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What the Research Says about Difficult Texts with Kristin Conradi Smith, John Strong, & Steve Amendum

• Episode 230

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Episode 230

In this episode, we discuss this article and the vital role of difficult texts with three experts: Kristin Conradi-Smith, John Strong, and Steve Amendum. They explore how thoughtful scaffolding and motivation help students confidently tackle challenging materials, clarifying the difference between text complexity and text difficulty. 

Listeners will hear practical strategies for assessing student needs and differentiating instruction, ensuring every learner can thrive. We also discuss key literacy components including activating prior knowledge, the importance of decodable texts in early grades, and the power of read-alouds for K-1 students. 

Drawing from research, expert guests highlight ongoing developments in understanding text complexity and stress the need for strong professional learning opportunities to equip educators with effective tools. This conversation is packed with insights and actionable ideas for supporting diverse learners on their reading journeys.

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We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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Lori:

If you're like us, you've probably been told to match students with texts at their instructional level and avoid frustration level, but research tells us to have students read more complex texts, even in elementary grades.

Melissa:

In this episode we talk to three researchers Steve Amendam, Kristen Conradi-Smith and John Strong about what makes texts difficult and, most importantly, strategies for scaffolding these complex texts and making them accessible for all students in your classroom.

Lori:

Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori:

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa:

Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi everybody, welcome to the podcast. John welcomed for the first time, and then Steve and Kristen welcome back. We're excited to have you back.

John Strong:

Thank you for having us.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

Yeah, thank you, it's great to be back.

Steve Amendum:

Yeah, thank you.

Lori:

Oh my gosh. Well, we cannot wait to dig into complex text and comprehension more with you all today. I want to kick us off by sharing that you wrote an article that kind of inspired this conversation. It was titled Supporting Elementary School Students Reading of Difficult Texts. You wrote this in 2018, but the big ideas are still so important today and one thing that stood out to me. I pulled a quote that said the support we provide can shift the level of texts the students can handle. That is so powerful, like when we and you kind of had this analogy of thinking about students' instructional level as elastic rather than fixed, because it depends on the support they receive. So I think this kind of does debunk that idea right of our teacher training. I know I had this teacher training of matching texts to a student's instructional level and avoiding those frustration level texts, but with the right support, we do know that students can succeed with these more difficult texts. Melissa, I think you might have a question about these difficult texts, so I'm going to turn it over to you.

Melissa:

Yeah, so I wanted to start. I think we're going to talk about, like the students and the texts a lot today. So we're going to start by talking about the texts themselves and what makes texts so difficult. But you know, we've heard this phrase a lot and most people probably have of leveled texts lead to leveled lives and there's been a lot of conversation We've talked about it on the podcast about leveled texts. So can we just start with that idea of what's the difference between a leveled text and a complex text and why might we want to lean more towards these complex texts versus the leveled texts?

John Strong:

Yeah, absolutely so. First and foremost, I kind of just want to give a nod to other researchers in this space who have done this work before us and who influenced us in this article. Other researchers in this space who have done this work before us and who influenced us in this article, I believe that leveled text leading to leveled lives quote we know Dr Al Tatum has used that quote and then the notion of the instructional level, sort of texts matched with students being more elastic. I think Kay Stahl had written about that as well, right. So there are lots of folks who are doing work in this space and I just kind of wanted to start with the impetus for this article about supporting students in reading complex texts. So we as teachers former teachers ourselves were trained to think carefully about how to match students with texts that would be at their level, that wouldn't be too frustrating for them, right, but which would enable them to grow. And then new sets of standards really kind of shifted the conversation to complex text for all students.

John Strong:

English language arts teacher it wasn't uncommon to use sort of quote unquote below grade level texts with students because maybe their reading proficiencies weren't matched with the grade level expectations, right, and so we've had similar experiences, and I know Steve and Kristen will talk about theirs as well. But so what we really wanted to do was look into what supports teachers could provide to help students read those complex texts. And really before we got into this article itself, steve and Kristen, with Dr Freddie Hebert, conducted a literature review investigating the relationship between text difficulty and reading achievement. So basically, what would happen to students' reading achievement in terms of fluency and comprehension, if you increase the text difficulty that they're exposed to? So I think it's important that we talk about that piece first here, and maybe Steve and Kristen could tell us a little bit about that.

Steve Amendum:

Yeah. So I'll give you a little history behind that review piece that we did. Kristen and I were both working at NC State at the time, working together, and we were in a big audience in a talk being given by Tim Shanahan, and it was pretty soon after the Common Core Standards had come out with the guidance for working in complex text, with the guidance for working in complex text, and Tim started talking in his talk, as he has across the years since then, with his argument about why instructional level matching was not an effective way to support students' literacy development. Chris and I were sitting next to each other and we both looked at each other and we were like no way, like this cannot possibly be true. You know, we were both trained in, like you said, laurie, in the instructional level matching kind of format, and so we started at the time he was citing some studies in his talk. We start Googling these studies as we're sitting there in the audience and you know that through those discussions, like between Kristen and I, we got to this point where, like, what does the evidence actually say about working in complex text? And so that sort of got us embarked on this piece that we ended up writing with Freddie and really looked into.

