As I was driving home from a recent training, I was ruminating over this question that keeps coming up, “When do I teach my complex text comprehension skills?”

You know my answer, right? Comprehension is an outcome. You can’t just teach “strategies” and pray a child comprehends novel text. I mean you can, but it’s a bad idea.

Comprehension happens when all the parts of the rope are in place. (That link will take you to Scarborough’s Reading Rope if you would like a visual.)

I think I said this same line about 20 times.

And yet… At the end of the first three days of training last week, a group of intervention teachers came up and asked, “How do we tie this into our guided reading of complex text?”

I made a face. I couldn’t stop my face.

They knew. They knew that guided reading wasn’t moving their kids. But, their administration is still asking for it despite ALL the evidence that states that guided reading does nothing to move poor readers, other than to reinforce poor reading skills.

I was making the 109 mile drive home from Middle Georgia, listening to a podcast when I had a Eureka moment.

The Knowledge Gap writer, Natalie Wexler, was talking about the importance of background knowledge as a key component for reading comprehension on this podcast I like. You may know her from her work on The Writing Revolution. I think this is the heart of the issues at hand.

Folks are directly and explicitly teaching tricks and strategies for comprehension of complex text and hoping decoding happens naturally through just reading more or guided reading.

THIS IS BACKWARDS.

Cognitive science demonstrates that decoding and encoding must be teacher directed and explicitly taught.

AND
Teachers should also directly teach content such as history, science, literature, etc. through read aloud and class discussion. It's through this read aloud and class discussion on *content* that your kids development the necessary background knowledge *while* building vocabulary. This is all DIRECTLY taught by YOU!

I know, I know. Direct + Explicit instruction isn’t flashy.

You know what is flashy? When your whole class can for real read and write and comprehend.

Anita Archer says time and again that kids can ONLY engage in discovery based learning when they have the background knowledge to do so. This means until they get ALL the background knowledge necessary, explicit instruction will reach ALL YOUR KIDS.

Cognitive science also suggests that techniques or skills for "comprehending complex text" only work on the target text and don't generalize to real world experience or standardized testing because you're not actually increasing any of the foundational skills in the language comprehension part of the rope.

I’m going to tackle the whole shared reading, paired reading, kill-me-now silent reading situation another day. Let’s just imagine a blank 100-120 minute ELA block.

Here's an example of what an ELA block that is grounded in cognitive science would/could look like:

Imagine teaching a unit on The Industrial Revolution. You- teacher- read complex text aloud to students. They follow along in their own text. Then you stop, monitor for understanding, check for visualization, and ask questions about juicy vocabulary words that you're encountering in the text. Students take notes and are actively engaged in learning about this new subject. This lesson continues for a week or two or three (!!) and includes projects, multimedia, etc. (whole group 15-30 minutes)

AND

You teach daily structured encoding lessons targeted towards a specific skill (this is not at all connected to your content!!) with cumulative spiral review. You embed your grammar and mechanics targets here. You teach writing *at the sentence level* first! Then build from there.

Fridays run the same lesson format, but don't check on the board. Instead collect their dictation pages = weekly data point for handwriting, letter formation, spelling phonetically regular/rule governed words, spelling non-phonetic learned words, & writing a sentence with mechanics and spelling. (whole group 20-45 minutes- I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the lower your kids, the longer this block needs to be)

Sidebar: Good writing must be directly and explicitly taught from a foundational level. It's not about quantity or length of time spent writing. Kids who don't naturally craft sentence don't know where or how to start. Even kids who have ideas lack strong sentence structure. Writing is about quality of word choice aka semantics & vocabulary, structure aka syntax, and grammar & mechanics. These things live on the top part of the reading rope! This is not accidental.

My favorite quote from Dr. Sylvia Richardson,

“Teach a child to read the word, and he may never learn to spell it. Teach a child to spell the word, and he will learn to read it.”

Let that land.

back to the ELA block…

AND

You teach daily small group word level decoding lessons targeted towards a specific skill with cumulative spiral review (this is NOT connected to your content!). You provide opportunities for student to read controlled sentences or short passages to practice generalizing these explicitly taught skills to text- AND- you monitor their visualization station by stopping and asking, "What do you picture?" Remember, reading isn’t about “sounding fluent” it’s about picturing and understanding what you read. (small group: 10-15 minute rotations)

While you're leading your small group...
Other kids are engaged in centers that reinforce the directly taught skills of spelling and reading alongside centers that build on the knowledge/content area. (small group: 10-15 minute rotations)

On Fridays, maybe you have a class art project or writing project *on the content*, and while kids are getting their art on, you pull kids 1:1 to read a short mixed word list of previously taught patterns (8-10 words) + all current learned/heart words + 2-3 decodable sentences. You get a weekly score for reading words in isolation, reading non-phonetic learned words in isolation, and sentence reading which you could score for accuracy and prosody.

These things work in tandem, but your decoding and encoding is skill building at the word level, and those words need not be on the topic of your content.

The *spelling test* IS NOT TIED to your content. The spelling test is a cumulative mixed list of words based on phonetic, morphological, and rule governed patterns that have been (say it with me) EXPLICITLY taught. The spelling test can also include a cumulative list of non-phonetic, high frequency words that have been explicitly taught and practiced using multi-sensory strategies to help these remain retrievable long term. I have a whole blog entry on this alone!

ALL kids get access to the content because YOU are reading it. This means ALL kids are building background knowledge + vocabulary.

You get weekly progress monitoring on your decoding and encoding goals, and your weekly project could check for vocabulary knowledge and content knowledge through some type of multimedia activity.

IF you're a specialist: your job is to do the decoding, encoding, and explicit teaching of writing -meaning grammar, mechanics, syntax AT THE SENTENCE level.

Since the content is read ALOUD, the content/background knowledge vocabulary could/should happen in the general classroom because that playing field would be level.

Read alouds allow ALL kids to access complex text, and these allow teachers to monitor understanding, vocabulary, and class engagement while building lifelong skills such as note taking and a love of learning through storytelling.

You sit in the seat of the teacher, not the facilitator.

You get fluent comprehension when all the parts of the rope are taught directly and explicitly by you.

As you build ALL parts of the rope, you get fluent comprehenders (and maybe even strong writers) as your ultimate OUTCOME.

Scarborough's Reading Rope