Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ®

Placing Text at the Center of the Primary Classroom with Meghan Hein

Share episode

Episode 240

Primary teacher Meghan Hein shares how she keeps the text front and center of learning. She discusses the shift from a skills-based focus to an approach where meaning-making drives instruction. The conversation highlights practical strategies for teachers to build knowledge through texts and create a more authentic learning experience. Meghan's insights reflect a commitment to continuous learning and adapting teaching practices to better serve students' needs.

✨ You’ll definitely want to listen to the podcast that inspired this conversation! Episode 37 with Sue Pimentel and Meredith Liben dives into their article Placing Text at the Center of the Standards-Aligned ELA Classroom.

Takeaways

  • Shifting from skill-based to meaning-making instruction is crucial.
  • Building knowledge through texts is essential for comprehension.
  • Teachers must empower themselves through continuous learning.
  • Curriculum should support, not dictate, teaching practices.
  • Understanding the intent behind texts enriches the learning experience.
  • Interleaving skills and content enhances understanding.
  • Students thrive when they connect learning to real-world contexts.

Resources 


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.

Grab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com.

Join our community on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter.

Lori:

Keeping text at the heart of classroom instruction matters. And today we get to talk about what that really looks like in practice.

Melissa:

Megan Hein, a second grade teacher, shared some thoughtful reflections on one of our earlier episodes. And we couldn't wait to have her on the podcast. Megan's here to tell us how centering text has led to more meaningful learning for her students. That's why.

Lori:

You'll hear us reference a past episode with Meredith Lieben and Sub Himentel called Placing Text at the Center of the ELA Classroom. That conversation has stuck with us. It's one Melissa and I still talk about today. We've refreshed that episode and linked it in the show notes if you'd like to go back and listen.

Melissa:

But right now, we are so excited to hear from Megan and her experiences bringing this work to life in her own classroom. 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, Megan. Welcome to the podcast.

Meghan Hein:

Hi, you guys. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Melissa:

We're excited you're here to hear about what you're doing in your classroom and to talk about one of our favorite podcast episodes. Can't wait.

Meghan Hein:

Mine too. It's embarrassing when I admit how many times I have listened to that one and just every time lean something new. So I'm really excited to chat about it too.

Lori:

Same. Okay, so let's jump right to it. Today we're going to talk about what it really means to place text at the center of your classroom. And I feel like this is a phrase that we often use a lot and it like sounds really easy. Place text at the center of your classroom. Just go ahead and put set text at the middle, you know, put it the center. What does that even mean? And what does that look like in the day-to-day? So you're a teacher. What does it look like in your classroom in practice? And also, why does it matter for students? How does this look for students?

Meghan Hein:

Yeah, that's such a loaded question. So, as far as I understand it, I look at placing text at the center as the evidence-based approach. And I'm trying to support my students more with the meaning making from what we're reading, what we're writing about. And so I look at that in the juxtaposition as how I used to approach things, which was looking at the standards to guide everything we do and fitting in the text to align with whatever our skill was that we were doing. So, in this sense, the meaning making is driving the way that I'm planning for my students and all the experiences that we do together. And there's a lot of parts and components to what that looks like in my classroom every day. I have a lot of examples to share, but mainly just the idea of how I'm planning and how I'm viewing what we're going to be doing together and what I want them to glean from the experiences that we are doing together as a class.

Melissa:

Yeah, I'm wondering, I'm you you just alluded to like what I used to do. Um and I have in my head all those things I used to do too. And I know I've talked about it before on the podcast, but I did a lot of the, you know, what was going to be on the test at the end. We have to master those skills before we get to that test at the end. And Lori's talked about how she did like a strategy of the week and those kinds of things. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how, you know, what did what it did you used to do and dive into it a little bit more of like, what was the way you used to teach literacy and approach it? And what how did you start to shift that?

