E40 | Comprehension Instruction Recommendations from the New IES Practice Guide with Drs. Deborah Reed, Jade Wexler, Kimberly St. Martin, and Joe Dimino

Building comprehension for middle grade students in ten words or less. It's coming up on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Hello and welcome to the... Teaching Literacy Podcast. I'm your host, Jake Downs, with Patrick Wells, making sure everything is running smooth in the background. I am really excited for today's show. Today we are talking all about supporting the reading comprehension of students in grades 4 through 9. My guest systematically reviewed over 1,500 studies and reports.

to identify high leverage practices for supporting readers in the middle grade. The outcome of this project was the recently released IES Practice Guide for Teachers entitled Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4 through 9. My guests are Dr. Deborah Reed, Dr. Jade Wexler, Dr. Kimberly St. Martin, and Dr. Joe Domino. And I'm very excited, and I think you will enjoy the conversation around the IES practice guide.

The guide overall has four recommendations. The first recommendation is building students decoding skills so they can read complex multisyllabic words. The second is providing purposeful fluency building activities to help students read text effortlessly. The third is routinely use a set of comprehension building practices to help students make sense of the text. And the fourth recommendation is providing students with opportunities to practice making sense of stretch text.

For today's episode, we are specifically focusing on aspects of the third recommendation around helping students making sense of the text, but you are definitely going to want to pick up the rest of the guide. It is free and it is in the show notes.

One quick disclaimer before we get started, the opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the US Department of Education. And with that, let's get to the show and make sure to stick around after for Jake's take on the subject. Doctors Deborah Reed, Jade Wexler, Kimberly St. Martin, and Joe Demino, welcome to the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Loving it.

I'm really excited to have all four of you on the show with me right now. This is the first episode that's taken all four time zones in the continental US to make happen. So Yeah, this is great. I'm also really excited because we're talking about a publication that you were all recently a part of, and it was a practice guide released from the Institute of Education Sciences, specifically focused on

Providing reading interventions for students in grades four through nine. It's a great document. It's freely available on the web. It's extremely practitioner-friendly. And I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about it. So quickly before we get going, will each of you just give a brief introduction of who you are and your current position or the research that you conduct?

I'm Deborah Reid. I direct the Tennessee Reading Research Center at the University of Tennessee, and we do research on all things literacy from birth through grade 12. Hi, I'm Kim St. Martin and I'm the director for Michigan's Multi-Tiered System of Support Technical Assistance Center. And I am also a co-director of our state personnel development grant.

And I've supported some research projects on implementing an integrated academic and behavior initiative and an adolescent literacy model demonstration. Hi, I'm Jade Wexler and I'm an associate professor at University of Maryland of special education. And my research is focused on adolescent literacy. and professional development interventions for students, teachers, literacy coaches, and really focusing on building school-wide literacy models at the secondary level.

And I'm Joe Domino. I'm the Deputy Executive Director and Managing Researcher at the Institute. instructional research group. My area of research for the past three decades has been reading instruction, specifically vocabulary and reading comprehension instruction, although our institute does conduct research in mathematics and we have developed along with these wonderful women here many practice guides and we're in Los Alamitos, California in Southern California.

Welcome everyone. To just help orient our listeners about maybe they're unfamiliar with like the Wetworks Clearinghouse or practice guides or the undertaking that a project like this would be. Can we get a background of why the project was formed, this specific project, and what its primary goals were?

Okay, sure. The practice guide today, of course, is providing reading interventions for students in grades four through nine. And it's another in a series of practice guides that have been developed over the past 15 years, covering a variety of topics. If you Google U.S. Department of Education practice guides or Jake, I don't know if you're able to put some sort of a link with your podcast.

you will see all of the practice guides. They cover reading, English learners, mathematics, post-secondary, behavior. And as Jake mentioned, they're free. All you have to do is download them. So how did this practice guide come to be? Well each year the Department of Education determines the topics for priorities for practice guides. And then there's a competitive process for universities and research institutes.

To compete for the contract to develop these guides. We competed and we got the contract and we asked Deborah Kim and Jade as three of the panelists. There were, I believe, seven panelists. We ask experts in the field to be on the expert panel to guide us. So the practice guides present recommendations for educators to address challenges in the classroom. They're based on reviews of research, the experience of practitioners, and the expert opinions of the panel.

is in these practice guides isn't something that, you know, the four of us made up and wrote down. It's all based on research. And you can get the specifics more than I'm giving you today in the practice guide. It explains everything. The impetus for this practice guide was based on the 2019 NAT. which reported that over a third of fourth grade students and a quarter of eighth grade students were reading below basic. And this is particularly troublesome.