Steve Amendum:

You know what happened for students, especially in elementary grades, but especially in grades two through five, and you know we can talk a little bit about some of the main findings that happened there.

Steve Amendum:

But I think that one of the things that I want to highlight before I get into the findings is that the articles that we looked at were generally articles where students were put into different levels of text to see what happened to the fluency and comprehension outcomes. But by and large these were studies where the level of support for students was not also being adjusted to help them be successful in more complex text. So some of the things in the article that John was referencing about really supporting students in complex text, those weren't happening. In our review we were just looking at what happens to students' fluency, what happens to their comprehension when they get into more complex text, and what we found was probably not unexpected for most people. The more difficult, more challenging, more complex the text is, students' fluency tends to decrease, and it's especially so for less skilled and beginning readers. And a similar relationship was found for comprehension, where the more complex the text was, the less comprehension students tended to show, especially for students who are less skilled and beginning readers.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

It speaks to our shock back in 2012, or whenever we first heard. Shanahan kind of did lead to that article, which then led to this reading teacher article, but I think it parallels the shock many teachers have as they're being confronted with this shift as well.

John Strong:

Right. So I mean to get back to your original question as well about you know why complex text and not level text. So once Steve and Kristen and Freddie had written this piece and I remember Steve and Kristen had come to me and said well, we want to write something for the reading teacher that teachers could. How could they use this information? Right? And so we summarized those findings and thought, okay, well, if we increase text difficulty, student achievement you know, in terms of fluency and comprehension might decline. But what can teachers actually do about that? Right? So we turned to some additional research, including practitioner-focused articles and recommendations, looking at what really are the benefits of complex text. One of the things that we wrote about and that was interesting to us was that complex text can be motivating. So persevering through a challenging task with support to be successful in that task can be a motivating experience, right? And then, of course, there are a host of other benefits of reading complex texts.

John Strong:

We wrote this article, I would say, a little bit before the current emphasis on knowledge-building approaches to comprehension. I mean, it was happening, right, so we didn't get too much into that. But of course reading more challenging texts can be useful for building knowledge, for building comprehension, for building fluency with progressively more difficult texts, right. So there's lots of benefits for using complex texts. But I think the fear is that if we just put complex texts in front of students without providing them with enough support, what's going to happen is that they're not going to have those successful experiences right. We want to ensure that they have that.

John Strong:

So really, the way that we set up this piece was around three main recommendations for teachers to consider. So one is to consider the text difficulty. Look really closely at the text that you're using. What makes a text more difficult than another text? Number two, look really closely at your reader's skills. Right Assessments that you have of student skills. Remember Steve's point from their piece that for beginning readers and less skilled readers, the detriments might be more pronounced. So we want to be careful about that and also think about, based on our students' assessed needs, how can we then provide supports to meet those needs? How can we then provide supports right to meet those needs? Basically, to you know, bring all students up to reading challenging, complex grade level text with appropriate supports.

Melissa:

John, I'm wondering, or anyone can address this, but can you talk about that motivation again really quickly? Because my first thought is if you give a student a book that's too hard, right that it's at their frustration level and that will decrease their motivation to want to read it, like they'll want to give up on it. So can you just talk about? You said that was research that showed that there was motivation for these complex texts. Can you talk about that?

John Strong:

Kristen, do you want to take this question?

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

So, first of all, I'm right now analyzing all this data where we interviewed second, third, fourth, fifth graders about reading reading preferences. So I'm kind of knee deep and spending time with kids talking about reading. Not one of them ever talked about text difficulty when they talked about the books. Right, they're talking wings of fire, dogman, graphic novels, whatever, but they're never saying, oh, I look forward to pulling out book on X level, like that's not part of it. What draws kids to text are the topics, the plot, those kinds of things. So on a side note, we just know kids care about books based on what's in them.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

There was a dissertation study done now, probably two decades ago, juliet Halliday, where she explored sort of what happens when you give kids texts that are interesting to them, to sort of see what have if they're difficult. But kids wanted to read them and she found that kind of that interest trumped what traditionally people would say no, this book's too hard for you and that makes sense, right, like if I really want to read about snakes, even though there's all this new vocabulary and I and I don't know much about it, but I'm motivated to read it, I'm willing to persist even as it gets difficult. Now current research on motivation is really highlighting the role of competence beliefs and that's going to fall on the teacher to really provide the support. So when a student has it, they have the belief that they will be able to be successful with it, and so that's part of motivation. I would say, have the belief that they will be able to be successful with it, and so that's part of motivation.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

I would say that's really where a lot of the research is out now to kind of think about what kind of language frames and scaffolds can teachers provide so that students don't look at it and go, oh, this is going to be too challenging for me, because we all know kids aren't going to say you know, ms Conradi, I can't read this book because it's too hard for me. They're going to say this is stupid, right, and so we have to figure out how do we navigate that? Does that kind of answer it?

