Welcome! I believe great teaching comes from consistently using simple, effective techniques with a strong curriculum that builds students' knowledge of themselves and the world through beautiful, challenging texts. Teaching practices only matter if they actually improve student learning, so I’m less interested in chasing the next new idea and more focused on practicing and refining what we know works, based on real evidence of what helps kids learn. In short ... simply teaching well.
Here, you'll find short, blog-post style reflections and resources on some of these practices. If you're interested in deeper learning, check out the professional learning pages.
It's everyone's nemesis ... pacing. A lesson goes too fast, and you feel like you haven't done it justice. A lesson goes too slow, and you've lost them. How do you get it all in, and well? If you've asked this, you're not alone. Pacing an EL lesson well, so that we know students have learned and worked AND we're able to teach one lesson in a day, is one of those things that novice and experienced teachers alike can find challenging.
But strong pacing is incredibly important, both within and across lessons. It's easy to get off pace and next thing you know, it's late spring, and we're struggling to even begin Module 4. We're frustrated and rushed, and the kids aren't producing like we want them to.
What's a teacher to do? Here are 5 of my favorite ideas to help with strong lesson pacing.
Set and use timers - in places in a lesson where you know it'll be tempting to slow way down such as student transitions, protocols, turn and talks, discussions, and question sequences.
Reach out to your academic coach for a time audit. He or she can come in and time stamp your lesson to see where you might be spending too much time and how you can adjust pacing.
Don't spend more than 5-10 minutes on learning targets. If your pacing is brisk out of the gate, it's likely to stay that way, and it's easy to get bogged down early in learning targets.
Don't add things to a lesson. The materials are designed to scaffold naturally.
Work with your academic coach to make sure you're beginning a Module with the end in mind. When you know where you're going, and what's most important, you're less likely to get off track in the day-to-day.
Looking for more?
Here are tips from EL
Here are tips from MCS teachers
If you’re wondering about the difference between a gist and a main idea (or theme), you’re not alone. It’s a common question because the terms are closely related and often used interchangeably. While similar, they are not the same.
The gist is your initial sense of what a text is mostly about. The word literally means the essence of a text. You get the gist when you skim or lightly read, forming a first impression. The main idea, on the other hand, is the key point the author wants you to take away. It can only be identified through careful reading and attention to important details.
Sometimes your gist turns out to be the main idea, but other times it doesn’t. That’s because gist is based on limited information, while the main idea requires deeper analysis of the entire text.
Here’s how this plays out in real life. Every Sunday, my husband and I get The New York Times. I skim my favorite sections with a cup of coffee, looking for articles that catch my attention. I might quickly read part of an article to get the gist. For example, I might think an article is about the benefits of planting vegetables in raised beds and decide to read it more closely. After careful reading, I may discover that the article really focuses on how to build a raised bed instead. My gist helped me decide whether to read, but identifying the main idea helped me truly understand the article.
Both steps—finding the gist and identifying the main idea—are essential for comprehension. Together, they help readers make sense of what they read. Here's a great video of kids explaining it themselves.
If you want to improve student engagement, one powerful yet simple strategy is implementing a Cold Call. It means exactly what it sounds like: students don’t raise their hands to answer questions. Instead, the teacher calls on students whether they’ve volunteered or not. While simple in theory, it can be challenging to break the habit of calling only on eager volunteers.
When teachers rely on raised hands, many students can opt out of thinking and participating. This also limits accurate formative assessment, since responses come from only a small group. Cold Call sets the expectation that all students should always be ready to contribute. It improves pacing, strengthens checks for understanding, and, when delivered with warmth, communicates that every student’s thinking matters. Most importantly, it’s an inclusive and equitable practice that amplifies all voices.
To implement this strategy, you only need a random name generator, and it can be as low-tech as popsicle sticks. A few key principles help ensure success:
Be consistent: Use Cold Call regularly so students expect it and feel prepared.
Be systematic: A clear, fair process reinforces trust and equity.
Be positive: Cold Call is not a punishment—it’s an opportunity to shine.
Be prepared: Know your questions, ideal responses, and which ones lend themselves to Cold Call in advance.
It may feel uncomfortable at first, but it ultimately leads to stronger classroom dialogue and a more supportive learning community.
It's spring. The trees are greening, we're having more warm days than not, and Spring Break is right around the corner. All of this means it's that time of the school year.
The Test is coming.
To begin - and to be perfectly transparent - the purpose of this post isn't to debate whether or not we should administer standardized tests, argue about the heavy accountability they carry, or rail against the system of assessments in general. No matter how we feel about them, they are here, they have a purpose, they are a reality, and they carry weight.
Instead, the purpose of this post is to talk about what we should - and shouldn't - do when we begin to feel the testing crunch that comes around every spring.
Here's what often happens. Right around Spring Break, text-centered lesson preparation talk turns to "comprehension skills" we think kids are lacking, the Test-like writing prompts they need to learn to unpack, and how much time there is before The Test to have kids practice taking The Test with passages that come from ... you guessed it. The Test. Usually, you can cut the stress and tension with a knife.
And I get it. As a third grade teacher myself, I've done these things, and they're an understandable reaction to the anxiety we can feel related to The Test. There is a lot of accountability tied to it, and we all want our students (and, if we're being honest, our teachers and schools) to do well on it.
But I am here to tell you this.
Reacting to The Test with lots of test preparation activities will not help students do well on it. It hasn't in the past, and there is no evidence to support the idea that it will now.
After all, as a nation, we have had about 1/3 of our students reading at proficient levels since at least 1992, and we have done a LOT of test prep since then.
Now, I'm not saying that students shouldn't have some familiarity with the format of standardized tests or the types of questions and tasks they encounter on them. The purpose of an assessment isn't for our students to do well; it's for us to see how well they can do. And I don't want the format of a test or question to be a barrier to students performing as well as they can so that we can make good decisions based on what we see. That's why, in our district at least, we give students occasional practice with cold-read passages throughout the year, using items released by the Tennessee Department of Education.
But I am saying that stopping regular instruction with the curriculum after Spring Break to test prep, or spending large amounts of time during the school year using The Test passages or instruction targeted to specific skills or strategies, will not help our students. In fact, it can actually harm their ability to learn at levels that will help them do well, because each time we make a decision about how to spend our time, we are choosing what we will do and what we will not do. If we choose to spend our time doing lots of Test-related activities that don't work, that means we're choosing not to provide the kind of instruction that research shows actually makes a difference for kids.