Meghan Hein:

Absolutely. Yeah, all of that resonates with me as well. So I started teaching in about 2003, 2004, and I grew up in the era of high-stakes testing. So I was like that on steroids, basically. Everything that we did was looking at what was considered essential standards and only essential because of how weighted they were on the assessments that we gave at the end of the year. And so we were just reading random text passages all year long that really didn't connect to one another with the purpose and intent of answering multiple choice questions based on whatever standard we were focused on. And I didn't even know what I didn't know then, thinking back to the experience I was offering my students and what they came away with. Um it's just heartbreaking, honestly. Hopefully they survived all of that and moved on from there. But eventually it kind of shifted to, you know, now in the last few years, I've had a curriculum that is built on more topical, you know, content areas. And I can see how, you know, that supports their meaning-making more. But even with that curriculum, I'm still driving my instruction through skill-based lessons. And I had this huge aha when my own children that went through that curriculum in elementary school, when they both moved on to middle school, and they were coming home just talking so excitedly about what they were doing in school, which totally surprised me because that was new for me to have these conversations with them about like what was, you know, fueling their motivation. And they were talking about their history classes and their science classes. And as they were talking about these ideas, I was saying to them, well, you know, you learned about that in elementary too, because all of these topics that we have in our curriculum are related on science and social studies topics. And they completely missed the mark. They were like, We've never had, you know, science before in school. And so I was having that experience with them at the same time that I was hearing this conversation about placing text at the center and the intent of more meaning-making and building knowledge alongside our students. And that was like hugely an aha moment for me that gave me purpose to trying to figure this out with my own second graders in the day-to-day.

Melissa:

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the assessments. I know that I felt the same way with you with those assessments. And it was this like data-driven instruction was the thing. And and it does it did make so much sense when I was like, oh yeah, right. Like what's gonna be on that assessment? And we're gonna teach it, teach it, teach it until they get it. But you know, when you step back with reading, it's a little bit of a different story, right? It doesn't work that same way that you would hope it would, because you don't know what's getting in the way of them being able to answer those multiple choice questions, right? It's probably not just what the question's asking, it's a lot about the text.

Meghan Hein:

You can't anticipate that. And I feel like that just reminds me that one of the shifts that I've had after listening to that podcast with Meredith and Sue was just like the human experience of reading and writing and thinking about a writer wrote this for us. Their intent was for us to learn from this. And let's think about ourselves as the audience and you know, what are we gonna glean from this? Let's see if the messaging and this, you know, comes alive to us. And just thinking about why we're reading the things that we're reading brings so much more purpose to it than just can we answer this question? Like, here's a question about the text now. Let's see if we can get it right. It just, I don't know how I didn't see it before, but it was almost like this just lifted up the veil. And I was like, oh my gosh, I thought I was doing things correctly. I thought I was moving us in the right direction, but there's so much more I can be doing that is gonna leave them with such a, I don't know, a better experience, I guess, with wanting to continue reading and writing and growing in those areas.

Lori:

Yeah, Megan, you're making me think about um when I taught, you know, second grade, I would put the standards up, I'd have them on my desk, like a printout of the standards, and I'd be like, okay, now I need to find a text to match this standard. So, you know, it's like I need to find a read aloud where we are finding cause and effect, right? And then I'm gonna have students practice for that week or that next week to make a cause and effect, and we're gonna find cause and effect in this text, and I need to find, I remember distinctly going to the library and being like, okay, I gotta find a whole bunch of books on finding cause and effect, and then after this, everybody was super with cause and effect. And I think the tip uh we're talking about is putting uh a text first and then thinking about what is this text asking of students? What is this text asking of the reader? What does the reader need to make a meaning, right? So does uh is it cause and effect? Maybe it is. And also probably a lot of other things too, though, right? And so thinking about how to bring the standards and the demands into the text that we're reading in a way that is the word that comes up for me is authentic.

Meghan Hein:

Yes, that's so true. Authenticity is so essential. And I feel like I even with knowing what you know you're sharing about and the, you know, standard posted on the board and all of those things, even when I started to have that realization that maybe there was a different way, I still feel like the way that my curriculum was presented was this sort of robotic method of, you know, these texts are really good, complex text, but now I'm gonna annotate them with this skill in mind, and you're gonna watch me and listen to me. And I want you to do it just like I'm doing it. And so even with like well-intended, I think curriculums, it can be so hard to place text at the center, which is so surreal to think about. And I feel like this whole movement is really empowering for me and for us as teachers. It's like, we are the ones who are driving the ship. We get to create meaning for our students with what we ask them, with what our focus is, with knowing exactly who's sitting in front of us and making sure that we're bringing down the barriers that are keeping them from understanding what they're being asked to read based on the little tidbits of knowledge that we're frontloading them with beforehand. And it's just, it's an exciting movement that I feel like creates so much more motivation for both us as teachers and practitioners and for the students that are experiencing that with us and alongside us learning together.

