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Helping Students Read Entire Books with Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway

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Episode 239 

Experts Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway join Melissa & Lori to tackle one of the biggest questions in teaching today: What happened to reading whole books in school? From the pull of digital distractions to the rise of skill-focused instruction, they explore why diving into full texts matters more than ever. You’ll hear inspiring ideas for making books come alive in the classroom, the magic of read-alouds, and the power of close reading. Plus, each guest reveals their favorite book to teach. Reading entire books ignites curiosity, builds stamina, and so much more.

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Lori:

Reading entire books matters. We're talking about real books, start to finish, cover to cover.

Melissa:

But in a lot of classrooms, kids mostly read short texts or excerpts. They have their place, but they can't replace the experience of reading an entire book.

Lori:

We realize this is tricky. Teachers are juggling curriculum, figuring out how to keep students engaged, and so much more.

Melissa:

That's why we're talking with Doug Lamov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway, authors of the new book Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. We'll dig into why whole books matter, how to choose them, and what it looks like to help students actually read them. Hi, teacher friends.

Lori:

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, Doug and Colleen and Erica. Welcome to the podcast. We can't wait to talk to you all today about some topics that we feel like sometimes get lost in the conversations, the science of reading conversations, specifically around comprehension. So we're really excited. Thank you all for being here.

Doug Lemov:

We're really happy to be here too.

Melissa:

Thanks so much for having us.

Erica Woolway:

Excited to be here. Thank you both.

Lori:

All right. So today we want to talk about texts. Specifically, what text should students be reading in the classrooms and how teachers can help students read these texts? And one really important thing to note is that we want to focus on reading entire books. That's what this conversation is going to be about. Um, Doug, you referred to this as the hidden tragedy that reading entire books are disappearing from schools. So I thought we could start by talking about what you notice. What do you all notice happening in classrooms if students aren't reading whole books? And how did we get away from this? Because I know I remember reading full books when I was in school.

Doug Lemov:

Well, and ironically, I mean, I think so many parents are not aware of this, that they imagine their kids in school reading books cover to cover. And that I mean, I'm so grateful to you guys for doing this episode because I think it's one of the one of the saddest and most important things that's like an almost unacknowledged change in reconstruction in schools. How do we get away from it? I think there, I think books have gotten harder to read. One of the things we talk about in the book is the decline of students' attention, but really our attention, right? Reading is such an intentionally demanding um exercise. And you have to actually have to use sustained focus attention in class and after school, really, because you're supposed to read at home. And we know that the cell phone has degraded people's attention spans. It's an attention fracturing machine. And one of the outcomes of this is a steep decline in reading behaviors outside of the classroom. You know, it used to be, you know, let's say 20 years ago, you could bet on having three times as many kids in a typical, say, fifth or sixth grade classroom who read every day compared to kids who never read. And those percentages are flipped now. Right now you're likely to have two to three times as many kids who never read as opposed to kids who are regular readers. So um, it's it's it's more challenging to get kids to read the book and be able to sustain the focus on the book. I think a second issue is um I think that people have come to believe maybe in some ways that the text is irrelevant sometimes, that there's so much focus on what we call skillsiness, which is like the purpose of reading instructions to teach kids how to make an inference. And so I'm going to describe inferences in seven steps, and we're gonna spend 45 minutes practicing making inferences. And that first of all, I think that that's unscientific, that making a hundred inferences from Tactic Everlasting will not prepare you to read um Oliver Twist. That, you know, I know you've had Daniel Willingham on the show. You know, he says, he says that um how we're thinking is domain-specific, that we think deeply about what we have. Uh, background knowledge on heat, there's a beautiful conversation between you and him about disambiguating text and how that happens through background knowledge. But I think that when you imagine reading as an endeavor that is made up of skills, the next step is to think, well, the book doesn't really matter. I can really practice my skills in almost any setting. All texts are more or less interchangeable. Gee, why don't I choose a book that will be super entertaining for kids like Captain Underpants, and then they'll really love that. And then the last thing that I like hope is true is that part of it is just lack of understanding about how important books are and the science behind books. Because that's kind of where we go in our chapter, which is there's actually a lot, there are a lot of reasons scientifically why books are the optimal setting for reading. And so maybe those are three reasons why you know the text has been crowded up by short informational passages. And when students do read, it's you know, oftentimes they're sent to the corners of the classroom to read a book on their own. And that can be lovely. We don't know much about what's happening in that setting, and there isn't much social interaction between kids, or between kids and teacher around the text. And we really believe that a text is a social thing.

Melissa:

Yeah, and I just wanted to jump in with, you know, I don't want to make teachers feel like we're blaming them, like they're the ones that are making this happen. Because I'm thinking back even when I was in school, although I did read some whole books, we also had those textbooks, which inherently are just short stories. And I remember like seeing excerpts of a play. Like it would be like one act of a play. And you're like, well, what's the point? I want to see what happens. Um, and then I also remember in Baltimore, this was about 10 years ago, um, we looked at the curriculum that we created in Baltimore, and there was a high school that was using an excerpt from holes, the book holes. And I'm like, well, I mean, I love the book holes, but one, I would question it being in a high school. But two, what's the point of reading just a chunk of that book? Like, you want to read the whole book. Um, and and then there's curriculum today that's on the market that lots of schools are adopting that use excerpts of text. So I just wanted to put that out there that like this is something that's been happening, still happening, not something that teachers are doing wrong.

