then discuss, try things with students, reflect, and repeat. This is how the science of reading matters, and how it works: by helping all our kids to become empowered and thoughtful readers.

For more on the science of reading from NWEA, see “The science of reading and balanced literacy: What you need to know,” Everything you need to know about the science of reading, and The science of reading for leaders: Helping your teachers shift instructional practice. 

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When my youngest stepson chose to come live with me and my husband, he had just turned 16. He’d attended more than 12 schools in the previous six years and had lived in three different states. He had been held back and was repeating his freshman year in high school. All those things we knew. What we didn’t know was that he could barely read. My stepson clearly needed reading interventions.

His English teacher called us in to break the news. The first thought that popped into my head was, “How? How could a kid make it this far and not know how to read?”

I was fully aware that NAEP reading scores were consistently low for grades 4 and 8, but for some reason, it never clicked that those low scores weren’t just related to lack of understanding. I realized that they were very likely related to the fact that some students couldn’t even read the passages, much less answer the comprehension questions about them. According to a 2017 study, issues with fluency were present in 80% of a sample of adolescent students who had difficulty learning to read. My stepson’s frequent moves from school to school only made things worse.

The root of the problem

As a former elementary reading specialist, I knew how to teach young students to read. But I had no experience teaching older students. My stepson, who read at a third-grade level, desperately needed to catch up to his peers, and I didn’t have a clue about how to help him. When I asked his teacher for guidance, he was very honest and admitted that his professional training had never focused on how to help high schoolers needing support with reading fluency; it had been more about furthering comprehension. And since he was new to teaching, he hadn’t run across a situation like this one before. Thus began the journey to find ways to support my child and ensure he would be career and college ready by the time he graduated.

We know that reading skills improve over time, as long as students meet some essential milestones. It all starts with early literacy skills at home. Families introduce unfamiliar words and concepts via oral language while conversing with their children. Children are exposed to environmental print, like stop signs or the large golden arches of McDonald’s, and they begin to understand those stand for words and have meaning. Research also shows that reading to children increases their reading achievement, so children who get to experience being read to at an early age are at an advantage.

Begin by prioritizing fluency without neglecting comprehension.

When children start school, they should be taught the foundational skills of reading, such as phonemic awareness and phonics. These are the building blocks that help shift their trajectory from attaining literacy skills to developing reading skills. As they progress through the grades, the demands on their reading abilities should increase as they navigate more challenging texts that come in a variety of formats. According to a 2006 report from ACT, the ability to process complex texts is the largest factor in helping students become college- and career-ready. By the end of high school, students should be able to read and comprehend texts that mirror what they will see in college or their field of interest.

But what happens if one of the required steps is skipped? That’s all too common, and that’s exactly what happened to my stepson.

If you’re a middle or high school teacher, where do you even begin when you want to help students who need extra support in reading? The bad news is that there is no magic formula; one approach may work for some students and not others. The good news is that teachers are usually really good at determining the areas giving their students the most trouble, even if those weren’t part of their professional training. I encourage you to begin by prioritizing fluency without neglecting comprehension.

Begin by prioritizing fluency

Let’s focus on reading fluency first, as that is often the main problem. Here are two specific approaches I recommend for reading interventions for fluency.

1. Use repeated reading

Have students read a grade-level text multiple times. This is called repeated reading, and you can learn more about it in the Reading Rockets article by Timothy Shanahan titled “Everything you wanted to know about repeated reading.”Our “Fluency protocol” can also help you plan a whole week’s worth of lessons focused on a single text.

Repeated reading can take many forms. You may read a text for your students first. You could also use echo reading (where students repeat after you), choral reading (where you all read a passage in unison), partner reading, and independent rereading. Whatever your approach, exposing students to the same text multiple times allows them to really dig deeply into ways to navigate it, which will help them improve comprehension.

Here’s a challenging sentence freshmen may encounter from Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”: “O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.”

The first time you model a text like this, some of the words may be unfamiliar to your students, such as “ridicule,” “reproach,” “withering,” and “rebuke.” “Nation’s ear” may also cause confusion. The second reading might be an echo reading: you read one sentence aloud and your students repeat it. At this point, every student will have heard the text modeled twice by you, with expression and correct pronunciation, which will help them when they read independently.

If any students are still working on their fluency after their independent reading, make a recording of you reading the passage and allow your students to use it whenever they feel they need to. Note that if a text is very long, this approach should be used with chunks of text rather than the entire text, to maximize effectiveness.

2. Make time for word analysis and syllabication

It’s important to help students figure out the meaning of challenging words. Let’s revisit the Douglass speech. “Ridicule,” “reproach,” “withering,” “rebuke,” and “nation’s ear” may all be hard for them to understand. I encourage you to explore context clues with your students—and to also talk about roots and affixes.

When discussing context, ask your class, “Is there any context in the sentence or the surrounding paragraph that would provide clues as to a word’s meaning?” Your students are likely to understand the word “sarcasm,” for example. What might that suggest about “ridicule,” “reproach,” and “rebuke”?

Zeroing in on roots and affixes can be helpful, too. Let’s look closely at “rebuke.” Ninth-grade students have seen the prefix re- many times over the years. Talk to them about its meaning. Then talk to them about how it changes a word it is added to. Next, look at “buke.” This is not a common root word, so it’s unlikely your students will know it means “mouth” or “mouthful” in Latin. With a little more guidance from you, your students can now piece together that “rebuke” means “a strongly worded statement back to someone.”

Another way to navigate challenging words is to chop up long words into syllables. Some students see long words and just skip them. Have them divide the word into syllables instead. Make sure they understand that each syllable has a vowel sound in it. For example, earlier in the speech, Douglass uses the word “immeasurable” to describe the existing inequality between Black people and white people at the time. When “immeasurable” becomes “im-mea-sur-able,” it can be much easier to read.

Don’t forget comprehension

As your students’ fluency improves, so should their comprehension; they will no longer have to focus on the word level and can concentrate on the information or message of the text they are reading. There are many reading interventionsto help students improve comprehension. I encourage you to focus on grade-level texts and practice chunking texts.

1. Use grade-level texts

Students must be exposed to texts appropriate for their grade level. Offering them only texts below their grade level doesn’t give them enough opportunities to strengthen their reading ability. An abundance of research has shown that students make more gains in reading when they interact with complex texts appropriate to their grade level.

Texts below grade level can serve to scaffold up to grade-level texts. Those lower-level passages that are linked to the grade-level text you’re studying as a class can introduce students to background knowledge on the topic as well as new vocabulary, building a stair step of knowledge that will then help them access the grade-level text. See “Building background knowledge through reading: Rethinking text sets” by Sarah Lupo et al. for more on this.

The Douglass speech I mentioned earlier is a prime example of this. It’s often taught in high school, but exactly when varies. It’s likely ninth-grade students will need more scaffolding than seniors, for example.

Students needing extra support, either because they’re early in their high school career or simply need more support with reading, could start with a biography about Douglass with a lower reading level; it explains one of the reasons he is so passionate during his speech. You could also give your class a set of questions about Douglass and ask them to use their digital literacy skills to find the answers. In heterogenous groups, the students who did the research could share their findings while the more confident readers could do the first out-loud reading of the text. Once you observe all students have captured the important ideas that will help them understand the grade-level text, they can all focus on the speech itself.

2. Chunk texts

With my stepson, I noticed that he gave up on longer texts before he even tried them. All those pages and all those words were extremely intimidating for him. So, we chunked them. I would read aloud one paragraph and then he would summarize that paragraph in one sentence, which we wrote down. When I felt he was ready, we would chunk two paragraphs at a time and he would write down the summary for those. At the end of a study session, he would read me the summary sentences and I would ask him questions about the text.

In the beginning, I did all the reading and he followed along in his book. But by the time we got to Night by Elie Wiesel, he was able to read more of the text himself. Was it perfect? Not at all, but it was a grade-level text, and he was productively struggling. We did this for months on end with every text he interacted with.

Keep exploring

The approaches outlined here are not a comprehensive list of reading interventions; rather, they are examples of what helped my stepson. There were things his teacher and I tried that didn’t work well for him, even though they were evidence-based.

The solution to getting students who fell through the cracks back on track isn’t going to be an easy one. But not finding a solution is unacceptable. I’m happy to report that by the end of the school year, my stepson was reading at a seventh-grade level, which means he gained four years during that one school year. He also went on to pass all of his state summative exams.

Students deserve to get the support they need to be prepared for life after high school. Scaffolds must be in place to ensure that reading is, indeed, a lifelong endeavor.

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Reading fluency in middle school isn’t always a given. A startling number of students enter those grades without the reading skills they need to be successful. For some, the troubling trend can even continue into high school and college. To help address this, we at NWEA have partnered with the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF) to better tackle the problem. Our goal? To support you in helping older students gain the reading skills they need by sharing our research on reading fluency strategies for middle school and above.

Our “Fluency protocol for upper grades” can help you plan fluency instruction for kids as young as grade 6. But first, some information on how we arrived at the protocol in the first place and why we think it can help you and your students.

The who

For the past year and a half, we have been working with AERDF to explore ways to solve the problem of students arriving in middle school unable to read fluently. Tim Rasinski defined “fluency” as “the ability to read the words on the printed page accurately, effortlessly, or automatically so that readers can preserve their limited cognitive resources for the more important task in reading—comprehension—and with appropriate prosody or expression so as to give meaning to the words that is implied through emphasis, phrasing, and intonation.”

We are one of four grant recipients from across the country who were invited to help further the vision of the AERDF Reading Reimagined program: “an American education system in which all students are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and beliefs necessary to be proficient readers, thus enabling them to advocate for themselves, their families, and their communities as they lead lives of limitless opportunity.” AERDF charged us with creating an effective instructional tool that could be used to improve word recognition, fluency, and comprehension. The tool had to meet the following conditions:

• Based on research
• Ready for teachers to use immediately (so, without time-consuming training)
• Designed to encourage student input and engagement during lessons
• Targeted to meet the specific needs of kids most impacted by inequities due to poverty or race

We were fortunate enough to find a willing partner for this work in Gwinnett County School District, in Atlanta, Georgia. They allowed us to work with three grade 6 classrooms and a total of 70 students in one of their middle schools.

The why

Given the many challenges facing education following COVID-19 school closures, why did AERDF and NWEA choose to focus on reading fluency strategies for middle school and above? Because we knew that reading fluency was a problem since before the pandemic.

National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) data from 2019 revealed that only 32% of eighth-graders were performing at or above “proficient” in reading; that is, only 32% of eighth-grade students nationwide had the reading fluency skills required for success in college or the workforce. NAEP data also revealed that students from historically marginalized populations scored even lower than their white counterparts. These trends were further confirmed when the 2022 NAEP data was released and the organization stated the following: “At eighth grade, the average reading score was lower compared to all previous assessment years going back to 1998 and was not significantly different compared to 1992.” It is clear that the situation continues to worsen and that no progress has been made in improving students’ reading fluency over the past 25 years.

I’d like to clarify that NAEP does not test students on reading fluency. However, research by Nathan Hartzler Clemens et al. has shown that there is a strong correlation between lack of fluency and low reading performance. Clemens and his team make it clear that if students are too focused on decoding words, they will find it harder to understand the meaning of the text they’re reading.

Let me show you what Clemens et al. mean by that. Read the following sentence: “The venture capitalist amalgamated his financial assets in hope of inveigling others to vote for the panacea he propounded.”

It’s quite possible that that sentence contains at least one word that made you stumble—one word that required that you focus solely on the word and sound it out. More than likely, you read the sentence more than once. Chances are you may not feel entirely confident that you understand exactly what the sentence is saying. That is what students in need of reading fluency support encounter every day. And they can’t even begin to think about meaning if they can’t navigate the words.

What happens if the topic of the sentence is something a reader has no interest in in the first place? What if you don’t care about investments or venture capitalists? It’s much harder to motivate yourself to understand the less familiar words, isn’t it? If that happens over and over (you struggle to read something only to discover you don’t care about it), you might become disenfranchised. In some cases, students who don’t get to see themselves in what they read understandably lack the passion they need to persevere with challenging reading material.

