Supporting Readers as Texts Get More Complex with Luke Morin

Episode 252

What actually happens when students encounter a complex text?

In this episode, we’re joined by Luke Morin to discuss his article "Wading Into the Deep End: What Reading Actually Requires When the Text Gets Hard." Luke shares a powerful classroom moment where students applied reading strategies before tackling a tough text and still couldn’t make sense of a single sentence. That experience led him to rethink what it really means to teach reading.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why using strategies doesn’t guarantee understanding
• How text complexity is shaped by the interaction between text, reader, and task
• What collective close reading looks like in practice
• How to provide “lily pad” supports without rescuing students

Luke challenges the idea that comprehension can be reduced to checklists or isolated skills. Instead, he offers a vision of instruction that prepares students to wade into deep water with support, intention, and growing independence.

RESOURCES

• "Wading Into the Deep End: What Reading Actually Requires When the Text Gets Hard" by Luke Morin
• "A Lily Pad, in Practice" (Collective Close Reading Sample)
• "Why Mastery Doesn't Matter" by Luke Morin 
• "The Surprising Power of the Humble Worksheet" by Luke Morin

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at literacypodcast@greatminds.org.

Transcript

Why Complex Text Feels So Hard

Lori 0:00

Reading complex text can feel like swimming in the deep end for both teachers and students. When texts get hard, it's not always clear what kind of support actually helps students make meaning.

Melissa 0:11

Today we're joined by teacher and coach Luke Morin to unpack what reading complex text actually demands and how teachers can support students in the text instead of just getting through it.

Lori 0:24

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

Melissa 0:33

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

Lori 0:38

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Luke. Welcome to the podcast. We're so excited you're here.

Luke Morin 0:54

Hey, thanks so much for having me today.

Lori 0:56

Yeah, so we're gonna talk to you today about an article you wrote that caught our attention. It's called Wading into the Deep End: What Reading Actually Requires When the Text Gets Hard. I can't wait for this conversation because the text gets hard a lot. And we need to help students get to that text.

The Ray Bradbury Wake Up Call

Lori 1:14

So in the article, one of my favorite parts is when you share that students were using a reading strategy before reading a Ray Bradbury text, which is so good, right? And then they couldn't make sense of even a single sentence. I feel like this every teacher right now listening is like, yes, I've had that moment in my classroom. So can you tell us a little bit more about what happened in that moment for you and for your students?

Luke Morin 1:39

Yeah, I think this was a really revelatory moment for me in my, you know, first year of teaching. Um, because I had been working really hard to integrate, you know, pre-reading, during reading, post-reading strategies. I had all these graphic organizers, you know, kind of big ideas of just how kids process text and learn. You know, that was very um academic in nature. And this was a moment where um we were using the tea party strategy from uh Kyron Beers' uh When Kids Can't Read, What Teachers Can Do, um, which is still one of my favorite books. But the Tea Party strategy, kind of how it works, is you give kids some um snippets like of the text in advance. So they have no context, they kind of come in intentionally hamstrung, and you you give them lines that kind of preview something um that might happen in the story. And so, you know, we had done this earlier with Freak the Mighty, um, you know, which is a pretty accessible text for kids, and you know, it talks about you know slaying dragons and fair maidens, and they made a lot of interesting predictions and you know, they were able to kind of make meaning of that because they had a lot of background knowledge and in schema and the text wasn't super demanding. Um, but in this case, uh, we were reading um A Sound of Thunder uh from Ray Bradbury, which is this amazing short story where hunters travel back in time uh to try to bag a Tyrannosaurus Rex, you know, and so it's just this like really rich, vivid uh piece of text, but it's significantly more complex than anything else we had read um that year. So I gave kids this line, and it was Eccles glanced around the vast office at a mass entangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered, now orange, now silver, now blue. And this is the first moment that the hunter Eccles comes across a time machine in uh the lab that he's supposed to get into. And so I kind of figured this is a line that's really vivid, it's rich, it's got a ton of imagery to it. And I thought kids were going to come up with some pretty sophisticated, complex predictions. Um, but instead, what happened is they ran into that text. They didn't really have mastery or like knowledge of almost any of the words, they weren't able to piece together like the word snaking, which was referring to the wires, you know, of the of the steel machine. Uh and the kids thought there were snakes in the office, you know. Um, and they kind of understood that we were in some futuristic context. Uh, but they were coming up with these wild predictions that um that were really shallow in a sense. Um, they didn't they didn't really require a lot of inference or thinking. Uh, kid asked me if this was a robot zookeeper. Um, they had never seen the word Aurora before, so they really couldn't make any predictions based on it. Um kind of through that process of watching kids struggle with this, um, I began to wonder if like the strategies were enough when it came to text that was really out of their range.

Rigor Without Drowning Students

Melissa 4:42

Yeah, so you're making me think here that like there's this big push for complex texts, right? And so this sounds like it's maybe the first time you were like, okay, I put a hard text in front of them, and what I used to do with not as complex text isn't really doing the job anymore. So is that is that kind of the light bulb moment you had here? Like, hang on a second, this isn't working.