Since as we all know, as students get older, they have to read more complex text and if they don't have these skills that are addressed in the practice guide, they're not gonna benefit from

the text that they're reading in their content areas. The recent research has demonstrated success in improving the reading level of students in grade four through nine with reading difficulties. And this practice guide, as Jake mentioned, It takes this contemporary research and explains it in understandable practical language for teachers and parents.

All of the panel members have conducted research in this area. And if you look at the authors, the expert panel and you look at the references in the back, you're gonna see there's a lot of match there. So we were in really good hands for this practice guide. Thanks for that overview. And I would agree to the fact that it's very user friendly, very explicit, and this is what it can look like in the classroom. The intervention guide itself has

Four overall recommendations. Today we're just going to focus on recommendation number three. And the recommendation for that was routinely use a set of comprehension building practices. To help students make sense of tech.

As you mentioned, as students move into adolescent literacy and upper elementary grades and middle school, the text demands increase rapidly, not only in just raw challenge, but also breadth that you're expected to read texts in social studies and science. And you're also expected to read you know, perhaps with extra quick activities if you're in drama and you're reading a script, there's different demands on text.

The first chunk of that recommendation number three to help students use a set of comprehension building practices is to provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions. Why is asking and answering questions such an important aspect of text comprehension? This is one of the strategies I think there are Most of the strike.

strategies in the guide that try to help build students' sense of self-efficacy, that there are things that they can do to control their understanding of text and their ability to process that text. If you've ever worked with adolescents who have difficulty with reading, you know that many of them see it as this chore. They're just going to plow through it. And if they're lucky, they'll say all the words on the page and then check the block that they've read that text.

The idea that they're going to gain any sort of meaning from it is a kind of anathema to them. They don't understand that the real purpose that we're engaged in reading this text is for Or Extracting meaning and for using what we Yeah. From the text to do other things relative to those content areas that you were just mentioning, Jane. So understanding how to answer questions is a preliminary step to understanding how to ask my own questions, which puts me in the driver's seat.

gives me that sense of self-esteem. can control my destiny with this text. But we first have to understand the nature of the kinds of questions that might be asked about a text so that we're actively processing the information. The first step is to look at given questions, understand different types of questions that might be given to you to process that information in the text at different levels, and then what it takes to answer those different types of questions.

Once you can successfully do that. you're ready to move on to forming your own questions and achieve that independently. I appreciate that framing, Dr. Reed, because asking and answering questions just it's the ubiquitous comprehension building practice. But we should always remember that the purpose of that in the classroom is in service of Leveraging global understanding of a text and also in hopes that the student can internalize an aspect of being able to interrogate or navigate.

a challenging or complex text independently. Within that recommendation, you provide a specific framework that I'm a big fan of. And I was really excited when I saw it in here because I really liked the way that it was explained and laid out. Can you talk about the framework that you provide that helps students find and justify answers and just an overview of the three-part framework? Yes, I think there are different frameworks. The one that you're referencing in the guide is

has probably been used quite commonly. There are usually three types of questions that we teach students again, first to identify and then later to Use To build their own. One is just this idea. there are facts in the text that we can point to, we can identify them, and we can pull them out and use them to answer specific questions. So it's just a very literal level fact right there on the page kind of a question.

The other type of question requires putting information together from different parts of the text. or different locations within a single page. So it can be across multiple pages or within a single page. But the idea Yeah. that it's not just that I'm looking for this one answer that I can pull out and use to flop down on the page to answer the question, but that I have to Hmm.

pieces of information that are given at some kind of distance and then relate them to each other in some way. So this is the beginnings of inference. That we have to in some way connect this information and understand the relationship between pieces of information that are at disparate points.

Mm. And then the third type of question goes to an even higher level of inferencing because it's not just this text that I'm relating to now, but I have to take the information from the given piece and somehow connect it with something else that I read. something I learned in another class or something I learned in this class, but in a different unit or on another day. So that distance between the pieces of information grows and that makes it even harder. The further apart.