The final factor that elevates the importance of addressing reading fluency in middle and high school is that secondary teacher preparation programs often do not focus on the skills needed to improve fluency. As Graham Drake and Kate Wash explain in “2020 teacher prep review: Program performance in early reading instruction,” that is an area of focus usually limited to elementary programs. Combine that shortcoming in teacher preparation programs with the fact that secondary teachers might have almost 70% of their students reading below grade level and you can begin to see how serious the issue of addressing reading fluency in middle and high school is and why it became the heart of our study.

The study

At the start of this effort, we hypothesized that the effective intervention strategy of repeated reading could be even more powerful if combined with additional components of daily study at the word and sentence level, as well as a focus on student engagement.

Our experimental solution was to create and test a new fluency protocol modeled after one designed by Student Achievement Partners to support teachers using small groups for reading interventions. Our “Fluency protocol for upper grades” consists of the following:

• Five 20-minute sessions
• Whole-class and small-group work
• Repeated reading exercises
• Several minutes of strategy work in the first four sessions
• A reflection activity in the fifth session

Remember that we were also interested in getting students to buy in and become highly motivated to improve their reading fluency skills, so before we had kids follow the protocol, we asked their teachers to do some aspirational work with their class. Students were supported in discussing the definition of “fluency” and why being a fluent reader was important to them. They also rated their reading ability on a 0–10 scale, explained their reading strengths and challenges, and set goals, both for what they hoped to accomplish during the study and what they hoped to achieve in life.

To help students identify with and enjoy what they were reading, we provided a set of 20 grade-level texts and asked each class to vote for the six they wanted to work with over the course of the six-week study. We chose texts we deemed relevant for historically marginalized populations, kids living in poverty, and the average middle school student. We gave teachers definitions of words we predicted students would struggle with, along with a preselected “juicy sentence” to use for Session 4.

Because we didn’t want the protocol to depend on lengthy teacher training, we only explained the juicy sentence analysis from Session 4 during our teacher training prior to beginning the study. This took 20 minutes. We also gave teachers two 15-minute mini-lessons to do with their students at the start of the study. Our hope was that the rest of the protocol was self-explanatory.

The results

So, what did we find? Spoiler alert: We may be onto something good!

We gathered two types of data: quantitative (involving numbers) and qualitative (involving teacher feedback). Let’s look at the numbers first.

The quantitative data

The way we determined whether the protocol impacted student outcomes for reading fluency was to administer a pre-test prior to starting any work with them. We then administered a post-test the day after the last session of Week 6, and a lagged test eight weeks later to see if the learning stuck. The assessments measured word recognition and decoding, vocabulary, morphology, sentence processing, silent reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Because the goal of the protocol was to increase fluency, we were most interested in the silent reading fluency scores.

The data told us that for students who scored above the 50th percentile on the post-test, the protocol did not improve fluency. In fact, the scores went down when compared to the pre-test. (I’ll talk about potential reasons why in the qualitative section.) However, for students who scored below the 50th percentile, there was a statistically significant difference, with students showing improved fluency, and most of that improvement lasting for the eight weeks post instruction.

To summarize: the data showed us that the fluency protocol may be most effective when used as an intervention with students who are not fluent, rather than as a tool with a class of mixed fluency levels. It’s important to note, of course, that studies like this should be replicated to see if the results stay consistent before making firm decisions about effectiveness. But we were excited by this early data.

The qualitative data

We wanted to know, from the teachers’ observations and interactions with the students over the course of the study, how they thought things went. And, remember: we wanted to know what happened when students were bought in. Did the goal setting, weekly reflections, and voting for relevant passages seem to promote student engagement? (We did have a quantitative assessment we used to ask students directly, but upon later examination, we realized it didn’t really fit the needs of the study, so the results were not helpful.) We interviewed the teachers about the protocol and the process, and some trends emerged:

• For students who previously struggled to read fluently and lacked confidence, the teachers felt the protocol had a positive impact on both the students’ reading abilities and how they felt about reading in general. (The quantitative data described previously seems to support this observation.)
• Teachers believed that the most impactful practice used in the protocol was repeated reading, which required students to read a passage aloud several times.
• We also heard that the protocol was easy to use with minimal training. The teachers said they’d continue to use it in the future with students who need intervention.
• Teachers noted that it was difficult to get higher-achieving students engaged in the work, as those students felt like they were already fluent or had already mastered the word- and sentence-level strategies. (Again, the quantitative data seems to support this observation.)
• Teachers mentioned that it was challenging to find time to fit the protocol work in with the normal demands of the classroom.

Looking forward

Although our study on reading fluency strategies for middle school focused on a smaller sample size of approximately 70 sixth-grade students, we are encouraged by the findings about the impact of the process and the protocol on the students who are struggling readers.

But research can be a bit like the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff: one answer can then lead to another question, which leads to another question, which leads to yet another question. We still have wonderings about what the best application of the protocol is to allow for use with the right students without impacting classroom time for all. And we’d love to have a chance to compare the outcomes of students who practiced repeated reading only to those who practiced repeated reading plus the word- and sentence-level strategies so we can see how the results of the two approaches differ. We’re also curious to explore whether students are able stay engaged if a protocol is used with texts from their normal curriculum in their ELA classes, or even in their science or social studies classes.

Maybe one day we will have the opportunity to explore our lingering questions, or maybe someone else will pick up the gauntlet and run with it. In the meantime, we are heartened by the fact that many student participants benefitted from the study and improved their reading fluency. We feel confident that the reading fluency strategies for middle school and higher included in our protocol can be a valuable tool for teachers to add to their toolbox.

If you’d like to read more about the work, you can access the full report on our website.

The post Reading fluency strategies for middle school—and beyond appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..

In many kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, students are tasked with memorizing a list of words commonly appearing in texts. These lists of high-frequency words tend to go by a variety of names, such as “snap words,” “sight words,” “star words,” and “red words.” Unfortunately, this practice of centering the learning on high-frequency words before students have learned to sound out words through phonics is an inefficient practice birthed out of the misconceived notion that children learn to read by memorizing whole words.

We know from decades of research that it is more effective for students to be taught individual letter-sound correspondences and use them to sound out words.

The trouble with sight words

Have you ever seen books used to teach reading to young students that have a repetitive pattern, such as “I see the police officer. I see the firefighter. I see the mail carrier,” or “In the summer, I can climb. In the summer, I can swim. In the summer, I can paint”? These books are also designed to support that same mistaken and outdated notion that students learn to read by memorizing whole words rather than sounding out words based on phonics skills learned.

These books emphasize high-frequency words, many of which use phonics patterns students have not yet been taught. This can lead students to believe that reading is a practice where they must memorize whole words rather than reading as a practice where they can use their phonics knowledge to sound the words out. This approach to reading instruction inadvertently teaches students the habits of poor readers, leading to an over-reliance on guessing at words based on the first letter, picture, or sentence context.

What researchers mean by “sight words”

Many people think students learn to read by memorizing a word’s shape or repeatedly seeing the whole word. You may have heard in schools, “Students need to learn their sight words” or “Let’s practice your sight words.” But this is different from how researchers refer to the term “sight word.” In research, a sight word isn’t merely one of several on a list of high-frequency words. It is any word that can be recognized instantly, as if by sight.

We now know students learn to read by mapping individual sounds (called phonemes) to letters that represent them (called graphemes). Scientists call this process of mapping phonemes to graphemes orthographic mapping. The more opportunities students are given to practice decoding and spelling words, the more these letter–sound correspondences “stick” in their memory. Once a word can be recognized within a fourth of a second, reading scientists call it a sight word: a word that can be read as if by sight.

Some think the value of sight words is that they help students quickly recognize words that are irregular, that is, words with spellings that “are not as clearly linked to the sounds used to pronounce the words,” such as “you,” “are,” and “what.” But as Linnea Ehri, one of the leading researchers in word recognition, said, “It is not true that only irregularly spelled words are read by sight. Rather all words, even easily decoded words, become sight words once they have been read several times…. Sight word reading refers not to a method of teaching reading but to the process of reading words by accessing them in memory.”

Learning to read irregular words

Even words we traditionally consider irregular, some of which are on high-frequency lists, have parts that can be mapped to sounds. For example, in the high-frequency word “said,” the letter “s” spells the sound /s/, and the letter “d” spells the sound /d/. The only part of the word students need to learn is the middle two letters, “ai,” which spell the sound /e/.

Research suggests that when teachers call attention to the parts of words students know and do not yet know, rather than presenting words as wholes, it can help students better learn to read and spell. Students can just memorize the part of the word that is irregular based on the phonics patterns they have learned. Some teachers call these “heart words” because students learn the irregular part of the word by heart.

As students attempt to use their phonics knowledge to decode unknown words, they will run into words with irregularly spelled parts. Teachers and administrators alike can support students in a variety of ways.

What teachers can do

There are several things teachers can do to support young readers:

• Provide opportunities for students to practice flexible decoding strategies with irregularly spelled words. Begin by teaching them to ask questions that help them tap into what they already know: “What word do I know that sounds like that word? Does it make sense in this context? Does it make sense with these letters and sounds I know?” Research suggests encouraging students to use a flexible decoding strategy aftersounding out the word using their phonics knowledge will help them become problem solvers while reading, leveraging what researchers call their “set for variability” to shift pronunciation and problem-solve words with irregular parts.
• Use decodable texts that align with your curriculum’s phonics scope and sequence. Buyer beware: Many companies market books as “decodable,” but without alignment with your curriculum’s phonics scope and sequence, it’s unlikely the text is decodable for your students.
• Examine high-frequency word lists and determine which words are phonetically regular (“can,” “his,” “me”) and which words have irregular parts (“said,” “there,” “would”). Use this information to plan for your phonics and fluency instruction.

What administrators can do

If you’re an administrator, here’s what you can do to support your literacy staff:

• Ensure your early grades classrooms have appropriate materials for phonics, including a wide range of decodable texts that align specifically with your school’s phonics scope and sequence.
• Do not create goals that include a set amount of sight words to reach by the end of the year. Instead, base student progress on curriculum-based measures, including foundational skills assessments, such as word-recognition fluency in kindergarten or oral-reading fluency in first grade.
• Ensure teachers feel supported with time for professional learning. Teachers need ample time to gather resources to plan for instruction, learn new professional practices, collaborate with colleagues, and reflect on their learning and growth.

It’s time for a change

If we want to build truly fluent readers, it’s crucial to reevaluate our initial approach to teaching reading. By teaching and practicing letter–sound correspondences in isolation and in decodable texts, pointing out parts of words that are irregular, and encouraging flexible decoding strategies, we can help students build a solid foundation in learning to read and spell and, ultimately, understand the world around them.

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When was the last time you had to read something you couldn’t understand? Stumped? That’s probably because you’re an excellent reader. I’m an excellent reader, too, so I asked my sister if I could review an article she was writing in support of her doctoral dissertation. “Maybe I can give you some constructive feedback?” I said, confident that my ELA teaching experience would pay off. Text complexity isn’t something I often worry about.

Two paragraphs in, and I was lost. So I buckled down and reread a few key sentences: “Over the past 50 years, a picture has been developing of the brain’s unique waste removal system. […] Here, we review the relevant literature with a focus on transport processes, especially the potential role of diffusion and advective flows. […] Communication relies on molecular transport, where transport rates determine the range-of-action for neurotransmitters and transport effects cell-to-cell communication (Ray and Heys, 2019).”

Nope. Still clueless. Time to admit my own hubris. I just don’t have the background knowledge or the discipline-specific vocabulary in chemical engineering I need to understand an article titled, “Fluid flow and mass transport in brain tissue.”

The power of not understanding (from a teacher’s perspective)

Humbled as I was after attempting to read my sister’s article, it dawned on me that I have asked students to do a similar kind of reading, and I have expected better results.