So, what is the best test prep? As usual, I'll turn to Tim Shanahan and here's what he suggests.
1. Have students read extensively within instruction across the school year. These tests measure reading ability, and you are not likely to develop reading ability without letting students read. A lot. I'm talking time in text, miles on the road-type of reading.
2. Have students read increasing amounts of text without guidance or support. Independence is our goal, always.
3. Make sure that the texts we put in front of kids are rich in content and challenging. Lots of reading of easy texts won't prepare students for navigating difficult texts on their own.
4. Have students explain their answers and provide text evidence supporting their claims. They need to engage with the type of thinking that moves past simply picking evidence and to reasoning about why they chose it, how it supports their ideas and thinking, and whether they could choose something better.
5. Engage students in regularly writing about text, not just in replying to multiple-choice questions. Want to give student a chance to process their own learning AND see visible evidence of what each and every student is thinking and what misconceptions they've got, so you can make adjustments accordingly? Let them write. A lot.
If all of this sounds familiar, it should. It's the type of instruction that happens every day when we use our curricular materials really well. And when we do this - when every single day, every single student gets their hands and heads in complex texts and does increasingly sophisticated work and thinking with them - then The Test will NOT be the hardest thing they've done all year. The daily work they've done under your guidance will be the most rigorous thinking they've done, and The Test will seem simpler by comparison.
There are lots of reasons why what we typically do to prep for The Test doesn't work, and why we should instead choose to continue to give all kids access to very complex texts, challenging work, and strong instruction every single day of the school year. I encourage you to read through the articles and resources cited below to learn more about them. They are research-based and have stood the test of time.
But in the end, really, it comes down to you.
You have the power to control how you choose to spend your precious time at this point of the year and put The Test in its place. You can choose to react to The Test with stress and anxiety and a narrowed focus on what we've typically done - even though it hasn't moved the needle for our students. Or you can choose to respond with trust and confidence that the work you've done all year - and that you continue to do until the very last day - is preparing your students to do well on whatever task is put in front of them. Then, the Test will be just a matter of course.
As Tim writes, "If you want your students to perform at their best ... you will accomplish that not by having students practice items ... but by teaching students to read."
Want to learn more? Here's what I recommend:
Shanahan, 2017: If You Really Want Higher Test Scores: Rethink Reading Comprehension Instruction
Shanahan, 2017: Welcome 2017: Let's Teach, Not Test
Shanahan, 2018: My Principal Wants to Improve Test Scores ... Is He Right?
ACT, 2016: Reading Between the Lines
Freitag, 2023: Keep the Tests, but Reform the Test Prep
Shanahan, 2024: 'Tis the Season of Test Prep: Bah Humbug
If you haven't read Reading Reconsidered by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway, I can't recommend it enough.
Recently in our book study around chapter 5, I was struck by the idea of literary miles on the road. In the book, the authors write, "Students must read not only well but also widely and extensively. Running is a decent analogy. Sure, you can improve your results by studying up on the science of training. In the end, though, there is no way around the fact that success requires a lot of road miles. In the case of reading, we sometimes refer to this as 'miles on the page.' Quantity matters."
It's easy to look at our lesson plans or reflect on how a lesson went and think that our kids have done a lot of reading in the course of an ELA block. However, the authors pointed out some startling statistics. In a typical school day in New York City public schools, students were reading for TWENTY minutes per day; almost 40% of students did not read at all during the school day. Seems astonishing, no?
But I wonder. How much of our time is spent getting ready to read, discussing what we've read, getting the supplies we need to read, finding the right page to read, reflecting on what we read ... and how much is spent actually reading? Actual eyes on the page, quiet classroom, minds on, purposeful reading?
If this is making you pause, too, here are some ways they recommend to maximize those road miles: "to help students read more, enjoy reading, and accrue the benefits of extensive reading."
There are three approaches to miles on the page in our classrooms, and each has its strengths and limitations. Because of this, we want to use each in ways that let us reap the rewards from their strengths and avoid their limitations. So, here's a description of each, along with concrete ways for using them well.
1. Students reading independently: The strength here is that it's sorely needed. However, keeping kids accountable and making sure they are reading well are a couple of limitations. To keep this accountable, you can:
Limit text and gradually release. Have students start by reading smaller chunks during class with greater accountability, even if that means starting with just a few lines of text at a time. Then, increase the amount of independent reading done in class, and gather data through questioning, observation, and written work that showed they've comprehended it.
Find a focal point. Tell kids what they should be reading or looking for before you launch independent reading. For example, "Take one minute and read paragraph 6 on your own. I'm going to ask you what Loyalists believe, so make sure you're looking for it."
Set time limits. Give students a finite period of time to read without telling them how much text they have to read. You can say, "When you hear the timer, mark the spot you've read to." This can help when kids rush to simply get through the text but don't read carefully.
Assign an interactive reading task. You can say, "I'm going to release you from here. Meet me at the end of chapter 12 and be able to tell me how Peter Pan responds to Hook in the chapter. Have at least one piece of evidence marked with a sticky note to support your answer."
Confirm and scaffold comprehension. The best are written checks, because they allow you to see evidence of every student's level of comprehension with the text and make adjustments accordingly. The best way to approach this is to allow kids to read, write, and THEN talk. So it can sound like, "Read back the part that introduces a factor the contributed to Jackie Robinson's success and then write one sentence that explains what that factor is." Only after you've spot checked everyone's work do you release them to talk.
2. Students reading aloud: The strengths are that it gives students time to practice fluency, you can get data on how they're doing, and there's simply pleasure in reading aloud done well. The limitations are that it's tough to keep all students engaged when just one is reading and doing this a lot may not translate to students reading independently. To keep this engaging, you can:
Keep durations short and the reader unpredictable. When you ask a student to read aloud, that student is the "primary reader," and all other students are "secondary readers." Move quickly and randomly among primary readers. Students shouldn't know who you'll call to be a primary reader next or how long they'll read. Behind the scenes, you can control the game by assigning shorter pieces to some readers and longer ones to students who are ready for a bit more.