Luke Morin 5:05

Yeah, I think that it is. And, you know, uh we talk about rigor, we talk about complex text, like you said, all the time. And I think as a younger teacher, my kind of default assumption always was just like rigor meant that I needed to step back, right? And really drop them off into really hard text, really hard things, and withdraw my support, step back and watch them struggle. Um, but the problem with that was that, of course, as kids kind of floundered and in in a sense, I use this metaphor in the piece of like kids drowning um in the text when they don't have the right support. Um, you know, you you kind of run into a couple of default explanations or or pathways, you know, and one of them is either to say, oh, well, this is too difficult for the kids, so we're you know, not going to do this hard text anymore. Um that's a trap that I see a lot of teachers and myself getting into um, where you eventually aren't bringing rigorous grade level text to students because you don't know how to support them to understand it, or rescuing, um, you know, doing all the thinking for kids, making sure that they get to the outcome that you're looking for, um, but ultimately um they're not the ones who are putting the pieces together, right? And it's like the teacher, uh and I've been in the position many times. You stand in front of a room and you really eventually tell kids what to think after, you know, fishing around for responses for a while and not getting what you're looking for from them.

Melissa 6:34

Yeah, I can relate to that for sure, especially with complex text, right? And and it's so hard to find that balance because you want them to have a little bit of what you're saying, that time to what do we call productive struggle, right? You want them to have some of that time. You don't want everything to be just a super easy text in front of them, but to find that balance is really, really tough. And I know we're gonna talk all about some strategies um later on that you did, but I want to talk a little bit more about text difficulty just for a second. So I know in your article you referenced, I think you mentioned it, um Tim Shanahan brought it up, but I know we we talked to Hugh Katz about it as well, um, which is this idea of text complexity is not even just about the text itself, right? So, you know, that text that you chose was very complex for your students in front of the, it might not be complex for somebody else, because it's really about the interaction between the text, the reader, and whatever the task is that you're asking them to do. So before we get too deep into like, how do you how do you help students with this? I wanted to just wonder like, what do you think about that idea and what should teachers think about as they're you know thinking about their students and thinking about what text they're they're teaching?

Luke Morin 7:48

Um I really I love that quote from uh Tim Shanahan, and I'll probably talk about him a few times in this conversation um because he's uh just been so influential in my thinking. But uh the quote from him is text complexity is not a property of the text alone, but of the interaction between the text, the reader, and the task. Um and so I think that's a really um important idea, right? Because at the end of the day, um our goal uh with all of this work is to develop student capacity so that over time they have the familiarity, the schema, the background knowledge that they need to actually make like further interactions with complex facts less complex, right, for them. And so, you know, uh to get a kid who um maybe is reading well below grade level, I I always have taught sixth grade, you know, um, but even my students who come in well below grade level, almost all of them can pick up a dietary Wimpy Kid and they can make meaning of it, even if they're not reading right at the even at the lexile level that maybe that that book says it demands. But if you um, you know, put me uh in a chair with a copy of this month's, you know, Jama uh text or like doctors. I'm a pretty good reader. I read all the time, almost every day. I have a really hard time. I have every second or third word um I have to look up. And then I'll tell you what, Melissa, I will Google the definition and the definition doesn't make sense to me either. Um still. And so it just becomes extremely rigorous um and and um and mentally uh taxing to kind of push through um things that we don't have enough knowledge or or background on. And so, you know, I think like this comes back to how I tried to respond initially when I didn't have a lot of tools in my toolbox as a as a young teacher, right? Like in the teacher rubric, it said, I need to be differentiating more, you know, and so it raised a lot of questions for me of like, oh, okay, well, what do I do when I have kids that that can't get here on their own? Um you know, which like it doesn't matter who your kids are, actually, you you should always be pushing them with text um that's gonna continue to push them beyond their their comfortable independent range. Um so I try to differentiate more. You know, I was like staying up until two in the morning trying to make three versions of a of a packet for kids. Um I got very focused on standards for a while and kept thinking, okay, well, this, you know, might be a 6.3 problem. And so I'm going to do a bunch of lessons um, you know, on the standard and see if I can increase their skills so that when I get back in the text, they can make clear meaning of it.

Lori 10:23

Is that a finding the main idea problem? Is that what that one was?

Luke Morin 10:26

Right, yeah, yeah. Um, you know, it's like I I tried all these approaches, and at the end of the day, I was really sending my kids out to pasture, um, right, with like the work. Um and I was confusing this withdrawal of support with rigor. Um, and I wasn't asking them to read complex text in a sense, I was really asking them to survive it. And at the end of the day, like that wasn't an effective strategy um for kids.

Schema Versus Background Knowledge

Lori 10:50

I want to keep going with this idea of like the reader, the text, and the task, but think about something a little bit different in that. So if we think about schema versus background knowledge, right? Because we know it's really important if we're thinking about the reader, if we're thinking about schema versus background knowledge, these terms are kind of used interchangeably, or I've seen them used interchangeably. But I think a lot of teachers aren't always sure how they're different. Can you help us a little bit kind of explain how schema is different than background knowledge and maybe why that matters for the reader and what they're bringing to the text?

