Why Strategy-First Reading Instruction Holds Students Back | Know Better, Do Better

I have to tell you a story. New York City has 36 school districts. The school that I ran was in one of those districts. And they had a monthly meeting, which the district usually tried to coincide as much as possible with rush hour. So I'm on the bus for a long time, and I'm next to this little girl who's looking at a sign. She asks, what's that word after no? And the mother says, spitting. And the child goes, ooh. Then she goes back to the text and she says,

You mean some people need to be told that? And the mother patiently explains, yes, there are some people who need to be told that. And she says, who put that sign on the bus? And. The mother explains, not the bus driver, but people who make the rules for the city. And once again, she goes back to the text and she's clearly thinking and she says, I don't think that's going to work. If there's people who need to be...

told not to spin on the bus, they need to put a policeman on the bus. But let's think about that for a minute. That child, in those brief three minutes or so, focused on a text, asked a question. visualized, because after she heard the word was spitting, she went, ooh, made an inference to her, a relevant inference to her knowledge. She knew that people in her family did not spit on buses.

And then she synthesized all that information and made a conclusion. They need to put a policeman on the bus. How often do we have to teach those strategies? That, in fact, is what a thinking human being does at the age of three or four, because this child was not in school. School hadn't started. I know. I was principal. She looked at the test. She asked questions. She visualized. She made inferences. She synthesized.

She drew a conclusion. I'm David Lieben. And I'm Meredith Lieben. Welcome to Episode 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast.

So if these processes that David witnessed on his long bus ride downtown from our school to the district office...

are part of what humans do naturally to make sense of the world. Why on earth do we spend so much classroom time teaching them as discrete skills to our students? We've done it. And we here really does mean us too. We spent a lot of years teaching comprehension strategies because we didn't understand the nature of comprehension and how our brain integrates and interprets what it sees.

I was the head of the Vermont Reading Institute, which was completely devoted to comprehension strategies. Know better, do better. That's right. So we are not blaming. any classroom practitioner for this. We think there's some policy issues that bring to bear on this that are maybe bigger than all of us. We want you to understand it so you can know better and do better in your classrooms. And another little story here.

We were hired at one point by a big district that had been underfunded for a long time and had a rush of new leadership. And they asked us to... do an audit of the curriculum, the materials that had been in place for probably 14 years at that point. So we looked at them and they used the same series from kindergarten through 12th grade. So yay for coherence. and loyalty to a publisher. But they taught reading comprehension strategies from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade.

over and over and over again in this mind-numbing sequence. This was McGraw-Hill. In the 13th year of this program, they were teaching high school students in the 12th grade. What an inference is. It was painstaking. And my analogy for this is if you want to be good at archery, you want to hit the bullseye, you take your arrow in your hand and...

And you run up to the target and you stab the center of the target over and over again and think that that's what's going to make you a good marksman. Let's take a few minutes to hear from Madi McCowan in our conversation with her, where we talk about... The damage that can be done when instruction is strategies forward and the text takes a back seat to an isolated list of strategies that...

are on a pacing chart, let's say, or in the unit that have to be covered. Why has the use of strategies come to dominate the field?

I think for a couple of reasons. One is what strategies, I mean, strategies really were an advance. I mean, they did replace something that was even less good, which tended to be either reading a text straight through silently, and then the teacher would ask a bunch of questions at the end, which were, you know, lots of them were literal, they were more assessment based, or...

Or sometimes there were some reading programs that actually broke the text up and had the kids read in silent reading units. But still, it's silent reading. And then we talk about, we ask you about what you read. And basically it was, you know, kind of quizzing the kids, you know, who was the character, what did they do? So it really wasn't an assist for comprehension.

comprehension really, by the time you get to the end of a text, either you've comprehended or not. We can't build comprehension then. I mean, we can take you back into the text and, you know, work with some things you might have missed or whatever, but you've already done it. So because strategies work with text as it was being read, that was a real advantage. That was really good. And why has it stuck around? I think because...