Information is, the harder it is to relate that information, to first identify that these are similar pieces of information. and then to understand what their connection might be or their relationship might be. So those are the same thing. Are the three levels working from the easiest at the literal to the next kind of low-level inference level within a text to the higher level inferences that are with this text and then outside or beyond?

Thanks for that overview of different types of questions. I appreciate that it's a framework I feel students can grasp really easily, or it feels very accessible to them to say that. you know, with the question that I'm being asked that there's types of information that I'm going to need to help understand that question and being able to help students to a degree self-scaffold or go out and find be able to determine what types of information they will need to answer the question.

Similarly, another part of that recommendation is to teach students a routine for determining a gist of a short section of text. So what is a gist and why is developing a gist important for comprehending text? Okay, well I've been working with the GIST for more years than I would like to admit. So another name for the gist is the main idea and generating the gist of a short portion of the text.

is really essential for building students' comprehension. The gist really is a synthesis of the most important information from a short one or two paragraph section of the text. It is not a summary. Generating the GIS provides students an opportunity to separate important information from irrelevant information and integrate these important ideas into a main idea or a gist. Statement.

And these statements help students remember the important information. I've been teaching this for years, and I've actually gone into classrooms and taught students how to do this. I explained to teachers that if a student has written a good gist statement. then that statement will trigger all of the important information that they had to synthesize to come up with the gist or the main idea statement.

What we ask students to do, since they cannot write in their textbooks, is they have a log, some teachers call it a learning log, and they write the gist statements in that log. And I also tell teachers and students that it helps them study for tests. So for example, if you read a gist,

And it's a good gist, and we're going to talk about that in a second. That should trigger all that information for that paragraph when you're studying for a test. If you can't remember that information, then maybe You should be rereading that paragraph so that you can do better on the test because obviously you forgot. It's a very powerful routine. So let's talk about the steps.

I think that's gonna be our next question here. The steps are that First, the students have to identify and mark the most important person, which we call a who, and a place or thing, which we call a what for that section of the test. Again, since students cannot mark in their textbooks, they need to have some sort of a log. And then they have to synthesize this information. This, and I'm sure my colleagues will agree, this is the most

difficult step for students to take all these facts, even though they are important, and to synthesize them into a GIS statement. Then we ask students to write the GIS statement in their own words. Now, in collaborative strategic reading, which we've been doing for years, just is one of the strategies. And what we've taught students. Is that they should write the gist in 10 words or fewer. And we always tell them that the main who or what counts as one word, which really helps.

So if the main who or what is the United States Constitution, that's one. In my experience, and I'm sure the other panel members could pipe in, if you don't give students some sort of a limit. Because I've experimented with this. If you say, okay, you can do 11 words or whatever, well, before you know it, they're writing a paragraph or they're rewriting the paragraph that they're supposed to write the gist for. So I really like to limit it to 10 words.

And they can do it. I have proof of that. So one strategy I've used in the classroom is after I've modeled it and all the good scaffold instruction and all that. I'll ask somebody to volunteer a gist statement and we'll put it on the board with the understanding that everybody's going to be respectful. We're not going to make fun of that whole thing. We get that out in the open first.

And then we write the gist on the board and as a group we edit it because it might be a little too long or it might have specifics that we can make more general. And the kids love it because it turns out to be kind of like a game for them. And so they learn how to take these GIS statements and fix them. At first, you're going to find these students are going to write just statements that aren't quite there. So we use that strategy. And so those are the steps.

I don't know if my colleagues have anything more to say about it or what they might do to get the students to have good GIS statements. I know Jade has done a lot of work. Yeah, so I think we can talk a little bit more about maybe where students struggle and how to provide more explicit instruction in how to get these gists because we know these students

often struggle at the multi-paragraph level, at the paragraph level, and some students even struggle to understand at the sentence level. So when we give them a strategy like get the gist, and we tell them It's the who or what that the section of text is about and the most important information about the who or what. For some kids that's not enough. And in fact, Deborah and I were doing an intervention in a juvenile incarcerated setting years ago.

Or we were trying to teach them this get the just routine and one of the students turned to me and he said, it's my favorite quote ever, he just said, I don't know. I mean, they always tell me to get the main idea, but nobody ever shows me like how do you get the main idea.

We thought that was so profound, but yet so simple, right? And it applies to this too. Even if we tell kids it's the who or what the section is about and the most important information about the who or what, it's still not enough for many of these kids. So, one way we like to think about it is something that Anita Archer talks about a lot, who's an expert in explicit instruction. I'm sure many of you have heard of her.