Luke Morin 11:27

Yeah, you know, I think that uh there's a big push right now uh for knowledge building. And I think it's a really important one. When I initially had started thinking about this problem of building background knowledge to help students um with complex text, um, I kind of began in this place of thinking about facts. What information do kids need? Right. And so I wrote in the piece that you know, when I came back uh to this text and and I had kids read it for the first time, I tried to load them up with like information that they might need, right? Like I gave them definitions of the terms. I made sure they knew what an aurora was. Um, I made sure that they um kind of like had pictures that were depicting, you know, what was happening. Um, but it turned out that it wasn't just the words themselves that kids didn't know or understand. It was the way that um Bradbury wrote about this in such a metaphoric, um, with metaphoric flourish, uh the way that he was um painting a scene in a way that kids weren't familiar with seeing, um, and the way that he used words in ways that they weren't familiar with. Um and so when I come back to the idea of schema, um, right, there's there's the background knowledge that kids need, there's the facts, there's the information. But in a lot of uh, but in a bigger sense, the word schema really in the context of reading class, it refers to this kind of broader operating system for kids, right? That lets them make meaning. So how do words behave across context? Uh, what is their comfort level with complex syntax? Do they recognize author signals, right, when they come up? Um do they do they see that somebody is describing something literally versus um creating a metaphoric image? Do they have a sense of when an author is telling you something that is advancing a scene or revealing something about a character versus when they're just giving descriptive language? Um, we teach uh a book um on the Titanic every year called Voices from the Disaster that I love. And we have to load the kids up with a ton of facts, just think about the context and the era and the time. We spend a day diagramming the ship, we go through all the ship terminology, right? They have to learn what a what it means to be aft and for, um, they have to know uh the the parts, the hold, they have to see uh the mechanics of how the ship works, because that does play out, right, in the in the tragedy itself. But when you really think about uh schema, it's like in this sense, kids have to have all this experience and exposure um to the genre-specific language, uh to the just like the moments that that trip people up when they get into a new piece of of writing. And it's really hard to teach that at a glance, right? Like to just say, like, okay, well, today I'm gonna teach you how science fiction uh works and operates. You know, you can give kids some some generic ideas about um commonalities in a genre or for an author or for a piece of writing. Uh but we don't read writing just because it's science fiction and generic, right? Like we read writing because it's it's human, it's emotive, it's beautiful, um, it does something unique. And like that's actually the point of great literature, right? Is that it's not like any other literature um that we've seen. Like it does something new and it conveys a message in a new way. And so you have a really difficult time building schema for specific text in advance. Um, it really requires that you immerse yourself into the text alongside your kids.

Lori 15:02

What you're saying about schema is so powerful. And it's interesting. I just actually had this experience uh with my own child. She read, you know, The Giver, she read um all the books in the Hunger Games, and is now um in late middle school. And, you know, after reading all of those books, she went back to a book that she had tried to read when she was, I think maybe in like fourth or fifth grade. And the book's called The Tripod Trilogies. And uh, or the tripod, it's a trilogy series. And it it's all this like dystopian stuff. And she really didn't get it then. But now that she's read all of these other books, this book is like, I mean, she's racing through it, right? Because she has that idea of the dystopian society and how this is working within that. Um, and it it just is providing the schema of the genre that is helping to help her understand the different language and the different things and maybe ask different questions. Oh, okay, like are we, are we even in current times? No, we're not. You know, is this even a time that can that could happen? And really, no, it's the you know, this definitely is like dystopian fiction and what does that mean? And just really trying to situate it within. But the schema is so important, but the background knowledge for uh is helping for other stuff. So I I really appreciate that distinction. I'm hoping you can kind of elaborate a little bit on what it means to build schema over time through like repeated experiences with complex text instead of you know trying to front load everything at the beginning, like we talked about.

Luke Morin 16:39

Yeah, I think that's a really powerful example. Um, in a sense, you know, we we teach the givers well and we spend about two weeks on a dystopia unit before we ever dive into it and we read Harrison Bergeron and we establish like the background knowledge, right? What are the traits of a dystopic story? Um, and we identify them. We spend a lot of time in that first story um looking for them and identifying how they operate. But then when we get into uh the giver, um we're able to uh kind of leverage um that experience that students have, right, with the initial story and instruction, and we're let them make a lot more um do a lot more inferential thinking on their own. And so I think uh kind of some of the power of this schema building over time is that in a in a sense, there are big ideas that you can build schema around, but most stories and and texts and novels kind of require their own um box of schema building for that specific text in and of itself, right? Like you actually have to get to know the characters and their interactions and their motivations and their personality traits like within an individual piece. And it would be tremendously boring in advance to tell your students, right? Like, okay, well, um, you know, in the Westing game, there's I think like 16 main characters or something, you know. So if you like, well, here's how the story ends, you know, and like here's how Mr. Westing operates, and it's it's not that takes away from the beauty and adventure of the piece, right? Like you actually have to get into the moments where the author, right, uses their craft to reveal um the truths about these characters, about the plot, about the story. Um, in a moment, you have to notice them, you have to see them, you have to experience them. Um, and like alongside that, um there's there's a thousand little moments and and things, right, that like you can't teach, you just kind of notice as an experienced reader. It's like an intersection of every standard really coming together. Um, and kids need to see you kind of model um that thinking in the moment so that not only are they developing like their their their source book basically for the novel or the piece of text or the text set that you're reading on, but they actually also need to understand, oh, okay, um when a pronoun, you know, uh appears in this way and it's it's not clearly identified, right, like who it's referring to, and I missed it the first time, right? Like a skilled, experienced reader is going to notice, right, that they didn't make full meaning of that or that they missed an idea. They're gonna stop, they're gonna go back, and they're gonna read it again. You can tell your kids to reread or monitor their understanding, right, till the cows come home. Um, and I've done that myself. So I can tell you it doesn't work. Um, what they actually need to see is they need to see you as the most experienced reader and writer and thinker in the room doing it day after day in all the millions of weird little contexts that it comes up in, right? And it's like only through some of that repeated modeling and exposure and creative thinking where they're really engaged and following carefully along with you, that they start to develop some independence on these skills that are somewhat difficult, I think, to otherwise um identify and name.

