How To Fix This Common Mistake in Comprehension Instruction (Part 2)

Welcome back to the podcast, teachers. This is part two of a little two-part comprehension series that we are doing. If you have not already listened to episode 244, go back and listen to that episode before you finish this one.

This two-part series was inspired by our Unlocking Comprehension workshop that we are currently offering to teachers. The goal of the workshop is to help teachers understand what comprehension is, what it isn’t, and how we can truly help students comprehend what they’re reading on a much deeper level.

We’ve received such great feedback on this workshop from teachers who have attended, and I know that not everyone has time to tune in and watch a 60-minute workshop, so I wanted to share some of the main takeaways here on the podcast. However, I will say that we are still offering this workshop throughout the month of March. So if you haven’t attended our Unlocking Comprehension workshop and you’d like to, you can sign up at stellarteacher.com/workshop.

Okay, let’s quickly recap last week’s episode, which was part one. Last week, we talked about the number one mistake teachers make when trying to build comprehension in their upper elementary classroom. If you remember, that mistake was teaching individual standards and comprehension skills in isolation and making the standards and skills the main focus of our literacy block.

For the longest time, we’ve approached comprehension with a strategy-of-the-week approach. One week we teach the main idea, the next week we teach summarizing. There’s this idea that if we teach individual comprehension strategies, then our students will become lifelong readers.

But we know from both experience and research that this isn’t the case.

So again, if you want to understand more about why the strategy-of-the-week approach doesn’t work, go back and listen to episode 244, or you can sign up for the workshop.

But my goal for today’s episode is to answer this question: What do we do instead? If we aren’t teaching with a strategy-of-the-week approach, then how should we be planning our comprehension lessons?

Today, I’m going to share two things that can have a significant impact and improve your students’ comprehension.

But before I do that, I want to remind you of a quote I shared last week from the article No More Strategy of the Week: Connecting Comprehension Instruction to Text by Smith, Williams, and Frackleton. In their article, they shared this powerful quote that I feel really connects to what we’re talking about:

“Decontextualized comprehension work does not transfer well. Instead, we need to consider how to facilitate the conditions in which comprehension can occur.”

So when thinking about comprehension, we want to avoid treating it as an isolated skill. Instead, we need to focus on how we can create the right conditions for comprehension to take place.

The first thing we can do is implement a simple framework that helps us be intentional about incorporating the elements that we know lead to comprehension.

I know I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, and many of you are familiar with it, but Scarborough’s Reading Rope provides a great visual for the language comprehension elements necessary for skilled reading. And really, skilled reading is just another way of saying reading with comprehension.

We’ve taken the language comprehension elements—background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax—and turned them into a practical 3-2-1 routine that you can use before any reading experience.

The whole goal of this 3-2-1 routine is to help you plan and create the conditions that we know lead to deep comprehension.

So if we’re not teaching individual strategies in isolation, then what are we doing? We’re intentionally creating the conditions that lead to deeper comprehension.

So let’s break down this 3-2-1 routine. There are three things you’re going to do before you begin reading. First, you’ll build and activate background knowledge so students have a basic understanding of key topics found in the text. Next, you’ll introduce and explicitly teach any key vocabulary words that are essential to understanding the text. And finally, you’ll preview or highlight the genre or text structure so that students have the literacy knowledge necessary to understand how the text is organized.

None of these steps take a long time—maybe just one to two minutes for each. But if your students have an understanding of the topic, know the vocabulary words, and recognize how the information is organized, it will be so much easier for them to comprehend what they’re reading. Taking the time before reading to lay this groundwork sets them up for strong comprehension.

Now, while you’re reading, there are two things you’re going to do. First, you’ll stop at a sentence that is particularly important to the text and discuss some syntactic element of it. In The Reading Comprehension Blueprint, which is such a great book for upper elementary literacy teachers, Nancy Hennessy says that comprehension begins at the sentence level.

Think about the texts your students are reading—they are filled with complex sentences, yet we rarely take the time to break them down and discuss how they are constructed. We talk about sentence structure in writing, but we don’t often help students understand how to analyze and deconstruct sentences for meaning. We want to pause and discuss the structure of a sentence—maybe explain how a conjunction is used to join two ideas together or how a pronoun replaces a noun. Anything that helps students better understand sentence structure will ultimately support their comprehension.

If students have strong syntactic knowledge, they will have an easier time comprehending complex sentences. As Nancy Hennessy says in her book, comprehension begins at the sentence level. Focusing on just one sentence each time you read is a great way to strengthen students’ ability to understand complex text.

The second thing you want to do while reading is to be intentional about incorporating questions that prompt students to use verbal reasoning. Verbal reasoning is the ability to use inferential thinking to determine what the author is implying but not directly stating. It also includes analyzing figurative language, metaphors, and the overall language used in a text to better understand its meaning.

We can ask strategic questions that encourage students to engage in verbal reasoning, making sure we are intentional about the types of questions we ask as students read.