But going from sort of the overt instruction to more covert so that we want in the beginning lots of modeling, lots of breaking down for the kids, using the graphic organizers. The learning logs, as Joe said, and then eventually fading those so that these kids can do all of this in a more covert way in their head, right? That's the goal.

But in the beginning, one thing that we've done in our work that we found really enhanced this typical evidence-based get-the-gist routine is to provide what we call these gist pointers. We ask kids to find the who or what a section is about, but we give them pointers on how do you actually do that. For example, one of the pointers is well, is there anything in that paragraph or section of text that you just read that's mentioned most frequently?

So if they're a who or a what that's mentioned over and over. And also we try to model pronoun usage. So it might say it when it's referring to the Venus flytrap. Uh in addition to Venus flytrap over and over, and then pointing out that it is actually referring to Venus flytrap. So my who or what.

is Venus flytrap, just for example. So really checking those pronouns or other clues in the text like the title to help you figure out what the who or what is. And then when we get to the what's the most important information about the who or what. Looking at is there any information in that section of text that we just read that relates to the who or what you just identified, the Venus flytrap, for example?

Is there anything that relates to an essential word that I pre-taught? Because many of these kids also need you to front-load this and give them explicit instruction in world and word knowledge before they read a section of text. And so really, you know, giving them more pointers on how they actually engage in that strategy has been really helpful for some of our very, very struggling readers.

Thanks for those thoughts, Doctor Dabino and Doctor Wexler. A very influential piece when I was in grad school was Dole Duffy Roller Pearson, nineteen ninety one, The Moving from the Old to the New. article and in that it talks about the important that something good readers do is they're able to determine importance and having the things that matter most is what should be the stickiest in the text or what the comprehension is is built around.

and they're able to let some things float to the top and some things are still attached, but they're not central to it. And so thinking of a GIS statement as 10 words or less.

uh less is more and then being able to scaffold and be more explicit for students who struggle by giving them specific cues or strategies from being more overt initially and then gradually transitioning to being more covert over time, I think is a really powerful way to help our students be able to grasp what's the most important thing of this text and being able to branch out from there.

So there's other recommendations on comprehension that we haven't gotten to yet, such as things like building word knowledge and helping students monitor their comprehension as they read. Can we talk about a sample of how these practices can work together into a single lesson and

putting it all together, what can question and answering look like and working on a gist and looking on vocabulary and monitoring comprehension, how do these pieces fit together into a single digestible and set of instruction for students? Yeah, absolutely. And I will just piggyback off of what Dr. Wexler said about teachers really needing to model. There needs to be guided practice. I will say I spent the past few days

actually working with educators and state leaders and unpacking this practice guide. And the biggest piece of positive feedback has to do with all of the examples that we have provided. And it isn't just examples in word, like in words only, meaning like this is the types of activities you do. We provide the example teacher language. of how they would introduce things, how they would practice these things. I was just with a variety of state leaders yesterday and they just said how helpful

the information in the practice guide is to assisting educators and thinking, how do you create lessons to put this together? So when we think about this bridge to practice, what I appreciate, particularly in recommendation three. But really all of these recommendations do interweave together. Even in recommendation number three, we are calling out the importance of making sure kids can read.

the words, right? There's no comprehension strategy powerful enough to compensate for the fact that you do not know the words. And that's another Anita Archerism, a a colleague of ours. When I think about the additional recommendations, just are parts of recommendation three. They are framed very much around what we can do before students start reading, while they're reading, and then after they have read.

So even Jake, if we take the example that you gave a nod to in building world and word knowledge, in that part of recommendation three, we give a variety of examples. And the first One being how to build word knowledge. So we give examples like a teacher before they begin the lesson. They can provide a brief five minute introduction about the topic that the student's going to read.

And it can be done in a variety of ways. So we give them a range of examples. It can be reading a brief, easier passage before they get into the more complex passage that's going to be used. It can also mean having students watch a short keyword being short video or clip of a podcast.

to be able to help develop that topic and background knowledge. That portion of building world knowledge is gonna help set their understanding and set some of the necessary background knowledge to be able to get them into the tech. and be able to extract the right type of meaning. So then when we think about building word knowledge.