The problem isn’t that students shouldn’t be reading complex, grade-level texts. In fact, they should be reading moreof them, since we know students’ ability to comprehend complex texts is a key determiner of their college and career readiness. But learning from complex texts requires what literacy expert Tim Shanahan calls “accommodative and supportive instruction.” In essence, if we want students to grapple with complex texts, we need to plan for their success.

Here’s a simple three-step process for setting students up for success with complex texts.

1. Understand what makes a text complex

It’s common for many K–12 educational publishers and curriculum providers to report quantitative   measures of text complexity, such as Lexile®. These measures can offer a good starting place for librarians, caregivers, and even students to explore and select reading materials. However, for classroom instruction, we need to dive deeper into the qualitative aspects of a text’s complexity because doing so can better reveal what supports our students might need to access a text.

There are four key qualitative dimensions to consider:

• Purpose (for informational texts) or levels of meaning (for literary texts). Purpose refers to why the author wrote an informational text, what it’s about, and its intended effect on the reader. Levels of meaning are the different ways a literary text can be interpreted, such as through themes or metaphors. A text may have a literal interpretation but also a deeper, more abstract meaning.
• Structure. Structure refers to how an author connects ideas, processes, and events in a text. This includes how the text is organized as a whole, as well as within specific paragraphs or larger sections of text. Structure also includes visual elements and text features, such as headings or sidebars.
• Language conventionality and clarity. Language conventionality refers to the vocabulary and sentence structures in a text, while language clarity refers to how dense or abstract the language is, as well as how challenging an author’s stylistic choices, such as voice, diction, and tone, are.
• Knowledge demands. Knowledge demands refer to the amount and type of knowledge (e.g., prior knowledge) a reader must bring to a text to access its full meaning. Types of knowledge can include general, common-practical, discipline-specific, culturally specific, and regionally specific knowledge.

2. Identify what makes a specific text complex

In my sister’s article, the language and knowledge demands added the greatest text complexity, so it’s no surprise my comprehension broke down in those areas.

On the other hand, her article’s purpose (to explain the brain’s unique waste removal system) and structure (a review of relevant literature) were fairly explicit. This explicit information provided a helpful scaffold when the going got tough, which was often with word- and sentence-level meanings. I didn’t know what “advective flows” were, for instance, but I did know from the article’s explicit purpose that they had a “potential role” in the brain’s “waste removal system.” And while I couldn’t fathom what the “range-of-action” for neurotransmitters might be, I could figure out from the syntax that these actions involved “cell-to-cell communication.”

In the end, I still had much to learn about “molecular transport,” since its “rates” and “effects” seemed very important to brain health. But overall, I was getting much closer to the main gist of the article, and I was living and breathing Tim Shanahan’s advice to focus on sentence-level comprehension.

3. Uncover the barriers students might face and plan accordingly

To anticipate potential barriers in text complexity for our students, we have to put ourselves in their shoes. When we compare students’ prior knowledge to what a reader is expected to bring to a text, we can better plan to address any potential gaps. A great way to start this analysis is with a list of questions developed for content-area read-alouds in K–8 classrooms.

In my case, the greatest barrier to understanding my sister’s article was my lack of exposure to technical terms like “transport processes” and scientific concepts like “diffusion.” Because I couldn’t tap into any prior knowledge, I couldn’t connect these ideas to new learning. But I did have other assets to leverage. I knew the general meaning of academic words, like “relies” and “transport,” even though I didn’t know their specific meanings in this context. Still, that vocabulary knowledge helped me. It revealed the relationship between ideas in the text—“Communication relies on molecular transport”—so I knew what questions to ask to better comprehend the text.

Students will have their own unique barriers to a text—but their own unique assets to leverage, too. To overcome barriers, try tapping into the funds of knowledge students bring with them to school, especially those from family, culture, and community. For example, medical and scientific texts like my sister’s article are often full of Latin-based vocabulary. Native Spanish speakers are often better than native English speakers at understanding Latin-based vocabulary because Latin and Spanish share so many cognates (words with similar spellings and meanings across languages).

If we can give our students clarity about why they are reading, and intentionally plan for their success, we can better prepare them for real-world complex texts they’re sure to encounter in whatever career they choose.

Keep in mind that language and knowledge demands are only half the equation for accessing complex texts. Students will also need support in determining the purpose or levels of meaning of a text and in navigating its structure. Repeated exposure to informational and literary texts in different genres gives students a strong foundation, as does repeated practice with articulating an author’s purpose and exploring the deeper meanings of a text, such as its themes and central ideas.

Explicitly teaching text structures is another method that has positive effects on reading comprehension, including among students who are learning English. Remember that informational text structures are more varied and often more complex than literary text structures. And since students typically have less exposure to informational texts in school, they can greatly benefit from more explicit instruction.

Do a little extra (planning) to address text complexity

Helping all students access the content and meaning of complex texts is the first and most critical step in planning, but there’s even more we can do to ensure all students succeed with complex texts. That’s because preparing students to tackle complex texts requires sparking their interest and motivation just as much as providing appropriate scaffolds to increase their access.

Aspire to meet the following three extra goals in future lesson plans.

Planning goal #1: Make it engaging!

For many students, the term “complex text” sounds dreadfully boring. But we can flip that dynamic on its head by incorporating movement and expression into our lessons. While engaging students in text analysis is the primary goal, we can also find ways to tap into their creative talents.

For example, students can tackle the language and structure demands of a text by working in small groups to memorize and perform an excerpt from the text, such as the prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This might begin with choral readings, so students can learn how unfamiliar words are pronounced, and then progress to adding more expression (prosody) and movement as students pick up the rhythm of the language, such as stomping or clapping to Shakespeare’s use of iambic pentameter.

Students will be more engaged when learning difficult vocabulary or navigating complex text organization if they know they’ll need the information to perform for other people. Questions like “What does the word ‘dignity’ mean in ‘Two households, both alike in dignity’?” or “What is the purpose of a prologue?” become more practical when students need the answers to create a strong performance. An added benefit of such explicit knowledge is that it provides a scaffold for students as they work through dense or difficult language in a text. My students often referred to the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, because it provides a concise summary of the play.

Planning goal #2: Make it accessible!

Letting students tell you what they know and don’t know about a topic is another authentic way to grapple with complex text, as I did when struggling with my sister’s article. Students of any age can create their own questions to investigate. Mine was, “What is molecular transport anyway?”

Students might explore a text’s levels of meaning in small groups, for example, and then present, discuss, and revise their findings with other small groups. While this process can be done with any text, poetry is an excellent choice, especially when students can make their own selection. If your class includes multilingual learners, you might offer (or help students find) poems originally written in a home language, such as Spanish or African American English. If possible, provide a side-by-side comparison of the original poem and its translation into general academic English. This will prompt students to think about the meanings of specific words and phrases, and it will encourage multilingual learners to leverage their linguistic and cultural knowledge to assess whether meanings have been altered or lost in translation.

Small group work is a great way to facilitate these discussions, and poetry also lends itself well to teaching students how to create and use text annotations.

Planning goal #3: Make it meaningful!

What do your students care about? What do their communities care about? What is important to this generation of young people? When we find ways to make complex texts more relevant to students’ lived experiences and the real world, we add that extra bit of purpose, meaning, and motivation everyone needs to persist through a difficult task, such as dealing with text complexity.

Consider that students might take a daunting issue, like climate change, and work in small groups to investigate various aspects of it. Strive for tasks that require students to sort through misinformation and disinformation as they develop their own position on a topic. This will force them to consider the purpose of the texts they read, especially when conducting research.

Research projects also help students think about the knowledge demands of the texts they write: Who is my intended audience? What do they already know about this subject? What knowledge outside the text do they need to bring to the text to understand my position? If the goal of the research project is to influence one’s peers, students may need to find or develop primers on unfamiliar concepts so their texts can convince classmates rather than confuse them. Finally, you might culminate this research task with a student-led summit fashioned after a real-world event. This requires a little extra work and planning, but it’s a powerful way to show students how their ability to navigate complex texts prepares them for global citizenship.

The power of understanding (from a reader’s perspective)

When I attended my sister’s dissertation defense over Zoom, I was thrilled to see the many features she included that made her presentation more accessible for the lay person (aka, me!). There were detailed diagrams, friendly definitions, and an impressive animation that finally revealed to me how molecular transport happens in the brain. While I still didn’t understand everything, I understood a lot more than I did from reading the article alone. Most importantly, I understood the significance of my sister’s work in her field, which (to be honest) was a more realistic purpose for reading her article in the first place.

If we can give our students clarity about why they are reading—and intentionally plan for their success—we can better prepare them for real-world text complexity they’re sure to encounter in whatever career they choose, whether it’s in education, like me, or engineering, like my sister.

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Have you ever read a book and felt like the author wrote it just for you? A book that was so profound that you felt changed by the experience? Now imagine you’d never read that book. Or couldn’t. Or that you read the book but didn’t understand it. How would you feel? That is the power of reading. It can change you for the better. It can immerse you in a different world. It can make you feel seen. But it can also completely strip away your confidence and make you feel powerless. There is more we can do to help young readers experience the best of what books have to offer them.

Being able to read is a skill everyone deserves to learn. But according to a report by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, about 54% of adults in the United States read below a sixth-grade level. That same report explains that adults with lower literacy rates tend to earn less, which can affect the quality of life for them and their families.

We need to do better at teaching kids to read, so we can raise literacy rates and increase the variety of professional opportunities available to our students when they graduate. Two ways we can help students are empowerment and building knowledge.

3 ways to empower young readers

Empowerment is motivating. Kids who are empowered are more likely to enjoy reading and to become lifelong readers. Here are three ideas for you to consider:

1. Follow reading science

The science of reading has outlined what matters in teaching students to read and comprehend. High-quality instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics and word recognition, fluency, vocabulary and oral language comprehension, and text comprehension is crucial for helping all students learn to read.

It is also important to remember that reading isn’t a bunch of disparate skills that kids learn in isolation. Yes, students need to learn how to decode, but equally important is their volume of reading, the access they have to complex texts, and the opportunities they are given to build knowledge (more on all of that later).

2. Offer windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors

Rudine Sims Bishop is widely credited with introducing the concept of windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.

Books that are windows show a reader a world that is different from their own. Sometimes those books can also be sliding glass doors, where the reader can imagine themselves as a part of the world they are reading about. Books that are mirrors show readers a world that reflects their own lived experiences back at them.

Why is all of this important? Seeing a world larger than our own can help us develop both emotional intelligence and empathy. Students who see themselves in what they read feel valued and that their experiences matter. This, in turn, can lead to them feeling empowered and, hopefully, motivated to read more.

Think about your class and the materials you select for them. How do you expose them to worlds different from their own? What are the things you look for that acknowledge your students’ lived experiences?

3. Elevate multilingual learners

As my colleague Teresa Krastel wrote, teachers must capitalize on multilingual learners’ superpowers, including funds of knowledge from their homes and home cultures. Even if a student is developing literacy in English, we must remember to honor and use the language knowledge these students already have. This can help them learn to read in English. It can also help them make sense of what they read because they have more of the context they need to understand.

Just as with mirrors, students who feel as though their home language and funds of knowledge are valued will almost certainly feel more empowered and motivated as young readers. Are there ways you could learn more about the multilingual learners in your classroom?

How to build knowledge

We all bring background knowledge to what we read. It serves as context that helps us understand texts. Read these two sentences, and I’ll show you how:

• Superconductivity is the flow of an electrical current through a material without transferring thermal energy out of the material, and it typically requires extremely low temperatures.
• The Harlem Renaissance was an important period of cultural and intellectual expression in Black history between World War I and the mid-1930s.

Was one of the sentences easier for you to understand? If you have knowledge of engineering or science, then the first sentence was probably easier. If you have knowledge of Black history, then the second sentence probably was. Or, if you are super lucky, you know a lot about superconductivity and you know a lot about Black history, so you had an easy time understanding both sentences.