Melissa:

Totally, or they need to go to the nurse for something right or the bathroom for 20 minutes.

Lori:

I also think we didn't say this, but I just thought. You know teachers listening might be wondering. I kind of want to think about what leveled means right Independent instructional frustration. Are we talking about the? When we say difficult text, are we talking in the frustration level? Are we talking about a continuum between instructional and frustration? I just kind of wanted to find that for those listening.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

I'm happy to kind of tackle it. In the article we address the difference between text complexity and text difficulty, and so text complexity is based on things, like you know, quantitative measures like a Lexile measure or some qualitative measures that can make a specific text just complex. Maybe it uses an unusual register or a lot of difficult vocabulary or figurative language or different things. That can make a text complex.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

Text difficulty, on the other hand, that's when we think about sort of the match between a reader and a text. So even a dogman book could be difficult for a five-year-old right, because that kid's not quite there yet. And so we try to sort of parse apart text complexity versus text difficulty. Because even you know, I have a PhD in reading but there are still texts that are going to be very complex and will present difficulty for me, and that's the same, of course, with our children. So we're not really getting at kind of the bets, instructional frustration, independent level kind of stuff. But we were really trying to parse out the difficulty level there. I don't know if that is that enough.

Lori:

No, that's really helpful. Yeah, because I keep thinking you know, that is a question that Melissa and I get a lot about the different kinds of levels, and to me, when we get those questions, it's like, well, there's also like it's not just about, like, the text level, it's about the reader too and what we're like. You all said, like all those invisible things, right, the motivation and the, the ability to persist if they're super interested in the topic or maybe they have some knowledge on it and they want to learn more. So there's just so many other factors that go into it. I like the idea of being able to parse those out like complex and and and difficult.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

And I think it falls on the teacher then to be the broker in that experience, right, because the teacher is the one who knows their students. They know which students might sort of need extra support in background knowledge building in order to access that text. They know which students for whom even just fluency might be difficult. But the teacher is the one who knows, you know, needs to know the text well to be able to kind of size that up, but also knows their students.

Steve Amendum:

You know, I think it's one of the challenges that we face in the field is the terminology around text complexity, and so, like to build on what Kristen just said, we've suggested in our article that text complexity is about the text right.

Steve Amendum:

It's about those factors that Christian was talking about, right Conceptual difficulty, right Vocabulary, those sorts of things. Text difficulty is about a text relation to a reader. But the other thing that comes into play here, I think, is at some point over the last few years with the Common Core, texts that are at grade level have become synonymous with complex text, and so sometimes the grade level text and complex text are sort of interchanged, and so I think that's an important distinction, to remember too right, that there are texts that are at grade levels for particular, you know, students or whatever but there are also texts that could be well above the grade level that students could be reading, and so those are somewhat different, and I think it's important, you know, I think it would be really great, especially to help teachers, if we could come to some agreement around the vocabulary and the labels for these texts to make the conversations easier to have.

Lori:

I love that and we're guilty of that too. So thank you for that reset. We're going to make sure we're doing better on that spectrum or labeling, I should say All right. So if we can kind of dig into this idea of text complexity because I know teachers are out there thinking, ok, you know if I'm hearing a lot about Lexile levels, but I know that's not the only thing to look at, what else do I need to consider? So I'll hand it over to you all to tell us a little bit more about what's likely to be difficult, about texts for students or a specific text.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

I can start, but feel free, john or Steve, to jump in. So the Common Core did some of this work for us because they outlined kind of what they were calling the qualitative sort of areas of difficulty and I addressed it a little bit earlier. But really sort of, is the meaning of the text, the purpose of the text? Is that pretty straightforward, or is that something that the reader is going to kind of have to figure out on their own? Is that straightforward? So that's one part of it the structure of the text, the language, conventionality and clarity and then, of course, these knowledge demands.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

What we know about teachers and research with teachers around difficult texts is that teachers tend to zero in on vocabulary. It's like if you ask a teacher to look at a text and go what's hard here, they just go and they start pointing to like 11 different vocabulary words. But there really is a lot more at play. How like? And I look back at when I was teaching second or fourth grade and I wasn't particularly good at kind of sizing up the text and seeing like, oh, there are no sort of sub headers here that are going to guide the reader, or this text employs a lot of flashbacks that might confuse a reader, or a lot of different characters, so there's so many different things that could lead to some difficulty for a student. So I don't know, john or Steve, if you want to add any more.