Reduce transaction costs. Transaction costs are the time you lose in moving from one thing to another. To reduce transaction costs here, when you are ready to switch primary readers, simply say, "Andrea," as her cue to begin reading. If Andrea has lost her place and can't pick up, call on another student just as quickly, move to her desk and get her recentered. Then call on her again soon.
Bridge. Bridging happens when the teacher hops in between student readers to read a short segment of text. This could be a segment that's particularly hard, important to read with a lot of expression, or a key point of the text.
Spot check. Similar to cloze reading, teachers spot check when they read aloud, leave out a word, and the class chimes in on it.
Rely on a placeholder. If you are close reading, this is critical as you move in and out of a text. So, you may say, "Finger in your book, and close it for a moment," before you discuss how Esperanza and Miguel reacted differently to a train ride. You could also say, "Finger freeze," or "pen to page to hold the spot" as a cue.
Correct decoding errors. Reading carefully is an important skill to build, and that means reading every word accurately, all the way to the end. So, if a student misreads the word "inspection," you could quickly correct with "In-SPEAK-tion?" as a cue to self correct. I have also been known to hold a clickable pen in my hand as students read, and if they make an error they don't self-correct, I simply click the pen as a cue that they need to return and reread correctly. What you don't want to do is make the correction and have the student echo what you said, because they don't actually learn from fixing the mistake themselves.
3. Students listening to oral reading: The strengths here are that is provides an expert reading model, it can ignite real passion for what's being read, and it gives kids access to texts that are much more complex than what they could read on their own. The limitations are that students don't get the practice they need, modeling can embed meaning (taking that rigor out of the work), and it keeps everyone at the exact same place. To ensure that this builds students' capacity to read on their own:
Model really beautiful, fluent reading. This seems like a no-brainer, but it's critical. If you choose to read aloud to students, that means the text is very complex and new to your students. So, read it yourself in advance and think about how you'll chunk phrases together, what punctuation you want to punch, the words that may be difficult to pronounce and you want to decode slowly, and how you'll use the words to convey the tone and intention of the piece. These are moments when students are exposed to rich and varied syntax, collegiate-level vocabulary, and genres they may not be able to tackle independently yet (think Shakespeare). Invest the time in advance to read and practice them so your students see the level of attention to detail they need to approach difficult texts on their own.
No one way of reading is inherently better than the others; it's the varied diet of reading in service of miles on the page that'll really make the difference for our kids.
The texts and topics we put in front of our kids are challenging. Through these texts, students are learning about topics as wide-ranging as issues of water access around the world, Native American boarding schools, and the ratification of the 19th amendment. Most of the time, students enter a module of study with very little background knowledge about it, and the most of the time, our response is to build some background knowledge before students engage with the texts.
Pre-loading this background knowledge can look like showing videos, reading additional articles, or leading classroom discussions before we engage with a text, and it is done with the very best of intentions.
But I argue that doing this - giving kids background knowledge about the texts before they have the chance to read it for themselves - actually does a disservice to our students.
If, as Doug Lemov writes in Reading Reconsidered, "... our responsibility as reading teachers is to ensure that students can create meaning directly from reading on their own..." (my emphasis added), then giving them our knowledge before they read makes them more dependent on us and moves us farther away from that goal of independence. Our goal is for them - at the end of the year or the end of school altogether - to be able to approach a brand new, really difficult text, and make sense of it all by themselves, whether or not they have background knowledge about it beforehand.
Now, you may be thinking, "But what about all the research pointing to the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension?" And you'd be right. There's research going back to 1932 that shows readers use their knowledge to understand text, and it's why we know that teaching social studies and science content, reading meaty texts, smart consumption of educational media (think more PBS and less Minecraft), and the like are all no-brainers.
But as Tim Shanahan writes, in literacy instruction, our goal isn't immediate comprehension of today's text; it's to build independent readers. If I'm always giving them background knowledge, instead of helping them develop the habits and behaviors they need to build knowledge from a text themselves, how do they ever learn to tackle a text on their own? Especially when they don't have a lot of relevant knowledge?
I also dispute the claim that readers can't understand texts unless they already know a lot about them. If that's true, how does anyone ever read Shakespeare? Or a college text on chemistry? Or the directions to reset the low tire pressure light on my car? I've been able to make sense of all of those, even without a lot of background knowledge. It wasn't easy, but I called on the behaviors and habits I'd been taught when I grappled with hard texts in a classroom to make sense of them on my own.
I'll also argue that it's this ... this ability to make real sense of a text even when I don't know much about it ... than can level the playing field for our kids. Our students from historically underserved populations - our students of color, students from poverty, students with disabilities - will often not come to the table with the same breadth of knowledge as their more affluent peers. But if I can teach a student to make sense of a text even when they lack the background for them ... well, that's a game changer. They can build that knowledge for themselves. It's why Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) calls reading "a vaccine against populism, racism, and nationalism."
Reading is more than finding information in texts that agrees with what I already know. In fact, we might do well to teach our students to question their prior knowledge, because research shows that knowledge can actually contribute to miscomprehension. If we really want them to learn from a text, they need to be able to set aside misconceptions they hold, approach a text with a sense of intellectual humility, and be willing to change their thinking with new knowledge from a text in hand.
So, instead of pre-loading background information, I encourage you (as a mentor of mine calls it), to let the text do the teaching. Because, as it did for the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, reading well allows us to live beyond where we are and independently build knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. And that can change everything.
I get asked a lot about the practice of getting the gist of a text. Why do we ask students to do this? Why do we ask them to do it SO MUCH? (In some cases, lesson after lesson?) After all, our standards don't mention gist, so why on earth would we spend so much time on it? Good, valid questions all around.
There are some very important reasons why this is a critical practice for our kids to learn to do well by doing it often.
Before we get into that, though, let's talk about what a gist is not.
It's not the main idea. I've blogged about the difference between the gist and the main idea here, and it includes a fantastic video from 5th graders explaining the difference.
It's not a skill. Skills are those things we can learn, master, and then check off (think phonics or grammar). Gist isn't a skill.
It's not a new thing. Folks have used the word for years, just not always in the context of elementary reading lessons. We may have asked for the gist of a movie, conversation, or event, but not thought about the practice as it relates to reading comprehension.