Lori:

For sure. Yeah. Melissa, do you want to ask something?

Melissa:

Yeah, I was just, I actually pulled up the quote from Sue Pimentel from the this this podcast we keep alluding to, placing text at the center. Um, and it's all about this authenticity and the motivation. And I was like, I feel like I used to have this written on a post-it note on my wall. Um, but I moved, so I had to, I don't have it anymore. But she said, we don't read a text to check on our skills and our comprehension strategies. The point of reading is to learn from it. And then when you learn from one text, then you learn from more and you build your knowledge, right? And that is the real goal. And I just love what you're saying about the authenticity of that. It's real, and that changes the way you know you as a teacher approach it and how your kids are learning, right? That's a different way of thinking about learning and sounds a lot more interesting to me.

Meghan Hein:

Yeah, it is. It feels really good at the end of the day, and it feels exciting to know. I've heard them echo the sentiment that like kids aren't gonna go home and talk about, you know, today I learned how to find the main idea, but they are gonna go home and talk about these topics that you're learning about and the knowledge that they're building alongside you as they kind of put that text at the forefront and think about why they're gleaning this information. And um, it's so true because yeah, it's very exciting to see the students talking about and writing more about it and using the academic vocabulary because it's theirs and it's it's like kind of thrilling to them. I'm yeah, definitely remotivated after all of these years of teaching. It feels like it's breathing new life into me, which is really fun.

Lori:

It's amazing. Well, I'm wondering if, you know, since Melissa just brought up a quote from that podcast, and in that episode, we did talk about the article placing text at the center. Can you share some powerful takeaways you had after listening to that episode or and or reading the article? I think it's really important to think about a teacher perspective reacting to that.

Meghan Hein:

Absolutely. So yeah, I listened to it the first time and I took so many notes and started talking to my friends about it. But it wasn't until I had the real experiences with the students in front of me that I really was like, okay, I am all in on this. This is making so much sense to me. So one of the first things for me was that we were, you know, mid-year, we were in a unit that was about um time or the past long ago. And there's always a poem connected to our weekly reads because again, it meets one of the standards. It's like a checkbox, right? And so I was looking at the teacher's edition, which I don't often, you know, frequently look at, but I was looking at the directive for going over this poem with my students. And the poem itself was really like a somber poem looking back at the past, and it was intended to be kind of this sort of sad reflective piece memoir. And when I looked at what it was asking me to do, it was having students, you know, highlight the rhyming words at the end of each line and also look for long A spellings. And it was just this very skill-driven poem. And instead, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna take what I learned from that podcast and from reading their paper, and I'm gonna just read it to my students. I'm gonna just sit there, I'm gonna read it to them, and I'm gonna let them feel what the author had for them in that. And I did it that way for the first time. And their little faces were looking at me like huge eyes, and they were all like, Why are you so sad? And I'm like, Well, I want you to listen to the words, you know, why did the author write this for us? And gosh, isn't poetry so beautiful? They're like artists that with their words they can make us, you know, evoke these feelings from us. And it was such an exciting lesson, so much more than just looking for long A spellings and circling them, which is what I would have probably done prior. Um, and then my students got so excited about poetry, and then they wanted to write poems, and then we were thinking about how we could take these, you know, topics that we were learning about and write about them in a way that was, you know, gonna evoke feelings from others. And that was my first, like, okay, I am all in. This is where it's at. This is what I've been missing.

Melissa:

I'm wondering, did you actually go back and do any of the skills along with it?

