Are You Making This Mistake in Your Comprehension Instruction? (Part 1)

Hey there, and welcome back to the Stellar Teacher Podcast. I have been looking forward to today’s episode because we’re diving into something that I think is going to resonate with so many teachers. We recently hosted a brand-new workshop called Unlocking Comprehension: Moving Beyond Strategies to Build Lasting Comprehension. We had over 3,000 teachers sign up for this event!

Now, if you did not get a chance to sign up, there’s good news—you still can! We’re going to be offering a few more sessions in March, so head over to stellarteacher.com/workshop to save your seat.

During this workshop, we shared a lot of practical ideas to help teachers build lasting comprehension with their literacy instruction because that is our goal, right? As upper elementary reading teachers, we want our students to truly understand what they are reading. But before we got into these practical strategies, we spent some time breaking down why some of our current comprehension practices just aren’t working.

Now, as we were talking through this, so many teachers were typing things like, Yes, I understand! I’m in the same position! I’ve never thought of it this way before! It really resonated with them, and it made me think—this would be something valuable to discuss on the podcast. So here we are.

During the workshop, I shared what I believe is the number one mistake teachers are making when it comes to teaching comprehension, and that is that we are teaching the standards in isolation.

Now, I want you to take a minute and check in with yourself—really think about this. Is this how you are currently approaching comprehension in your classroom? If so, then your teaching might look something like this:

You start your lessons with an objective like, Today, we’re going to identify the main idea, or This week, we’re going to practice analyzing characters.

You choose texts to match specific skills. So if you’re teaching main idea, you find a text with a super clear main idea so it’s easy for your students to identify. If you’re teaching text structures, you find a passage that includes all five different text structures, regardless of the topic.

You model and teach one skill at a time, focusing on each standard separately. Your instruction is centered around a checklist of standards—one week you’re teaching plot, the next week you’re teaching character analysis, then point of view, and one by one, you check off the standards throughout the year.

If your students struggle with a skill, you simply give them more practice with that specific skill or standard. Maybe you pull them into small groups based on standards, or you find task cards or passages focused on that one skill your students need more practice with.

Now, I know this approach all too well because it’s exactly what I did in my classroom. This was my approach to comprehension. And now, being out of the classroom, I realize this did not lead to my students building lasting comprehension.

There are many reasons why this approach doesn’t work for our students, and I’ll get into that in a minute. But I remember thinking specifically about this time of year—test prep season. My school was all about being data-driven. We wanted to make data-informed decisions.

So we would analyze students’ practice test results, identify the standards they struggled with, and because we wanted them to pass the test and master the standards, we would give them more passages and questions targeting those exact same standards.

I remember spending hours creating personalized test prep packets for each of my students. If a student missed a main idea question, I’d give them an entire set of main idea passages with additional main idea questions. If they struggled with text structure, I’d do the same.

I even remember when I was an assistant principal, we had Saturday tutorials, and we would spend so much time grouping students by the standards. Okay, this group needs help with summarizing. This group needs help with context clues. This group needs help with text structure.

But here’s the thing I failed to realize then—something I now know—This approach doesn’t always work. And it is not going to work for all of our students. And if we are teaching, we want our instruction to benefit all of our students. If this has been your approach, you may have noticed the same things I did.

So, I would have students who could ace a main idea question on one passage but struggle with it on another—their comprehension results were so inconsistent. I had this group of students where I never knew what to expect. Some weeks, they would score in the 90s and high 80s on their tests, and then the following week, they’d be in the 40s and 50s. And I was like, What is going on?

Ultimately, students were inconsistent from text to text, and their inconsistency really made me question my approach to teaching comprehension. If comprehension is a skill, shouldn’t students be able to apply that skill across any text they read? It’s kind of like driving a car. Once you learn how to drive, you can drive anywhere—whether you’re on a highway, in a city, or on a country road. But reading comprehension isn’t like that.

That leads me to three big reasons why teaching the standards in isolation doesn’t lead to lasting comprehension. And like I said, if this sounds familiar and you’re recognizing some of your current instructional practices, hang in there. We’re going to talk about why this approach doesn’t work, and eventually, I’ll share a solution. But also, don’t feel bad about it. This is how so many teachers have taught, and once we realize there’s a more effective way, we can adjust our approach.

So, let’s talk about why teaching the standards in isolation does not lead to lasting comprehension.