Now, let's talk about what a gist is.
It's a first understanding. On Sunday mornings, we get The New York Times. There is no way I can read the entire paper, but I want to read the articles that matter most, and carefully read a small number of those. So, I skim the headlines to see the topics and then I do a first, light reading of the articles that stand out. Once I have the gist of the article, I know whether I want to read it again more closely, abandon it, or recommend it to Claude.
It's a reading practice. While finding the gist of a text isn't a skill, it is a critical reading practice that is a precursor for more careful analysis of a text, such as determining the central idea or writing a summary.
It's the first step in the process of close reading. When we read closely, we return to a text multiple times to squeeze every drop of knowledge and understanding we can from it. Reading for the gist is the first step in that process of reading closely and carefully.
It's a habit we need kids to develop. Finding the gist is a practice we need our kids to do well independently. We want it to become a habit of reading, so we need them to do it ... habitually.
In its simplest form, getting the gist is a reading comprehension practice to help students identify their initial thinking about what the text is mostly about.
And it's a practice that's critically important for several reasons. First, we need students to monitor their comprehension while they read - to track their understanding or lack of it - and if they are stopping periodically to think about and write the gist, they're more likely to do that. Second, the practice can help kids integrate information across a text as they think about what each section of the text is communicating to them. Third, it can help students access the most important information when they read. As expert readers ourselves, it's easy to forget how much cognitive effort our kids are putting in when they read really complex text; inviting them to stop and jot the gist at logical intervals helps them get that their ideas of their working memory and onto the paper so they can free up mental space and come back to those ideas later.
Think of reading as peeling an onion. If you want to peel back the layers of the onion to get to the core of it - in our case, the depth of knowledge and understanding students need to get out of a text - we have to begin by peeling back that first layer. That's the gist.
In the classroom, if we're going to closely read a text, we should start with an initial reading of the text in which they write they gist of chunked sections in the margin. On a second read, they may underline reasons the author gave for their argument or some similar annotative thinking. With this understanding in mind, they may then write notes to help prepare them for a rich, text-based discussion or writing task that helps them understand. At each layer of the work, students are digging a bit deeper into the meaning of the text through some pretty complex thinking. But it all begins with that first, initial read and gist, and the later work will not be as rich if they haven't done the first.
When you work with this practice in your classroom, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Use the language of "the gist." This is a practice that builds consistently across the grade levels in EL, so it's important that we use that vocabulary consistently. You'll be saving your kids from confusion - and teachers in later grade levels will thank you, too!
Keep it short. The gist should be very short - some folks say no more than 10 words. Don't hamper your students with a harsh word restriction, but the idea is to get their thought on the paper and then move on with the reading.
Use it as a check for understanding. Use the gist as a check for understanding to see who's getting at least a surface-level understanding of the text in front of them. If they are, you're good to move on to deeper reading and thinking. If not, you'll need to adjust your instruction.
Use it for accountability. If you are working to release the reading to your students and you wonder if they're actually reading, circulating to note their gists is a great accountability piece.
Honor the power of the quiet. Readers need quiet to decode, link, synthesize, and think. That quiet can feel weird to teachers sometimes, but just take a look and see the effort your kids are putting into what they're doing and resist the urge to fill the quiet. Don't interrupt that first reading with vocabulary, comprehension questions, or the like. It's a skim, and it's okay to give your kids the mental space to do it. It's a powerful quiet.
I hope you see that getting the gist is purposeful and important work for our kids to do. Repeatedly. Because it's the kind of thing we want them to do for the rest of their lives to be good and careful readers, and it all starts in our classrooms.
I'm a big believer in beginning with the end in mind, and when we think about what we want our students to be able to do at the end of the year - and at the end of their education, really - independently reading really complex text is key to that. So, we want our instruction to include lots of opportunities for students to independently read and grapple with complex texts.
At the same time, a part of our job as teachers is to be the expert in the room with them, to guide them through knowing how to make sense of the text and analyzing it to the depth that's called for by the standards. And we should be asking kids to regularly work with texts that are too complex for them to make sense of independently right now. That means that there are times when we put a really tough text in front of our students and it is most appropriate to read it - or portions of it - aloud to them.
The problem that we encounter a lot is: How do we keep kids engaged, even when the text is being read aloud? How do we make sure they are truly "minds on," so they can get what they need from the read aloud and then take it into their own, second reading of the text?
If that sounds familiar, here are some ideas you can try that can help press for strong student engagement during a read aloud:
1. Read it all the way through without stopping. This is especially true of a first, gist read. The purpose here is not to teach vocabulary, ask questions, or make note of connections or things you're thinking. The purpose is for readers to begin to get a picture of the whole piece - to get the lay of the land, so to speak - so that they are better able to deeply parse chunks of the text on a second read.
2. Read with appropriate fluency. Read alouds are incidental fluency instruction, so don't miss this opportunity! Be sure you are altering your pace, chunking phrases together, using volume as appropriate, attending to punctuation, read with good (though not overdone) expression, and the like. A boring, rote reading will lose them every time.
3. Circulate. Project the text on the board if you need to, but also have a copy in hand that you can use as you walk the room. One strategy I love for circulating is Teach Like a Champion's "Break the Plane," and you can read more about circulating a classroom here.
4. Give them a purpose or question for reading. Either establish a purpose ("We're reading this article so we can learn more about this type of frog and add it to our notes for our book") or pose a question ("Who were the Loyalists and what did they believe?"). Every time. It's easy to skip, but it becomes glaringly obvious how important this is when I'm in professional learning, am asked to read something, and I have no idea why.
5. Establish a "student do." Should they track the text with a finger or a pencil? Should they whisper read the text with you? Should they underline text that supports the purpose or question they're answering? There is a time and place for simply listening to a read aloud for pleasure, with no ask of the student other than enjoyment. I would argue that instructional time isn't it; make sure there is a clear "student do" during the read aloud, that students know what it is and how to do it, and that you're circulating (see above) for accountability.
It can be hard - especially if you're early in your career - to juggle teaching content and monitoring engagement at the same time. (Or maybe it was just me.) Try inviting your coach in to observe and note student engagement, or video a lesson and watch it to see what your students do during a read aloud. If engagement could use a boost, try the above and see how they work!