Meghan Hein:

Yeah, so that's a good question. And that day, no, honestly, no. Um, and I think that has been like the evolution of this whole process for me was that I think at first I was like, okay, I am all in on this. Like, forget the standards. I am just gonna be like the driver of this ship, and I'm gonna make all the meaning in the world out of these texts, and we're gonna build these thematic units around them. And so I went, thankfully, I had the autonomy too and the trust of my administration to just try that. And I got students that were excited about learning and we were singing about these topics, and vocabulary was pouring out, and all of these great things were happening. But again, when it came time for the types of assessments that we are required to give, I wasn't seeing the benefits of my students' growth per se, and that particular type of assessment. And so in the last year, I mean, this has been like kind of a three-year process for me. In the last year, I have been sort of going back to the standards and diving more into the standards to better understand, you know, why they were written, Sue wrote them, they have meaning behind them. And so now I'm looking at the frame of, okay, I've got these topical units that I'm gonna be covering. And yes, we're gonna be making, you know, building knowledge together through these and making meaning out of the text. But what standards do I need to put in place at the forefront while we're doing that that's gonna help them leverage, you know, the type of reading that they're doing here and all of the reading that is to come. And so I have put more of that back to make it like very practical. We have these four-week units that we do that are covered on topics. And the first week, we really dive into a lot of like knowledge building, giving them all of these, you know, multimedia quick presentations and read alouds and things to kind of spark their interest in what they're gonna be reading. And then as the unit progresses in through those four weeks, by the end, we're really working on more like skill-based instruction after we prioritized the putting the text at the center and making meaning from the text that we're reading. So yeah, it's been sort of an evolution of at first it was like abandon it all, and now we've kind of come back to it, but with more purpose, I would say.

Melissa:

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I could see, I don't know the poem that that you're speaking of, so I don't know if it would make sense, but I could see kind of like a balance between those two, like you're saying, right? That like maybe there is a reason to look at the rhyme in this poem, right? Maybe I am looking at those rhyming words for a reason, but it's what you talked about as what it was at first. I mean, they barely even needed to read the words, right? They just needed to find the the words that kind of looked the same. I don't even know that they would have gotten anything from the poem. And then on the other hand, you know, like, oh, like they get the deep, like it's it's a somber poem and it's sad, and why they wrote it, but then they miss out on some of the like things that they need to help them. And maybe there's a balance there. If if that works for that poem, I'm not sure.

Meghan Hein:

But no, that's absolutely true. And I think you're right on like the rhyming aspect of it. That author intended for that rhyme to be there for good reason. Like it added like a flow to the poem. So that's something to focus on. But using it strictly to look for like the long A words, no, we're gonna use something else. That's like in a different time of the day, right? So um pick and choose, and just again, like that empowerment to feel more mindful about why we're focused on the things that we're focused on and how does it help us to better understand what we're being asked to read.

Lori:

Megan, you just made a really good point, and I don't want to let it slide by that you just said um we could do those long A words at a different time of the day. Yes. Can you say more about that?

Meghan Hein:

Yes, I can. So I'm glad that you brought that up because yeah, when we think about Scarborough's reading rope or we think of the active view of reading, there still very much is an emphasis on that word recognition component. So I'm still working very explicitly on, you know, all of the things that are phonemic awareness and phonics and those types of skills. That's in a separate part of our day that is unrelated to this. I look at this more as like the language comprehension focus. So when we're working on developing our vocabulary and our comprehension, and when we're working on syntactical features of text and all those things that build language, um, this is the other end of the rope. So we can marry them at times, but certainly like there is a need for that strong, explicit, very standards-based focus instruction and foundational skills. And then there's this work too, which hopefully will, you know, build upon each other to create these skilled readers.

Melissa:

Megan, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about um again, I'm coming back to the shifts. I know you just gave a good example, but you also mentioned that your curriculum that you're using, you know, gives you some good texts, gives you good some good topics, but doesn't always, you know, give you the right thing to teach. Um I'm wondering if you could give some more concrete examples of like, what does this look like then for you in the classroom? Like what are you doing with those texts that's different than what is you're being told to do?