John Strong:

Yeah, I think you've summed it up pretty well, kristen. Yeah, I think you've summed it up pretty well, kristen. Right, in the Common Core points to that and in the piece we kind of included some maps that teachers could use or, you know, to kind of plan and supporting students' readings of challenging text through making the text structure clear, right and more explicit for them. So that's a piece where I think it's useful for teachers when using a text that might be difficult for their students to think about. Well, how are the ideas in this piece structurally related to one another and how can I make that clear to students and that can help drive comprehension as well.

Melissa:

All right. So I think we should start to talk about the hard question of what teachers can do when they're in this situation, where and this happens all the time right, when you have a fourth grade grade level text right, steve, I'm going to use your terms there to the grade level text, which might be complex for that grade level and that's why it was chosen for whoever chose it, the curriculum or the school or the teacher chose that book for the fifth grade and then fourth grade, and then you have all your students at different places, right? So you have some students that might not even be that difficult of a text. Others it might be like, right, where they need to be, and for others it might be really difficult. And I really want to talk about that's the hardest part is, when it's a really difficult text for students.

Melissa:

How do we help them? What do we do? You mentioned scaffolds a few times. How do we scaffold and support students to read that difficult text? Instead of saying they can't read that, let me give them a different text that they can read. What can we actually do? And I'm going to just throw in another thing what are things that might not actually be that helpful that teachers think are like I'm just trying to get them to get through this book, but it might not be the most helpful.

John Strong:

Yeah, I think we're going to share three main recommendations and I'll start with the first one and I'll get to the second part of your question first. So when we look at observational research in classrooms, both with print text and digital text, what we see is that one of the main ways that teachers will try to support their students reading of grade level complex text is they'll either read aloud the text for students or, if it's a digital text, they'll employ kind of read aloud functions, right, well, the text can read that for them. And I don't want anyone to misunderstand. I'm not trying to say that read alouds, interactive read alouds, in the way that we conceptualize them, aren't important. They certainly are for building listening, comprehension and background knowledge of vocabulary and language knowledge and all sorts of things, right. But if we are consistently reading aloud text to students instead of giving them the opportunities to read the text with support, then we're perhaps not building their reading comprehension skills right to the extent that we are hoping to do so.

John Strong:

So, building on that idea of interactive read-alouds and other texts, our first recommendation is really to think about how texts are presented in sets of related texts, right, so that perhaps teachers and students work their way up to challenging grade level text by reading easier texts on the same topic and then working their way up to more difficult texts, or even beginning with an interactive read aloud of a text on the same topic, where they can be exposed to some of the vocabulary and knowledge that they will then see in the text. And so lots of folks have done work in this area. I'll say as well. You know, gina Cervetti's work on conceptually coherent text sets, as well as the work on quad text sets that Bill Lewis and Sharon Walpole and Mike McKenna had started, really point to the benefits of approaching text from a sets of related text approach. Instead of thinking about well, I have this one difficult text in isolation, what am I going to do about this? Well, let's think about that in relation to the other texts that students experience.

Steve Amendum:

So I can jump in with a second idea here and related to your question, melissa, about sort of you have this wide range of student abilities in your classroom.

Steve Amendum:

I think another thing that can be really helpful for teachers is to have profiles of their students that are based on the assessment data that they have, to really help them think about what types of scaffolds and supports are going to be most helpful to different groups of students in their classrooms.

Steve Amendum:

And so I think being able to have a really high quality set of assessments that can help identify students in your classroom who may have difficulties with word recognition and fluency still, or maybe some comprehension difficulties with more challenging and difficult text, and students who might be multilingual learners and so they may not have the English background they may have it in their home language, and so thinking about how to really support students that fit that profile would be another important thing that teachers could focus on.

Steve Amendum:

That really helps identify which scaffolds might work best for which groups of students, and I say that, but I also say it with a caution, that that only works as well as the sort of like the quality of the set of assessments that you have. So if you don't have a set of assessments as a teacher that can really help you pinpoint, like what the particular strengths are of readers and what their particular needs are, so that you can really address scaffolds to those particular needs, I think it could be really challenging. I know in a lot of the work that we've done here in Delaware and in working with our Department of Education, one of the frustrations that we often run into is where people may have a screener that they use with all the students in their classroom and anyone who shows up as below benchmark is sort of getting the same scaffolds to support them right. So these are my kids who are, quote unquote, struggling to use with different profiles of readers in my classroom.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