I've been thinking a lot about concrete ways in which we can improve at releasing the work to the kids, especially when we're asking them to dig deep and think in sophisticated ways. I ran across this strategy - Pose-Pause-Pounce-Bounce - from British educator Dylan Wiliam recently, and it seems to fit the bill: simple, doable, and effective at moving the cognitive lift to your students.
Typically, when we pose questions to kids, it follows a predictable pattern of Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE). So, I may ask, "What central idea do we see the author developing in this section of the text," (initiation), a student may say, "Jackie Robinson had characteristics that made him well-suited to serve as an agent for change," (response), and then I might say, "Yes! We see that in his calm demeanor, his clear mission, and his ability to communicate well," (evaluation). If you notice, I asked the question, the student responded, and then I evaluated the response and went on to fully answer the question myself. One student (maybe) and I did the thinking and learning here.
Instead of this, Wiliam calls for the Pose-Pause-Pounce-Bounce (PPPB) questioning sequence that's better at eliciting deep thinking. In it, the teacher:
Poses a question
Pauses to give suitable think time
Pounces on one student for an answer
Bounces that answer to another student who builds on the response
If I rework my above example with PPPB, I might ask the same question (pose), give the kids some quiet think time (pause), then call on one student to answer (pounce). That student may say, "Jackie had characteristics that made him well-suited to serve as an agent for change." I'd then say, "Thanks for that start! Jordan, can you build on what Emily said?" (bounce) and after Emily added on say, "Lola, would you like to add on or react to Jordan's thoughts?" (bounce again)
If IRE is the ping-pong of questioning, then PPPB is the team-centric, basketball version that can help deepen student discourse and thinking.
If you try this in your classroom, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Use an open-ended question that requires some thinking and discussion from your kids.
Be sure to give that silent thinking time.
Use Bounce as a form of check for understanding to informally assess progress. If you're not getting a lot from bouncing the response around the room, you know you need to back up a bit and reteach. If several are really digging in and they know their stuff, you may be good to move on.
Try preparing the Pounce and Bounce ahead of time, anticipating the responses you think you'll get and how you could push another student to take the idea farther.
Implement a No Hands Up or Cold Call policy to make sure you're hearing from as many students as possible
Want to learn more? Check out what Dylan Wiliam has to say about the strategy in a video here.
If I'm being perfectly honest, turn and talk has typically been one of those things I pull out of my back pocket when I get the blank stares from my kids or it gets weirdly quiet in a discussion - especially if there's an "observer" in my room.
It'll go something like this.
Me: "Okay, based on the character's actions and feelings, do you think she's a Loyalist or a Patriot?"
Kids: *Blink, blink
Me: *Scan the room and pray for a good response in the middle of my observation. Try to make eye contact with the kid who can always pull out something but they look away.
Kids: *Blink, blink
Me: "Okay, let's turn and talk."
And sometimes it works, and it kind of primes the pump of the conversation to get it going. Which is fine.
But sometimes, it feels like a filler in my lesson that I plopped in because it felt like it needed something - that little dash of hot sauce on top of the chili - but not necessarily because it was just the right instructional move at just the right time. I know this is the case when the kids' talk is surface-level, or not 100% on topic, or when they talk for just a second and then stop. Then I wonder, should I have given more wait time, or asked everyone to write, or asked a clearer question instead?
To move turn and talk from being just a thing to being just the right thing, here are a few moves you can make:
Post a good question where it's visible. It may seem obvious, but give them a thoughtful question to really respond to. Instead of "What do you wonder about this?" try "What is new information to you here?" or "How does this build on what you already know?" or "What might someone disagree with here and why?" And always post it so it's visible. With turn and talk, the room can get loud and kids are having to take turns, and that can overwhelm some brains. Posting the question on the board gives them a place to go back to and remember what they're actually supposed to be talking about.
Give time to process. Give the kids a heads up that a turn and talk is coming and then give them some time to think before they have to talk. Odds are that about 50% of your kids will be more introverted and need a bit of time to collect their thoughts before they interact with someone else. Try, "Here's your question. In a minute, I'm going to invite you to talk to your partner about this question. I'll give you a minute of quiet think time to consider what you want to say and how you'll listen."
Set up partners or triads early. I have probably wasted hours of classroom time in coming up with cute ways to pair my kids up. "Who's peanut butter? No, Charlie, you're jelly. Brayden, your jelly partner is missing today, so find another one. There isn't one. Just join another group. I don't care if you're jelly or peanut butter - just talk to them, please." It's best to keep this super simple and adaptable for when kids are out. Try elbow buddies, row buddies, or anything else that takes less than 15 seconds to organize and get going.
Have a standard in-cue and out-cue. Have one standard, verbal (and/or non-verbal) cue that lets students know it's time to talk and it's time to stop. A simple one could sound something like, "The question to talk about is on the board. Take a moment of quiet time to think of your response. And we'll talk in 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1." When it's time to bring them back together, give them a minute or so of warning and bring them back with the same countdown.
Use your out-cue at the crest of the wave. Often, we wait until the turn and talk conversation fades a bit so we're certain they've finished, and then we bring them back to the whole group discussion. Instead, try bringing them back when they're not quite finished - when they're at the top or crest of that discussion wave. Doing so can help bring that discussion energy productively back to your whole group discussion.
Try Everybody Writes (see TLAC) instead or in addition to. Instead of so much turn and talk, try this strategy from Teach Like a Champion, where you give kids time to write their responses to a question or prompt. It takes about the same amount of time, gives kids independent time to think and process, and makes their thinking visible to you. Or, if you see that some ideas need to be fleshed out through discussion, you could do Everybody Writes and then have students turn and talk about it what they wrote.
And always know why you're using your turn and talk strategy. If it's a filler or just a way to get some discussion going, consider whether there's something else you need to do - or whether you just need to let a question sit for a bit. On the other hand, if partner discussion is just the thing that's needed for kids to process, press in on their thinking, practice some speaking and listening skills, or even rehearse writing, then maybe turn and talk is perfect. Either way, know exactly why you're using it before you do so you're making the most of every instructional minute you've got.
Jennifer Gonzalez from Cult of Pedagogy wrote about hexagonal thinking recently, and it's a powerful way for kids to consider the connections between ideas and nuances in word meaning as they're exploring a topic of study.