First of all, when students learn comprehension skills in isolation, they might be able to identify a main idea in a very controlled setting. Right? You search for a passage with a clear, easy-to-identify main idea because you want your students to be successful. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they truly understand what they’re reading or that they’ll always be able to determine the main idea in any text they encounter.

Let me give you an example that might help illustrate why teaching skills in isolation doesn’t guarantee that students will be able to transfer them from text to text. I consider myself a strong reader. I read often—it’s one of my favorite hobbies. I read a variety of genres: fiction, nonfiction, and literacy books. I can summarize a text, identify the main idea, and analyze text structure. But here’s the catch—I can only do those things when I have enough background knowledge and vocabulary to understand what I’m reading.

Now, my husband is an engineer, and we have a lot of engineering textbooks in our house. If he handed me a textbook on thermodynamics and asked me to summarize it or identify the main idea, I would struggle—big time. And my struggle wouldn’t be because I needed more practice summarizing. My struggle would be because I don’t have the background knowledge or vocabulary around the topic of thermodynamics to read and understand a textbook without support.

The same thing happens to our students when we isolate comprehension skills. Teaching main idea as a standalone skill doesn’t mean our students will be able to apply it to any text. True comprehension requires so much more than just mastering individual standards. It requires things like background knowledge, vocabulary, and the ability to read fluently.

Comprehension is more than just the standards, but for some reason, in upper elementary specifically, we tend to equate the two. We think that if we teach our students the standards, they’ll be able to understand anything they read. But when we focus only on teaching comprehension skills and standards in isolated lessons, we ignore everything else that is essential for true, lasting comprehension.

So, the first reason why we don’t want to teach the standards in isolation is that it does not lead to lasting comprehension.

The second reason why we want to avoid this is that our standards aren’t really a checklist of what to teach—they are end-of-year expectations. And I think this is a major misconception about how we view the standards. We treat them like a checklist, and this is exactly how I approached them in my classroom. This is also how my school handled it.

At the start of the year, we were given our standards, and we would map them out. We’d look at them and say, Okay, let’s teach plot for two weeks, then character analysis, and so on. We’d map everything out so that when we looked at the entire year, we had a plan to teach every standard in isolation before the year ended.

But the problem with this approach is that our standards tell us where students should be by the end of the year. That’s not the same as how to structure our daily lessons or how to map out what we’re actually teaching.

So, let’s talk about an example. By the end of the year, if you’re a fourth-grade teacher using the Common Core State Standards, according to RI 4.2, your students need to be able to determine the main idea and explain how it’s supported by key details.

Does this mean that you must teach identifying the main idea in isolation? Does that mean your students have to practice it in isolation in order to master it by the end of the year? Not necessarily. And I think there are a few reasons why we don’t have to teach everything in isolation.

First of all, students have already been introduced to concepts like main idea in earlier grades. It’s not a brand-new concept for a fourth grader. So, we don’t always have to start from scratch with explicit, isolated instruction every year.

Secondly, students need lots of ongoing practice. When we teach our standards in isolation, it often looks like, Okay, this week, we’re focusing on the main idea, and we put all of our emphasis on that one skill. But then, we tend to forget about what we previously taught. If you think about it, students are really only getting one or two weeks out of the year where they focus on that specific standard.

Instead of teaching just the main idea for a week or two, what we really want to do is prompt students to think about and determine the main idea whenever they’re reading nonfiction. The more practice students get at finding the main idea across different texts and in different contexts, the better they will be at applying that skill.

Ultimately, what we really want is for students to stop thinking about comprehension skills in isolation the way we teach them and instead be able to apply multiple comprehension strategies at once.

For example, if students are reading nonfiction, we want them to be able to identify the main idea, summarize, ask and answer questions, and use context clues—not just focus on one skill at a time. But when we teach standards in isolation, we’re not really showing our students how to integrate multiple strategies naturally while they’re reading.

This is something that really stood out to me when I was reading through the National Reading Panel. About a year ago, I did a whole series on the five pillars of reading, and the National Reading Panel emphasizes that students benefit the most when multiple comprehension strategies are taught and practiced together rather than in isolation. Research shows us that combining strategies leads to greater comprehension gains for our students.

In fact, there is an article, No More Strategy of the Week: Connecting Comprehension Instruction to Text by Smith, Williams, and Frackleton, that states, decontextualized comprehension work does not transfer well. Instead, we need to consider how to facilitate the conditions in which comprehension can occur.