And then I just want to add on and I don't think we've said it yet, so I want to make sure we sort of really hit it home None of this sort of should happen in the absence of also really good code-based instruction, right Like we're assuming for our kids in fourth grade who are really struggling still we're assuming that sort of as part of this conversation they're getting really good phonics, fluency support and instruction. So I just wanted to make sure I said that. But a third kind of recommendation that we'd make is we want to think about so if we're really talking about, instead of differentiating the instructional level, instead differentiating the support, like Steve said, we need to know our readers and then we have to be kind of mindful of thinking about how do we differentiate that support, when and where and how can I make sure all of my students will be successful with whatever text? Whether it is a luxury of doing a novel in your fourth grade classroom or whether you're doing sort of a you know core reading program, there are going to be students that need support, and some of the supports are already embedded. If you do have a core reading program but you're still going to have to be the one to kind of navigate and decide how to kind of support your students. We've been influenced a lot by Walpole and McKenna and their bookworms model of differentiating at the skill level rather than kind of instructional level.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

And so as you look at your school data and you look at your students and go, hey, I have some students who still are going to need some maybe small group time or extended learning time where we're working on code-based things. But maybe I have some other students who we're about to tackle a text that's set in the future and has robots, and I have some students who I don't think quite have the knowledge that would be helpful for them to sort of understand that text. Maybe on Thursday and Friday this week I'm going to pull that group of students to the side and I'm going to have them read with me an easier text about robots so that they have some exposure to it beforehand. So some of this comes down to teachers being aware of what scaffolds are available and then knowing when and how and in what context they can provide them. And of course we still love the before, during, after kind of format. But there are certainly things you can do before you read a text to sort of make sure students will be successful Vocabulary, background knowledge, text structure and, I really think, setting a purpose for reading, because it's not just about, hey, we're going to start reading now, right, like well, let's set that purpose.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

And then, during reading, there's a lot of research to show the benefits of partnering students up I know you had Jake Downs on and so partnering students up where one of the readers might be a little bit more skilled than the other and that'll support them as they read more complex texts. And then we can't sort of sleep on the importance of discussion and writing and thinking about the text afterwards.

Melissa:

On the importance of discussion and writing and thinking about the text afterwards. Kristen, I'm just wondering about one thing you mentioned because I was guilty of this for many years where I would, you know, I would give an assessment that was based on my standards and then I would get it back and I would say, okay, well, this student got this question wrong about theme. So then we would do a little small group about theme and that is not what you're saying. No, no, I didn't. I know I didn't do what I needed to do then, but can you talk about how that's different from what you're saying about these like skills?

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

Yeah, I mean it really is, and I find I think Our constrained skills data, our data about sort of everything from letter awareness, letter sounds through fluency are very reliable, and it's easy for me to look at that data and then go I need to support my kids and these things.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

Our data about the top of the rope, the unconstrained skills, are not going to be as helpful for us, and it's certainly not very beneficial to lump kids in groups like they got six out of 10 on inferring, and so I need to infer more with them.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

We know that kids don't transfer and apply it in the same way, and so I would say, if you have students who have shown proficiency and fluency but sometimes look up at you after they've read and they go I have no idea what I just read, then we might want to do more things like chunking up the text, like the scaffolds that I encourage teachers to do, or things like paragraph shrinking or getting the gist. They have to be I don't want to say trained in, but they have to learn the practices that we all, as proficient readers, do anyway, and so I would move more in the practices of comprehension and of thinking while reading, and less of let me parse this up into subskills which I did so 20 years ago. If you went into my classroom that was me, does that answer it? Absolutely yes.

Steve Amendum:

I just want to add on to what Kristen said when she referenced the tap of the rope, which I thought was a great comment, and because actually I had the same thing running through my head when she mentioned that.

Steve Amendum:

And I think so many teachers now have been trained in the science of reading and have gotten exposure to the reading rope, if they haven't been already. But I think one of the things that we don't often discuss about the rope is what those five components in language comprehension are all important, but what's really important is how they weave together over time for students to become increasingly strategic, as it says on the label on the rope, and I think that's the key part. So in your example, melissa and I did the same thing when I was teaching Right, we had standards. We wanted to make sure that we address those standards based on the assessments, but what often happens is the important part is how those standards are actually integrated and woven together for students to become skilled readers. And so to Kristen's part. I think that's the really important part that we see in the top half of that rope is that sort of development over time, as students can integrate these in different texts for different purposes. Right, and that's the thing that really matters.

John Strong:

I just want to add one more piece here, just because Kristen made the point about. You know, kind of all the way from letters to fluency, right. So just to make this kind of really practical and actionable for teachers, right, thinking about code-based assessments you know, beginning, middle and end of your benchmarks or any progress monitoring in between, that's done around students' word recognition and decoding skills, their oral reading, fluency look and see where students are performing in relation to grade level benchmarks in time of year, right, and that's a good starting point for thinking about. Well, these students might need more fluency support, but they don't need more word recognition support.

