Summer Series - What Does an Upper Primary Reading Lesson Look Like?

Guided reading in small groups is a key feature of many upper primary classrooms; however, with a move to structured literacy, there are other choices. In this episode, I will share key ideas from two key books and provide details about how you can create a robust reading lesson. 

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Transcript

00.00
Introduction
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm Jocelyn. I'm so pleased to welcome you here. Today we're going to talk about what a reading lesson could look like in an upper primary classroom when we are applying concepts of structured literacy.

00.20
What does a reading lesson look like in an upper primary classroom?
Now, for a lot of us in our upper primary classrooms, we're very used to having small groups and running that guided reading kind of an option. But many of us are used to teaching from a novel and having a novel study present in our classrooms. We can level this up if that's what we are doing, and if it's not what you are doing at all, then there's a little more adjusting to do. But please know that this process of organizing really comprehensive, useful reading lessons is not something that you have to be perfect at overnight.

00.54
How the books Reading Reconsidered and Questioning the author supported me in my learning journey.
To help point you in the right direction, I'm going to share with you my experiences of unpacking and working with two books in particular. They are, 'Reading Reconsidered' from Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway and the second one is, 'Robust Comprehension Instruction with Questioning the Author - 15 years Smarter' from Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Cheryl Sandora.  Now you may recognize Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown from the book 'Bringing Words to Life', and you might recognize Doug Lemov from the book, 'Teach Like A Champion'. These particular professionals are very experienced, and they have a lot to share with us.

I'm going to say from the outset that 'Reading Reconsidered' is not the easiest read in the universe. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't give it a try. But if you are looking to dip your toe in the water or to help your team work through something really practical around comprehension, Questioning the Author from Beck, McKeown, and Sandora is probably a good place to start. Then, you as the leader, can approach Reading Reconsidered,  with an, 'I'm going to take this one day at a time approach' and know that you will be able to draw really great things out of it. I'm going to share some of the things that stuck with me.  It's kind of game-changing in a way, and so I hope that you find value in both of these two books as I have.

Now in terms of my own experience, I was already playing with a thing that I had been calling whole class guided reading, and so effectively, this involved providing everybody with rich texts. So we are not differentiating the texts that students are reading. We're differentiating the amount of support that we give children to access what's in those texts and the thinking and learning that they need. So that's the first difference between this guided reading approach and this whole class approach that is recommended in upper primary.

02.55
How do I decide what text to choose?
In terms of what text to choose, it's important to know that texts need to be rigorously chosen to be slightly more challenging than what the children can access on their own. So what we are talking about here is not just decoding but in the language and the content. We can always read to children while they follow along if they're not there with the decoding. But if we want children to extend their comprehension skills, to develop their thinking skills, to build vocabulary, to learn how to engage with richer, higher-order texts, we have to not just expose children to them but actively teach them how to engage with those texts.

So the way that I managed things in my classroom,  I had a year three to six class, and I had a range of students. From a student with an intellectual disability all the way through to a girl who was in year five and operating at a year, eight or nine level in literacy. So I had a very broad range, and I needed something that I could use very effectively. So every moment of time was used in active learning by the students. There was no busy work that we find when we break off into small groups; it's just what happens.   So we want something that we're going to have every student engage the whole time with.

04.13
Do I have to use a novel?
But it doesn't mean that you have to use a novel. You can use short stories, and certainly, inside The Resource Room, you will find short story units that put the concepts that I'm going to share with you in this podcast to work. So if you're a resource, remember you've already got units there ready to go.

You can use novels certainly, but sometimes some of the challenges that children have is that they're just not kind of intellectually ready to engage for a very long period of time with a text. So short stories are a great way to provide challenging texts to really stretch children; we want a little bit of stretch, not too much, but provide enough stretch so that there's learning. And also, it means that you get to bite this kind of teaching off in small chunks. You don't have to commit to a whole novel. So I wouldn't recommend that that's your first step if you're not used to teaching in this way.

So let's get into these books and have a look at what they recommend. Now, as I mentioned, I was already doing something that I called Whole Class guided reading, and when I came across these texts, it was very affirming because I thought, okay, I've been on the right track. Now I can refine, and that's what I did.