Why Standards In Isolation Fail

Melissa 20:03

Yeah, Luke, I wanted to talk about one thing you brought up a few times, which is the standards. And I know Lori and I went through this same, I think you went through the same kind of shift in thinking about standards as we did, which was, you know, we used to think of it as if they can master these standards, they'll be able to read any text, right? And you know, I think about your Ray Bradbury example, and you know, back in the olden days when I first started teaching, I would have been like, okay, there's lots of figurative language in here. So we'll do like a little figurative language, you know, lesson beforehand, maybe a few days on it. I'll really teach figurative language and give them some examples, give them a little test at the end, make sure everyone's mastered figurative language, and then they'll be good to go on this Ray Bradbury text, right? Because they all know how to interpret figurative language. But I think we've all come to the realization that like that is not quite the case. Um, can you talk a little bit about that shift that you made as well?

Luke Morin 21:02

Yeah, there's this um really incredible video um of Timothy Shanahan um giving a um skipping a keynote at an unbound ed conference um by 10 years ago. Um and this video has um sadly and mysteriously disappeared from the internet.

Melissa 21:20

Oh man. Wrote it down to go look for it.

Luke Morin 21:22

Yes. I'm working on digging it back up, but um, he he kind of wanders around on the stage and he starts doing this like lifting motion, right? Like he's just walking and talking and he's got nothing in his hands, but he's just lifting air again and again. And after two or three minutes of this, he he stops and and kind of asks the audience, like, Hey, am I looking am I looking pretty swole up here? You know, he's you know his own his own version of that. Um, you know, it makes you stop for a moment, but he he kind of starts referring to this idea of like the standards. Um if If you are if you're teaching them like in isolation, or if you're teaching them especially um with uh with text that doesn't match like the intellectual readiness and appropriateness of where kids are at, it's like having kids lift weight that weighs nothing, right? Like if you are not merging um the rigor of what is uh developmentally appropriate for kids um with like your standards lens, in a sense, and the the completeness of the picture of what the text has to offer, kids are pretty much like they're just lifting light air um in isolation. And so in the story, I I kind of write about this idea of like uh sticking with the barbell theme. Like if you are teaching kids a bunch of figurative language um in isolation of the text, but then you're actually having them go into the story and try to analyze uh a pretty complex piece of figurative language in the context of maybe a character interaction or a studying reveal, um, it's kind of like studying pictures of barbells, you know, and then going in and trying to lift them um yourself. It just doesn't really work. Um they're not even really related in a lot of ways. Um, you can really only teach reading by reading in and of itself. And I think like we have a real temptation to teach standards because it's something that you can see and you can name. There's a thousand worksheets uh associated with it. Um, but we'll reteach those again and again because they're easy to name and identify and kind of make it look like um you're doing something with kids, but it's not actually what's most crucial and important to understand.

Melissa 23:36

Yeah, you're reminding me of um I remember there's this book where it was the three little pigs, but it was told by from the wolf's point of view. Oh yeah, I remember that. You know, so then when it was time to teach point of view, it was like, yeah, we can teach this. And I remember the kids being like, oh my gosh, again, like every year teachers are doing this because it's like it was the easy way to teach point of view, but it didn't really translate to a sixth grade text or a high school text. But still, that was like their way of that was the way of teaching point of view was to show them like, look, it can be told from a different point of view. And it's like, okay, but that's not getting them where they need to be for their grade level.

Lori 24:12

Well, and I'm gonna bet point of view is a lot more difficult when you flip it up in a Ray Bradbury text versus uh three little pigs scenario, right?

Luke Morin 24:21

It is. And you know, I think like it's not to say that I'm like against standards. Uh there's a lens, right? In in many ways. Like I actually think the standards are are thoughtful uh distillation of like the things that pretty much every text, literary and informational, um, presents and has to offer. I think it's important to know them and understand them, but they're just the lens on what you're doing, and the text really has to be at the center of it. And so if you look at any high-quality instructional materials, any curriculum that I think like is really pushing kids to do quality reading, they're gonna name the standards that you're looking at in every lesson. Um, you know, every text is going to present you with an opportunity, right? And the climax, you're pretty much always gonna need to be studying character development, right, of every story, because like something fundamental is shifting or changing in the characters' view of themselves or you know, the world around them. Um, the ending of pretty much every piece of fiction or nonfiction is gonna present you with a lesson or main idea or a story, right? Like those opportunities exist um every single day in text, but I think the shift for me as a teacher came when I started planning my standards thinking and you know, question processing around what the text had to offer, right? And not like what I thought my students still needed to master or grow in. Because at the end of the day, the lens of the standards just informs the kinds of questions and thinking we should be pushing kids to do what we should be looking for within a text. But the actual work of developing reading comprehension is the work of complex, careful daily reading.

Lori 26:00

All right. So I want to keep going and get a little bit nerdy now and into this standards conversation. So I'd like to take less like a step deeper. Um I think you know, the way that again, like checking off standards is is not the way we want to go, right? Like, okay, yes, we got standard 6.3, check the box. Melissa can do standard 6.3 forever. We've got, we know that that's not the best way to do it because really it's a text, the reader, the task, and those interplays are going to differ depending on, you know, where the reader is in that moment, the text, and then the task that we're asking. So when we think about standards, I've seen this a lot, Luke. I've seen these this verbiage. Standards based and standards aligned. Can you help us understand what's the difference? Like, how do you think about the difference in those two?