There's something tangible to do. You know, let's teach you a routine for making a summary. Let's teach you what you need to do to make a prediction. And that's something that, you know, a teacher and kids can grasp onto. And so it makes comprehension somehow seem less, you know, fuzzy and complex, which it is. So we're, you know, we're sort of avoiding what comes. really is in order to adopt strategies. And it's, it kind of reminds me of, there's this old joke about

There's a guy who's searching for his lost watch under a lamppost. And a friend comes by and the guy tells him what he's doing. He said, oh, did you lose your watch here? He says, no, I lost it over there, but the light's better here. So it's not going to get you anywhere, but the light's better. It makes sense. It's easier to do.

I don't dig the charter schools like I will the publishers, but in a well-regarded, well-known charter school that I was helping, I walk into kindergarten. It was a relapse. They were going through the book and every page. the teacher stopped and asked, can you make a prediction? Can you make an info? They had not, I figured that would get you. They had not finished the book when they were asked to do that. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing.

Prediction is like a disease. I mean, first of all, they just ask for predictions willy-nilly. So it teaches kids to just kind of say anything. Oh, that guy might die. Oh, that tree might blow up. Plus, there was a wonderful article, oh, maybe 15 years ago, that Art Grazer did with somebody showing that good readers, mature readers, don't do a lot of predicting.

Because that wastes resources. You know, there aren't really that many places in a text where it's like, oh, I know where she's going with this. And you don't do that unless stuff is stacked up and it's pretty clear where. the author is going to take you next. Otherwise you do not, you just don't predict. Yeah. Equally.

horrible is we've seen situations, seen materials where kids are asked to make predictions when they have read the entire text two or three times. It's like you check your brain. You're asking kids to check their brains at the door. wouldn't exercise. So if that's what grieving is, you sure as well aren't going to like breathe. Yeah. Yeah. And then something I read this morning, I think it was on Twitter said something about.

you know, with strategies and kind of overdoing strategies like that. So good readers are just going to ignore it. They're going to be put through that, but they're going to ignore it because they know how to read. The struggling readers are going to kind of believe that this is what they should do, and then they'll never get there.

What would you say is the appropriate role of reading strategies or standards or skills in instruction at all? Okay. Well, this will be a very short answer. None. I just wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't teach strategies. None. Zero. Zero. I just wouldn't. I think I know again. Some of those words are important. I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn't say, hey, kids, today we're going to learn to do a summary. What I would do is that...

In a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, very nice, you gave us a good summary of that and move on. Or, wow, you had to make an inference because the author didn't tell us. you know, X and Y. So we had to put together ourselves. That's called an inference. I'd use it as vocabulary, but I would never teach strategies.

I was observing a 10th grade class reading Oedipus. And there was a scene where the chorus states that it takes a lifetime to determine if a man is a good man. but if a man is evil, you can determine in a moment. And I thought that was really interesting. I looked at, and I started pondering it. I looked out at the class, and there were a few kids who actually...

also stopped. And we're clearly pondering that. The teacher did not stop. The class did not stop because that did not have anything to do with the standard of the week. And that's one of the great losses. When you don't make text at the center. You can lose gems like that on a regular basis. And reading, of course, loses meaning for a student whose interest is piqued by something like that. They want to stop and think about it for a while.

And they can't because the instructional goals, the material has driven the teacher on away from it. This is the essence of comprehension instruction also in balanced literacy. In balanced literacy. As a rule, whether it was from Lucy Corkin's units of study or districts that were making their own version, the teacher would read aloud from a grade-level complex text or above. And very often, they were excellent texts.

For example, in one lesson, this is actually in Lucy's book, they're reading the biography of a well-known artist. And the idea was to get the character. And the students then go back to their individual books and they find something having to do with character. But there's a number of problems with that.

One, their books might not be nearly as sophisticated in an example as the one that was read from what's called the mentor text. Two, that portion of the text that they're reading, character might not be very important that day, yet they're supposed to look for character. Three. A strong reader ignores that. They read to absorb what the text offers. A weak reader is going to hop on that like a life jacket.