John Strong:

Based on the data that I have, right, these students are performing at or above benchmark and fluency, so maybe they don't need as much fluency support with this text, so that we're all approaching the same difficult text but some students might need more word level support. Some students might need more fluency support. Some students might just need those comprehensive supports and then there might be mixing and matching across those, right. So I think that's kind of how I'm thinking about differentiating the instructional supports from supporting the code-based skills that they need. Right To attack the text, and I'm going to probably assume that if I'm using a difficult text, that I'm going to provide comprehension supports for all students but again, maybe different supports for for different students based on what they're bringing to the text reading experience.

Lori:

Yeah, john, actually that was. I was thinking about the same thing and one thing that ran through my mind I'm so glad that we're talking about this too, because I think it's like the trickiest of all of them, the most nebulous, right, like differentiate supports. Okay, well, I'm a third year teacher. What does that actually mean? Like, how do I get my kids heads? So I love these practical examples and ideas. One thing I was thinking was something like very practical, like an anticipation guide. Very practical, like an anticipation guide. Right, I could give that to all of my students, but then I could pull the ones who really just have no idea about this particular set of knowledge or vocabulary or information.

Lori:

Kristen, you gave that robot example, like thinking about going to the future.

Lori:

If they have no concept of what you know time travel might be, or robots or any kind of information about any of those topics, they're going to be lost reading that particular text. And once we can scaffold and give them I think we're now going back to the first recommendation maybe some scaffolded text sets that include some knowledge and vocabulary to help them, but like build up to what we're asking them to do, and then I I'm just kind of putting it all together right Based on again they're they're a little profile based on what we've learned about them. Then we can kind of like build it all together. It's not neat, it's not clean, it's kind of messy, and I think that's what's tricky about the whole thing is it's not like a check. Now they know about robots so they can go ahead and read this text effectively, you know. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Like I appreciate the depth of this conversation going very practically, and I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

Can I, can I add to that? I think I mean, the beauty of this, right, is, now we're getting to encourage teachers to pick texts that they want to read, texts that relate to other texts that are on topics that they want to sort of read about. And it's not just what I did, where it's like, oh, we need a level R or whatever sort of I was going for. And all of this just makes sense. For just an anecdote, my husband's really into science fiction and before sometimes he like convinces me to watch a science fiction movie with him, and I know I'm going to be lost, I don't even want to read it. But what do I do? As like movie with him? And I know I'm going to be lost, I don't even want to read it. But what do I do? As, like, I go to IMDB and read the plot first. Right, I do that so that I'm not lost while we're watching the movie.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

And this is these are the kinds of that's a little scaffold I've sort of developed in myself to make sure I won't sort of be unsuccessful watching the movie. And that's what we're talking about with some of our students. Right, that's a tiny little scaffold to go. Hey, we're going to read this thing. This was set in World War II. Some of you you have varying knowledge of that and I'm going to decide whether it's a whole class read aloud or whether I pull a group of students here or whether I tell all of you just in a few minutes what you need to know, so that you're not lost already in page one or page two and again kind of shut down. And so we're trying to think through how can we support readers through that.

John Strong:

I just want to respond to that and build a little bit on what you said, laurie, about the anticipation guide as well. Right, because when we're thinking about knowledge and supporting that before, during and after reading a text, I think an important distinction to make as well. Where do I need to build specific distinction to make as well? Where do I need to build specific, perhaps content knowledge that the text expects readers are bringing? Where is the text itself going to build knowledge and where can I activate prior knowledge that students already have?

John Strong:

So I make that distinction between the building versus activation of knowledge, and I think we're perhaps doing a disservice to our kids if we're always assuming, well, I need to build knowledge here because they're not going to know this. Well, different students are bringing different you know experiences and knowledge and topics that they're interested in into the classroom and you know teachers will know this right by the students really interested in this one particular topic and knows everything about it and maybe the others don't. But so I think that's an important way of scaffolding and differentiating. Right is, where can I, you know, activate some prior knowledge and build on that? Versus you know, build knowledge about a topic that some students might not have?

Lori:

Okay, so this is a little follow up question to the one Melissa asked a while back, but I'm I'm thinking about our teachers in K2. And you know students are still learning to decode and I know we had our caveat right that we're thinking about this idea in context of students having this really good structured instruction. But if we could kind of just like maybe backtrack to our K-2 students, does this look any different in those grades? And I'm specifically thinking about maybe decodable texts? Is there like? To me there's a different purpose for those. So I just want to make sure that we briefly chat about that.