Doug Lemov:

Yeah, totally agree. And I I'm really glad you said that because we want to distinguish between the situation the teachers are in and really determine that, really, you know, are well uh really have you know full uh control over their own curriculum. And uh, you know, and know that many teachers want to read books and and yearn to read books. And uh one thing we'd like to do is give them the support of science to say, you know, you're right, keep going with it. It's worth the struggle.

Erica Woolway:

Melissa, I'm so glad you mentioned that too, though, because uh uh sort of it's it's important to think about why books have have started to disappear from the classroom. Um and we do believe deeply in the power of and the importance of, you know, state assessments to hold schools accountable to make sure that they are high quality and meeting the needs of every student. But I think what's happened in this stakes in this era of high stakes testing, that the tail has begun to wag the dog a bit. And that um the reason, and actually my son's um AP Lit teacher uh from last year coined this the passage passive education of the English class. Um, and oftentimes it's it's kind of a sin of enthusiasm on on behalf of schools, wanting to make sure that students get enough practice uh so that they feel prepared for the test. And of course, so that they as a school do better on the test. Um but to Doug's point, that's not that's not the effective way to teach reading. It doesn't matter how many passages you get to identify main idea, to do it in a complex setting is is will all will always prove a stumbling block. And actually having a deep relationship with one text is actually proven to be much more effective in preparing a student to be able to do that than than just with these like pass death by passages, you might call it. Um so you're absolutely right, Melissa, that it's not, this is not teachers being like, ooh, we're gonna do passages instead, uh, but rather just the dynamic that's been set up in education. Um, and it's and it's much more detrimental on the reading side even than the math side, because on the math side, actually that frequent practice is important to create that automaticity, but it just doesn't work the same way in reading as you guys both know.

Melissa:

Yeah, and Eric, I'm wondering if we can dig in there where you just talked about, you know, the benefits of reading a full text. So, what do you feel like students, or what do you all know students gain from reading a full text versus these shorter passages?

Colleen Driggs:

We talk about this a lot, and I think that um we know that like increasingly in our society, the hot take uh has become uh our primary mode of communication. Um, and we don't need to go deep on the problems I think that that that is causing us as a culture and society. And I think that what's happened is that we have now replaced the, you know, sort of this hot take with um valuing deep and reflective thought. Um, really thinking through a complex issue, being able to like, you know, develop your thinking over time, being able to go back and say, here's what I originally thought, and actually here's how my thinking has changed. And actually, maybe there was a moment when I was actually even maybe wrong in my initial argument. And so we think that books can be the antidote uh in society as a this sort of helping to reshape the way that we think about communication with each other and then conversation. We just think that it's really beautiful to experience uh in the reading of a book the full range of a character's triumphs and tragedies. We think it's especially powerful when you can experience that with your peers and your teacher. Doug talked about the reading of a book is a social experience. Um, and then you can observe and discuss changes that happen to a character within a book over the course of the book enfolding. It's not a process that happens quickly, it's a process process that happens really slowly. And so there's a lot of empathy building that also happens because you start to understand the full range of experiences and the complexity of being a human. Doug, it looked like you wanted to jump into it.

Doug Lemov:

Well, I was just gonna I love I love the point that you're making there. I was just gonna chime in to say something really obvious about books, which is that a protagonist never believes at the end of the book what they believed at the beginning. But it's always about careful analysis and um perspective change and belief change. I just think it's so important, you know, is probably to live to a time when the message is, you know, you can understand the world in 128 characters pretty easily. You're probably right. You know, just that whatever your hunch is, you're probably right. And I think just long-form narratives undercut that expectation that it's really important. I think there's interesting, like there's a lot of research around the idea that like books are cognitively privileged, that stories are cognitively privileged. That when we hear information in expository form and when we hear it in the form of a story, we remember it better in a story. You know, we we stories are familiar to us, right? They reduce the extraneous cognitive load because we kind of know what the conventions are and how things will work. And so we're able to just pay attention more to what we're learning, and especially they often build a bit of an emotive context. And so um, you know, Daniel Willingham, this this phrase, you know, he uses the word psychologically privileged, but I you know it's a little bit clear to me what he means by that. I think if we just say cognitively privileged, we learn more when we read stories, especially when we build a relationship to the narrator and their perspective. I was just reading um Ian McEwen's book Atonement. And um, for the first 60 pages, I kind of was not that into it, if I'm honest. Like I was counting the pages and I was like, I'm on page 58, you know, like and then suddenly I looked down and I was on page 106, and then suddenly I looked down, you know, uh page 206 or whatever like that. And I think that the other thing that happens when you read long form is that you it's always a little bit of a struggle to enter the world that the author is creating, and it takes some patience, and then you're immensely richly rewarded for it. And I think that's a really important message for young people, which is it doesn't come easily, that some insights are worth struggling for. Um, and maybe just a last point I'd make is cultural capital, which is books are the medium in which the most important ideas have been expressed, captured and expressed in our society for hundreds of years. Uh, and when you go to college or out into the world, people will, you know, if you've if you've read 1984 and you know a little bit about what Orwellian means, or you've read Lord of the Flies, but you're more able to participate in cultural conversations about meaningful ideas, and that's a gift to students uh to do this. So sometimes maybe there are you know four ideas in there, you know, the Collins idea of the medium is the message, cognitive endurance, stories are cognitively privileged, and there's cultural capital in books. It's really important.

Melissa:

I was a former middle school and high school teacher, so all of this is like I'm like over here cheerleading. Yes, this is exactly right. I am curious though, a lot of our listeners are you know lower elementary teachers, and I'm wondering about that. Like, would a picture book fall under this same uh category that we're talking about? Or, you know, would reading aloud an even longer text be beneficial?