05.24
What are the key features of Doug Lemov's Reading Reconsidered?
Let's start with Doug Lemov's Reading Reconsidered and have a look at some of the key features.  Reading Reconsidered gives us a framework to help us engage children with rich texts in a way that has everyone with eyes on the page and has everybody thinking. Now the book is very big on talking about background knowledge and vocabulary, and I don't think that that's new for any of us these days; we know that you can't comprehend a text if you don't have adequate background knowledge and you don't have the vocabulary. So this is a huge implication for assessment, which we don't have time to get into today, but certainly, children need background knowledge and vocab in order to actively and accurately comprehend what's happening in a text.

06.09
How should I teach vocabulary?
And if you want to know how to teach vocabulary,  Beck and McKeown's other book and it's Beck, McKeown and Kucan in Bringing Words to Life, that is a great book, hugely practical, a pretty easy read for us busy teachers whose brains are exploding half the time, so I'd recommend that one.

In terms of background knowledge, it is around actively seeking out knowledge-building experiences, and I'm going to save that one for when we talk about 'Questioning the Author' because there's some implications there of how we choose background knowledge.

One of the key features in bringing words to life is this idea of close reading, and I'm not sure that this idea is new to many of us. It wasn't to me in my whole class guided reading that I was engaging with. We were examining texts and exploring it. So close reading is not new to us, but how we engage in close reading is where Reading Reconsidered really comes into its own.

07.04
What is effective questioning?
So there's this idea of effective questioning, and it really opened my eyes to learn about a thing called text-dependent questions. Now, this applies for early years teachers as well, not just upper primary and secondary too; I wouldn't want to forget the secondary folks.  Text-dependent questions are questions that, unless you understood what was happening in the text, you couldn't answer the question.

So let's take the story of the 'Three Little Pigs'. You could ask the question, "Well, why were the pigs scared of the wolf?"  Well, you don't have to have read the story to be able to have a guess that they were scared because the wolf was going to eat them.  But if you asked the question, "What did the second little pig build his house out of?"  If you don't know that text, you can't answer that question. So think about when you're asking children a question, what they actually have to know in order to answer it.  And I think what we'll find is that in many examples of questions that we ask, particularly in assessment, they're the 'what do you think questions', many of those are not text dependent. You can have a pretty good guess based on what you know of life, and we are giving kids ticks and saying, oh, well, they've done a good job comprehending.  So really pay attention to the sorts of questions that you are asking.

When it comes to the kinds of questions, there are a few. So Bringing Words to Life talks about asking questions at word level, at phrase level, sentence level, or paragraph level.  Again, this is probably not revolutionary for many of us, but what they add to this conversation is that there are two kind of intentions here. The first thought is to establish meaning, and the second kind is to analyze meaning. And in the book, it gives you examples of the sorts of questions that you might ask to achieve those two purposes or intentions.

08.55
What are Toggling and Zooming?
Now, moving between establishing meaning to analyzing meaning that's called toggling, and so we might use that on the computer where we go between one thing and another; the other element that this book describes is a concept of zooming,  if we think of this as a continuum, we can switch between word level questions and text level questions where we're thinking about author's purpose. So zooming works the same way that it does on a camera at different times. We're going to zoom into the word, zoom out to the phrase, maybe then zoom out to the author's intention at text level and then in the next questions, we're going to zoom back in again. So zooming in and out and toggling are two of the key features when it comes to the types of questions we're asking and knowing how to engage children in really thinking about these texts.

09.44
Will I need to create suitable text?
But when it comes to them actually reading, you will see this next idea featured in our short story units inside The Resource Room, and it will be really clear to you because in the plans we give you for our short story units, there's a yellow box around particular paragraphs that are labelled 'Accountable Independent Reading'. And what this is, is an opportunity for children to literally independently read a passage with particular questions in mind that they have to answer.

The reason that this is so important is that when we ask children to read on their own, and we do this all the time. So many schools have 10 minutes silent, independent reading, 20 minutes silent, independent reading. When that happens, we have no idea what those children are thinking. We have no idea whether they're actually comprehending, whether they're decoding, whether they're actually thinking about this thing at all. So Accountable Independent Reading is not about testing children. It's about monitoring how they are engaging with the text.

So in the unit for Rosie's journey in Year 3-4, we ask the students to list the things that Rosie took with her on her journey. And this might seem pretty simple, and yes, it's very literal, but what that does is addresses the minimum reading standard for year five for NAPLAN, which is to locate directly stated information in a narrative text. In this way, you can assess children.