If one or both of the sentences felt overwhelming to you, it was likely because you don’t have enough background knowledge to help you as you read about those topics. The sentences don’t provide enough context to help you understand. This is just an example of how the more we know about a topic, the easier it is to understand what we read. And the more we read on a topic that’s already familiar to us, the more new knowledge we can gain. Knowledge begets more knowledge for adults and young readers alike.

As a teacher, you can leverage the knowledge your students already have and build upon it. This can help your young readers make connections and comprehend what they read. But it’s also important to understand that not all your students will have the same amount of knowledge on any one topic. That’s where building knowledge comes in. Here are four things to try:

1. Give students plenty of time for independent reading

Independent reading directly contributes to the volume of reading students do. This is so important for building stamina, which helps improve reading skills overall, and it also builds knowledge.

Scaffolded silent reading, or ScSR, is independent reading with support from you, the teacher. It might sound counterintuitive at first. How can you help your young readers build knowledge if they are reading independently? By helping them choose appropriate texts!

When you help students choose appropriate texts and provide scaffolding, you help them read grade-level texts at a variety of complexity levels. (Remember: It’s always important to provide students access to grade-level texts.) I encourage you to also have regular check-ins with students to monitor comprehension and hold them accountable for their reading time. One way you can do this is to use reading response journal prompts for younger students and dialectical journals for older students.

Another way to make good use of independent reading time is literature circles, where groups of students read and discuss the same book. Help your young readers choose the books and groups. Ensure students are assigned roles (a circle role sheet can help) and that discussions are guided and focused.

2. Read aloud

Building knowledge begins even before students can read independently. Teachers of younger students build knowledge all the time by reading aloud.

The same kinds of scaffolding you would provide to independent readers can be used with read-alouds, such as asking questions and having students respond in writing (or drawing, for younger kids).

3. Support reading in the disciplines and digital literacy

Reading complex texts with rich vocabulary builds knowledge. Complex texts are especially important for building knowledge in different disciplines, like science and social studies. They also help older readers develop the skills necessary to approach and gain knowledge from texts in different disciplines. This is referred to as disciplinary literacy.

Digital literacy is also essential for accessing and building knowledge in the disciplines. Reading should not just happen in print, and students need guidance for navigating the digital world that is literally at their fingertips. My colleague Laura Hansen shares some tips in “3 ways to improve students’ digital literacy skills.” 

While both disciplinary and digital literacy are more relevant for older students, it’s never too early to begin introducing the concepts to younger readers.

4. Help students connect the dots

Activating background knowledge is an important start to building new knowledge. But it is not necessarily an intuitive skill. Students need to be taught how to connect what they already know to the new knowledge in the texts they read. Students need lots of practice doing this with all kinds of texts.

Build activities that facilitate asking your young readers what they already know about a topic an assigned text covers. Point out the ways the text helps them learn something new.

Don’t forget about multilingual learners, who benefit from knowledge-building just as much as native English speakers do. Comprehension is stronger when students can activate the knowledge they already have about a text, regardless of language. Encourage and facilitate translanguaging to help multilingual students make meaning.

A love of reading

Empowerment and building knowledge are essential for improving reading. But they are also crucial for building young readers’ confidence. Our job as educators is to give students the tools they need to become strong readers. This can lead to better outcomes once they reach adulthood.

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When I taught eighth-grade English, I sometimes came across a reluctant reader. One of the things I prided myself on was finding a book even the most resistant reader would enjoy. One year, I had a student who told me—quite happily—that he hated to read and that he didn’t do it. He was also what test scores would call a “weak” reader (quotes intentional). In that moment, it was like someone had shone the Bat Teacher light in the sky, prompting me to pull my reading superhero suit on. That’s when I first started thinking more about the role of reading motivation and engagement.

The story of a reluctant reader

When I met that happily honest student, I was using Kelly Gallagher’s strategy, The Reading Minute, every week to introduce students to new material. I had a wide array of topics, authors, and texts of varying readability in my classroom library, and I read a mix of genres aloud.

One week, I read a short passage from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, a 500+ page tome on the history of, well, nearly everything scientific and in the natural world with a Lexile score that places it in grades 9–10. (It’s also an interesting book with a cheeky tone, but it took me a long time to read the entire thing on my own because it tested a lot of my prior knowledge on geology, biology, and chemistry.) That reluctant reader came up to me at the end of class and asked to see the book. I gave it to him. Later that week he told me, quite nonchalantly, that he was going to “see what it was about.”

Daily, for two weeks, my reluctant reader came in, excited to tell me a new science fact or to quiz my knowledge on obscure science. What had taken me, a lover of books and reading, over a month to plod through took this reader with low test scores two weeks to read. And not only that: he could also discuss the long and winding complex text incredibly well. Why? Because he was motivated and engaged. Why? Because the text tapped into his interests.

The role of reading motivation and engagement

The research community has known for a long time that reading requires decoding and much, much more, including motivation and engagement. Reading motivation and engagement go together like warm cookies and cold milk. Motivated readers keep reading, even when it is a challenge, and engaged readers are interested in reading in the first place.

Motivation is the driving force that causes us to keep going, even when the task (like reading a long book) seems difficult or insurmountable. Motivation to read can spring from external forces, like a grade, or internal forces, like a personal desire. We know self-efficacy in particular plays a role in reading development: Research has demonstrated that when students believe they are competent at a given task, they perform better, regardless of their previous performance. Perhaps most importantly, students with high self-efficacy regard reading as a challenge to master, arguably driving themselves toward mastery, even for difficult texts. Conversely, when students believe they are bad at something, including reading, they can become less motivated to engage in and work through it.

Unfortunately, 2016 research conducted by Allan Wigfield, Jessica Gladstone, and Lara Turci indicates that students’ positive attitudes toward reading decrease each year they are in school; by middle school, some “become actively resistant to engaging in reading.” This tracks with my experience as a teacher with students who found reading a chore to avoid rather than an engaging problem to solve or an unexplored place to navigate.

While I was able to find the text that unlocked reading motivation and engagement for that one reluctant reader of mine, that alone was not enough to propel us through the school year. To keep students of all grades engaged in reading requires more than a robust classroom library, though that certainly helps.

How to motivate and engage your students

If any of your students just aren’t feeling it, try these tips to improve their reading motivation and engagement:

1. Expose kids to a rich body of texts that are racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse, reflect a range of genres and structures, and have a range of readability. Students can’t read what they don’t know exists. By exposing them to a wide range of texts, including fiction, nonfiction, prose, poetry, plays, essays, graphic novels, and even epistolary novels, like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Dear Martinby Nic Stone, or Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, you can help them see just how much is out there—and they’ll be more likely to find something that speaks to them.
2. Scaffold challenging grade-level texts appropriately. Scaffolding challenging texts can build students’ confidence and self-efficacy. Small-group conversations, structured debates, and pairing complex texts with easier reads on the same topic to build vocabulary and prior knowledge can provide students with small wins on the way to the complex text—and encourage its completion. (For more on this, see “Let’s talk equity: Reading levels, scaffolds, and grade-level text.”)
3. Discuss with students the value of reading in their own lives, now and in the future. Sometimes students don’t know why they’re reading a text. In addition to setting a purpose for reading that is meaningful for them, consider engaging students in discussions about the value reading has for them. Or, alongside the text-dependent questions, encourage students to make personal connections to a text and to also discuss how reading about a topic that is meaningful to them matters.
4. Provide some autonomy. Your students aren’t going to have the exact same taste in books as you (or each other), and that’s okay. Autonomy helps foster reading motivation and engagement. Consider giving students the chance to choose between a few pieces to read for in-class assignments (I recommend two to four). Try expanding beyond traditional books and offering optional pieces, like comic books, artwork, music, or podcasts that are good pairings for your core text. Work with the school librarian to curate a book list for your students and let them choose which books they want to read for pleasure.
5. Provide adequate time to read. Rushing through a text during instructional time, or assigning too many pages to read as homework, may discourage students from reading deeply, closely, or at all. When you can, consider slowing down and allowing students time to read and reflect in ways that foster unique ideas and deeper understanding. Processes like a Socratic Seminar, book clubs, or philosophical chairs can provide time to relax into a text so each reader can consider its ideas with more depth.
6. Encourage students to read for pleasure. Reading doesn’t have to be something students do only when it’s required. Encourage them to explore books and reading outside of school. Share stories about how books helped shape you when you were their age to inspire them to consider that they might find comfort in them, too.

If none of these work for you, check out my tweet, where I ask a community of educators how they engage reluctant readers. See if something grabs you there, and add your ideas to the list!

How the story ends

How did my reluctant reader fare? Well, we ended the year with him asking me to tell him more about Bill Bryson’s books and no longer telling me that he didn’t read. I gave him my copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything.

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I want to tell you a story about a shy girl who always had her head in a book. Because she always had her head in a book, no one knew she struggled to read. No one knew how much longer it took her to read a story than the other students. No one knew she didn’t finish standardized tests because she had to re-read the entire passage to answer every single question. Guess what? That shy girl was me, and I have ADHD.

What are executive functions?

What I know now, but didn’t know then, is that reading (and writing!) require a lot of executive functions. Executive functions are the mental skills we use to manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to achieve goals.

Since achieving learning goals is the primary purpose of K–12 education, our students must put their growing executive function skills to work every single day, in myriad ways. And since people with ADHD often struggle with executive functions, they can benefit from extra support to develop the skills needed for reading.

Turns out that the same instructional strategies that work with kids who have ADHD can help all students free up mental energy to use on tasks like reading for pleasure, reflecting on a book’s theme, and analyzing an author’s argument. This is the kind of flexible reader we want all students to be, and knowing how to support their reading-specific executive function skills is one way to help them get there.

Why are executive functions important for reading?

Students have to decode words to be able to read. That’s a given. And they have to know what words mean to make meaning from texts. Another absolute. That’s why word recognition and language comprehension are the two primary factors in the simple view of reading.

You are likely already familiar with Philip Gough and William Tunmer’s simple view of reading. You may also know they didn’t claim this model covers every single mental process involved in reading. We know that motivation, engagement, background knowledge, and (yes!) executive functions all play an important role, too.

Looking back at the simple view, we might consider executive functions to be the brain’s way of coordinating word recognition and language comprehension—the two factors that must happen simultaneously for reading comprehension to occur. An alternative model, the active view of reading, proposes exactly that.

For the purposes of this article, it’s not important that we agree on which model of reading is right or best. My goal is to help you better understand what executive functions are, how we use executive function skills when reading, and how we might best support students in developing them.

So, here are five ways to help students better understand and build reading-specific executive functions.

1. Support planning and organization

Planning helps us all set goals, and organization helps us achieve those goals. In reading, students need to know why they are reading. And they need to know how they should read to achieve those reading-specific goals. Should they skim a text for the main gist? Use headings to locate a piece of information? Re-read a text multiple times for a deeper analysis? Or should they simply enjoy the excitement, humor, or knowledge gained from reading for pleasure?

Knowing about different purposes for reading and different ways to read helps us become more effective planners. Planning becomes especially important as students begin to read more widely and are expected to read longer and more difficult texts. Meanwhile, knowing how texts are organized helps us remember what we read because it gives us a mental structure to hang our hats on—or, in this case, our summaries.

Tips for educators

Here are two specific things you can do to help your class with planning and organization:

Teach students to think more explicitly about why they are reading. What is their goal? What steps can they take to achieve that goal? After reading, have students reflect on how well they did and what they might try differently next time.

Teach students about the structure of language—at the word, sentence, and text level.

Words have inherent structures. Think spelling patterns and syllables, which are often based on roots and affixes. Ask students to find these patterns and word parts in the texts they read, and then work with a partner to list other words with similar patterns, parts, and meanings.

Sentences are made up of words. Learning how words are ordered to make sentences builds syntactic awareness, which we need to become strong readers. Give students a stack of 5–10 word cards and see how many ways they can arrange them into complete sentences.