Erica Woolway:

Yeah, I would say absolutely. So when we talk when we talk about um, you know, sometimes Doug will use the language like the book is dead. Um, that is really more in the middle to upper grades. I think um the beauty, and and this is certainly true in my own household, the book was not dead when they were in kindergarten through, you know, sixth grade. It was, it was sort of once the device started entering, um, the sort of the inclination to pick up a book, whether that be um uh at home or even in the classroom, has has started to dwindle. Um the first chapter of our book really talks about the importance of attention building um and how uh, you know, that that's one of the challenges that we face, that that even as adult readers, um, you know, Doug, your story, we won't tell Ian Ian McEwan how you initially felt about his book, but um uh most read most reader, adult readers might not even relate to that because on page five, they would have picked up their cell phone or they would have, you know, oh, what's this that I want to look up? And now I'm, you know, five web pages in. So uh it really is more of an upper and middle grade um uh challenge that we face. Um and I think the focus also shifts. So, you know, building that joy um in those early grades, um, building the importance of, to your point, uh Melissa, the read aloud in order to build fluency and to support student comprehension, continuing that practice as the grades progress is just so incredibly important. Um, and in fact, we have a, in addition to the book, T Lac Guide to the Science of Reading, um, we have a middle grades curriculum. It's grade currently five through eight with with um a couple books that we're starting for high school. Um, but but it's book-based for this very reason. Just that we want to make sure that we are um reconnecting um students uh to the relationship that they can have with the book. Um and one of the important pieces there is it's not only the joy they find in the book, but the comprehension. I love the points you made about, you know, the how a character can evolve, how our relationship with the text can evolve over the course of reading about it. Um one of the ways that we do it, both in the in the T Light Guide to the Science of Reading, but also um in our curriculum more broadly, is just how important knowledge is. So it's not only reading the the book that you're reading, but also supplementing it with the important knowledge that students need in order to access it.

Lori:

So I the you're making me think, Erica, I have a seventh grader myself. I'm sorry, an eighth grader now, incorrect. Um, and she last year she read Lord of the Flies. And she, you know, as as she was reading the book, she was like, I I like this book. It's really interesting. And they did a whole thing on like, you know, society and and all the d dystopian things you would do with with a book like that. Um but they also read other books as well. And when she got to the end of the book, she was like, I liked it, but it wasn't my favorite to talk about dystopian societies. But she was able to explain why, and she was really proud of herself for reading it. So, Doug, to your point, she, you know, she got through it, and she, I would even say joyfully got through it because she was just doing a lot of discussion with her peers. But the thing too that she was really proud of was what they did in class with that book. And she ended up writing a four-page paper in response to a topic and learning a whole lot about how to write an essay and what skills you need for the future. Um, but I I think sometimes we forget that you can't really it's hard to write a four-page paper when the thing you read is four pages. Do you know what I mean? Like if you haven't read a whole book, you could write a four in seventh grade, you can write a four-page paper with guidance and support from your teacher. It's very difficult to do that if the thing that you read isn't bulky enough in terms of concepts, ideas, text to do that. So I just want to read that. You only read a chapter. Correct. You're really gonna be lost in that one.

Doug Lemov:

But Colleen talks, yeah, Colleen talks about that all the time, how it's really important that we that the books, books be worthy of analysis. But I just want to linger for a minute on the daughter's surprise, right? That like and to she's proud of herself for having done something hard, for having read something challenging, for something that she knows is meaningful, and then to like find herself. You know, I would love it if kids would, if kids love the books that we read. But to have them walking away having written a four-page, like cohesive argument to be able to, you know, articulate a series of very complex ideas about the book, even if it's to say this is why I wasn't that crazy about the book and I don't like dystopian fiction, f like victory, to be able to like books are the are the place in which substance in which substance is explored. There really isn't another way to communicate that level of substance. And you know, like you could say, well, could you write a four-page paper about a movie? Yeah, you probably could. But there's something about the durability of a book, and that you can go back and you can look at the author's exact words and examine them and continue to like refresh your working memory of those of those concepts. That's really important. And I do think is like one of the messages that kids take away from school, which is um I didn't really wasn't sure I wanted to read it. I wasn't always sure during it that I wanted to read it. I read it, I'm really uh I understand it, I'm really proud of it. And then I wrote a really good argument about it, and I looked back on for something that means something in school. You know, people like to have done meaningful things.

Lori:

Yes. And I mean, yes, obviously it was in school, right? It would be a different thing if she were reading at home. We wouldn't have had that same dialogue. She wouldn't have, I don't think she would have felt as proud because I I think part of it was the collaboration, as you all said, with her classmates, that conversation and really digging out the key ideas there. So I think the next question that I want to ask you all, because I think this is this conversation is getting at that, um, is that you say in your book, you say, quote, a lot of books thoughtfully chosen, read together and discussed as a class. Right. So as a teacher, I think, what books? What are we looking for in these books that we're choosing? Are there certain qualities? And why would we choose some books over others?