Luke Morin 26:50

Yeah, I like that um kind of thinking because um, in a sense, when you are going standards based, you are starting to search for things that are like maybe not there in your day-to-day lessons, right? So you may take a piece of text um that is wrapped up in the um kind of exposition, right? Where you are learning a lot about the um about the characters, about the setting, um, about the the worldview, right, um, of the author. And if you are really focused on trying to get kids to do like a main idea standard that day, um, you're starting to ask kids to do some mental gymnastics, right? And you're doing mental gymnastics in your own mind um by by kind of forcing um forcing things that aren't there, and it's gonna cause you to miss, I think, the most rigorous, interesting, and and really important part of the text, right? That is going to come up in that chunk of reading that you're teaching day to day. And so when you are standards aligned, um, you are starting with the text itself. And I um got this phrase from a former coach of mine, and she said um that um, you know, every every lesson we would always focus on the heart of the heavy lifting, right? Like what is the most important thing that students are going to be reading uh over the course of that chapter or the course of that paragraph or that segment? Um, you know, and what is the crucial thing that kids need to kind of master that they need to understand? What is the important piece of practice or the important piece of knowledge or schema that they need to gather? What is the crucial understanding, right, in that chapter that's going to then allow them to understand and have more independence and autonomy, right, in the future demands of the text itself. And so when you are standards-based, I think you have different incentives lined up. It makes the experience um of reading often really clunky because you're just kind of prioritizing these like two or three standards, maybe throughout like uh the story that don't really align with what it has to offer. And also I see the rigor tend to go down a lot too, because um, I'll see districts and coaches name things like 6.1, you know, which is like just find uh text evidence as like the priority standard. Well, you should be doing that probably 50 times every single lesson, right? And and like that needs to be at the center of your practice. Like these standards aren't really all like built quote unquote equally, right? Like some of them are gonna play out um almost no matter what you're reading, no matter what text you're interacting with. And and others, I think, um, really belong in like a high-level analysis space when you have a big picture set of ideas like text comparison. And uh so I think there's just a more sophisticated way really to think about text. I think it's important for folks to keep that in mind as they're planning for lessons.

Collective Close Reading In Practice

Melissa 29:43

Yeah, I'm I'm really loving like all these ways that you shifted your thinking about texts and your students and how to teach. So we want to get a little more specific now about what did you actually do in your classroom? Um, you talked about like daily reading of these complex texts. And I know in your article you mentioned something called collective close reading, which was a new term for me. I was familiar with close reading, as I imagine most of our listeners probably are, but I really loved this idea of collective close reading. So can you talk about like what that looked like in your classroom?

Luke Morin 30:18

Yeah. Um, I I think this idea of collective close reading um is one of the most powerful things that I came across. And it's like I have uh this piece of text here um that you know I I lined up a little bit in the story, but there's nothing I think more fun or more beautiful um for kids uh really or for teachers than to get the text that you're actually reading together and like get out your flare pen, you know, their their pencils, and like really start getting messy um with the work. Um and I think for me, annotation was always a bit of a struggle because nobody ever had me annotate as a student. I never, you know, I sometimes will go to a friend's house, and my favorite thing to do is to start just taking the books off of their shelves, you know, and and and and reading through them and not very popular at parties. Uh, but um I they will sometimes have these just like beautiful uh margin note, you know, filled uh text that they read like all through high school. That's really cool.

Melissa 31:19

But it's I loved in college when you would get a used text that had like all the notes in the margin. I'm like, I love this. Yes.

Luke Morin 31:28

I didn't have this experience, right? And I, you know, started in this place where it was like, okay, we like icons, okay, uh kids, let's all draw a question mark if we have a question and let's draw a star for any big ideas, you know. And and I initially tried that with with kids, but at the end of the day, it was really difficult for me to go back and even for them to go back and trace like what did that mean? And also if they didn't have um, if they didn't have like the right context and and meaning developed, they were making really meaningless annotations anyway.

Melissa 31:58

Yeah.

Luke Morin 31:58

And so I started shifting to this um kind of core concept that actually if I am giving kids a really complicated question on a really complicated text, and I like am actually expecting them to meet the rigor of my exemplar in class, uh, I it's not something I can just leave up to chance, right? Like I can't sit here and actually uh just like hope and pray um that they're gonna come to this key core understanding. So once I became determined really to like, all right, we're we're I really want kids to write this. What's it gonna take? Um, I I came to this idea of collective close reading. And so some of the non-negotiables here in this process, um, every kid needs to have a pencil and paper um in front of them. Um, I know that ed tech is kind of continuing to take a bigger and bigger role um in classrooms, but I am really a big pro paper guy. Um, they need to have a chunk of text in front of them kind of laid out in such a way that they have enough margin space and blank space, like double space the text the kids are gonna be working with, so they have room to write in it. Um, I need to have my intellectual prep documents that I need to know in advance what I'm gonna be marking up and putting down. So I'm not making it up. I need to have grappled with that in advance. Um, and then there's some like shared norms, right? Like I always say board equals paper. And for my sixth graders in particular, they're coming out of their final year of uh elementary school, right? And the middle school's a new phase and space. A lot of the grading I do, especially early in the year, is like I will do a ton of marking on my document camera, and I will actually just collect. And for some of the first weeks of school, um, most of the grade they're receiving is like, did you actually do everything that I did in class? Does your paper match mine exactly? Um, are you staying with me? And I think it creates such a cool record, right? In class of like, um, I sat up here and I I modeled and I talked and we we interacted and did some like turn and talks and whatnot uh for for five, seven, eight minutes. Um, what were you doing during that time? Um, well, now I actually have a record of like were kids uh with me um or not. And um this is a shared meaning-making space. Um, and it's definitely less watch me read and more read with me, right? Like I'm gonna be underlining and marking something up. I'm gonna be narrating what I'm marking up and why. Um I'm doing it for a purpose, right? Um, in the in the case of this uh Eccles short read for Bradbury, it was about like how does the author develop the ominous tone, right, of the opening paragraphs, like as the machine comes into focus. But over the course of that, like there's a ton of little implicit vocabulary moments where I need to define terms. Um, I'm drawing arrows from descriptors um out to the object that they described, right? Like I really fill up my paper, and a lot of the thinking that I'm doing in the moment um is revealed here. And I did a video on this that's on my blog um as well that really breaks it down and kind of has the relics, the before and the after that you can see as well. But I think the record um that it produces is really eventually like representative of the thinking that makes comprehension and reading possible.