Fifth grade teacher Stephanie Fontaine at Siegel decided to use it in her classroom as a way to review some work in social studies, and I want you to look at the connections her students made between ideas as disparate as immigration, Ellis Island, Henry Ford, yellow journalism, labor unions, and constitutional amendments.
This may seem very similar to concept maps, and you wouldn't be wrong. But the nature of a hexagon means you've got multiple opportunities to connect ideas or concepts in ways that can be very close or farther apart. And you could give the same set of hexagons to different groups of kids, as Stephanie did, and the connections are going to be different every time. Because while the connections are important, it's the conversation, thinking, justification, explaining, and attention to precision behind those connections that develops the habits of mind our students need.
Hexagonal thinking can be used in any subject area - or across them - to really push student reasoning and logic. You could introduce hexagons at the beginning of a unit of study, and adjust the connections as you go, or use them at the end to review and solidify thinking as Stephanie did. You could also leave the hexagonal connections posted in your classroom throughout a unit and ask students to write out their justification for or disagreement with specific connections. There are SO many possibilities for deep, critical thinking with this.
Shapes and words in the hands of a skilled teacher and eager students. What a beautiful thing.
It may sound like a mathematical practice - because it is - but I will argue that attending to precision is a critical literacy practice, too.
Take, for example, an assessment you're going to give to your students. When you take that assessment yourself, consider not just the correct answer and how students will have to think to choose it. Also consider the most common wrong answer you'll get and how students need to think to NOT choose it. What you'll find almost every time is that students need to do things like read the entire question, read all of the answer choices, think carefully about precise word meanings, read every part of the word (even the ending), pay attention to all of the punctuation, make sure the answer is fully correct. In short, they have to attend to precision.
I'll also argue that it's easy to let precision slip. There is such a sense of urgency about the work in the classroom - there is so much to complete, and so many things that need our time and attention - that it's easy to go light on precision. But pressing for precision is one of those habits of mind that's like a rising tide - it'll lift a lot of ships.
One habit you can foster that will help students attend to precision is what Doug Lemov calls "Right is Right." As he writes,
"Right is Right is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way right - between pretty good and 100 percent. The job of the teacher is to set a high standard for correctness: 100 percent."
It sounds simple, but here's what it can look like when we let this slide.
Let's say that I'm teaching with the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. I ask the kids how William used design thinking in his solution to providing access to water, and one student says, "He designed a windmill." It's not wrong, but it's not all the way right, either - it's only partially correct. And a couple of things can happen here. I might say, "Yes, that's right," and then move on to another question. Or I might do what Lemov calls "Rounding Up" and say, "Yes, he did design a windmill, and he did it by first identifying the problem, doing some research, and designing and trying out some prototypes before he arrived at a final solution." Basically, I have "rounded up" the student's answer and I have done the thinking and speaking that they should have done.
There are a few ways in which students will give you not-100%-correct answers:
A partial answer: As above, they started a correct answer, but it's not fully developed.
Answer a different question: A student may do this when they don't know the answer or don't understand the question. If Katie's confused about William's design thinking, she might say, "His windmill was really important to the people in his village, and it showed how much he cared." It's not wrong, but it's not an answer to the question you asked.
A non-answer: A student might also give you an example rather than an answer. For example, Katie might say, "Design thinking is when you go through the steps of the design process to arrive at a solution." That's an example of design thinking, but not how William used it.
Right answer, wrong time: A student might get ahead of you and answer a question a few steps down the road. Katie might have said, "William's design solved a critical problem and had a profound impact on his village, showing his empathy and commitment to community." Great answer, but you don't want to take the class there yet.
Imprecise vocabulary: Katie might say, "William designed that thing that spins to get water to his house." What's the thing? Can you use better vocabulary than spins? Was the water going to his house or to his village as a whole?
When students do these things - and when I pay attention, I see them do them all the time - we need to get into the practice of holding out for all-the-way right. Here are a few ways you can do that:
Know the ideal student response you're looking for: As you study the EL lesson, don't just study the questions - study the exemplar student responses, too. It's hard to know what all-the-way-right looks like unless you've thought about it beforehand.
Rephrase your questions: For hard questions, the first student answer is rarely 100% correct. So, try rephrasing some questions with stems like, "Who can get us started in talking about how frogs' behaviors help them survive in different environments?" or "Katie, would you kick this off by sharing some of the ways Jack is feeling in this part of the book?"
Ask for an add on: Say, "Good start; thanks for that. What can you add on to your thinking to get us closer?" or "Good start; can you get us the rest of the way?" or "Can you develop that?"
Press for specific details: Say, "Thanks for that answer. What specifically about William's work on the windmill shows design thinking?"
Press for more specific language: Say, "Thanks for that answer. Can you use a more precise word than X?" Or ask them to replace a pronoun in their answer with the noun it's replacing. For example, "Katie, you said, 'It was spinning.' What is the 'it' you're referring to?"
Pitch it to the group: "Katie gave us a strong start here. Who can take us another step?"
And if you want to see it in action, here's a video.
As I'm finding with most things in literacy, this isn't flashy or new or particularly innovative. It's just an old idea done very, very well.
Recently, Tim Shanahan blogged about his top 10 pet peeves when it comes to teaching reading, and per his style, it took two separate posts (post 1 and post 2) to get them all in. His Pet Peeve #7 resonated with me most:
Pet Peeve #7: Teaching Reading Comprehension by Asking Certain Types of Questions
Here's what he had to say about it:
"Here is another issue that I get a lot of mail about. Principals (and sometimes teachers) are often seeking either testing or instructional materials that will allow them to target specific reading comprehension standards or question types from their state’s reading assessment.
Those requests seem to make sense, right?
They want to know which comprehension skills their kids haven’t yet accomplished and asking questions aligned with those skills should do the job, they presume. Likewise, having kids practice answering the kinds of questions the tests will ask should improve reading comprehension performance. Again, it looks smart. It seems like a great idea to have kids practice answering those kinds of questions they’ll have to answer on the state tests.
My mama told me that just because something seems right doesn’t make it right.
She was right in this case. There is no evidence that these so-called comprehension skills even exist. There is, in fact, considerable evidence that they don’t (Shanahan, 2014; Shanahan, 2015).