I love that phrase—how do we facilitate the conditions in which comprehension can occur?—which leads me to my third and most important reason why we really want to avoid teaching standards in isolation: comprehension is not an individual skill; it is an outcome.

If there’s one big takeaway I want you to remember, it’s this. We talked about this a lot in our book study last summer when we read Shifting the Balance (the third- through fifth-grade version). In that text, the authors explain that while it might seem logical to treat comprehension as a skill, reading comprehension is actually an outcome, not a single skill.

I loved this quote because so many of us—including myself—were taught or trained to think of comprehension as an individual skill that we can teach.

And for me, I think it probably wasn’t until I saw Scarborough’s Reading Rope that I had my own personal aha moment. Looking at this visual—and if you’ve never seen it, go Google Scarborough’s Reading Rope. I know I’ve talked about it a lot on the podcast, but it’s helpful to see the visual. When I saw the rope, I realized that comprehension isn’t a skill—it’s an outcome. It’s the result of reading. It’s the goal, right? When our students read, we want the result to be comprehension.

So let’s quickly talk about Scarborough’s Reading Rope to help you create a mental image that reinforces the idea that comprehension is an outcome. Imagine a rope with two strands woven together. The upper strand represents language comprehension, which includes elements like background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, literacy knowledge, and verbal reasoning. The lower strand represents word recognition, including phonological awareness, decoding, and sight word recognition. When these strands intertwine and are woven together, they result in skilled reading—which is another way of saying they result in comprehension.

And I think this is why this model explains comprehension so well. Let’s go back to my example of trying to read and summarize my husband’s engineering textbook. Why would I struggle to summarize that text? It’s not because I lack the ability to summarize in general—it’s because I don’t have background knowledge about thermodynamics, and I don’t have the content-specific vocabulary to make sense of the words on the page.

This is exactly what happens to our students when comprehension is taught in isolation—we tend to overlook everything else that impacts comprehension. Imagine that I’m a student struggling to summarize that engineering textbook in a classroom—maybe even my own classroom from years ago. If I think about how my school would have handled that scenario, my teacher would see me struggling and assume I needed more practice summarizing. So, I’d get worksheets, graphic organizers, extra strategies, and a lot of summarization practice.

But here’s the problem—summarizing isn’t actually my issue. What I really need is someone to give me key vocabulary words from the textbook so I can understand the terminology. I need background knowledge about thermodynamics to provide context for what I’m reading. I might also need an explanation of the text structure so I know what to expect and how the information is organized. If I had those things, I wouldn’t necessarily need tons of extra summarization practice—I’d be able to read the text, apply multiple comprehension strategies at once, and actually understand what I was reading.

And the same is true for our students. When we isolate comprehension skills, we miss the bigger picture. Comprehension isn’t about practicing a single skill repeatedly. It’s about creating the right conditions so our students can actually understand what they’re reading.

If we want our students to build lasting comprehension—to truly understand what they read and move beyond surface-level reading—we need to stop treating comprehension as a set of isolated skills. Instead, we need to ask ourselves: How can we create the conditions that allow comprehension to happen in our classroom?

Now, we need to talk about how to shift our instruction to create conditions for deeper comprehension while still ensuring that our students meet end-of-year expectations. Because even though we might not be teaching our standards in isolation, we still need to make sure our students are prepared for their end-of-year tests. We want to be able to say with confidence, Yes, they can determine the main idea. Yes, they can summarize a text.

There are definitely strategies we can use to create the conditions that lead to comprehension without having to teach our standards in isolation.

Unfortunately, we’re out of time for today’s episode, but tune in next week because I’ll be doing part two of this series. I’ll break down exactly how to shift the emphasis away from isolated standards and share strategies to help you create a more effective, comprehension-driven literacy block.

And if you really want to dive deeper into what I talked about today—and even more of these strategies—join us for our Unlocking Comprehension workshop. What I’m covering on the podcast is just a teaser for what we go over in the workshop, so if you want to dig deeper, sign up! We’re hosting a few sessions in March, and you can save your seat at stellarteacher.com/workshop.

Be sure to tune in next week, because, like I said, I’ll be sharing specific strategies to move away from the “strategy of the week” approach and instead create the conditions that lead to lasting comprehension.

As always, thanks so much for tuning in this week—I’ll see you next Monday!