Steve Amendum:

Yes, I think that's a hugely important topic, especially when we're talking about text complexity and using complex text, because I mean Tim Shanahan and his argument, and he has a new book coming out around this but one of the things that he talks about is that we have to exempt K-1 from the sort of discussions around text complexity that are appropriate for grades 2 through 12. And because of exactly what you said, laurie, right, we have students who are still learning the basics, the foundational skills around reading, and so I do think that we have to think about K-1, I'm going to limit it from K-2 to K-1, slightly differently. And, um, and I guess I would sort of boil it down to saying that we don't want students' initial experiences with learning how to read to be in something that is complex and really difficult and really challenging. We want them to be able to practice the foundational skills that they're learning in a way that's sort of helpful and sort of for lack of a better way to say at a really great level. And so, like your example for decodable text, I think is a great one.

Steve Amendum:

One of the things that we're hearing in some of the research is that decodable texts are often being used for too long of a period of time and that they're really appropriate for that point in time when students are really learning about the alphabetic, and that they're really appropriate for that point in time when students are really learning about the alphabetic principle. They're really learning about blending and segmenting and, you know, decoding, and so practicing those skills with appropriate decodable texts that are matched is the ideal time for those things to happen, but not beyond that right. Then we want to start to move students into some, you know, types of easy readers, things that may have controlled vocabulary, where they can also practice some of the other beginning reading skills as well, and so I think decodable texts are really important, but they're important for a particular period of time and a particular purpose, as students are learning to read in those early grades.

Melissa:

And I would imagine, bringing back to the read alouds that John brought up earlier, that that's the place where our K-1 students are hearing these complex texts is through the teacher read alouds.

Steve Amendum:

Absolutely. Just. Like John said, that is the ideal time for the read-alouds that are clearly above sort of the K and 1 level, where teachers are reading those, they're introducing new vocabulary, different language structures, right, they're modeling strategies for comprehending, engaging students in lots of discussion, oral language development. All of those things can happen in really effective, interactive read-alouds in the early grades.

Melissa:

Right, so this article came out about eight years ago. If you all can believe. It's been that long, but you told us you've continued to do research on this topic, so we're just so curious about what you've learned since you wrote this article. So, please, we'd love to hear whoever wants to start sharing what you've learned since.

John Strong:

Yeah, I'll start with some of the work that I've done since then. Right Eight years ago when this article came out, I was a doctoral student at University of Delaware working with Steve, and now I'm about to be an associate professor at University of Buffalo. So it's been about that long, and in the time since, I've been working mostly in the upper elementary grades, but now into the middle grades and high school as well, with an intervention called Read Stop Write that I initially designed to focus on supporting students' informational text reading through text structure and learning how to identify and use text structures, both when reading informational text and use text structures both when reading informational text and then when writing their own informational text in response to the informational text that they were reading. And what I was really trying to counter was something that I had mentioned earlier, which was seeing a lot of teachers using informational text passages and reading them aloud to students and then giving them kind of comprehension questions afterwards. But instead, how could I build out some supports, focused initially on text structure, for students to comprehend and write about those texts? And so that was actually my doctoral dissertation. I developed and I tested a version of Read Stop write in fourth and fifth grades and I found, you know, positive impact of this type of instruction on students' comprehension and writing skills. But with those experiences with teachers and talking to them in that study, teachers were still concerned with like Kristen had mentioned earlier, the vocabulary that was in the text right and the words been developing a new version of Read Stop Write with my colleagues Laura Tortorelli and Blythe Anderson, which builds out multisyllabic decoding vocabulary and fluency supports into the Read Stop Write instructional model and we just wrote about that in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, so there's an open access article on that program.

John Strong:

But really my work in this space now in grades four through nine is to again provide all students with opportunities to read complex grade level informational texts about science and social studies topics and then differentiating the instructional supports that teachers use and that students benefit from to read that text with some multi-sloppy decoding strategies that are immediately connected to vocabulary right, because it supports a more robust word learning right, not just decoding the word but also attaching it to a known word memory or discerning the meaning of the text from the context, as well as including fluency supports through repeated reading in this lesson structure that we've developed and still really focusing on text structure and comprehension strategies like getting the gist, like paragraph shrinking where students pause reading with partners, pause, identify main ideas and important details in the text and then summarize those, think about how they're structurally related, organize those in a graphic organizer to support text structure and then plan and write their own informative writing to support their comprehension and build their writing of the text.

John Strong:

So that's really the work that I've been doing is thinking about how we can implement this type of instruction from upper elementary through high school grades and it's really aligned also with the one of the most recent IES practice guides on which Sharon Vaughn was first author, providing interventions for students in grades four through nine right. So in that practice guide you know from her research and lots of other folks' research supporting students in what they call now stretch texts so to throw out another term for you there right Texts that are going to be challenging for students and especially building their multisyllabic decoding skills, their comprehension skills and their fluency in order to comprehend those texts. So that's really the work that I've been doing for a number of years and that I hope folks are interested in checking out.