One of the things that has gone over well with educators are the examples we provide of how to develop word knowledge before they start reading by briefly providing the meaning of a few words that they're going to encounter in the passage that they're going to read. There's also examples of how to teach students to figure out the meaning of words while they're reading, so using the surrounding context, the sentences, and there's some examples of how the teachers can help reinforce.

the vocabulary after students have read. And so what's really nice about that is that it does start to get teachers thinking a little bit more holistically and how they're designing and delivering the lessons that they're going to be teaching. Any of my colleagues, would you like to add anything based on what I talked about for bridging this into practice?

I'll say I think that many teachers underestimate what it requires to really model. I love the comment that you had, Kim, about working with people who appreciated the language being there so that they could add. Well, yeah.

Thanks for those thoughts, Dr. Eden, Dr. Saint Martin. When we think about literacy as being as a whole, right? W H O L E, all of the components matter, but it's being able to do all of those parts well in order so that students can be able to Read and comprehend and understand really challenging X. A critical part of that is modeling, which we've already, you know, briefly talked about.

So what is the role of modeling? And like Dr. Reed just mentioned, you know, how do we avoid underestimating how much modeling a student might need in order to be adequately supported? So ironically, I just came off of a chat with Dr. Anita Archer and our conversation was focused on the science of instruction. I mean, the magic really is in instruction. And yes, modeling is critical. We want to make sure that it's clear, it's unambiguous, try to be free from jargon, it's concise.

At the same time, though, when we think about a lesson needing modeling or the teacher demonstrating some guided practice. some independent application or some I do, I do it, we do it, you do it in terms of how we form our instruction. Some of the more recent research that a Dr. Arsh and I were just talking about was

The piece that's getting overlooked is the guided practice. It's the we do. So there's a lot of teacher models, teacher models, teacher models, and then it's assigned the work and have the student independently do it. The importance is that we've gotta engage in modeling. and we've got to be very clear and think break down the lesson into manageable chunks. We have to have guided practice of those pieces of what the strategies or what we're trying to teach.

And it could be me modeling and then we're gonna practice, we're gonna practice, we're gonna practice, we're gonna practice. And then we're gonna give students an opportunity to independently demonstrate their learning. And based on the feedback that as educators we're provided with what students are able to do as we're moving through that. a gradual release of responsibility and getting students independently using these strategies in this case.

We may find the next day that we have to go back and do another modeling. We need to go back and solidify, reteach some of the parts and go back into giving students more guided practice, more guided practice. to gradually release responsibility. The quote that r has resonated with me is that many of our students are overexposed but underdeveloped. And it the overexposure is the model, model, model, model.

And the underdeveloped is not enough guided practice along the way. And so we have to move away from the we're gonna teach, we're gonna model, model, and then just assign kids and pray. that they actually can do it. We have to keep that that middle part of the guided practice with gradual release of responsibility intact as well. I love what you said. I always say this to my teachers that it's not just I do, we do, you do. It really is I do, then we do, then we do, then we do, then we do, right?

And you're looking at data as you're going along, and then you may need to go back to that I do and remodel. And when we think about modeling, I think one thing that is challenging is really thinking about what is modeling, you know, and that there's a distinction between telling them something and doing a think aloud. So in the case of something like a strategy like get the gist.

back to my Venus flytrap text, which I have on my mind because it's in my current professional development I've been working on, really reading something aloud with the kids and then talking through. Peeling sort of apart your brain and showing them your thought process. So, you know, the Venus flytrap is an insect-eating plant that lives mostly on the East Coast.

Oh, Venus Fly Trap is mentioned in the first sentence here. And I know that that's the title of this. So I'm going to go ahead and circle Venus Fly Trap, you know, and then going on and really exposing your thinking to kids. And you can still do that while getting active engagement from kids as well. Put your thumbs up if you hear me say this word again and then thinking aloud for the rest of the passage.

And then piggybacking on what Kim was saying about guided practice, then we really need to make sure that kids are practicing something correctly because if we just give it to them and say, peace out, see you later, right? We don't know if they actually have it. So have them really practice something correctly, give them lots of prompts while you're engaging in guided practice and giving immediate corrective feedback. So really making sure that you're monitoring what it is that they're doing.

Is correct. And if not, go back and reteach again. Just kind of been a theme of what I know we've been already talking about. One thing that I've noticed in the professional development, speaking of piggybacking on Jade's thinking aloud, is seems like folks. They're self-conscious doing what Jade just did.

in front of their students. And uh in our professional development, you know, we ask teachers to come up and model. And invariably what happens is they start to model and then they go into question mode. So we stop them. Very kindly, of course, and say, okay, let's back up a little bit. You're starting to ask questions. You need to think aloud more. And I'm not saying it's easy.