Now,  one of the questions that we have asked all the time is if my benchmark reading assessment isn't getting the job done, how do I assess comprehension? This is one of the ways. So we're engaging children with rich text, and we're asking them to really think about what's in it and provide some evidence of their thinking.

11.30
What about students who can't decode?
Now, of course, you are going to have children who, at different points, cannot decode the text you are giving to them. Remember, we're challenging in terms of language and concept.  We're not just focusing on decodability. And so, in that instance, an adult could read that student the text. They could have a more developed reading partner do the decoding, but they have to answer the questions.

So it's not about every child decoding because that's unrealistic.  Oh, I wish it was realistic that we could just have every single student in every single upper primary class decoding a rich text on their own. And there's schools where certainly you get pretty close, but there's lots of schools I work with who that is just not achievable. So think of it like this. We don't differentiate the richness of the text. We differentiate the level of support we give children to decode.

And certainly, when I had my year three to six class with that big range of readers, we were all reading the same text, but what the children had was they got their ruler, they placed it underneath a line, and for certain elements of that reading lesson, I was reading aloud, and they were following along with their finger, and then I would stop, and I would ask them particular questions they had to answer. Same concept, done slightly differently, and as I said, when I read these books, I felt really affirmed, but I also learned a whole lot.

Our goal in the upper primary is to connect reading and writing in our literacy blocks. For so long, we've been used to organizing our literacy block in reading time and a writing time. We can bring that together, absolutely. And one of the ways we can do that is to have students write about their reading.

Expressive language is so important.  We want them to capture their thoughts in writing.  We have children speak with a partner; you might give them questions, and they talk with each other, but then they write, and these are only some of the concepts in Reading Reconsidered. There's another idea around The 5 Plagues of Reading and texts that are difficult for students.

One of them is Archaic texts, and so that's books that were written more than 50 years ago because they're full of language we no longer use today. And this is why our short stories inside The Resource Room are archaic texts and in the public domain so we can take that text, put it in a PDF, we mark it up so that you know where the accountable independent reading is, you know what the tasks are, you know what the questions are to ask as the students read and as you read with them. And we also have partner practice reading included in that text-level reading.

So if you're a Resource Room member, have a look. But if you're not a resource member and you want to give these things a try, grab yourself a copy of Reading Reconsidered. I have no affiliate links to this book whatsoever. I just think that it is really handy.

The second book I found really useful is Robust Comprehension Instruction with Questioning the Author - 15 years Smarter from Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Cheryl Sandora. Now, as I've already said, these two out of these three authors were the authors of Bringing Words to Life. So if you liked that one around vocab, you are also going to like this particular one.

The book begins with an explanation of established practices in comprehension instruction and discusses why they may not be the best thing ever and how we can build some new understandings in this area. So rather than thinking about comprehension strategies or comprehension skills as we have in the past, where we'll teach inference for a term and summarizing for a term, these authors suggest a cognitive processing model of instruction. That's what they call it, and it's an approach that works for all areas across the curriculum. So instead of relying on teaching standalone skills, which we know are not a thing in comprehension, this cognitive processing model views comprehension as a reader's active process of attending to information in text, and I'm quoting directly from the text now, "..making decisions about what information is important, holding that information in memory as further information is encountered and making connections to new relevant information. " Doesn't that sound complex? Because it is, and so it talks about the fact that comprehension is an active process.

The strawman arguments that structured literacy is all drill and kill and chalk and talk. It's simply not true. We know that children learn when they build mental models, so it's no surprise to us that something like this that asks children to actually think is an evidence-informed way to go.

So questioning is a key aspect, hence the title Questioning the Author here.  This was so powerful to me to read about because they say instead of just asking questions, we are going to pose queries that children think about. Now there is a subtle difference here, and let me unpack that.  It all comes down to the fact that comprehension is a gradual process and that we teach students that, as readers, we take on a text little by little, idea by idea, and we build our understandings.

One of the things that we're going to do as teachers is to anticipate the challenges that a student may have, and this is where this idea around selectively choosing the background knowledge we build comes in.  So we have to have read the text, and as we read, we have to think about where might my students' misconceptions arise. That's the focus of background knowledge building and vocabulary. The things they'll be able to figure out for themselves based on what you know of them, we don't need to go into too much detail about. Let's anticipate their challenges, and then let's think about how we can help front load information in vocab, but build the bridges for them to actually comprehend.