Meghan Hein:

Yeah, thanks for asking. So um in my curriculum, like I said, it's got these 10 sort of thematic units that are built on literary concepts and on science and social studies concepts, and they kind of vary throughout the year. Um, when I'm looking at them, I know what texts we're going to be reading because they come with the you know curriculum. And before we jump into those, I'm always looking over them with my grade level team and seeing, you know, what is standing in the way of them making sense of all of these texts. So for a concrete example of that, um, we do a unit all about inventors and why inventors create inventions, where they get their ideas from. And when we were flipping through those texts as they were offered to students, we noticed that most of the texts that we were going to be reading were biographies. And when I think about my second graders, I'm like, how many experiences have they had? You know, we've read a lot of informational texts, but how many biographies have they read and how many have been read to them? And so we take time to, you know, do a quick little um chart or whatever pictorial to just talk about we're gonna be reading this new genre. It is an informational text. We know about informational text and why authors write them for us, but let's talk about what biographies are and what's a predictable structure that we can expect to glean from every single text we're gonna be reading. And we talk about, you know, they're gonna be talking about their early life. We're gonna be learning about, you know, some of the hardships that they had, we're gonna be learning about the inventions that they created. And that really just sets them up for success. So that wasn't built into our curriculum. There's nothing about biographies and talking about that with students, but looking ahead at that and understanding, okay, what's gonna be a downfall or what could hinder them from making sense of what they're gonna be reading? Let's quickly jump ahead in front of that for them.

Lori:

I love that you're placing text at the center before they even hit the text. Yeah. Right. You're centering the text structure for them. So I love that. That's so cool.

Meghan Hein:

And that's like the frame of thinking that my team and I always have is now what do we do to leverage their understanding in this unit that's gonna help them to now read biographies for the rest of time, right? Now they're very well versed in what to expect. That's gonna be helpful to them. So just kind of taking it upon ourselves to think about what things we can add in that will build their knowledge base and help them to, you know, better understand what they're reading. And some of the other things. So we always, you know, in the day-to-day look at, you know, what topics are coming up. And so part of that, I mean, I feel like knowledge building is so synonymous with this placing text at the center because when we're talking about meaning making, right, we're building knowledge alongside that. So we're always just looking for little snippets of multimedia, which makes learning so much more accessible. Um, in that unit of long ago, there's this quick little five-minute video I always show about the life of a pioneer because, you know, in the next day, we're gonna be reading this fictional narrative that's a diary of a pioneer on the Oregon Trail. They certainly don't have any historical background to understand that. But if they watch this short video, they're gonna have all of this imagery and they're gonna be able to picture what she's talking about as they're reading her narrative. And so I feel like anything that we can add in, um, I'm always connecting our writing to our reading, which is done by the curriculum that I have. Thankfully, we don't have writing siloed. But I feel like I can look to my students and see what's of interest, what conversations we're having, what questions they have, and kind of add in a little bit again, feeling more empowered to not just follow the writing, you know, topic that they give us, but going, gosh, they're really like interested and curious about this. Let's make this our writing topic and we're going to inform others about this, you know, topic of interest that came up from our reading. So yeah, there's a million things. I one of the things that I've been trying to do alongside my students too is think about how are we learning from our text throughout these four-week units. And so um, I either create something like an anticipatory guide where they're answering true or false questions that I know they're gonna be learning from the text that we're reading beforehand and then coming back to it after. One of my favorite ones is um we build a concept map at the beginning of this unit about how Earth changes. And it's got all these like, you know, vocabulary cards on it with little pictures and they're sorting it beforehand, and I'm listening to like what they already know about the topics. But certainly after we read a series of texts that's all about, you know, the fast changes to Earth and the slow changes of Earth and all the things that we study, afterwards we come back in and watch how they do their concept map again. And it's so profound to see like, wow, we've learned so much from these authors over the last few weeks. Look at you guys are experts at this topic now. And um, yeah, I don't know if that answered your question. I have like a million things to say, but those are just some of the things that we do in the day-to-day that have been a change, a shift.

Melissa:

Yeah, it really made me. Lori, you mentioned this, like you're placing text at the center throughout. And and I'm thinking even for planning, right? Like you as the teachers are planning with text at the center versus, you know, what I would have done is potentially been like, okay, we need to teach theme, right? So I'm gonna do, you know, instead of showing a video about the topic, I'm gonna show a video about what a theme is. And that's gonna get them interested. And it would like if that's not what we need, right? What what you're doing is what we need to happen, right? Not like, okay, we're gonna do theme all week and we're gonna just practice theme with these texts. But you're thinking about, okay, this text is the one they I want them to read it, I want them to understand it, I want them to build knowledge from it. And what do they need, right? They need some more knowledge about what a biography is, they need knowledge about the topic of this, some probably some vocabulary they get they get from that video that's gonna help them when they go to read it. Like you're helping them build to get to that text versus I used to when I was doing it the wrong way, was like build knowledge about the standard or the skill that I wanted them to do with it.