But it's something that when you're doing professional development that you should make your participants aware of that they go into that other mode. It's difficult thinking a lot. Until you get used to it. I really like the example you gave earlier about showing examples and non-examples and then doing a think aloud about why this is a good gist, for example, or a not so good one, for example. And I always would

In third period, when I was teaching, I'd say, oh, these are some just statements from fifth period. Because they they love critiquing each other's. without putting names on them, of course, and and walking through them, but doing a think aloud of each, just using a rubric that matches it. Well, does this name the who or what? Well, I don't see Venus flytrap mentioned in this gist, and we just identified that that was the

you know, the subject of what we just read about. So I'm wondering what we need to do to fix up this gist statement here to make this a better gist. We can do modeling and for lots of reasons. And even with teaching vocabulary, I mean, examples and non examples are equally important there as well. Absolutely. I appreciate all those thoughts, especially around think aloud. In order to learn really efficiently, we've got to have a good model that we can then

you know, mimic and if comprehension is just in the black box of our brain, that's really challenging for some students to figure out how to figure out text. And so I appreciate those notions of How am I making sense of a text? I'm the most expert reader in this classroom. Let me show you how I'm going to walk through and unpack this text and let's do it together and that being part of that.

We do, we do, we do process that guided practice where it kind of scales up and back and down and on the path to independent practice. We've covered a lot of ground. And again, we only covered a chunk of recommendation three. So we haven't talked about multisyllabic word reading. We haven't talked about building really purposeful fluency to help students read effortlessly or how to be

strategic around using stretch text in your classroom. A teacher might be listening to this and be like, this is really overwhelming. And we didn't even get to all of it. So

Any thoughts on trying to improve practice when it seems like there might be so many things that need to be implemented and a middle school period's only fifty minutes or sixty minutes long? I know all of my colleagues on the phone are working in spaces with educators. So right now there is a lot of professional learning that is needed. And sadly, the current realities, time for professional learning is a challenge. I mean

when I can go down the highway in the state of Michigan and see a billboard advertising for substitutes. So if you've made it on a billboard, there's a crisis. What I learned though is that when working with what I've learned is working with secondary educators.

They have never really had the opportunity to understand the source of reading difficulties. For many of these folks, especially if they are a core subject area teacher, most of their college coursework was in their What I have found in the secondary space is really helping teachers, leaders understand that this is an all We're all in this together kind of approach because we're talking about the intervention space right now with this practice guide.

However, for students to be able to accelerate the reading outcomes, it requires opportunities for kids to apply these strategies and what they're learning in the context of their classroom settings. And so I really do find that working with leaders, in having a very planful approach to systematically develop background knowledge. Why do our course subject area teachers need to incorporate these strategies into the teaching of their subject areas?

And people who are delivering intervention. How do we provide intervention curriculum resources that could already include these elements, these four recommendations? but make it perhaps easier for them to be able to implement. I can't speak for the states in which everyone else on the call is in, but I know we have a lot of paraeducators. We have a lot of emergency certified educators who are providing.

reading intervention. And so to expect these individuals to have the background knowledge and experience to design daily lessons that would incorporate Right. these evidence-based practices depending upon students' needs, in my opinion, is not very realistic. And so I do think professional learning is key, as is a planful approach.

Rome wasn't built in a day. And so we can't expect to teach educators in a couple of sessions all about reading acquisition and why it's important to integrate in core subject areas and how to structure intervention. just structuring the lesson, let alone the school-wide system that is needed to give students access to the intervention if they need it. But I'm curious, I'm dying to know from my colleagues on the call, what would you add?

So I think one thing to emphasize is that it doesn't need especially when we're thinking about tier one, the content area setting for the secondary, it doesn't need to be a million different strategies. And I think we tried to do a good job in the guide of not presenting too much. There are a lot of examples, but it's not a lot of a million different strategies.