Melissa 35:17

Is that that you the paper that you're holding up that has all the notes on it? Is that available on that video site that it is? I have it, I have it fully linked. If it wasn't there, I was gonna ask you if you could if you could share it with us. But yeah, we'll we'll link to that in our show notes so that our our listeners can get to it.

Establish Meaning Before Analysis

Lori 35:34

Okay, so Luke, you make a really important distinction between establishing meaning and analyzing meaning, analyzing meaning. And I think this work with the text has a lot to do with that. Um, but I'd love to hear from you why is it so important that students really understand what a text is saying before we ask them to analyze it? Because I think often sometimes those two get lumped in. And then I feel like that's when we're pushing students off the dock right into the water, just like flail around and take a guess, you know, do whatever stroke you think might kind of work and hopefully you get back onto the to the dock and you can pull yourself up. Like that, I think when we explicitly um really help students understand before we ask them to analyze, it makes a big difference. So I'd love to hear from you more about why.

Luke Morin 36:24

Yeah, I think that's such an important clarification. And I got this phrasing of establishing meaning versus analyzing meaning from um the book reading we considered. Um, and it was an incredible unlock for me because one of the things that they lay out there is that we have a tendency to like understand um uh like the it's the blooms um taxonomy, right? Of like you start at the like the base of like facts and understanding, and you work all the way up to like the top of the pyramid, which is analysis, um, which logically makes sense. Um, and and I'm sure in many disciplines uh that I do not teach, it is it is true. Um but when it comes to reading, a lot of times it actually plays out in the opposite manner, and especially when you get really complex text in front of kids. And so this idea of establishing meaning um really is the taking the time to kind of unwind the riddle, right, that like authors have put on the page. And so um it feels elementary a lot of times. I think one of the examples from reading we consider they use um is just oriented on pronouns uh again, like it's uh description of uh the army in Troy. And I think the um the pronoun they comes up like something like 13 times in the paragraph, you know, and when you read it as an experienced adult reader, you pretty much can kind of kind of sort your way through it pretty quickly. But um, when kids uh encounter it, um you suddenly realize there's a lot of he's, she's, and they's, and if they've mixed up, right, like even one of these pronouns, they suddenly don't really um understand uh the antecedent and who uh a particular action is is referring to. And that can really quickly mix up comprehension and understanding in kids in ways that we have struggled, uh, we often struggle to understand in the moment as a teacher. Um, I think the same often can come uh with uh authors who are intentionally like obfuscating meaning, right? And like that's what part of what makes a novel interesting, right? Is an author doesn't just come out and say what they mean, right? Like they they intentionally hide information, um, they intentionally describe things in obtuse ways um for readers, um, but uh over the course of the story, kids actually have to see and notice those small moments. So coming back to the opening chapter of The Giver, which by the way, we spend four days on in my class, um, because I think there's so much important kind of hidden information that if you don't notice uh the small author moves, kids are gonna really struggle to actually be able to analyze later in the story and and kind of make inferences. Um if you don't if you don't understand the tone, right, like in like the way that the the characters respond when the plane flies overhead, if you don't um if you don't see that what they do when they throw their bicycles down like reflects uh fear or an urgency and compliance, um, you miss a huge amount of the world building, right, that Lilis Lowry is doing and the opening pages. And so I do think analysis is the goal. Like I'm not gonna give kids a um a final essay on a text that is like just explain what happened in the story, right? We don't summarize to close things out. But when I'm asking this really complicated question, it's often a series, day after day of meaning-making um, you know, exercises with complex, interesting text that then enables kids to like focus, you're right. They have all of this meaning and background knowledge behind them, the schema is established. And then you'd be surprised, even kids who are really below level as readers, right, like their their brains still function right at a high level. And I think that's like a really important thing to remember about our kids who are reading below grade level. They actually are intellectually still functioning as 11-year-olds. They're able to process big ideas once you give them the tools and the understanding that they need in order to um to do so. Um, and so a huge part of this idea of collective close reading is we're picking our moments, right? We're finding the most crucial um kind of segments of text on a day-to-day basis. We're making meaning of them so that then I can release kids to go do a lot of analysis um on their own.

Planning Lily Pad Support Moments

Melissa 41:02

So, Luke, in your article, you talked about lily pads. And is this what we're talking about here? Are those lily pads? Because I love that idea of like, you know, you're giving them this like support so they can move forward on their own. I really love that. I'm wondering, you know, you're talking a lot about the teacher having to really dig into these texts to find those places that will help students to be able to read on their own. Do you have any tips for teachers on like what they should be looking for as they're analyzing their text that could, you know, really help their students move forward?