Erica Woolway:

Lori, to your point on um uh your daughter's experience about writing the four-page paper, it's interesting because um when we were writing uh to that guide to the science of reading, we really struggled with whether or not it was going to be Reading Reconsidered 2.0. Um, but uh, but we also wanted to just take advantage of this moment within the science of reading. And again, I think one of the things that made our book so different from the first from Reading Reconsidered was this real emphasis on the research. Uh and but in our first version of the book, uh, we really, really emphasize the importance of writing. Um, and I think one of the things that you describe is just like the indelible connection between reading and writing and how it can, how it offers a mentor text really for students. Um, and then Melissa, you know, you were sort of joking, but like, you know, how do you write a four-page paper on a one-page article? The other piece there is my own. So this is actually my seventh grader, so a year younger than yours, but uh uh he had a similar exercise, but it was in science class. So it was a science article, a science video, and then he had to answer a series of questions. And I actually think that they're able to do this in other classrooms. And so in middle and high school, it really should be reserved for, again, this emotional connection with one single book for all the reasons that we've described. But then now you're mentioning this idea of which books, uh, which is a complicated uh question to ask. But I think Doug or Colleen, one of you guys could kick us off just with the idea, I think first and foremost for us is text complexity and being thoughtful about um uh exposing students to complex texts because on their own, you know, you know, Doug, you alluded to the SpongeBob or the, you know, Captain Underpants or whatever it is, though if those are the those are the books they're going to flock to and they're going to find joy out of, then it's our responsibility to bring in more rigorous texts to ensure that they can also have those effective relationships with Lord of the Flies and conquer them themselves. So, Doug or Driggs, I'll let you take the canonical question there.

Colleen Driggs:

I know you love to talk about the the canonical texts. One of the things that's really important to me when we're thinking about, you know, we we did this when we were thinking about choosing books for our curriculum, is we know the relationship between knowledge and comprehension. And so we want to be thoughtful about what are the books or the portfolio of books that are going to help us to build uh students' background knowledge, specifically thinking about a breadth of background knowledge, uh, so that they can use that knowledge that we build through the reading of these books to fuel their comprehension of future texts. And so I think one of the things that happens to teachers is they so earnestly wanna inspire their kids to read more that they say, great, do you love to read about sports? That's fine. You can read as many books as you want to read about sports, and that's fine. But I think what we start to then shy away from is putting books in front of kids that are going to offer them rich opportunity to build new networks of knowledge, uh, again, that are gonna support their comprehension and their understanding of future books that they read. And as importantly, the building of knowledge in new contexts about things that they might not have known about previously, we actually start to build their interest and engagement and curiosity in areas that they hadn't previously known about. And so just because they love sports doesn't necessarily mean that they're not interested in nature or space. Uh, they might be, they just don't know it yet. And so I think that we have a real responsibility as teachers and parents um to think about great, so what's a new topic or what, you know, a book, what's a new topic in a book that might my kids might be exposed to that might generate uh this new interest that is going to fuel uh lots more curiosity and lots more reading on a topic that was previously unknown to them.

Doug Lemov:

I was gonna throw out a couple of just rules for changing the book. One is it should be pretty hard. I mean it shouldn't be like impossible, but it should it should actually be pretty hard. Because part of the benefit of reading it together as a group is that you with the support of your teacher, you learn that you can handle things that are harder than you initially thought. That is the fundamental experience of being, you know, in a college or university, is like I remember um being in the basement of some, you know, some uh university building trying to read the sound and the fury and being like, this makes no sense. Uh and then you're like, you know, eventually eventually it does. But the part of the way you get there is by having engaged in productive struggle, ideally with the support of an adult who kind of guides you through it and understands how you make meaning when meaning is difficult. Like, and it's not just because you want to read the sound and the fury in the basement of your dorm, but if you like anything, a contract, a legal document, a scientific uh, you know, pit of research, we have to be able to struggle with hard. And the other thing about hard is that I think one of the most overlooked things in reading is complex syntax and how uh so many students can read very, you know, can read well when this when the sentences are simple or simple, but you come up against something that's written in a multi-clausal structure with the subject and the object reversed, and suddenly everything falls apart. So being exposed to complex text is important. And it should be great. The book should really, really be great because one of the messages is you struggle through it. It was hard, but it was great in the end. And you had these thoughts that you didn't know that you would have. See further, you know, your daughter with Lori with Flies. And I just think it's really important to remember that with the decline of reading outside of school, hopefully we will be able to change it. But it is an inexorable and demonstrable like uh social trend. For many students, the books that they read with us, the 12 books, the 20 books they read in school will be the only books that they read cover to cover. Like that is really sad to acknowledge, but it also reminds us how important those book choices are. And like we should be choosing great books. And one of the, to me, one of the like criteria for like what is great tested by time is a pretty good proxy that you know people for you know 50 years have been thinking, wow, Lord of the Flies, this book is really great. Um that's something you know it doesn't mean that every book has to be old, but it's something we shouldn't dismiss out of hand, right? That that tells us something.

Melissa:

Doug, I just have to say you brought me back to my college days in my Chaucer class. It was the exact experience that I had, which at the beginning, I was just like, I don't, I want to drop this class. This is like a whole new language. I have no idea what's going on. But then, you know, with that tea, the teacher helped me through it. And by the end, it was like, this, these are actually fun little stories.

Doug Lemov:

I I did, I dropped a class in college because the reading was, I was, I wanted to, I was like, oh, I should be a doctor probably. And I took a bio class and I had never really read any scientific text before. And they like sent me down to the science library to read a couple of, and I was like, that's over. And I became ironically, I became an English major. Anyway, but like I, you know, you should not, you should not be scared, people should not be scared of difficulty, is it's part of our duty to young people to help them understand how to how to struggle and actually be gratified in the end that they persisted.