Meghan Hein:

And we were doing that with the best intent, right? Thinking that if we taught them about, you know, determining theme from a text, they will be able to do that with other texts. But then I look back at all of the work of these psychologists that we didn't have, you know, so readily, I think, and weren't aware of. And now because of podcasts like yours, like I'm constantly hearing from people. And um, Daniel Willingham is a psychologist. And I look at his papers and I'm like, he wrote this in you know, 2007. Why didn't I hear it until you know last year? But talking about how they don't transfer their knowledge of these strategies from one text to another, it's not the strategy that carries, they don't become experts at finding the main idea, they become experts at the topic. Um, and that's what will, you know, when they go into secondary and they go into high school, those are the things that they carry with them, not the skill-based, you know, practice. And that's a huge aha for me. Like science shows us that now, now we know we're like empowered to understand that because we've got this, you know, research right in our hands.

Melissa:

So And that doesn't mean we can't ask them about the theme or talk about the theme of the book we're reading or ask them the main idea of a text we've read, because that might help them understand it better, right? So we do still want to do those things, but it's the re like the reason why we're doing it is different.

Meghan Hein:

Exactly. And that they should be doing all of those critical thinking skills once they understand the text. So once you've gotten into the text and once they make sense of it, that's when we then build in those higher level, like we I was saying towards the end of my unit, that's where we do that nitty-gritty work and really get into like the the high level, I don't know, understanding of what the standards are asking them to do with what the text they're reading.

Lori:

I'm thinking a lot about you're both making me think about the con the idea of interleaving. That's something that I think we're talking about, but we're not naming because I think it's often named in like with foundational skills instruction, but we're talking about interleaving of content and also skills so that our students can uh see the content, right? So let's take your inventor topic or biographies, right? Both of those are uh our content topics. They're gonna come back around in life for these students, right? They're they're gonna hear about an inventor someday, they're gonna hear about biographies, they're gonna read a biography. They're also going to uh at some point potentially need to find the theme. So it's not that I don't think any of us are saying don't teach a theme. I think we're saying elevate the theme through these texts. And I actually what you're making me think about is that this is a higher level of application, right? When you have to find the theme in a text that is complex, that's very uh rigorous. That's hard to do, especially if you don't understand the text we read. So understanding the text is but also like the application is really uh important. And I think sometimes with um the quote way that I used to do it, uh the application wasn't there because it was a very um, it was like a false application, right? Because there didn't need to be a deep understanding of the text you because the texts were predictable. It's really hard to find that uh structure or whatever it might be, or that you know, when the text is not predictable, which like most texts that we read in life are not predictable. So that's kind of what you're making me think about right now.

Meghan Hein:

Yeah. And I still think, you know, I don't know how common the practice is, but it certainly was for me up until a few years ago with that strategy-driven instruction or that standard-driven instruction where, you know, like you said, Lori, the standard was on the board. And so in my guided reading groups with these low-level texts that students were reading, we are practicing these high-level, you know, skills of understanding with these very simple texts. And that is just not a match. Nobody needs to work on critically thinking on this level, whatever text that's placed in front of my students. So using those complex texts that are at grade level is where the deep thinking comes from. And students are able to do that when we put in enough supports to help them through that and building that meaning along the way. Yeah, that's a great point.

Melissa:

I'm wondering, Megan, if we can come back to this idea of the standards, because I know when we first put out this podcast with Sue and Meredith and a few other times throughout the years here, we've heard questions about, you know, well, I still have my standards, right? I they're still there. I'm I'm required to teach the standards. I still have the assessments at the end of the year that my students have to take. I still have to put an objective on the board every day, and my principal comes to check on it. You know, so with all those things, you know, it's like I I know people do have this like similar to what you already mentioned, right? There's this like pool to like one side or the other. And I'm wondering if you can share a little bit more about that balance and how you found that balance.