Luke Morin 41:38

Yeah. So I I've kind of started using this this term of a lily pad moment um in text, with the metaphor really being that a complex text is the pond, right? In a sense, and um kids need to get from one end of the pond to the other. And if you don't provide them with enough support, you know, as I described earlier, um, you're really just you know sending them out to pasture and they they begin to struggle, they begin to drown in the in the depth of the pond. Um lily pad moment for me is the moment where you uh kind of pull kids out of the deep water, right? Of the of the murky text. Um, you stand there with them, you kind of pull them above the depths. They they they get a little bit of a respite, right, from the struggle that is swimming, um, the in the the the depths of the dark water, and you you make meaning in a way that allows them then to kind of take a breath, to gain their confidence, regain their strength, to rest, right? And like you give them then from that collective moment on the pad itself, give them the tools that they need to jump back in the water and and swim to the next lily pad, right? And so I make a note um, you know, in the piece like if you give kids too many lily pads, right, like they can just walk across the pond and they never have to swim themselves, right? They don't have to struggle, they don't have to do any independent meaning making at all. And that's not a good thing either. But if you don't give them enough lily pads, right, they're not going to build the momentum, they're not gonna have the strength, they're not gonna have the even experience the joy, right, of the text itself because they're just gonna be struggling and drowning um and and and splashing about. Um, and so there's this quote that I that I love from from Harriet uh Janetos, and she says, the trick is finding that fine balance between explicitly sharing the secrets of complex text with our students and instilling in them the cognitive patience, as Marianne Wolfe calls it, necessary to tap into those secrets for themselves. And so when I think about Willie Pad moments and when I think about planning those really pad moments, my goal is actually like for as heavy as the support can be in these moments, my goal. Is actually always independence, right? And so in this moment, um, you know, this is the beginning of the story. Um almost always the beginning of a story, beginning of a novel, the first chapter, the first paragraphs, whatever it may be, um, there's so much happening, right? Even as an adult reader, when I get into a new piece, I'm just like, I know, I know the first 20 pages are gonna like kind of rock my world because there's a whole new set of language and ideas and sometimes physics, you know, and and and relationships that I'm gonna need to learn and immerse myself in, right? Like you rarely love a piece of reading from the first paragraph, right?

Melissa 44:40

I do it a lot with audiobooks. I'll go back. I'm like, I I need to listen again and only to the beginning because it's like I don't, I didn't get it. I didn't I don't get where we are, I don't get who the people are. Let me hear that again.

Luke Morin 44:50

It it takes a minute, right? And so it's like you, it's really important for you to be a guide for your kids in that moment. I almost never let kids finish a story on their own, right? Because it's so emotionally resonant, even if they, even if they have, I you know, almost always they do. If you've done a great job of teaching a novel or a piece, they're so eager to finish, but it's so joyful, right? To to finish and wrap up a piece of text um with your with your class. Kids have that memory, that lasts, that momentum forever. The number of times that a class of 34, sixth graders has stood up and started clapping, right? Like at the end, it's like it just really gives you a lot of juice and it gives them a lot of juice and joy as well. Um, you know, the the the climax of a story, I'm almost always going to name as a as a key moment, right? That we're gonna need to stop and really notice it together. So when I think about this, it's like any passage that's gonna require significant comprehension work, right? Which again often comes early in a story. Um, we really tend to go slowly um early on and a lot faster through kind of the development of the exposition or the rising action. And then I think any moment where that's either really emotionally resonant, right? Like um the passing of a character or a heavy event, anything that shifts the plot, right? Like when we kind of are pivoting between the elements of a story, the exposition to the rising action, to the climax to the falling action to the conclusion, those tend to be really pad moments. And um then I look for any opportunity that I have to to kind of illustrate beautiful craft, right? Um there's this really great um video of a teacher named Rue Ratchre. Um, and again, the giver is one of my favorites to talk about, but it just offers so much. And it's the moment where Jonas's father um, you know, does a commits release um on an infant and he does a sensitivity analysis. And in this case, his Lulipad moment is only one sentence long. Um, and the dad describes the baby, like is talking to him in a babyish voice. He calls him a little shrimp um as he is, you know, ejecting the infant. And it's like this really powerful moment, right? Um, with you can see the intellectual and emotional disconnect of the father, you can see the cruelty of this system and kind of some of its um kind of horrific outlays, right? It's something that was it's like the moment you see the through the utopian um blanket, the dystopia that it is. And so he has kids read that sentence four or five times. He swaps out individual words, how would that affect the meaning? Um, I think it's a perfect example, right? A Louispad can be a whole chapter, it can be a paragraph, a sentence, or even a couple of words for kids.

Let The Text Drive Lesson Structure

Melissa 47:28

Yeah, Luke, as you're talking about this, I'm I'm just reflecting back on teaching and thinking, you know, so many times like I had people coming in for observations and they were looking for this, like I do, we do, you do in every single lesson. And as you're talking, I'm thinking, like, yeah, maybe one day is like so much you do because it's that part of the text that they can do on their own. And maybe another day is like all we do because it's one of those lily pad moments, and we need to do this together. Um, would you agree with that? That like the normal like way people think about that explicit instruction might just not, it might not work every day in that same sense with this.

Luke Morin 48:06

No, I love that idea. And I think this idea um that release like is gradual by default is really flawed, right? That like every day I'm gonna model, then you're gonna, you know, I I think that um the reality of of immersing in messy text almost never plays out like that, right? And that's part of why I think standards-based instruction and like worksheets can be so tempting because they can offer a very predictable framework for how you know a middle school reading class can go. Um, but at the end of the day, it's like you're gonna have days or swaths of days where it's really heavy collective practice. You're gonna have some parts of text where there's long independent swims, right? Where you need to send kids off to go kind of work through, take what they've learned, what they've studied with you, and make some independent meaning and struggle a little bit. And there's also gonna be a lot of times where it's like, okay, we've worked through something hard. Now I'm gonna see what you can get, and then I'm gonna run around with my pen in hand and I'm gonna create a ton of checkpoints. And as soon as I notice that five or six of us have all made the same wrong inference or we've missed the same crucial point that's in my example, like I actually need to stop and pull back. And maybe I need to just quickly model or explain that point so that you can dive back into the water, right? Like, I think um the beauty of this is like you really let the text decide the lesson structure and not the other way around, right? And it makes every day feel different. It makes you um, I think really excited for your intellectual preparation as well, right? Because like truly you're you're just reading and you are thinking about how is this intellectually going to play with the kids over the course of class. Um, and when you start doing that, it makes reading class and like preparing for reading class, I think really fun because there's such an intense interplay between you and the students at all times of class.