Texts are made up of sentences. Narrative texts typically have the same structure: a problem, goal, events, and an outcome. Have students work on story maps, first with support and then on their own. As they internalize this structure, they’ll get better at retelling and summarizing stories, too. You can also use story maps to analyze multiple perspectives. Have students note how each character responds to the same events in a narrative. Then have them reinterpret the story from these different points of view.

2. Support developing working memory

Working memory refers to how we temporarily hold onto bits of information until we no longer need them, like where we put our car keys or phone. When reading, we hold onto bits of text until we’ve made the connections needed to understand the text.

One way we use “bits of text” is to resolve writing shortcuts, such as pronoun and acronym use. Each time I connect an acronym back to what it stands for, I use up some of my working memory, which has a fixed capacity.

Our working memory helps us make deeper connections when reading, too. It’s how we integrate each new part of a text into what we already understand of its structure, or how we re-evaluate an author’s argument every time we encounter a new claim or counterclaim.

Tips for educators

To assist kids with developing working memory, try the following:

Show students how to use graphic organizers for reading. Graphic organizers are a great tool for teaching students the structures of informational texts (e.g., compare-contrast, definition-example, problem-solution), which are more varied and sometimes more challenging than literary texts. Graphic organizers can also support inference-making. Record two pieces of information directly stated in a text, then give students a space to speculate about what’s missing. The missing information is the inference, or the meaning that readers must bring to the text.

Show students how connecting words signal the relationship between ideas in a text. Try removing a connecting word (e.g., “because,” “instead”) from a text your students are reading. Next, ask students to visualize what is happening and (literally) draw connections between the individuals, events, or ideas in the text until they know what the missing word should be and why.

3. Support cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is what allows our minds to shift between one task and another, say when we read an email and listen to a podcast at the same time. When learning to read, students must constantly shift between the tasks of decoding and meaning-making, as explained in this short video. When reading to learn, students spend more time shifting between basic comprehension and deeper critical thinking, such as analyzing an author’s purpose or resolving conflicting evidence across two or more texts.

Tip for educators

When you focus on cognitive flexibility, engage students in activities that require constant shifting between two mental tasks.

For younger students, have them sort a stack of word cards, first by meaning and then by sound. This is a well-researched method that has led to some impressive reading outcomes. One reason is because this activity mimics the constant shifting between language comprehension (meaning) and word recognition (sound) required for reading comprehension. (Remember our earlier discussion of the simple view of reading?)

For older students, switching between reading a text and annotating a text, or conducting online research and taking relevant notes, are ways to mimic the shift between basic comprehension of a text and deeper critical thinking about the text.

4. Support inhibitory control

Whether we know it or not, we use inhibitory control to manage many aspects of our lives. Every time we think before we act, we are using this skill. In reading, inhibitory control is what helps us suppress the common, everyday meanings of words in favor of their text-specific meanings. When we use context clues to determine that “duck” is a verb instead of a noun, for example, or that “canon” means a group of works in a specific discipline, not a weapon of war (spelled “cannon” by the way), we exert mental inhibition.

Tips for educators

Here are some ideas for addressing inhibitory control:

Show students how to approach multiple-meaning words in a text. Have them work with a partner or in small groups to create word maps that distinguish between the everyday meanings of words and the less common ones, including figurative and domain-specific meanings.

Show students how to resolve ambiguous meanings in texts. Use books of homonym riddles, idioms, or even dad jokes to turn this into a hilariously fun activity. Identify the misconception (ambiguous meaning) and then work together to resolve it. Embrace laughter and silliness along the way.

5. Support social understanding

Social understanding is what we use to make inferences in our daily interactions with other people. These inferences are based on our in-the-moment social, emotional, and cultural understanding of the world. In reading, we apply these skills to comprehend literary, historical, and social studies texts—all of which require social inference-making. We are flexing our social understanding every time we recognize humor (That’s so funny!) or irony (How ironic!) in a text, or when we grasp more sophisticated literary techniques, like foreshadowing or allegory (Oh, I see what the author is doing here. That’s a clever way of adding suspense).

Tips for educators

To help your class leverage social understanding when reading, try this:

Encourage students to “read the minds” of literary characters and authors. Try turning your classroom into a courtroom and putting a cast of characters on trial. Or mock interview an author in a class podcast: Why did you use this style? Why did you include certain facts and exclude others?

Encourage students to read widely and diversely. The more knowledge they have of the world—and the varied people, cultures, and ideas within it—the greater their potential for social understanding.

We can help set students on the path to becoming lifelong readers

Since I wasn’t a hyperactive kid, I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was an adult. Many girls and women aren’t. If I could teach that shy girl who was me all over again, I’d use the tips I’ve suggested here. While they’re good for all kids, they’re especially good for kids who have weak executive function skills. Kids like me.

I was lucky because I really wanted to be a reader, so I kept trying (and trying!) until I found my way. But perhaps I didn’t need to try so hard. I just needed to try something different.

Our challenge as educators is to find that “something different” for all our students—the thing that sets them on the path to becoming lifelong readers. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to raise good readers and writers, too. We need to tap into that village if we want our students to become the flexible readers, writers, and thinkers we know they all can be—if given the right support!

Special thanks to Kelly B. Cartwright for her research on the five executive function skills most critical for literacy and many of the practical teaching tips recommended in this article.

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When we at NWEA released a document sharing our views on writing instruction last September, we were excited about the innovations happening with digital literacy. We even discussed a body of supporting research devoted to digital writing: “Reading is a rapidly evolving experience in the digital world,” we acknowledged. “Readers must be savvy consumers of digital and multimodal texts.”

Then, two months later, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and teachers’ worlds turned upside down.

Initially, there seemed to be a sense of panic. Teacher forums were flooded with valid concerns about how students could use ChatGPT to cheat on written assignments. Some school districts even took steps to ban it. However, as the use cases for AI became more apparent, that sense of panic has started to shift to, “Okay, ChatGPT is here to stay. How can I leverage it to improve my students’ learning?”

My experiments with ChatGPT

When I first started brainstorming for this blog post with a colleague, I honestly didn’t know where I stood on AI, or what exactly I was going to write about. Each time I thought of an example of AI’s potential instructional utility, I immediately followed up with an example of its potential dangers. My colleague remarked, “Lauren, you keep contradicting yourself. I’m not sure you actually know what you believe about this tool.” Ouch. But she was right.

On one hand, I know that AI applications like ChatGPT have become common in the workplace, and the internet is inundated with various AI tools. I want students to be prepared to use the technology effectively and responsibly. On the other hand, I know that the process of writing facilitates critical thinking. We don’t always know what we think about a topic until we start writing about it. New thoughts and connections come to us as we write. This blog post itself is an example! If students rely too much on a chatbot to write for them, they could miss out on vital critical-thinking experiences.

Faced with this dilemma, I decided to go directly to the source: I asked ChatGPT to help me write this post. A few curious things happened.

My first prompt was “Write a 1,000 word blog post on the benefits of using ChatGPT in the classroom.” ChatGTP suggested teachers could use the AI to “develop critical-thinking skills,” “offer personalized feedback,” and “enhance creativity by examining different perspectives.” Great. These all sounded very plausible. However, when I asked it to write a blog post on the dangers of using ChatGPT in the classroom, I got eerily mirrored results. Dangers included “loss of critical-thinking skills,” “diminished interpersonal skills,” and “exposure to biased content.”

So I dug a little deeper. When I asked ChatGPT to provide me specific suggestions, I was able to cull the following promising ideas for instructional benefits:

• Provide differing perspectives on a topic to help students evaluate claims
• Build students’ language skills via sentence expansion and vocabulary activities
• Offer various writing prompts to spark students’ imagination
• Present step-by-step guides
• Offer suggestions for revisions

With these ideas in my toolbox, I went back to ChatGPT to help me make them a reality, with various levels of success.

I asked ChatGPT to write an argumentative essay and told it to include research to support the position. With my first attempt, I only got phrases like “Research shows…,” so I refined my prompt to include parenthetical citations, which ChatGPT then did. However, when I refined it further to include a works cited page, ChatGPT provided some bogus references.

Next I tasked the tool with creating an instructional activity on vocabulary. I got a few really interesting lesson plans, but none of them asked students to use their new vocabulary knowledge in new contexts, a key principle in effective vocabulary instruction.

I directed ChatGPT to draft several ideas for writing prompts for Romeo and Juliet. While all the prompts were on topic, they were also very generic and didn’t necessarily promote synthesis of ideas. I also prompted it to create a step-by-step guide for students on how to create a podcast, but it vastly oversimplified the process for a first-time user.

When I asked it to provide feedback on a piece of writing (which had already gone through copy edit), it rewrote the paragraph but didn’t explain why it was making the changes. I had to try several prompts for it to provide me constructive feedback to consider, instead of automatically rewriting the paragraph.

I’m sure if I continued to tinker with my prompts to the chatbot, I could have gotten better and more precise results, which brings me back to the NWEA document on reading instruction: “readers must be savvy consumers of digital and multimodal texts.” The more I experimented with the technology, the savvier I became at using it.

ChatGPT is just one piece of the digital literacy landscape. As my colleague Laura wrote about in “3 ways to improve students’ digital literacy skills,” students need intentional support with developing digital literacy skills. Thus, I firmly believe that students need access to and support with using chatbot technology, including appropriate guardrails, so they can develop the digital savviness needed to use it effectively, efficiently, and responsibly.

How to responsibly integrate ChatGPT into your classroom

Based on my interactions with ChatGPT and my research of the broader conversation around its use, I recommend the following strategies for using it with your students.

1. Set classroom norms on the use of ChatGPT

Spend time discussing the different use cases for ChatGPT with your students, as well as the pros and cons of each. Invite students to coconstruct the norms with you. Perhaps your norms will involve using the technology only to generate ideas or produce outlines, not drafts, or require the inclusion of ChatGPT as a coauthor when appropriate.

For more on norming, read “The science behind classroom norming.”

2. Establish a baseline of students’ writing skills

Before online plagiarism programs were invented, many attuned teachers could catch cases of plagiarism because they knew when a piece of writing didn’t sound like a student.

Make sure to provide students the opportunity to write without the assistance of ChatGPT. This might look like assigning personal narratives or writing with pen and paper. Read those pieces of writing, provide students feedback, and keep a record of them in each student’s writing portfolio.

At the end of the year, you might even ask students to reflect on how using ChatGPT helped or hindered their writing development, using examples from their portfolio.

3. Help students evaluate the credibility of arguments and the effectiveness of language choices

When given good prompts, ChatGPT can quickly produce models of writing for students to critique.

You might use the AI to provide students with the opportunity to examine alternate perspectives on a topic or to illustrate how word choice and syntax can affect tone. You can also use it to help students understand the criteria of your writing rubrics by having students assess how well ChatGPT meets the expectations of a rubric category. This can be especially useful when trying to showcase the formulaic features of AI writing versus the authentic voice of human writing. You can even ask students to manually revise ChatGPT’s writing to reflect a more unique style and voice.

4. Augment your lesson plans

If your students need help with writing more complex sentences, ChatGPT can quickly produce a list of sentences for students to expand. If your students need background knowledge on a topic to access a more challenging (and authentic) complex text on it, ChatGPT can produce a primer on the topic. It can also translate texts into different languages for your multilingual students, and it can create a variety of tailored graphic organizers to assist students with organizing their ideas.

But remember: ChatGPT is not an expert on pedagogy or content. It is a generative language model that is trained on vast quantities of openly available online writing, which include both research-based information as well as blatant misinformation. Teachers should evaluate its suggestions carefully for accuracy.

5. Model its use with students

Just as teachers should model the writing process in front of students, they should also model how they use ChatGPT. This might look like setting specific goals for using the tool (e.g., idea generation, feedback), trying different prompts to obtain more precise responses, fact-checking content, or choosing which feedback to apply and which to disregard.

Hearing you “think aloud” as you use the tool is an invaluable experience for students.