Lori:

Yeah, for sure. Learning is not only hard, but really messy and it's never a straight line, it's always all over the place. I think the thing that I'm thinking about now is if I'm a teacher listening and I am given books to read, I don't have the freedom to choose. Like, what what do I do there? How do I, how do I bring the spirit of this conversation to my curriculum? And I know there are so many, I always I think it's so important that like whatever you're presenting to your students should be with the utmost energy, right? I mean, that's your energy, they mimic. So if you're really bummed about reading Lord of the Flies and it's in your curriculum, they're also gonna be really bummed. Um, yeah, I I it's funny. I was I teach at the gym. Uh I teach classes at the gym. And the cla the the one the muscle groups that are the hardest, I'm always like the most pumped about because I know nobody wants to do chest ever. They're like, no, that's exhausting. You know, chest push-ups, it's too much. So I'm super pumped. I'm like, chest is my favorite. Here we go, guys. This is gonna be your favorite too by the end. You're gonna see how much growth you've made. And your last five reps are the most important, and we're gonna do this together. But I think we need that same energy and spirit with the books that we're given. So besides that, though, I don't really have a lot of great advice. So I'm excited to hear what you're all gonna share with us.

Colleen Driggs:

For me, it's my shoulders. Those are the ones that I always do. Oh, shoulders are tough too. That's that's yeah.

Lori:

Okay. Well, if you're in my class, that would be my your my favorite for you.

Colleen Driggs:

Um what so I think like at a very foundational level, I think like we have to be, I want to give teachers license just to jump in and start reading. Um, I think one of the things that has happened in to teachers, we talked about this at the beginning, is teachers have been told that we should be doing all of these other things in reading class other than reading. So we should be writing, which we love, we should be discussing, which we love. Uh, we should, you know, be doing like projects and PowerPoint presentations. And what's happening is Which we don't love as much. I didn't comment on that one. Uh but what we've lost sight of is that the real work and the real learning happens in the text. And so I think our first inclination when we get those texts that we might not love as much is to actually like stay away from the text, right? We'll we'll assign kids to read it independently. We'll hope that they read it independently, but if they don't, that's okay because we're just gonna talk about it the next day. So I think the first step is just really encouraging teachers to devote as much of their time in their reading classes to doing the reading and then starting to think about well, how do we support kids in making meaning? So this is the real work of reading classes. And I think as teachers, even if it's a book. That we don't love, um, first we should start to think about what makes this book challenging, right? What is going to be hard about this book for kids? Because I think that's sometimes the reason that we either don't love a book or we think that our kids won't love a book because we're worried about the challenges that it will pose. And so then we need to start to think about great, is it a knowledge gap? What's the contextual knowledge that I need to provide to my students in order to help them access this book at a foundational level or perhaps to see this book in a new way? What are the vocabulary words that are gonna be really challenging for my kids? And how am I gonna teach those words explicitly so that the vocabulary doesn't become a barrier to understanding? And then I'm gonna start to think about so, what are the different ways that I'm going to read this with my students to support them in reading this book in a more fluent way? So I'm gonna do some shared oral reading as a class. I'm gonna wanna spend some time doing teacher read aloud and preparing to do that read aloud to really bring that book to life. And then, of course, there will be opportunities for them to do some short bursts of independent reading. And I think it's also, and so I think in thinking about what makes it hard and doing our homework and thinking about great, here are the networks of knowledge that I'm going to build to give kids access. I think we start to understand a little bit more about the author's intentionality. We begin to see the book at new depths. I think we start to understand, hmm, this is a really interesting perspective, learning more about the author that I didn't know before. Now I have a clearer picture of why they might have written this. And then I think we should also just ask ourselves, what makes this book beautiful? And if we can't answer that question ourselves, that's okay. That's when, again, we start to do a little bit more research. So we start to read uh a little bit of the lit crit. Why do why do people love this book? We talk to our colleagues. Have you ever read this book? What is it about this book uh that I might be missing that I could share with my students so that they might enjoy it? So doing these like, you know, mini book club discussions outside of class so that I can bring that joy and that knowledge to my students.

Doug Lemov:

As Colleen's talking, I keep thinking about um how hard Shakespeare is. But then one of the ways to get kids to love Shakespeare is for them to see it dramatized. But like when when it comes, when someone brings a text to life, oh, it's really good. If you read the screenplay of your favorite movie, you'd be like, but then the movie, then you see it dramatized, it comes to life, it's beautiful. And so I just want to double-click on what Colleen is saying about the power of read-aloud. But like stories like invested with meaning and read and brought to life are so powerful. One of the my favorite videos in the book is a video of uh a teacher named Gabby Wolfe. She teaches what's to us the equivalent of 11th grade at King Solomon Academy in London. And they're reading um Marvel Louis Stevenson, uh, Dr. Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde, right? This is a really hard book. Uh, very complex syntax. You could imagine kids being put off by it. But the lesson starts just with her reading it beautifully for like four or five minutes, just investing it with expression. Like suddenly, this very dry book has like come to life. And then she asked them to start reading a little bit, first in like pairs and then aloud to the group. And like they're kind of mimicking her, like taking just immense pleasure and bringing this difficult book to life. So I just think like read aloud is so underestimated. And of course, then they're hearing the meaning come to the book. She also supplements in a couple really interesting ways. I think that's one of the things that we could think about. She showed them, she was talking about Victorian sensationalism. So she showed them some like these are headlines from Victorian newspapers, and these are some of the things that were written about at the time. And so she's building their background knowledge, but she's also um, you know, supplementing. And if you have a book that you, you know, you went, you were saying, like, what if it's a book that I really, really don't like? You know, you could always supplement with either nonfiction or other fiction passages that are similar. I mean, I don't know why anyone wouldn't love No Breathe the Stars, because I think it's a great book. But let's say you're reading something about World War II and you didn't like it, you could bring in, you could read aloud a section from the Diary of Anne Frank, you know, to like embellish it with uh with something you really did think that was great, that's kind of tangentially related to the book that you're reading. So if you're not crazy about the book, one bring it to life, I would say try to, but then like you can bring it to life by finding related, comparable texts also that might be might cause connections for for students or for yourself.