Meghan Hein:

Yeah. So like I shared earlier, sort of been this evolution. And now my understanding sits at this point of looking at the demand of the standards. When I look at how the standards are assessed for my seven and eight year old students, it is it is hard. And if I don't reach for that level of depth of understanding, they're not gonna get there. And not that the test is the end all be all, but I want to push them, right? I want to take them to these highest levels that I can. And so I Look at that as a great goal in mind. And so, for example, I'm using the standards in my planning. Um, we have three literary units that we focus on throughout the year: one at the beginning, one mid-year, one at the end. And I have, you know, these 10 standards that are built into our Common Core standards that we follow. So I'm looking at the unit, and the very first one, um, I'm now looking at my standards and going, what will be supportive of their understanding now if we focus really heavily on this idea and the standards? What's going to help them the next time we hit a literary unit and then the next time? And so for us and our team, there's a standard that talks about understanding the structure of a literary text, understanding that the beginning introduces the end, and that there's, you know, resolution to whatever challenges at the beginning. I'm like, that's really important at the beginning of the year. So we go heavy in our first literary unit talking about the predictable nature of, you know, fiction, narrative, text. And really, it's amazing. Then the whole year, every time I'm doing a read aloud of its fiction or every time they encounter a fiction text, I'm hearing my students go, there's the climax, or oh, here comes the resolution. And I'm like, yes, because that stuck with them. They understand that. Now that builds into everything else we do. Um, in the second literary unit, this year we focus on looking at our standards, um, looking at the texts that were laid out in that particular unit. And we dove in as a team for the first time. I've been back in second grade for like six years, never really looked at the standard so closely, but it was focused on um point of view, but more particularly, it was a fluency standard. So it was talking about reading character dialogue in a way that reflects the point of view of the character based on their thoughts and actions. That's a really high-level skill. So I took that down to the nitty-gritty, and I did, you know, very explicitly teach them like there's dialogue. What is dialogue? How do we know it's dialogue? What kind of clues in the dialogue help shape the way that we read it? And by the end of that unit, built in our own kind of you know, performative assessment that was these um reader's theater with my students. And oh my gosh, they had so much fun demonstrating the, I mean, even students you wouldn't think about really working on their dialogue and the way that they were saying things. It was amazing. And now I know that when they're encountering any narrative text with dialogue, they're gonna build into that standard what they've learned in that unit. And then by the end of the year, that's when I can look at, okay, we're reading literary texts. They really know how to read them fluently, they understand character dialogue and the character's point of view, they definitely understand the structure of the text. Now, what kind of standard can we hit home on that's really gonna help them continue to build? And that's when we started to do more like comparing and contrasting of texts and looking at different characters and analyzing the characters. So there's definitely room for those standards, and I do think they build and they're important. Um, it's just a matter of kind of reversing why we're doing it. Let's use those standards to leverage their depth of understanding rather than have them just rotely practice them for the sake of showing and demonstrating like I can do this standard. It's like, why? How does it help us as readers? And I definitely saw a progression of how they did lend themselves to helping my students become better readers by the end of the year.

Lori:

Yeah, you're making me think of a quote that um I came across in our book recently and I had forgotten about it. It's Natalie Wexler, and she said it's not a matter of teaching them or not, it's what's in the foreground versus what's in the background. And the text and the meaning from the text needs to be in the foreground, right? I think that's kind of what we were illuminating earlier too, but you've said it so clearly right now.

Meghan Hein:

Yeah, definitely. Natalie Wexler, I'm a super fan of hers as well. I feel like I read everything and watch everything she puts out. It's so helpful for me in this journey.

Melissa:

So I just wanted to say, like, it's another example of placing the text at the center, right? Again, is from the teacher level, you're not starting with the standards and saying, okay, we're gonna go through all these standards, but you're like, this is the text. What is the standard that's going to help them understand this text? Right. So it's bringing that text back to the center all the time and not ignoring the standards, but starting with the text. Exactly.