Lori 49:57

Yeah, as you were uh, Melissa, you were asking that question and and Luke, as you were responding, I was thinking a lot of even about Bloom's taxonomy that we talked about earlier, that it really does kind of mimic that not able to be followed kind of structure. Like, you know, I know there are times where we go deeper into a text the further that we are repeatedly reading it, or the more that we are, you know, know about the characters, or maybe we're on those lily pads. But going back to that reader, text and task, if I'm a reader who has a really strong like background knowledge or a really great understanding of this type of genre that we're reading, I might go up the taxonomy rungs a little faster than another, you know, student sitting next to me. And that's not to say that like if the principal comes in and they're looking, you know, for this checklist and whatever. Like we're still deep in the text and we're we're working at different levels within the text in order to meet the needs really of everyone and to meet the textual demands. So I love the idea of putting that text front and center. It's something Melissa and I talk about a lot. Um, but I do think it can get like a little bit tricky when we're talking about it in the context of, you know, a checklist or observations. And it does feel harder.

Luke Morin 51:16

It does feel harder in some ways.

Support Without Endless Differentiation

Luke Morin 51:18

And uh, but it's also um I think it's like also just important to remember that um you don't have to like you don't have to really modify your materials, right? Like if you have a curriculum, I don't think that this process is asking anyone to go and rewrite all your your lesson plans, right? Like if you have a great curriculum, it is um inherently like littered with interesting, complex text, right? With good questions already written. And I think this is more about how are you building the bridge, right? Between like kids are being asked to read this pretty complicated thing, they're being asked to write this pretty complicated response, right? And I need to help figure out like what are the crucial moments, what are the things I'm gonna be checking and looking for, and how am I gonna support them, right, in the text itself. And when your default is really to have your pen in hand and to have your your document camera at the ready, um, sometimes things go according to plan. I know, okay, paragraph two is like gonna be where the heaviness of this is. This is the heart of the heavy lifting today. And so I'm gonna take the time and I'm gonna model this carefully and read it carefully with my students, right? We're gonna mark it up together and then I'm gonna release them um with their partners or independently to kind of wrap up the rest of the text, make one or two more annotations. I'm gonna get around and check. I know I'm looking for this, you know, one idea. So sometimes you you plan that out. And sometimes you get in and you read the first response they've written and you realize they haven't understood uh a crucial idea. And it's just a matter of having the the tools and the structures in place, right? To like, hey, looks like we need to take a quick pause. Uh, I see we're missing a really key important point. So we're gonna dive into the text real fast, get your pencils in hand, uh, make sure your paper matches mine. We're on paragraph number two right here. And here's a here's a piece of dialogue that we're gonna we're gonna break out. And so I think, in a sense, this can feel overwhelming if you are thinking, oh, I need to rewrite a lot. I I'm not uh approaching text. But as long as you are integrating appropriate complex text in your class, I actually think this frees you up from feeling the weight of having to differentiate so much in class. So, what I think this actually does for you is it really frees you um from this burden of feeling like you have to um, like I used to create two or three versions of a packet every day, or or do this intensive differentiation where you're creating all these different materials for students and for kids. Um, instead, you can really release kids into the work and you can pull back as needed when you spot those opportunities and those moments. Um, and you can really just think about what are the key ideas within the plan and the text you already have that are going to be required to give kids the tools they need to then answer at the level the exemplar demands.

Lori 54:04

Yeah, it's it's just working smarter. Uh, I I think anyway, I think it's a smarter way to work because it's it's a way of really focusing on your students and what they need and then allowing the materials just be supportive of that and you support them. And it's a beautiful little symphony there.

Final Advice And Ways To Connect

Lori 54:23

So, Luke, we're so glad that you came to talk to us about this. Um, I guess if there's anything that you want to share with teachers who are listening, like teachers who are feeling like, oh, you know, I get this, I'm feeling the weight of this, uh, what would you say to them?

Luke Morin 54:39

I would just say, like, if we want to build resilient readers, like we really have to let our students experience the real work of reading. Um and that happens really with us beside them, um, and like wading into the text itself. And at the end of the day, it's like the natural process of what you would do as a reader, right, is like what students need to see being done. And so um I think this is just a really aligned, joyful, paper-driven um way of thinking about quality reading instruction. And the the payoff is that once you really take the time to establish like the key ideas at the beginning of the text, kids can absolutely soar on their own. Um, they are brimming with confidence and joy. They come to start to really love the text that you're reading. Um, and they can handle so much more work and rigor if you just give them the tools up front. And so um it's really worth the it's worth the stretch to kind of figure it out. Um, and I I can't think of a better way to bring the gift and joy of reading um to our middle grade kids.

Melissa 55:51

Thank you so much for sharing, I mean, for being so open and honest about the way you used to teach, like we do, and you know, how what shifted for you and for sharing this really, you know, new way of looking at teaching reading that I hope a lot of people are already doing out there. But if not, I hope that they're they're listening and can make some shifts in their practice as well. And we will link your article because we absolutely loved it. That's why we reached out to you immediately, and we'll make sure that we have that for our listeners to listen or to read as well.

Luke Morin 56:20

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And you can check out more of my writing and examples of this work, um, models of how I've done this with different texts on my blog, the Middle School Literacy Project.

Melissa 56:35

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 56:45

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 56:55

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

Lori 57:07

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