Finally, after you have finished reading, the one thing you’re going to do is assign students some form of written response. Students need to write about reading, and research shows that writing about reading improves comprehension. In fact, I did an entire podcast episode on this topic. So if you want to learn more about how writing about reading boosts comprehension, go back and listen to episode number 222.

So not only is writing about reading going to improve your students’ comprehension, but it’s also an opportunity to reinforce key writing skills. In this short written response, students can go through the entire writing process—they can practice brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, and publishing. You can also remind students of important writing concepts like capitalization, punctuation, and subject-verb agreement, integrating grammar into the process. We know that grammar is most effective when it’s taught in the context of actual writing.

Pretty much any writing objective you want to teach can be incorporated and practiced through a written response about a text students have just read. Research also shows that when students learn how to write through writing about the content they are reading, it is far more effective than separating out the writing block and having them write about random topics like their favorite vacation or what animal would make the best pet. So again, you’re going to get a lot more bang for your buck if you incorporate writing about reading into your literacy instruction.

So, let’s review the 3-2-1 framework. The three things you do before reading are: activate background knowledge, introduce vocabulary, and highlight text structure. The two things you do while reading are: discuss sentence structure (syntax) and incorporate verbal reasoning. And finally, the last thing you do is have students write about their reading. This framework can be used with any type of text—novels, articles, picture books. When you put this 3-2-1 routine in place, you are naturally planning and creating the conditions that we know lead to strong comprehension.

That’s the first suggestion—if you want to create the conditions that lead to comprehension, implement the 3-2-1 framework.

The second thing you can do is be really strategic about your text selection. So often—and this is what I did when I was in the classroom, and of course, I wish I could go back and do it differently—we select texts based on the standards we need to teach. For example, if our strategy of the week is identifying the main idea, we look for a text with a really clear main idea. The problem with this approach is that when we select texts based on standards, we’re making the standards the star of our literacy block—when really, the text should be the focus.

Instead, we need to think more intentionally about how and why we are selecting texts. First, we want to select texts that are truly purposeful. If the only reason you are reading a text is to practice a standard, that’s not a strong enough reason. You want there to be a deeper purpose—such as expanding students’ background knowledge on a specific topic, introducing them to a historical or scientific concept, helping them develop empathy or compassion, or even simply enjoying a story by a favorite author. The purpose should not just be practicing a standard, because here’s the thing—you can apply standards to any text. You don’t need to choose texts based on the standard; instead, you should focus on selecting texts that are meaningful and engaging.

Another important factor in text selection is paying attention to the topics covered in the texts. When possible, we want to choose texts that explore meaningful and significant topics. There are so many sources available for finding texts, which can be great—it makes teachers’ jobs that much easier. You can find passages on TPT, ReadWorks, NewsELA, Time for Kids, and even inside The Stellar Literacy Collective, where we have a wide variety of texts. However, with so many options available, we need to be selective about the topics we choose to teach. We don’t want to simply grab what is quick and easy—we want to be intentional about reading texts that cover important and relevant topics.

I remember when I was teaching fourth grade, and we were covering nonfiction text structure. When we discussed the sequencing text structure, my students read a passage about the assembly line process in a fast food restaurant. It explained the steps from placing an order to how the food was prepared in the back and delivered to the customer so quickly. It was interesting, and it was fine, but if I think about the significance of that topic, it wasn’t necessarily meaningful or important. If my goal was to teach my students how to identify the sequencing text structure, I could have chosen a passage about the life cycle of a plant or an animal, or a historical text outlining the timeline of the civil rights movement—something much more meaningful and significant—while still applying the same standard.

Really thinking about important topics is something my curriculum team and I focused on when we were creating our whole group lessons inside The Stellar Literacy Collective. We wanted our texts to expand students’ knowledge. In our lessons, students are learning how to identify the main idea and how to summarize, but they’re doing so while also learning important science and social studies topics like ecosystems and the American Revolution, or while reading stories about how to be a good friend or a responsible citizen. Again, you can teach the standard with any topic, which means we should be strategic in selecting topics that will be meaningful to our students and help them expand their knowledge.

Okay, let’s do a quick recap. If we want to move beyond the strategy-of-the-week approach and truly help our students build comprehension, there are two things you can start doing.

First, be intentional about creating the conditions that lead to comprehension. You can use the 3-2-1 framework I shared, where you build background knowledge, introduce key vocabulary words, analyze sentence structure, encourage verbal reasoning, and incorporate writing about reading.

Second, be intentional with your text selection. Be mindful about selecting texts that are both purposeful and meaningful—ideally, ones that are content-rich rather than simply choosing texts to match a standard.

If you start making these shifts—while there are certainly more strategies you can incorporate—even these two adjustments will help students engage with texts on a much deeper level and truly comprehend beyond just surface-level understanding.

If you’d like to learn more about moving beyond the strategy-of-the-week approach or dive deeper into what we talked about today, we’d love to have you join us for our Unlocking Comprehension workshop. Like I said, we’re offering it through the month of March, and you can sign up at stellarteacher.com/workshop to get even more strategies and insights.

As always, thank you for tuning in! I hope to see you back here next Monday, and until then, have a stellar week.