Study after study (and the development of test after test) for more than 80 years have shown that we cannot even distinguish these question types one from another. Likewise, there is no evidence that we can successfully teach kids to answer the types of questions used on tests.
If you really want your kids to excel in reading, get them challenging texts. Then engage them in discussions of those texts. Get them to write in response to the texts. Reread the texts and talk about them again. Come back to them later to compare with other texts or have them synthesize the info from multiple texts for presentations or projects.
Ask them questions that are relevant to the understanding of those texts. Don’t worry about the question types. Worry about whether they are arriving at deep interpretations of the texts and whether they can use the information. Reading comprehension is about making sense of texts, not about answering certain types of questions."
I think Shanahan said it so well, and this is why I'm a proponent of putting the text at the center of instruction, not standards. Standards hold us to a common set of expectations for what well-educated students should know and be able to do by the end of each grade. They should be kept top of mind while planning and teaching students to plumb texts at the appropriate challenge. But the standards themselves are not the goal of daily instruction; understanding the text, gaining knowledge from it, and being able to express that understanding is.
If you want to read more, Shanahan has (lots) more to say here and here and here.
The work of teaching and learning is big, now more than ever, and teachers are feeling that pressure in big ways. Everything feels urgent and important and critical, and the challenges are complex, and the needs are many. And all of that "bigness" can make the work itself seem simply overwhelming. How do you know what the next right thing to do is when it's all coming at you so fast, and the solutions seem as big and daunting as the challenges themselves?
When I'm feeling that way, that's when I know it's time to turn to a One Small Thing. A very small tweak or change or adjustment I can make, easily and tomorrow, that can still create real change for our students.
Today, that One Small Thing is: The complete sentence.
In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov writes, "The complete sentence is the battering ram that breaks down the door to college." Yet, we know that writing good, complete, thoughtful sentences can be a challenge for kids no matter the grade level.
One powerful practice you can adopt is to insist that students speak in complete sentences consistently so that they get plenty of practice in hearing, using, and attending to complete thoughts. That means that no matter the instructional format - classroom discussion, small group work, close reading questions - students express their ideas and answer questions in complete sentences all. the. time.
It can take an extra dose of patience at first, but I have seen this pay off big time when students begin transferring the skill of speaking in complete sentences to writing in complete sentences. And it will happen, but it takes daily, frequent, consistent practice.
Here are a few techniques you can use to prompt for complete sentences in your classroom:
Remind students before they start to answer. ("Who can tell me in a complete sentence what the setting of this story is?")
Provide the first words of a complete sentence, with the expectation that the student will use them to start his or her own ("The setting is ...")
Remind students with a quick and simple prompt after they answer ("Complete sentence.")
Use a nonverbal signal (Create a hand signal, such as bringing the fingertips of both hands together in an "A" shape to both remind students to use a complete sentence or to mark it when they do.)
It's one small but mighty thing.
I ran across this idea recently and I've been thinking about it nonstop since.
When I'm teaching, and I pose a question to the students, am I fishing for an answer or am I hunting for one?
Here's the difference.
If I'm fishing, I'm tossing a question out there to see what student responses crop up. I'm not really certain of what I'll hear or what I'm looking for. I'm casting my line and fishing for an answer.
On the other hand, if I'm hunting, I'm posing a question and I know exactly the ideal student response I'm looking for. If I hear it bubble up, I know we're good and we can move on. If I don't, I know how to press - what follow-up question to ask or the reteaching that might need to happen - to get a fully correct response from the students. I know my question AND I know the student thinking I'm looking for before I ever ask it.
Now, I think there's a time for both. When we're looking for open discussion, some creativity, when we're building on some rich questions or ideas over time ... these are times when you might pose a question and fish a bit. But I think the idea of hunting with a question is critically important, and I just don't know that we do it enough. When we hunt with a question, we deeply know the purpose of the lesson, we know exactly what students need to learn from it, and we make the very most of every precious moment in our classroom because we can make real-time adjustments to our content in response.
If you're looking to shift your questioning from fishing to hunting, here are a few next steps you can take:
Find an upcoming lesson with a sequence of questions that are already planned.
Review them and assess the balance of fishing and hunting.
For your hunting questions, write out the exact, fully correct student response you're looking for
Plan follow-up questions you can ask if you get blank stares or less than fully correct responses. Be careful not to give away the thinking.
Then think about 2 or 3 misconceptions you know students are likely to have that would lead to an incorrect or incomplete answer. Plan out the questions you can ask to move them past that misconception and toward a fully correct answer, again without giving the thinking away.
As with so many things in literacy, it's good, minds-on stuff that doesn't require a whole lot: A rich text, well-planned questions, and the relationship between a teacher and a student. Yet it's the most beautiful and powerful work I know.
Fishing and hunting.
When my middle son was little, I was distracted and in a hurry to get some dinner on the table one night. (Sound familiar?) I plopped him in his high chair, gave him a plate with chicken nuggets and sauce, and then busied myself with other things.
After a couple of bites of nugget, he started crying, and I couldn't figure out why. Nothing was hurting him, and there was nothing obvious going on - just a half-eaten chicken nugget on the plate. I encouraged him to take another bite. He did, made a face, spit it out, and started crying again.
Frustrated, I was just about to call it a night and break out the back-up cereal, when I thought - what if there's something weird about the nuggets? They looked perfectly fine. But when I bit into one, I realized the issue ... they were still frozen solid in the middle and absolutely disgusting.
I always think about this story when I think about the power of teachers doing students' assignments themselves. It's an incredibly powerful practice, but in the busy-ness of planning, prepping, and teaching, it's all too easy to put it to the side. But we can learn so much from doing our own tasks, taking our own tests, completing our own note catchers, doing our own projects. When we do these things - when we eat the chicken nugget ourselves - we can better pinpoint where things might fall apart and prevent that from happening in the first place.
So, here are 5 ways you can eat the chicken nuggets in your own practice.
Clarify instructions. Check the instructions on every assignment and make sure they are clear, concise, and complete. If the directions send students to a specific page number or tool, is it correct? Do they have those materials handy? Do your directions answer the questions you know students will inevitably have?