Keep learning

The suggestions above just barely scratch the surface. The AI landscape is rapidly evolving, and as more advanced versions of ChatGPT (we are on version four as of this publication) and other AI tools are released, we will need to continuously reexamine how we use them.

Even ChatGPT makes this statement about itself: “It’s important to note that while ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it should not replace human interaction entirely. It’s crucial to establish clear boundaries and ensure that critical or sensitive tasks are handled by human professionals when necessary.” I can personally attest to this experience. ChatGPT gave me a launching pad for ideas for this blog post that I could then explore further based on my knowledge and experience as an educator.

For more information on the ongoing debate, check out these resources:

• “Suspicion, cheating, and bans: AI hits America’s schools”: In this episode of the podcast The Daily, journalists interview students and teachers on how ChatGPT is changing education.
• “Pivoting the conversation on AI in writing”: In this article, Central Michigan University professor Troy Hicks explores how we can rethink our current writing assignments in light of ChatGPT.
• “6 ways to use ChatGPT to save time”: This Edutopia article offers teachers tips for using AI efficiently.
• “19 ways to use ChatGPT in your classroom”: This EdWeek post offers additional ways to use ChatGPT in your classroom.
• “Lessons and tools for teaching about artificial intelligence”: This curated list from Common Sense Education includes free instructional resources.

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Digital literacy is something we didn’t have to think much about a few decades ago. But as the amount of information available to us—from online newspapers and other websites to social media videos and more—seems to multiply daily, it’s increasingly important for educators to help students gain digital literacy.

The American Library Association defines digital literacy as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.” That’s a long definition, and it describes something that can feel easier said than done.

We can all be fooled

I’ve run across the following quotation countless times: “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back, everything is different?” It can be found all over the Internet, with multiple sources attributing it to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series. With so many different sources saying Lewis wrote the words, how would we know that, in fact, he didn’t?

The sentiment expressed in this quotation exemplifies what has happened to digital literacy. We can look back just 30 years and observe that the digital landscape was very different then from what we see now. Over time, relatively unnoticeable changes have added up to huge differences in how we gather information and interact with others.

The confusion around the quotation’s origins drives home the point that we must be savvy consumers of information we consume in the new digital world. Students and teachers are having to learn to access more information presented in new ways, for example, multimodal texts that incorporate not only print but also images or sounds. They are also needing to sort through that information to separate the truth from misinformation by reading critically and corroborating sources. Then they must share their learnings responsibly.

Times have changed

Let’s think for a moment about how information is presented now versus in the past.

Traditionally, back in the “old days,” as my kids say, if we wanted to learn something about a specific topic, we needed to read an article about it or (gasp!) use the card catalog at the library to find a book on the topic, which we then pored over for hours. We also learned from newspapers printed on paper, magazines printed on paper, or newscasts in the evening, which were available only a few times a day. Some reading this may remember how Walter Cronkite, whom we trusted to keep us informed about events of the world, would sign off: “And that’s the way it is.” Well, that’s the way it was.

Compare all those activities to now. If we want to learn about a specific topic, we can access online articles by searching for keywords, looking over the list of titles that pops up, and then skimming a selected article to quickly see if it fulfills our quest for information. That digital article will likely look different from articles we used to see in print. It may have audio or visual elements embedded or hyperlinks to other digital texts that can take us further down the rabbit hole as we search for the answers we seek. Or we can watch a video on YouTube or TikTok, or maybe even listen to a podcast. What’s likely is we will do all those things. After all, there are now about 200 million active websites vying for our attention.

Misinformation abounds

As we spend time poking around some of those millions of websites, what do we do if we run across information that conflicts? What if the person producing the text, audio, or video is only a self-proclaimed expert? How can we tell? Those questions also apply to the information we are getting on newscasts. How do we determine if the news media is reporting in an unbiased manner? How can we learn to fact-check on our own rather than relying on fact-check sites that may have their own biases or perspectives? These are problems confronting society, and schools are now having to help students navigate this space to be fully informed digital citizens of the world.

Unfortunately, the digital world has changed so fast that the K–12 educational system hasn’t had much time to think and plan for how to help students best avail themselves of digital information and how to then use it responsibly to inform others. In fact, the term “digital literacy” is still being defined by some. In 2020, a group of researchers spent some time analyzing how people were thinking of digital literacy, and after reading over 20,000 articles on the subject, their conclusion was that there are two ways to think about it: “skills-competencies for the use of technology” and “teaching-learning and its strategies.” Both are important.

How to support today’s kids

Students should be taught how to use technology, from how to use a keyboard to how to write an email. They should also be taught how to maximize technology to increase their knowledge. That is, they should be taught how to know if a source is reliable and how to check for accuracy of information.

What, then, can educators do to facilitate student learning in this space? I have three recommendations.

1. Start small

When teaching your students digital literacy, begin by helping them identify key words. Having the right key words can enable them to find information closest to what they are looking for. It’s also important to help students learn to interact with different formats. Practicing with different sources of information can help them get in the habit of questioning everything they encounter.

Something to try: To practice with key words, find an informational public domain article on a topic of interest to your students. Print it out and black out the title and any subtitles, as those often include key words students will end up selecting. Make enough copies for all your students. Then, create a list of questions related to the topic of the article.

Put your students in small groups and have them work to brainstorm the key words they think they would need to use to find answers to your questions quickly. Once students have a list of keywords they want to try, set a timer and let them loose to see who can identify the best key words the fastest. Discuss as a class both the successful searches and those less successful, and why particular words worked and others didn’t.

To give kids practice working with information in different formats, find a text that presents information differently from a textbook. It might be a digital article with hyperlinks, like this blog post. Or it might be an interactive map that allows students to click the graphics to learn more. It could even be a video or podcast. Work with students to explore the information and its various features, discussing how the format differs from the forms they encounter most often at school. How do they need to adjust to effectively glean the important information?

You can also serve as a model for effective use of digital formats, consistently presenting information during lessons and using multimodal or nonstandard texts, surveys to increase class participation, digital white boards, and more.

2. Make meaningful connections

To help students make meaningful connections, I encourage you to focus on building background and helping them analyze sources.

Some things to try for building background: For younger students, have them read an informational text that is part of your current unit of study. Tell them they will be digital investigators and need to learn at least three more details about the topic. Provide them with at least three student-friendly, topic-related websites they can use to build their knowledge while becoming more digitally literate. Teach them about the search bar and the other features on the sites that can help guide them to helpful information.

Sites you might consider, depending on the topic of study, include the National Park Service website for students, NASA website for students, and National Geographic Kids website.

This same concept can be used with older students as well, even with literary texts. For example, students who understand the historical context surrounding Passing by Nella Larsen have a much better chance of understanding the various themes. Have them explore what was happening in America during the 1920s, including racial tensions, The Great Migration, and classism. Discuss how those events are revealed throughout the book.

Some things to try for analyzing sources: Many older students are well acquainted with social media platforms, and just as many may not realize how much misinformation is posted there. If you have a bit of extra time right before the end of class, show students something that has gone viral and have them discuss it. Ask questions, such as, how could we determine if this information is true or if this event really happened? Could there be another side to this story? What words does the social media post use that may give us a hint about how the creator feels about the topic? Could their perspective be masking the truth?

The News Literacy Project is a wonderful organization you can use to learn more about ways to teach students to discern fact from fiction on the web. Learn more about these free materials and resources in my article “Helping students get to the truth with the News Literacy Project.”

3. Integrate practices into other content areas

Often, when people hear the word “literacy,” they immediately think of language arts. But as my colleague Miah Daughtery explains in “How not to teach literacy across disciplines,” literacy—including digital literacy—is an important part of all content areas.

Something to try: If you’re an ELA teacher and feel tasked with teaching digital literacy all by yourself, reach out to colleagues. Maybe even consider starting a PLC dedicated to brainstorming ways for incorporating digital literacy into all content areas.

Math teachers could show kids how the Pythagorean theorem is used in the real world. In social studies, your colleagues could bring history to life with videos of people recreating historical events, timelines, and primary source materials housed in libraries and available digitally worldwide. Science teachers can explain the role of blood in our bodies by showing moving diagrams of blood flow, or they can assign a podcast where scientists explain chemical reactions and the results of various experiments.

Change is constant

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back, everything is different?” Everything isdifferent now because of changes in technology.

Many of us are still working to improve our own digital literacy. Seize that as a great opportunity to remember how it feels to be a learner, immersed in knowledge acquisition. Get in the trenches with your students. It’s okay that we, too, are wading through vast amounts of digital information, presented in interesting formats, with each needing to be vetted for accuracy and potential bias. It’s a challenge for both educators and students, but one day we will look back and realize this was an exciting time of exploration in education that helped create more savvy world citizens.

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Teaching literacy across disciplines is difficult.

When I was an eighth-grade ELA teacher, my school required that all content-area teachers participate in a cross-disciplinary unit each year. Teachers in ELA, math, science, and social studies were directed to co-plan and teach a topically themed unit students would explore from different perspectives. The ELA teacher was supposed to teach the agreed-upon text while the others were supposed to teach the content. It was a mess, until we figured it all out.

One of the ways things go wrong

I clearly remember a planning session for one of these required cross-disciplinary units.

I was working with a science colleague, and I could feel my frustration growing in minute increments. He wanted the unit to be about frogs because the science curriculum required a focus on something about animal kingdoms and classes. The trouble was, I didn’t have a good reading selection about frogs. I didn’t have any frog poems. I didn’t have any meaningful non-fiction about frogs. I had no plays about frogs, no speeches about frogs. I didn’t even have a quotation about frogs. (Of course I thought of Frog and Toad, a staple in elementary school, but it didn’t make sense to use it with middle schoolers.) In fact, what we were about to read couldn’t have had less to do with frogs if I’d tried. We were about to start a unit on freedom by reading What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? by Frederick Douglass.

The science teacher, however, did have a text about frogs. His double-sided article was all about what they eat and where they live. It included models of frog anatomy and a graph of their lifespans.

After skimming the article, I asked, “What do you want me to do with this?” I was genuinely curious. What was I, as an ELA teacher, supposed to do with a scientific article on frogs that had nothing to with any of the topics or themes in my ELA classroom, or anything to do with ELA as a discipline? “Miah,” my colleague began, “they can’t read. Teach them how to read this so I can teach them about frogs.”

Something important clicked at that moment in the conversation. I replied, “Do you think eighth-grade reading teachers teach kids how to read scientific articles?”

“Yes,” he replied, quite definite.

“I can assure you that there is a zero percent chance a student will leave my ELA class understanding how to read a piece like this.”

“Really?” he asked, “Don’t you teach reading?” Clearly he was as confused as I was.

“Not this type of reading,” I said.

Reading literature vs. reading scientific texts

I didn’t have the language then to explain my confusion to my colleague, to tell him that ELA teachers didn’t teach kids how to read like a scientist. It wasn’t our job to show them how to deconstruct a model, to connect phenomena to theory to observation, to navigate the complex content that undergirds the language of a scientific text, or to understand how language is used flexibly in science texts. Sure, I could teach my students the word “croak,” but it would most assuredly be in the context of a character who had shuffled off this mortal coil, not the sound a frog makes.

If I had done what my science colleague had expected of me, I would have spent precious time with my students reading a text on frogs, finding the central idea and supporting details, tracing the structure, and even identifying the organizational pattern. But that would have been a shallow and cursory attempt at understanding the importance of the science content. My instruction would have resulted in little more than my students gathering decontextualized information.

Yet, at the same time, I understood my colleague’s confusion. Many literacy skills and practices transfer from place to place, discipline to discipline. These skills include decoding, fluency, and vocabulary. They include writing with purpose, attuning to task and audience. However, text is highly contextual and situational. Scientific texts frequently have structures unfamiliar to students, including visual elements likes charts, graphs, and diagrams. They often include technical vocabulary with Latin and Greek roots, and everyday words like “stage,” “family,” and “order” can have very different meanings than they do in other content areas. Science texts are also full of complex sentences that often use the passive voice. Students need disciplinary literacy support to make meaning of these types of texts.