Melissa:

Yeah, I am loving these suggestions because uh throughout this whole conversation, I was thinking about all those times that I would assign my kids to read a chapter at home. And you know, you have all over the place. You have some kids who come back the next day and they're like, I read the whole book. Then you have other kids who haven't read anything, and you're like, great, how are we gonna have this lesson? You haven't read a thing, you know, and you have everyone across the spectrum and you're trying to have this lesson. So I just love the ideas you're talking about with, you know, keep it in the classroom. That's what the class is for, right? Like, let's read it in class. But then I've also seen, I won't say I've done it, but I probably have, where teachers are like just reading aloud just to get through it, or even playing the audiobook just to, you know, like, well, if they didn't read it at home, they're not gonna read it at home. So we're just gonna do this to get through it. And I love the way you all are talking about these read alouds as being purposeful, right? So it's not like don't read aloud to your kids, but use it as a purposeful way of getting them into the book, getting them interested, excited, ready for this lesson, and then giving them their space and time to read it too. So is there anything else you all want to add about that? Just because I that hit home for me for sure.

Erica Woolway:

I love that, Melissa. What you just mentioned um certainly resonates. I I mean, I as a parent, I use Audible as a hack for sure. Um, one of the things I use it in the car as a as a replacement for devices. So we'll just listen to something together. But when it comes to the classroom, I think one of the things that Read Allow allows you to do is um do what we call knowledge feed. Um, whether it's maybe it's just for vocabulary, right? So you encounter a challenge in vocabulary word and you just briefly say that means X, um, which you can't do with an audible, right? You'd have to be pausing it every so pretty frequently, depending on the book, uh, to give that knowledge. Um and both Colleen and Doug have talked about the importance of preparing um for us as teachers, even just if it's just rehearsing your read aloud, encircling that vocabulary that you know that you might have to define for kids and actually just jotting a note to yourself in the margin what the what the um how you'll define it. Because oftentimes um when we come up, try to come up with a definition for something on the fly, it's not as accurate as we might um think it to be. And so I think that would just be one other um additional suggestion um in terms of how to increase the intentionality of your read alouds. And of course, obviously modeling the the drama um um in that read aloud and that passion is really what's gonna help it come alive, not to mention um help it make meaning, right, for our most struggling readers. Um, and that's usually the benefit of Audible because it will it will lend that sort of spirited read that that we might not otherwise be able to bring.

Doug Lemov:

In the video of Kathy Wolf that I was describing before, she does that twice. Once she says to the class, I want us to read it aloud, I'll start, you'll pick up, and we're gonna read it in the spirit of Victorian sensationalism that we know Stevenson was trying to achieve. So I should really hear the sensationalism in your voice, which to your point is like causing them to be like doubly attentive to the text and pull things, pull meaning out of the text and find the words that were sensationalists and read it like, read it purposefully, which I think is beautiful. And then there, you know, she pauses every once in a while to like drop down a vocabulary word or feed into little nods, a scene where like the maid faints when she sees, you know, the terrible deeds of uh you know Dr. Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde or whatever. Anyway, she then she pauses and she's like, Well, she faints. She says, because she's just a woman, you know, and like the whole class breaks up laughing. But now they're now they're sort of more attentive to paying attention to Victorian gender expectations, you know. And so like she even asks them to like play that up a little bit. So I just think that I I I love your phrase, which is like reading aloud, but making read aloud purposeful is it's an exercise in shared meaning making, uh, and it can save us a lot of fun. You expect having to ask you a bunch of questions, like, did you know where in what which words made it sound sensationalist? Because if you read it aloud, sensationalist, and you talk about, you know, the body jumped upon the roadway or the uh the bone, the uh the bones audibly shattered, then uh then you've already shown that you understand. I also think is really interesting, those are actual quotes from um from the I'm just struck by how well I can remember exact things that Gabby reads with her kids because it's so beautifully expressed. Like um it's weird that I remember that I remember that text so well just because she reads it aloud so beautifully.

Colleen Driggs:

We we love read aloud, so is it okay if I I jump in as well? And I think it's particularly important because I think that a lot of a teach a lot of teachers assume that read aloud is something that happens in K through two or maybe K through three, and then after that, read aloud is done. And one of the points that we really try to make in the book is about the power of read aloud, even through high school. Um, and so as Doug was talking about the Gabby clip, it reminded me of another clip that we show in the book of Scott Wells. And he's it's a part of his lesson where he's really focused on fluency. And so he does a read aloud, but he is very careful about calling his shots just like Gabby. So in this case, he says, as I read, I want you to pay attention to how I convey the emotion of the characters. And then they do a quick debrief and he says, and now it's gonna be your turn, you're gonna use those same methods. And so they do a partner reading of the very same section. And so I think that like, here's a clear model, here's the purpose for the model, here's what I really want you to attend to, can make it a really productive and meaningful experience. For teachers who are interested in using read aloud, a couple of things that I think are important for uh shaping students' attention and supporting comprehension. Um, so we talk a lot in the book about annotation tasks. And so for students who are ready to annotate, rather than just saying, listen as I read aloud, uh, but if we say, um, I am going to be um reading aloud, and as I read aloud, I want you to uh notice any of the words uh that Lowry uses uh to show Andre's specific emotions in this scene, for example. Um and then also just pausing to ask kids what we call established meaning questions. Uh so we want to pause to confirm literal understanding. Uh, it can make it a more active experience. We can then uh make sure that students are comprehending in the ways that we hope that they were, or the ways that we're anticipating that they will. And that's really important to do if it's a particularly challenging section of text that we've just read, or if it's a particularly critical moment in the text that we want them to be able to come back to and remember.