Steve Amendum:

Yeah, and I'll jump in and say I was on John's doctoral committee and it is great work, so I do hope people are interested in checking it out. And then I would say you know, the most recent work that I've been engaged in is actually with Kristen, and we have a chapter that's coming out in the handbook on the science of literacy in grades three through eight, and our chapter is on text complexity. And so you know, I would just highlight, you know, we sort of talk about some of the things that we've already talked about today, sort of being able to operationalize and sort of define text complexity, text difficulty, so on. We also do a review of sort of what is known about text complexity, especially focusing on the year since we wrote our original review on text complexity. And then we also, I think you know, talk quite a bit in the second half of the chapter about what kinds of things can we do in the field, so, especially for teachers, what kind of things can happen. And you know, I just highlight a couple of things that we talk about in there. One of the things that we talk about is helping teachers to build a deep knowledge of text complexity, so helping understand the different sort of variables that go into text complexity, what makes a particular text complex? Not only things like vocabulary, as John mentioned several times and Kristen mentioned, but also things like sentence structure, organization, you know, language, conventions, knowledge demands, all those sorts of things that play into complexity and difficulty.

Steve Amendum:

The other things that we talk about, as Kristen mentioned, were, you know, making sure to address foundational skills that students may need. So if students are struggling with word reading or fluency, we have to make sure that we're providing supports for that, addressing things like morphology and morphological knowledge to really support students' abilities to be successful with difficult and complex text. We also talk about different types of supports that teachers can incorporate. So we talk about supports for fluency, things like partner reading, as we've mentioned, also repeated reading, and you know, as Kristen mentioned, we've taken a lot of the work that we've done from the work that Sharon Walpole and Mike McKenna did on bookworms, and they even incorporate repeated reading into their shared reading block so that students are reading new text each day, but they're reading it once as a group and then a second time with a partner, so they're building in both the partner reading and repeated reading.

Steve Amendum:

And then we also know about structured programs like Stahl and Kuhn had with 4E, fluency-oriented reading instruction, as well as there's a variation of that called wide 4E where students are reading multiple texts within the week. We also talk a little bit about multi-component supports, so being able to integrate and combine some of these different scaffolds and supports, so making sure we have like vocabulary supports as well as text structure analysis. You know that plays into something like the shared reading block in bookworms, like we've mentioned, but also in John's work around read, stop, write is also a type of multi-component intervention that really builds the integration of those scaffolds and those skills in for students. And we also reference John's new term there, the stretch text that Vaughn and colleagues talk about as well.

Lori:

Oh my gosh, so much good stuff, kristen, I'll let you add, but I do want to jump in and say it's all in the show notes. We're going to link the book to one so we'll get all that information, but it's all. It's all in there. The intervention is linked, so if you're like I want to see what this is, go to the show notes, click on it.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

The only thing I was going to add to that is that most of my energy has been on sort of translating research for teachers since 2018. But I do do research in reading motivation and I'm currently doing a big review and I alluded to it earlier. But this notion of confidence, beliefs and how we can not convince, but how we can sort of provide the support and create the conditions where students then think they can be successful. I'm really excited to sort of see what research is out there and try to kind of synthesize it for the field, because there really are certain language frames teachers can do and certain supports to ensure that students will be successful. So I also have an article out in the issue that John mentioned, the JAL article about motivation as it relates to adolescence and specifically as adolescents encounter texts that are difficult. So I'll make sure to share that as well.

John Strong:

I just wanted to say one more piece, since the book was mentioned on the science of literacy in grades three through eight. Sharon Walpole and I wrote a chapter on professional learning for that book as well, and so you know, when Steve and Kristen are talking about all these sorts of professional learning right, that we hope to build in our teachers to consider also the ways in which we approach professional learning for teachers to be effective for them right. So it's not just kind of like the sit and deliver or perhaps some other approaches that we're seeing for professional learning. So we really actually dug into the science of professional learning for that chapter, and so I won't say too much about it here. But if you're already checking out the book, I think that chapter would be of interest as well.

Lori:

Cool, that's awesome. We'll link it all. You all are just so busy. I don't know how you even had time to podcast with us today. Thank you, this is awesome. I feel so much more informed about all of this and I'm just so grateful that you all took the time to talk with us. Like eight years after you know, it's like become knocking on your door. Hey, we really want to talk about this topic, so, thank you.

John Strong:

Thank you so much for having us.

Kristin Conradi-Smith:

Absolute delight, as always.

Steve Amendum:

Yep, as always, a lot of fun. Thanks for having us.

Melissa:

Thank you of fun. Thanks for having us. Thank you To stay connected with us. Sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, Join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Lori:

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Melissa:

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori:

We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.