We must teach literacy across disciplines as disciplinary literacy

Back when I was teaching, the language we used in schools to refer to what my science colleague and I were trying to accomplish was “content-area literacy,” not “disciplinary literacy.” Content-area literacy focused on applying general reading strategies across different content areas. Disciplinary literacy, in contrast, does not prioritize all-purpose reading strategies. Instead, it emphasizes learning how to read and write in ways that reflect the expertise of a discipline.

Many of us erred in the belief that all reading skills are learned in reading or ELA classes. We believed students could just apply the generic reading skills they’d learned in their ELA class in their science, social studies, and mathematics classes. But that exchange with my science colleague began to show me that something was not quite right. For years, the science department had been exasperated with us, the ELA teachers, for not teaching students how to read the texts, graphics, and models used in science texts, or how to write to demonstrate scientific understanding.

What I now know we really wanted to achieve with those mandatory collaborative units was disciplinary literacy. What we wanted was to show students how to ask questions like a scientist, a historian, a mathematician, and a student of the letters to derive rich and useful meaning from a text. We wanted to turn our students into readers equipped to attend to the unique and nuanced reading demands within each discipline. We wanted our students to become apprentices to the disciplines.

As they progressed through the grades, we also wanted our students to be able to meet the reading demands of each discipline as texts became even more specialized. As writers, we wanted them to understand that attention to task, purpose, and audience are key components of writing in all disciplines but that the specificity of audience, task, and purpose within each discipline is unique.

A happy ending

That fateful school year ended with a lot of frustration and ongoing confusion between me and my science colleague. However, this story does have a happy ending.

That experience began to open my eyes to the importance of teaching literacy across disciplines effectively. It began to disabuse notions some of my colleagues—even my ELA colleagues—held about literacy instruction. That year ended with me teaching “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe and thinking, halfway through the unit, “This would be a perfect collaboration opportunity for social studies!”

The next year, I helped plan a cross-disciplinary unit on plagues. The ELA teachers taught Poe while the social studies teachers taught about the Black Death in Europe and the science teachers taught about the science of infectious disease. Each of us had our own texts that were relevant to the topic and our disciplines.

It was so much fun to listen to students talk throughout the school day, making connections on their own about plagues, Poe, and the past. Our students built multifaceted, connected knowledge, understood the topic with more flexibility, discussed the content across disciplines, and—best of all—asked us to do it again.

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How can we support all learners in an academically diverse classroom? Will providing supports to some give them an unfair advantage? We can begin to address these common concerns by thinking about signs.

Supports are all around us

Frequently, in our day-to-day activities in the community, we encounter signs posted in various places: placards indicating self-serve checkouts in the grocery store, information about how to appropriately sort materials at the recycling center, posters explaining equipment use at the gym. A frequent patron might not need such reminders, or might only occasionally refer to them, but new visitors certainly do rely on such posted information for a successful experience. The signage presents no harm or inconvenience, and even occasional benefit, for many visitors, while being critical to others.

Thinking about signs in the community can remind us that what’s needed by some individuals poses no barrier—and can even sometimes be beneficial—for others.

One doesn’t have to look too hard to find other environmental features that support accessibility, inclusivity, and fairness for some individuals without posing a barrier to others: a sign language interpreter at a public event, an entry ramp on a building, a handrail on stairs. Again, some people rely on these for full participation in spaces and events, and there’s no harm done or extra advantage for those not needing them.

Supports in schools

The school environment parallels the greater community in many ways, including the heterogeneity of the people found within. The impetus to support accessibility, inclusivity, and fairness is surely at least as strong for children in school as for the general population in the community. This aim often manifests as features that are tailored to specific students and unlikely to be used by many others, such as Braille materials, instruction in a student’s home language (when not English), or a weighted pencil for students with fine-motor issues. Accommodations like these are typically mandatory per a student’s IEP or other support plan and are therefore likely to be implemented consistently.

Other student needs, formally identified or not, might not call for such explicit or obvious supports. Teachers must utilize a wide range of accommodations and modifications to ensure accessibility, inclusivity, and fairness for all students, including those with linguistic differences, those in need of scaffolding, and those who could benefit from extension.

How to support students with writing

Previous Teach. Learn. Grow. posts have focused on integrating supports for success in math and reading. Fair, accessible, and inclusive writing instruction calls for many of the same approaches while also presenting some unique opportunities to expand one’s toolbox of strategies.

Supports for success in writing instruction must be dynamic and responsive to changing student needs and learning goals. To that end, teachers may utilize general or targeted strategies, employed flexibly as appropriate, including differentiation of the content, process, and/or environment. These may include:

• Establishing student ownership and an authentic purpose for writing. Students are more engaged with a writing task that they find personally meaningful and that they believe will be impactful for others, and engagement is a key component of inclusivity. The more constrained and contrived the task, the less students feel ownership and meaningful purpose. As much as possible, allow students to write for self-directed, authentic purposes.
• Teaching mnemonic devices. Mnemonic devices are memory tools with broad utility across the curriculum. Mnemonics, such as acronyms and acrostics, can serve as critical scaffolds for helping students access the complex writing tasks of planning, organizing, developing, and even revising and editing. A quick online search will reveal many tried-and-true acronyms, such as POW, TREE, TIDE, and COPS, but you and your students might create some of your own.
• Modeling. We frequently think of modeling as useful in math and reading instruction, but it can also be a powerful addition to the writing instruction toolbox. Help make writing tasks accessible by modeling processes, techniques, and products. Seeing their teacher expand a paragraph with facts from a source, for example, can give students the needed framework for implementing a parallel task in their own writing.
• Providing specific, targeted feedback. Vague feedback (like “needs work” or “getting better”) is just as unhelpful in writing as in other scenarios. At the other extreme, too much feedback at once on a draft can be overwhelming and leave students feeling frustrated and unable to take action. Aim for feedback that is actionable and focused. Feedback is an especially useful tool for differentiation; it can be tailored to each student’s needs, including reteaching, linguistic support, and extension challenges.
• Using flexible peer learning groups. Flexible grouping is a powerful tool for bolstering accessibility, inclusivity, and fairness by facilitating targeted instruction and support. In the writing classroom, students may participate in flexible groups for various purposes: planning and brainstorming, peer review, and targeted grammar/mechanics skill groups, among others. While there may be occasion for using random or student-selected groups, aim for deliberate grouping informed by students’ situational needs for the greatest impact. See “NWEA guidance for student grouping” for more information on best practices for using flexible peer groups.

Many instructional strategies that support accessibility, inclusivity, and fairness can be delivered via self-regulated strategy development, or SRSD. SRSD is especially powerful for students with learning disabilities but can be useful for all students. Components of accessible, inclusive, and fair instruction also follow Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines, a widely applicable framework for reducing barriers to learning. SRSD and UDL are not mutually exclusive but can be merged for maximal impact in planning and delivering writing instruction.

Closing thoughts

Supports for success are all around us. Buildings often feature door levers instead of knobs; you may even have some in your home. These can be essential for individuals with limited hand mobility but also helpful to others, as when hands are full or dirty. Skilled teachers employ instructional techniques that function similarly—providing varying levels of support, from minimal to intensive—to maximize accessibility, inclusivity, fairness, and, ultimately, student learning.

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How much do we want all our students to be successful in reading? I’ll borrow a phrase from my son when he was little and say, “Infinity much.” We can all get behind that statement. So how do we design supports into our teaching to facilitate that student success?

One useful framework is the notion of teaching responsively. This is about responding to students and their needs, both planfully and in the moment.

The three principles of responsive teaching

A responsive teaching framework points to three fundamental attributes we should target in designing supports: accessibility, fairness, and inclusivity. If we take a moment with each and get our heads around a handy metaphor, then we can apply those to the particular case of responsive reading instruction.

1. Make learning accessible. Designing for accessibility means thinking about shelves. First is scaffolding: If the learning is about content that’s on a high shelf, then we need to give access, like stepping stools. Second is modification: In some cases, we need to move from “off the shelf” thinking to “made to order.” We want kids spending time learning the content we care about, not expending most of their energy just trying to access it.
2. Ensure fairness. We all know that sometimes fair is not equal. If a child needs prescription glasses, that doesn’t mean we should give all kids glasses just to be equal. But sometimes the only way to fairness is to build universally. Not every child needs a curb cut to get their wheelchair onto the sidewalk, but we’re only building each intersection once, so let’s build it fairly. (Bonus: Curb cuts are good for strollers and skateboards, too!)
3. Build inclusivity. A classroom should be a unified community even while each student is uniquely different. Our classroom is one garden, and each student is a particular plant. We want a plan that helps all students belong and grow together in our garden, with each different plant getting and giving nutrients to the soil.

Shelves and stepping stools in reading instruction

Consider that the shelf is sometimes a high reach for students. Should we just lower it? In reading instruction, sometimes the grade-level texts that we discuss for comprehension can feel like they are up really high. But it’s critical to keep that height. All students deserve access to rich, grade-level text so they can develop their comprehension and knowledge. If you’re limiting kids to text at their “reading level,” consider how this affects equity in reading instruction.

So let’s design those stepping stools: scaffolding. Before we discuss structure and meaning in a text, we can preview vocabulary and build engagement. How does this connect to our lives and our current knowledge? To support each student’s decoding of the text, we can do repeated readings of passages, moving from high support to less. Model an oral reading yourself, then read chorally with the whole class, then do a partnered read. When all students are supported in building fluency on a text, they can free up effort and energy for thinking about meaning, text structure, and unpacking the author’s craft. When a grade-level text is a pretty high reach, if read independently, it is our job to build the right stepping stools so that everyone can gain access to the rich learning opportunities it presents.

Made-to-order modifications

Sometimes we need to shift from off-the-shelf to made-to-order. This is where modifications come in. Some students with disabilities, for example, will have more significant modifications called for in their IEP.

If I expect my high school students to read Romeo and Juliet, that’s a high shelf. But suppose the discussion today will center on a scene in the middle of the play, in which our happy hero kills—oops—and gets banished. To approach that scene with understanding of the 11 that come before it, one or more students might need an alternative to the text as written. A made-to-order solution might make use of a graphic novel version or a highly decodable summary.

Not all students will be offered this modification. Fair is not equal: we don’t give all students eyeglasses because one student needs them to see well.

Eyeglasses or curb cuts?

But when is access and equity more like eyeglasses and when is it more like curb cuts? Ideally, this is not about hard and fast boundaries but, instead, about cyclical, responsive thinking. Sometimes thinking about individual accommodations and modifications can improve our design of broader scaffolding.

Suppose I decide to send the qualifying student a video of the scene to watch twice before the day of the close reading in class. She’s the one who needs this, as protected in her IEP, so it’s certainly fair that she has a unique support. But here’s another thought: what if my target for this lesson isn’t about decoding the words but, instead, about how Shakespeare uses humor to deepen tragedy? Then, heck, why isn’t that video preview a good idea for the whole class?

Sometimes when we build solutions we thought were eyeglasses, they turn out to be good curb cuts instead. That’s building our capacity to do universal design for learning (UDL).  

A garden of readers

Designing for student reading success needs to focus not only on access and equity but also on building inclusivity. Our choice of texts plays an important role.

If every text we use in high school is written by an old, dead, English-speaking white guy, then we signal to many students that their lived experiences are far outside what we consider worthy of study. Instead, we want students to read material that is both foreign to and familiar to their own lives, and that means seeking out diverse authorship.

Rudine Sims Bishop uses the analogy of windows and mirrors: when our readers look into a book, can they see themselves? Can they see something outside their lives? Both can be true at once. In The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, the mix of torment and compassion in sibling relationships is a mirror for me. But the Black family’s careful navigation of different levels of racism is a window.

Remember: Every student is a unique plant, and we can offer nutrients that feed all of them, sometimes in different ways. The plants then return nutrients to the soil themselves, if we let them. For this, we need to build a classroom where student voices are on, both orally and in writing, and where they are encouraged to speak as themselves and from their own experiences.