So the role of the teacher here shifts to that of a facilitator of thinking through the deciding on background knowledge that we're building and the queries rather than that of a quizmaster.  I wan to quote for you again from the text about what the authors have to say about the difference between questions and queries. "How does the author compare and contrast the jungle in the day and the night? The problem is that the question does too much work. The point of the two paragraphs that were in the text that were given as an example is to portray the difference in the look and sound of the jungle in the night and the day. But the teacher's question already surfed up that information." So I'll just read that question again  "how does the author compare and contrast the jungle in the day and the night?"

Now, in contrast, the question that could be asked is this one, what's going on in the first two paragraphs? Or what has the author set up in the first two paragraphs?
So in the questions that we ask, we're doing the heavy lifting.  We're leading the children to X marks the spot. We're not asking them to think about it.  There's a fine line here between giving them everything in an explicit approach and not giving them anything in an inquiry.

So we have to know our students. We have to base our instruction on their age and what's most appropriate, and we might have to teach them to think because reading is a thing where you say words and then you're finished. We're not actually teaching anybody to think, so you might want to start slowly with this. And as children become more and more used to building connections, looking for patterns, and talking about those patterns, they will be able to do this much easier.

19.14
How to include analogy as a thinking tool.
One of the conversations I've had recently is around how do we teach children to do that. And a simple task that you can build in, to your day-to-day is word analogy.  So how is this word the same as that word?  How does this word differ from that word? And it could be in their origin; it could be in their meaning. They could be synonyms or antonyms. It could be in their structure. Oh, they both have this same suffix.  Helping children identify and discuss the patterns that they find can really help them in that comprehension at a level that goes higher than simply word level.

19.48
Step one of Questioning the Author
Now when it comes to planning, Questioning the Author asks us to do three steps, and this is page 25 if you've got a copy of the book. First step is to identify the major understandings that the students should develop from a text and anticipate obstacles to comprehension. What do I actually want students to get out of this? What do I want them to understand, and what things might get in the way of that?

The second step is segmenting the text to decide where in the text to stop reading and initiate discussion. So think back to reading reconsidered and that idea of the text-dependent questions. If we bring all of this together, we've got some really robust reading instruction going on now.

The third step is developing initiating queries and potential follow-up queries. So we are going to think about the queries we'll be asking in order to get children to think, but we'll also identify where might they run into trouble and what follow-up questions might I need to ask if I pose a query and they're sitting there looking at me blankly? So we want to scaffold and structure their thinking as much as necessary, hands off as much as possible, hands-on, as much as necessary, and if we think about scaffolds in that way, then we'll be able to use them really well.

21.07
So what does this mean for me and my students?
Now this book and the process of questioning the author was developed for... they describe it as middle elementary students and above. So what does that mean for us if our students are not decoding and reading for themselves or if they're younger? Well, the suggestions are that we might have to have more targeted follow-up queries, particularly if children are used to... as I said, 'reading is I say words, and then I'm finished', so we might need to have more questions to support them.

We might need to be careful that younger students don't rely too much on pictures if we're using picture books, so that's something to think about as well and plan for more stops and discussion points when working with younger students particularly,  to make sure they're paying attention to the important features in the text.

We want to be checking for understanding all the way through.  There also may be less discussion; learning to discuss and express ideas is a skill that takes practice. So if you are coming from a learning environment with children where that is not something they're used to, start small and build up as you go.

22.17
Powerful ways to think about how we structure a reading lesson.
These two books, Questioning the Author and Reading Reconsidered, are two very powerful ways to think about how we structure a reading lesson In Upper Primary.  Our goal is to get children thinking. Our goal is to get children applying the background knowledge and vocabulary that we've taught them to think about the text in answering the question: what is the author trying to tell me, and how do I know?  

Both of these books have great tools to use. As I said, they're not equally as readable, but they both are incredibly powerful if we just start small.  We recognize that we are not going to be perfect in adopting a new way of teaching, and we'll probably never be perfect. It's about what I can do tomorrow that is slightly better than what I did today. And if we focus on continual improvement, if we focus on just getting in and having a go, then we are absolutely going to be doing a great service for our students.

Please remember something evidence-informed done imperfectly is going to be much better for your students than something that's not evidence-informed, done with full fidelity. 

See you next week, everyone.  Bye.