Melissa:

Yeah, so this is making me think about something else we wanted to ask you about, which is close reading. And close reading became, you know, very popular when the common core standards were introduced. And, you know, my understanding of close reading, I think is like just reading a short passage and analyzing that short passage. So I'm wondering how you all see close reading kind of fitting in, like if we're reading these longer texts, is there still a place for this idea of close reading?

Doug Lemov:

I think we really love the idea of pulling short, especially meaningful uh sentences or passages from a longer text that are really useful in helping me to understand how this text is making meaning more broadly. So I'm almost like digging deep into the DNA of like one or two sentences, studying them briefly, uh, and then letting you kind of take and apply that to the rest of the text. One of my favorite videos in the book, another favorite video in the book is one on the teacher named Jan Breaming. Uh, she's in Plymouth, England. Uh we have a lot of American teachers in the book too, I promise you, Kevin. Um she's reading the beginning of Lord of the Flies. Uh I don't know if you want to if you want to gather your daughter around for this lawyer and a bunch of I've actually I have it, uh that's the page where I when I picked my book up.

Lori:

I don't know if you saw earlier, I have a sticky on.

Doug Lemov:

Uh so there it's the beginning of the book. You know, so for I'm sure most people know the story, but it's a group of boys from a British boarding school. They're stranded on an island. It's just the boys, there are no adults, they attend to they and they attempt to recreate society. It looks like it's going to be idealistic. It descends very quickly into like the darkest dystopianism that you could imagine. And there's a scene where um one of the one of the protagonists, Ralph, it's really hot on the aisle and he takes off his clothes. And so Jen has like taken this sentence and she projects it on the board wherever can like read it and read it and reread it and kind of like keep it in their working memory. She asks them to read it. And then she has a she's rewritten a version of the sentence that is slightly different. And instead of uh tearing off his clothes fiercely, he tears off his clothes eagerly. Right. And uh instead of um remember the the other exact difference. I don't know, maybe you can you can see it in your in your book, their look, but he she basically takes a couple of just word nuances and modulates them slightly. So you can see the like the foreshadowing in the word fiercely versus eagerly that shows like this the savagery beneath the surface of the boards and she just asks the students to compare. How is the mean how is the meaning that's made here differently? We could spend a lot of time talking about symbolism and yet, but really like this is just an exercise in putting an important piece of text in a cognitively privileged environment where students can study it and go back and forth between the two and continue to compare them and study what I've described as like minimally different examples, how very small change affects meaning making. And this, you know, I just think there's a lot of like cognitive science research about how powerful these ideas of cognitively privileged environment minimally different examples are to helping people understand how a complex phenomena works. In this case, you know, syntax and word choice. I think once you've done that for the rest of the chapter now, and you're like, oh, that word choice, you know, that there's a lot of savage imagery in this book. Hmm. Rather, you know, so I think that um I just think that's a great example of close read close reading. I'll let Colin Eric make a little bit more sense of it from there.

Melissa:

I was just gonna say real quick, I think it makes so much more sense to close read something that they will have more knowledge about and can make more sense of than like just reading those two sentences and then never seeing it again.

Lori:

Yeah. I was even thinking how that would play out for the students in their writing, that when students are responding to writing tasks about Lord of the Flies, that they're thinking about the words that they want to choose to represent certain parts. And if I had to choose between the two words that we were talking about in this section, which one I would choose and why, I mean, that's gonna help me in writing in both the reading and writing tasks down the road too, unrelated to this text, right? Because as a writer, I'm gonna stop and think, okay, well, what if I use this word? Okay, what if I use this word? All right, now the what's the meaning I really want to convey? Okay, this word's probably the better choice. And I can have that dialogue in my head. I know you all have that dialogue because you wrote this awesome book, right? And Melissa and I had that dialogue both out loud and in our heads when when we wrote our book too, we feel compelled. You're putting the words on the page, but why did the author choose that word? Right. And I mean, it it just levels up everything. So sorry to sorry to interrupt. I know Colleen and Erica, you both, I'm sure you want to say something awesome here too about this.

Colleen Driggs:

No, I love that. I think one of that's one of the important um, you know, Erica mentioned the indelible connection between reading and writing. And so one of the ways that we prepare our kids to be better writers is to give them models of complex uh sentences that are interesting, that have, you know, sophisticated word choice in them so that they can then, you know, make those same decisions or they're more equipped to make those same decisions when they're writing their own complex, you know, sophisticated um complex sentences uh with varied syntax and more interesting vocabulary words. So I love that point. Um, I also just wanted to um come back to this idea of one thing that's really important about us is that we're close reading in the context of um books that kids know. Um, in the classroom book, um, Melissa, I loved your point of like they have more knowledge about it, so they're gonna be more successful about with the close reading, which is an important component of being able to successfully close read. I also think that after reading reconsidered, this was one of the misconceptions that a lot of teachers had, which was to choose a text simply for the sake of close reading, versus this is the book that we're reading because it's a rich and beautiful book that we're gonna read together. And there are going to be some exceptionally hard passages, or there are going to be some exceptionally uh critical passages that are worth further study. And so lift, let's lift those and study those. The goal is to understand them fully and completely so that we understand better the whole work, uh, versus let me find a perfect text for close reading that is actually going to be meaningless to you tomorrow.