Clean up the format. When you do the assignments yourself, you'll see if the format needs to be changed. Do you need more space in a graphic organizer? Do lines need to be added? Is there too much room, and students will think they need to write an essay rather than a paragraph? Is the font the right size? Are there too many papers to shuffle through? It's amazing how much seemingly small things like these can impact how smoothly an assignment plays out - or doesn't.
Identify likely misconceptions. Especially when you take an assessment, think about likely misconceptions students will have and how that may impact their answer choices. For example, if the student chooses B as the answer, but the correct answer is really C, ask yourself why she would choose that: What's the misconception that's leading her to choose B over C? And even more importantly, what do you need to say or do during instruction to clean up this thinking?
Maintain a beginner's mindset. Sarah Brown Wessling tells of the time when a student in her high school English class was having a hard time with an assignment for The Great Gatsby. Sarah struggled to help break the work down into chunks for the student because she had developed a high level of expertise with the novel and the assignment, and the student was a beginner. So, Sarah took her own assignment to the library and completed it with text that WAS challenging to her - Proust. This required her to adopt a beginner's mindset to her own assignment, and she found ways to scaffold the work better because of it. Doing student assignments yourself can help you adopt your students' beginner's mindset and be more prepared to break down steps or coach them through sticky spots.
Create an exemplar. Completing assignments - especially writing assignments - yourself helps to create an exemplar that you can refer to when teaching or assessing student work. And with EL materials, it's powerful practice to complete the assignments and compare your own work to the exemplar that is in the teacher supporting materials. How close did you come to ideal work? And what did you learn from that comparison that you can bring to your instruction?
Two more notes. You'll want to plan ahead so that you can complete assignments or assessments well BEFORE you're scheduled to teach the content. Wait too long to do them, and you won't have enough time to apply what you learn when you're teaching. And this is ideal work to do with colleagues during a PLC meeting. Bringing completed work to the table and comparing the clarifications and instructional moves you suggest with your colleagues is a huge opportunity to dig deep into content and learn together.
There's no denying that it takes some time to eat the chicken nuggets, but when you do, you'll find that instruction is clearer, assignments are smoother, and learning is deeper.
And you can avoid a whole lot of tears.
It's catchy. And if you've been in education for any length of time, you've heard this one. "First kids learn to read, and then they read to learn." And you usually hear this in relation to that jump from second to third grade, with folks saying that kids "learn to read" in kindergarten, first, and second grades through decoding and phonics instruction. Then in third grade there's a shift to "read to learn" that focuses solely on reading for information and comprehension and lasts through the end of their school careers.
I disagree. And I'm gonna get weedy about it.
A lot of this began in the early part of the 20th century, when children would practice letter-sound relationships and memorize spelling rules without any practice in a text. In the 1930s, the look-say method took hold and advocated for children learning whole words in basal readers and on flash cards. Then in the 1960s, the pendulum swung again with a heavy emphasis on systematic, explicitly taught phonics and comprehension was simply "caught" along the way.
Through all of this, a couple of ideas took hold. One is that children have to learn to decode before they can comprehend. Another is that students stop decoding in second or third grade. It's as if you have these two very separate and hierarchical reading tracks that don't really cross.
Research over the past 20 years by folks such as Marie Clay, David Pearson, and others has debunked this idea.
What we've learned is that students can and should begin comprehending text as they begin to decode. In the early days, those texts may be very simple, but students can still understand the content and should be taught to attend to it. If we wait until third grade or above to attend to good, thorough comprehension, we have waited far, far too late. We've also learned that students don't and shouldn't stop decoding in second or third grade or beyond. Students - and especially those who struggle to read - need continued work in decoding and multisyllabic word work to become proficient readers as they progress through the upper elementary grades.
And if we want to get super, super weedy about it, I think we need to have a common definition of what we mean when we say "reading." To me, "reading" is more than decoding. It's the process of both decoding and understanding text to get meaning from it. Which is, after all, why we do this work.
So, reading isn't built on two separate tracks that never meet. We don't learn to read and then read to learn. Reading well happens when two intertwined threads in the same rope work together from kindergarten to middle school and beyond.
It's no secret that there are a lot of anchor charts in EL. Like, A LOT. We need to create them judiciously so that we don't overload students (or the walls). But the "Close Readers Do These Things" anchor chart is an important one that I'd make and keep up all year long.
Here's why.
First, the contents of the anchor chart are a set of 8 close reading strategies that are fairly brief, simple, and to the point. They are:
Read the text slowly, at least twice.
Get the gist of what the text is about.
Circle words you don't know
Determine the meanings of words you don't know by:
Using affixes and roots for clues.
Reading around the word (using context)
Using reference materials
Reread, annotate, and underline key vocabulary.
Use the text to answer questions.
Gather evidence from the text.
Talk with each other about what you think it means.
Read again to summarize or answer basic questions.
Second, these are strategies that go hand-in-hand with the close reading lessons, which is one of our 4 key instructional practices. The whole purpose of reading closely together is for students to eventually be able to do that level of work independently, and using this anchor chart gives students a scaffold to turn to as you release that responsibility to them.
But third, and most importantly, every single one of these strategies is solidly research-based. While there are no studies showing that teaching discrete comprehension skills leads to better comprehension, there is a substantial body of research that supports teaching reading strategies. And inherent in the list on this anchor chart are strategies that we know work: monitoring comprehension, summarizing, asking questions of the text, and rereading to answer them. Students have to actively think about the ideas in a text if they are going to understand them, and this anchor chart describes a set of actions that can help readers do that.
Which is, after all, the point.
Also, a couple of things to keep in mind.
If you've got students who are struggling significantly, know that you may need to support their decoding and fluency before and as they close read, and these aren't called out on the chart. Intentional, targeted vocabulary instruction, especially if the text is unfamiliar or has new content, is always a good idea, too.
Speaking of text, there's no point in putting text in front of our kids and teaching them to read it closely ... when they already can. You can't closely read a text that isn't appropriately complex. If the text isn't complex enough, there's simply not enough there to dig into, and we never want to encourage students to use strategies when they aren't needed; it just ends up being something kids "do" with a text rather than working to deeply understand it. Ultimately, we want to make sure that our teaching is always stretching our students to do a bit more than they could when they walked in our doors that morning, and that calls for texts that are going to challenge them.
So, this anchor chart? It's one to keep for sure.