So you know, word of the day, right? When you were in high school and they read the vocab word of the day over the loudspeaker, I always think of it like that because it's like in one ear, out the other. Like what what happened? You know, you're trying to teach me your word. And I think it's the same thing with these practices that It shouldn't be a new practice every day. It should be a cohesive set of practices and a simple routine that. All these teachers can integrate into their instruction.

across different content areas. And also if you think about that, we want it to be across content areas because we want to increase the dosage of instruction that these kids are getting. First of all, a lot of the struggling readers are spending most of their day in the Gen Ed setting. And in a lot of these schools, we have these flip triangles, right? Where 80% or more of the kids are

qualifying for more tier two or tier three intervention, but the schools can't possibly provide it. So the implications are to strengthen that tier one. It is possible for science, social studies. English and even math teachers to integrate a simple set of before. provide world knowledge, word knowledge, instruction before a kid reads a text, and then integrate some kind of routine like get the gist or answer, you know, ask and answer questions.

And then have that school wide. And when you do that, if you think about that one student. Their dosage of instruction, if they get one science lesson a week that integrates evidence-based literacy instruction with eyes on test. So eyes on text and co-occurring literacy instruction. One science, one social studies, one English. And maybe this happens to be a student in an intervention class.

that's a pretty healthy dosage of literacy instruction. And the burden doesn't all fall on the English language arts teacher or on that intervention teacher, if you will. So I think the message just it doesn't have to be a million different things. Just A cohesive set of a few things that can be scaled up across the school, which takes talking to each other and figuring things out, but it is possible.

I agree with that notion in the sense that it's not uh necessarily robbing from the content areas anything because if I'm in a biology class and I'm a struggling reader, I'm not accessing the text. But if my biology teacher has a small set of high-leverage strategies to help me unpack the test. That's for my benefit as a biology teacher because that student is now getting better domain knowledge in my specific context.

So I appreciate everyone's time here joining us on the Teaching Literacy podcast today. Final question What makes a good teacher? Oh that's a really good question. So I think a new teacher is someone who embraces new learning. strives to continuously strengthen their knowledge and abilities and they seek out feedback from others, whether it's individuals in coaching roles or colleagues.

to really help bridge this implementation gap. I mean there's a lot of evidence-based practices, many of which we have in this practice guide. But the evidence-based practices and the ability to implement those things to demonstrate outcomes is sometimes easier said than done. And so by coming into this with a continuous improvement, we're learning new things.

We're going to seek out feedback to be able to implement things very well and use data to improve our instruction. Those are just really good things for our educators to keep in mind and just to have those mindsets. Dr. Deborah, Dr. Jade Wexler, Dr. Kim Really St. Martin, and Dr. Joe Demino, thanks for joining us on the Teaching Literacy podcast. Thank you. Thank you. for having

A great big thanks to my guests for joining me on the show today, and especially for the work that they did with the IES practice guide. Uh for my big takeaway on the subject, I followed Dr. Domino's advice and I tried to create a gist. level summary of it in 10 words or less. And I did it with eight. And my big takeaway was putting it all together with less is more.

Dr. Kimberly St. Martin mentioned a couple times Anita Archer and different little Anita Archerisms, little short phrases that Dr. Archer has. And there's one that comes to my mind from the conversation, and it is cut the fluff and keep the The clear takeaway for me was starting with a high leverage set of practices, a small set of practices.

And the two ones that stuck out. Things like questions. Questions are ubiquitous to comprehension instruction. Go into any classroom doing comprehension today, my guess is you will see comprehension questions in one form or another. And not all questions are the same or require the same types of information. So can we think about explicitly teaching our students the different types of questions?

and the different types of strategy or skill needed to interrogate and investigate the text to answer those questions. Can we give them a sense of self-efficacy of being able to navigate challenging questions really well? And then also gist level statements. I love what Dr. Damino had to say around saying that. Helping readers build a gist-level understanding of a text in 10 words or less is actually a really challenging thing to do.

And it requires them to sift through all the information in the text to determine which parts are most important. And then those are going to connect to other parts of the text that have been uh decoded and then are in the reader's schema. But uh we can go down other rabbit holes after that, but starting with overall, what is this text all about? And then being able to build on it from there.

But if we are consistent with our students, these are practices that are going to help them navigate challenging texts. Which is going to benefit them not only in our ELA classrooms, but it's gonna benefit them in science, in social studies. It's gonna benefit them when they are applying for trade schools or college or jobs.

Um, being able to navigate complex text, I think, is one of the most critical skills in the 21st century. And I'm so grateful that we had high caliber expert guests to uh talk to us about how to do that well. That's all I have for you today. Thanks for what you do in your sphere of literacy. And until next time, let's go and teach reading just a little bit better.