Erica Woolway:

And I would just add two other brief things. Um, I think one of the um one of the reasons I'm really glad we called this the T Lak Guide to the Science of Reading is um the power of naming that Teach Like a Champion has as a text and as an as an ethos. And the the close reading technique that Doug described earlier, we call sensitivity analysis. And we actually borrow it from math. Um it's something that they often do in math. Like, so for instance, if the number was 6,485, you might ask a student, okay, how will this number change if we change the the digit in the in the tens place? And so it's sort of the same idea but applied to to ELA. And then the other thing I would say is um if you've ever been able to join us in person in our workshops, you'll you'll get to see, or you would have gotten to see in potentially the future, I think you're bringing it back, Colleen. Um, uh Colleen do a model of the opening paragraph of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Um and it really um uh we often talk as part of that. It's it's a the purpose of that is so that participants can experience close reading as students, but as adult readers as well, because it's a pretty complex passage. And we often talk about how the first paragraph of a book is usually uh pretty rich for and worthy of analysis, and also oftentimes is um foreshadowing themes that are gonna uh appear throughout the book. So it's another great place also um for teachers to look in terms of opportunities for close reading. But we hope you'll join it uh join us at a workshop as well.

Lori:

Yeah, we'll be sure to link that in the show notes. We'll link information for your workshops, obviously the book, um, and everything else we talked about today, too. I like that Daniel Willing uh Willingham episode that Doug mentioned earlier, too. Um but such a good point. Yeah, I mean, teachers um can take away some practical tips just from this conversation right here, right? So that back and forth with different vocabulary choices, um looking for the first paragraph, the last, but really important places for those close reading opportunities. All right, so I'm gonna bring it home for us. Um I have a really fun question to finish us out today. If you could each read an entire book with a class of students tomorrow, so just yourselves today, tomorrow you walk into a classroom and and you're gonna teach for the next month. Which book would you choose and why?

Erica Woolway:

I'm happy to go first on this. Um, and I might have cheated because I just reminded myself of the books that we um teach in our curriculum. Uh, and we've already mentioned one of them, so I won't re-remension that. Uh as I mentioned, our curriculum is for middle school. So for the earlier part of middle school, I would love to read Wonder with my students. Um, I think it's, you know, Doug talked about the importance of reading books that were written long ago. This does not satisfy that. Um, however, Colleen talked about the importance of bringing in um topics that students don't know as much about. Um, and I think um what this book has is is both an entry point because it's just about all kids, but also um uh the main character, August, um, living with uh a craniofacial abnormality and how students respond to him and just the empathy that's that um you learn through reading the book. Um and so it really captured one of the things that we talk about when when it comes to text selection is the importance of windows and mirrors. And so I think it both gives a window into someone else's experience, but also a mirror into their own experiences as they might be classmates of someone um like this. So that would I only I'll only give one for now.

Lori:

I know it's very hard to choose. When we wrote that question, I was not sure if you were all going to be able to rise to the challenge of just one.

Doug Lemov:

I suppose that's an argument for books, right? That we none of us can choose, that they're also meaningful to us that none of us can really choose the one that we most want to teach.

Lori:

That is right.

Doug Lemov:

I'd probably choose Lord the Flies, but with a giver, I just think they're um spectacularly beautiful and thought-promoking. Allah Khalleen take us home with the winner.

Colleen Driggs:

Um so it's hard. I was also thinking of Lois Lowry, Number of the Stars, because I'm reading it with my fourth grader at home right now. But if I were gonna walk into a classroom of students tomorrow, it would definitely be Bud Nut Buddy by Christopher Christopher Paul Curtis. Um, speaking of canonical authors, to me, he is a canonical author of uh youth fiction. Um I taught uh the Watson's Go to Birmingham when I was teaching middle school. And I love that book deeply, and that was the one I was pushing for. Uh the team decided it might be uh a bit of a stretch for fifth grade. Um so on our fifth grade curriculum is we have Bud Nut Buddy. Um and I think it is he is so Bud is just so relatable, but surprising and complex. Um, and given that it's set during the Great Depression, um, just an opportunity to build those rich networks of knowledge. And so I think at first kids enjoy the book because they're like, I like Bud, he's funny. Um, and by the end of it, um, they just like see the depth of Bud and the depth of the story uh that he's part of.

Melissa:

Colleen, I taught both of those books. Um, yeah, I Watson's Go to Birmingham is one of my favorites. But when I taught the Bud N Up Buddy, the kids learned so much about the Great Depression. It was crazy. I was like, and they were eating it up because they could also relate to him and his story. It was it was wonderful. Well, I think this is it, you guys. This has been a great conversation. Thank you all so much. I want to keep talking to you all, but we have to end the podcast at some point. Um, yeah, thank you all for your time and your knowledge and your book, and we are so excited to get this out into the world.

Doug Lemov:

So much fun. Thanks for having us. We're big fans of the podcast, by the way.

Melissa:

Thank you so much. It's been a real treat. To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com. 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.