Meghan Hein:

And I think again, that idea of empowerment, because when I look at my curriculum, it's like every week it's a pretty repetitive cycle of here's the story. The first day we're looking for key details, second day we're looking for key details of the second half of the story, third day we're doing author's purpose. It's just very like rote practicing. But when we empower ourselves to think like a reader approaching text and think about what is going to be challenging for them, what's going to help build this up and give them like superpowers in order to be able to read this on their own. And yeah, it's it's pretty exciting. And they feel it too. I feel like they're so impressed with their growth as they're working through that and they they're capable of so much, which is really, really thrilling. So all right.

Lori:

So when we think about all the teachers out there listening, we know that some might be listening and have curriculum, some might be listening, not have curriculum, some might be listening and have super curriculum, some might be listening and have not so super curriculum. So for every teacher out there in any situation, Megan, what can they do to place text at the center?

Meghan Hein:

That is the question of the day, right?

Lori:

It really is, right? We saved it for Yeah.

Meghan Hein:

And I think curriculum never ever can replace a knowledgeable teacher, right? Like the first step is just continuing to learn ourselves. I wouldn't have made any of the shifts, regardless of what curriculum was in front of me, if I didn't have, you know, listening to you guys, listening to Meredith and Sue, reading more about it. So I think just empowering ourselves with continuing to learn is the first step. And then as far as curriculum, I can't imagine having, you know, very little to work with. I'm grateful for the foundations of what I have in front of me. If I didn't, I think I would go to my history and my science standards and think about those topical themes that students are supposed to be practicing, which often I think in this day and age, or at least in the last decade, have kind of taken a backseat to literary and you know, math topics. Bring those back to the forefront. And, you know, whatever students are working on, let's say they're doing like, okay, they're supposed to be working on understanding different habitats. Let me pull some really good literature. We can find things, even free things, or going to your library or whatever, your your school librarian, and finding really good, rich text that students can read based on those topics. Um, I think that's that's a great starting point. I'm sure there's more out there. Maybe you guys are aware of other ideas that you know teachers could have, but I feel like that's where I would be going is kind of building these like thematic topical units based on science and social studies themes.

Melissa:

Yeah, I think that's a really good suggestion, especially for you know the lower grade levels where you, you know, I'm assuming you probably do teach science and social studies as well. Um, so it's a that's a great way to get that in, um, to get those topics in. I think we would also probably suggest the Knowledge Matters campaign. Um they have suggestions for knowledge building curricula. Um, and some of them are free resources. So, you know, even if your school's not adopting any curriculum right now, you can take a look there and see what's there.

Lori:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I I I mean uh teachers are the best uh sharers of resources too. So absolutely I would always say ask a teacher friend, you know.

Melissa:

100% same. Well, Megan, is there anything else that you want to share about, you know, this this shift, this work that you're doing with your kids with placing text at the center? Anything else we didn't mention already?

Meghan Hein:

No, I I mean I'm just so excited to be able to chat. This is very surreal because I first learned about it here. So coming to chat with you guys about my journey so far is just kind of like this beautiful full circle moment for me. Um, but yeah, I'm come hang out with me and socials. I'm always talking about this and I don't have it all figured out yet. And so I'm constantly just sharing where I'm at in the journey. And I love just getting to talk to like-minded educators that are in the same boat of wanting to do better by their students and kind of learning alongside just trying things and yeah.

Melissa:

Yeah, Megan, your uh your social media handle is always more to learn, right? That is correct, yes. Yeah, and so I I love that because I think we're in a very similar place where we're always saying that you know we we love learning more and there's always more to learn. So absolutely. Yeah, we agree.

Lori:

Yeah, and we will link everything in the show notes. We'll link your social media stuff. Megan will link the text at the center article we've been talking about, the podcast episode we've been talking about. And I'm even thinking we should email this episode to Meredith and Stu after. Of course. No, after it's live. I know it's not live right now, but Meredith and Stew, we're gonna send you this episode. So oh my gosh. We are so grateful, Megan, that you took some time to talk with us so that we could hear a practitioner lens. And we're just really excited to hear from you in the future and all that you've learned even more about placing text at the center. We'll have to do a take two.

Meghan Hein:

Oh, thank you both so much for all you do. I have learned so much from your interviews, and I'm just so honored to be here with you. So thank you.

Melissa:

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:

If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend, or leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

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.