Imagine a kindergarten teacher, the book Abuela open to the kids on the carpet. The teacher is pointing to the page and asking “What sound does this letter make?” When she calls on Raul, his answer might be, “My abuela died.” Grief is clearly bigger than letter sounds; responsiveness matters more than the plan for this minute. When we can have conversations about real feelings and events, students learn that they matter here.

High quality teacher–student interactions and student–student interactions are absolutely key to a good garden: they develop language, belonging, deeper thinking, and engagement.

Humans, teaching responsively

We all want student success in reading—infinity much. Translating that want into action means designing instruction in ways that make learning accessible, ensure fairness, and build inclusivity. We can all get better at designing ahead with this kind of universality of support for success. And even when we are really good at it, it will always be the case—for infinity time—that we will discover during instruction how we can improve further still.

That’s a lot. Kind of like life. So, then, all this individual and universal support we’ve been talking about? Let’s build that for ourselves and for each other, too. Let’s remember to give ourselves the kind of patience, flexibility, and compassion we offer our kids when we teach responsively.

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When we use progress monitoring with a student, will we close gaps in learning? Maybe, but maybe not. It all depends on how we respond to the data. So how can we be planful and clear about connecting data to real decisions about intervention change?

Progress monitoring is about this: when we do an intervention, we want to know that it is working. If it isn’t, we want to make a change quickly. Because progress monitoring involves collecting student data at a higher frequency—often weekly—it can provide a faster data-based decision cycle in the area of our intervention. With MAP® Reading Fluency, progress monitoring can be done in oral reading fluency, phonics and word recognition, and phonological awareness. (Our new MAP Reading Fluency with Coach feature also gives students one-on-one and in-the-moment tech-enhanced tutoring.)

What does it mean for an intervention to be “working”? An intervention is an increase in intensity and individualization, and its purpose is to accelerate growth over what regular, Tier-1 classroom instruction has been producing. “Working” means that the intervention is boosting the student’s growth in the domain of interest.

Two components are critical for deciding whether an intervention is accelerating a student’s growth sufficiently. One is to define “sufficient,” by setting a goal. The other is to lay out how and when we will conclude that we are or are not on track toward that goal.

Setting the goal

The National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII) offers three approaches to setting a goal for student growth during an intervention:

1. Benchmarks
2. National growth norms
3. Intra-individual framework

First, we can use benchmarks as the end goal. This means finding the end-of-year performance we expect of typically achieving students and setting that as the goal for our individual student. From the student’s baseline—their performance now—we draw a line to the goal. This line becomes the goal line, and we track the student’s growth against it.

The second approach is to use growth norms, or the typical slope of growth we see on average for all students. Maybe we find that in oral reading, normal growth for a particular grade and season is an increase of one word correct per minute (WCPM) per week. With this approach, we draw a line with that same slope beginning from the student’s baseline. Notice that the endpoint, or goal, comes second, because it is calculated by following that slope forward for a set period (e.g., 12 weeks).

The final approach to setting a goal for a student’s growth during intervention is more self-referential. Beginning with the student’s past growth rate, we calculate an increase. If the student has been growing at a rate of one WCPM per week already, then we might set the new goal line at a slope of 1.5 or two WCPM per week.

Important considerations for goal setting

To help navigate these three approaches, both NCII and other progress monitoring researchers have offered some important guidance.

When choosing a goal, we should be sure to find a balance between ambitious and realistic. For some older students with very low initial performance, targeting the benchmark may be unrealistic by end of year. For example, a third-grader who reads 12 WCPM in winter may not reach a benchmark of 112 WCPM in one season. That would require an increase of something like eight WCPM per week. That’s definitely ambitious. It may not be very realistic, though.

At the same time, aiming to simply match typical rates of growth may not be enough. If our third-grader starting at 12 WCPM only has a target of increasing by one WCPM per week, that means we are only targeting 24 WCPM at the end of the year. That’s still a far cry from where their typical peers will be. The necessary growth to close a gap is inevitably steeper than the normal growth we see for typical students. (Check out the excellent discussion of normal vs. necessary growth by my colleague Michael Dahlin.)

We need to acknowledge what it will take to close a gap, but we also need to be realistic about just how much any intervention can advance a student in a given timeframe. Setting goals for progress monitoring should take both into account.

Setting decision rules

Once we have a goal for how much an intervention will accelerate a student’s growth, we need to clarify how we will make decisions. Eyeballing a set of data points and making gut decisions based on what we see leaves too much room for our own biases. We run the risk of either settling for something that’s not really working or fiddling too early and often with something that is. So how can we set up rules about how we will read the data to inform our decisions?

We need to acknowledge what it will take to close a gap, but we also need to be realistic about just how much any intervention can advance a student in a given timeframe.

Oregon, a state known for great research on progress monitoring, offers some guidance to consider. (While Oregon is a leader here, be sure to check your own state, too!) They suggest two possible approaches to setting decision rules. Remember: laying out these decision rules ahead of time moves us away from falling back to our own biases.

The first method is to compare the most recent data points to the goal line. If we are looking at the last four data points on a student’s graph, for example, and they are all below the goal line, then the decision rule is to make a change to the intervention: growth is insufficient. If all four data points are above the goal line instead, then the decision rule is to either fade the intervention out or increase the steepness of the goal line. (Ambitious goals, remember?)

The second method is slope analysis. After many weeks, we fit a linear trend line to the student’s data, to characterize the trend in their overall actual growth. Then we compare the steepness of the student’s growth trend to the slope we want: the slope of the goal line. If the student’s slope is more shallow than the goal line, then growth is insufficient. It’s time to make a change to the intervention.

As we plan out and then navigate our decision rules, we should hold some principles in mind. We want to err on the side of helping the student, first and foremost. That means we may plan to be more liberal in concluding that we should improve the intervention, but more conservative in concluding that the intervention has been successful. As educators, we need to proactively problem-solve when interventions are not working well, and we need to verify that what looks like success in reaching goals is both real and lasting.

Putting it all together to close gaps

Setting a goal and a set of decision rules is not enough, of course. These components only make a difference when they surround solid, research-based interventions and a clear capacity for improving those interventions when needed. When our decision framework says to make a change, we need to know how to increase intensity. What does that look like? It can look like more time on the intervention, or it could look like more opportunities to respond and get feedback (think smaller group). There are other ways to increase intensity, too. Luckily, NCII has a great tool for thinking about intervention intensity, complete with an accompanying video. Spend some time with each.

Progress monitoring, done well, is the heart of data-based problem-solving. It means setting the bar for student learning high and holding ourselves, as teachers, accountable for accomplishing that, through constant use of data. It means a commitment to equity, to the idea that all students deserve whatever support is needed to reach high standards and expectations. If we don’t want to fall back to the kinds of bias that come from eyeballs and gut feelings, then let’s be clear and specific right up front about how we intend to connect data to real decisions.

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I am the parent of two elementary school children who were mostly learning from home this past school year because of the pandemic. During that time, I often wondered, “How can I help my children with their reading, and how can I best do this with the limited time I have?” If you’re a parent or caregiver who has thought the same, you’re in the right place. (If you’re an educator eager to support families reading at home, please share this post with them!)

The good news is that there are ways to make a difference. In fact, you are likely already having a positive impact on your child’s reading by just having conversations with them. Why? Because reading and language are strongly connected. When we read, we are trying to understand language from words that we see, usually on a page or screen. So learning new words through listening and using them when we talk can help us better understand what we read. This is particularly true for children who are just starting to learn to read.

To better understand how to support your reader at home, it helps to learn about areas of reading instruction that have been shown to further reading growth. We’ll explore some of these—and explain how they’re connected—in upcoming posts. But for now, let’s talk about the model many educators base their reading instruction on: the simple view of reading.

About the simple view of reading

Why do we read? We read for many different reasons, such as enjoyment, learning, and inspiration. But to benefit in these ways, we must first be able to understand what we are reading. As you think about what may help your child make sense of what they read, consider the two main building blocks they’ll need: language comprehension and decoding.

[B]oth language comprehension and decoding are required to make sense of what we read.

Language comprehension is simply the ability to understand language, whether it is heard or read. When a friend calls to tell you about something funny that happened to them, you understand what they’re saying because you can comprehend language; that is, you understand the string of words your friend is speaking.

Decoding, on the other hand, is the ability to turn sets of letters you see into the sounds they represent and to then blend them together to form words. If that same friend describes the funny situation over a text message, you are able to read the words because you can decode them. To understand the text, you need to be able to decode and understand the language your friend is using.

The idea that both language comprehension and decoding are required to make sense of what we read is the simple view of reading in a nutshell. The simple view of reading is also represented in the graphic below. The top piece of the triangle is reading comprehension, or making sense of what we read. This is a key goal of reading. The two skills needed to reach this goal make up the bottom two pieces of the triangle: language comprehension and decoding.

The simple view of reading

What can I do now to support reading at home? 

So where do you start to help your child? There are lots of things to consider, like phonics, and I promise we’ll dig deep into each one of those and give you specific strategies to try in the coming weeks. But for now I encourage you to focus on the following three things, which you’re probably already doing to some degree. Remember: you don’t need be an expert in reading to try any of these or to support your child in growing as a reader at home.

1. Get to know your reader

Kids are at different places in their reading development, but they can all grow. A good way to find out how your child is reading is to listen to them read out loud, even something short. Doing this can provide you with information about how they are doing. Maybe your child needs help knowing how to pause at periods, or maybe they read smoothly and with the right expression.

It’s equally valuable to talk to your child about how they feel about reading. Do they like to read? Are there topics they especially like? What are their favorite books or stories? How is reading going at school? Understanding where they are can help you be better prepared to support them.

2. Give kids access to age-appropriate texts

Make sure your child has access to reading material that’s right for their age. Educators call these age-appropriate texts grade-level texts. They include vocabulary, sentence length, and topics appropriate for students at their age. Reading grade-level texts helps students meet their grade’s learning goals for the year because they’re getting enough—and the right kind of—practice to develop the skills they need to succeed. If your child struggles with reading texts for their grade, talk to their teacher about ways you can help them, and follow the suggestions in this and upcoming posts when working with your child at home.

Think about whether the subject matter is interesting to your child, too. If they’re big science fans, for example, they’ll likely be extra motivated to work hard on understanding the text of Ada Twist, Scientist.

For more on the importance of grade-level texts, read “Let’s talk equity: Reading levels, scaffolds, and grade-level text” by Cindy Jiban. For help finding grade-level texts for your child, talk to their teacher or a local librarian. You can also browse the Mississippi Department of Education’s “Equipped book list: Lists by grade level.”

3. Read together

Find something enjoyable to read with your child and take turns reading out loud: a picture book, a chapter from a novel, a graphic novel, a comic book, or even a news or magazine article. Your child will benefit from hearing you read because your reading demonstrates skills for your child, such as how to pronounce words, pace themselves, and add emotion to their reading.

Not sure where to find something to read? Your local library probably has a great selection, and a librarian can help you find just the right book. If you would rather research on your own, take a look at lists of award winners. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ library has an excellent database that will let you search by numerous awards. I recommend books that have won the Batchelder Award, Caldecott Medal, Coretta Scott King Book Award, Geisel Award, Newbery Medal, Pura Belpré Award, or Sibert Medal. (UNLV also has a handy page with details on the history and focus of each of these awards.)

If you prefer e-books and your library doesn’t offer them, try the free or low-cost options on Story Mentors, for kindergarten and first grade, or Open Library’s Student Library, for kids in preschool through sixth grade.

You can do this!

Wherever your child is in their reading development, you can support them. However you choose to do that will likely have a positive impact on their reading.

Read our next post to learn more about how reading works and how to support your child with the time you have.

Many thanks to my NWEA colleagues Leslie Yudman and Toni Gibbs, ELA senior content specialists, and Lauren Bardwell, senior manager of Content Advocacy and Design, for their contributions to this blog post.

The post What families need to know to support their child’s reading appeared first on Teach. Learn. Grow..