And they'll say, okay, all I have to do, even with this simple text, is look for character. By teaching that way, you are absolutely teaching the wrong way. We don't read that way. We don't go home and read The New Yorker or The Atlantic. and say, this week I'm going to focus on character. This week I'm going to focus on sequence. And I am psyched out of my mind because next week we do seem. That is not the way we read, but that is the way it has been taught for many years.

many years. And what it boils down to is we are teaching in terms of comprehension, the exact wrong way. This is key to why An approach that emphasizes a standards-first approach or a strategy-first approach is so unhelpful. And doomed to failure. With all these stories, we do not. blame teachers. Remember, we were the ones who taught this way or who led the Vermont Strategic Reading Initiative, etc. And I do think it's really important that there's a bigger picture here.

With teacher accountability and the assessment movement, all of these things started with good intentions to help students learn more and be better readers. But they have had this downward pressure. of creating incredible anxiety around the items on the test that students are going to have to master. And we have the tail is wagging the dog here in all this instruction.

in ways that are dangerous and damaging for kids. Because it's not mastery of standards that makes students competent readers. It's actually learning how to navigate. all the things that text can do, which is why we keep talking about centering text and the unique features of each text. And in that way, you can use the strategies or you can use the standards when they fit.

as opposed to fitting the text to the standard or the comprehension strategy. Oof, we've been throwing a lot of tough stuff at you in this particular episode. And I know if you're like we were for years after we learned some of these things, weren't great. It doesn't feel so good. We want to leave you with more hopeful ground. We are getting to solutions, but we have a thought experiment for you.

In the meantime, to get back into the nature of reading and what it takes the brain to do to read well. Einstein wasn't the only one who did thought experiments. So even though it worked out well for him, let's do one here. You've been working diligently over the course of years asking questions based on comprehension strategies or standards. In some cases, actually teaching those standards outside of the context of the text even. And in many other cases...

crafting questions to align with the standards. Comes a day of the test, students still unable to comprehend the text that they're asked to read with enough facility. to pass the reading test, despite this work with standards over the course of all these years. Why is that the case? What happened and what can be done about it?

So we've been talking a lot about what not to do. What do we do? We start by looking at those things that underlie, those concepts that underlie comprehension. And that is, of course, foundational skills. If you don't have those as a basis, you can't comprehend. But there's also developing breadth of vocabulary.

meaning the number of words in your long-term memory, and depth of vocabulary, how much you know about words. And then growing students' knowledge of the world from extensive reading, especially... a volume of reading on a series of topics, which helps grow knowledge and helps grow tier two vocabulary. Reading is not the only way to grow knowledge of the world, but as Marilyn Adams said long ago, it's by far the most efficient.

And then there's also the idea that students develop an expectation that what they read will make sense. And not only that what they read will make sense, but they will work to do it when they don't. When it doesn't make sense. And actually, cognitive psychologists have a whole theory for this called Standard of Coherence.

Thank you, Meredith. We work well together, don't we? Standard of coherence. The belief that you will understand everything that the text has to offer and that when you don't, you will work to achieve it. There's a huge irony. in what we're just talking about now. You will work to do something about it when it doesn't make sense. That, what you do, is a reading comprehension strategy. You reread. You question.

You monitor for understanding so that you notice when you don't understand. Those are the reading comprehension strategies that do make sense as long as they're called up for the sake of comprehension. Which is really interesting. Comprehension monitoring is a strategy and in the right context, it's useful. It's not the same as standard of coherence. Standard of coherence is not a strategy. It's a habit of mind. It's the habit of mind that you enter into a text.

expecting to understand everything, and will do all the work necessary to do that. That's the difference between standard of coherence and comprehension strategy. Absolutely. And you're even annoyed when you don't understand and that's why you want to go back and repair understanding. We're going to talk more about standard of coherence.

versus comprehension monitoring later in the season. Right now, we want you to hear from middle school teacher Sean Morrissey. You heard from him last episode on vocabulary. When his school was piloting some of the new ELA programs, we had quite a lively discussion about what works and what doesn't and why when it comes to curriculum. So right now we're in the process of reviewing and piloting.

programs in the future, about a year from now, I'm adopting. I think we had enough educators that had a good kind of lay of the land of the different types of programs out there. So the teachers in my district, I think, knew the difference between like some of the knowledge building programs and sort of the bloated basils. So it's not by luck. The teacher's kind of new. But I think with districts, I think sometimes adoption is sort of by luck based on who's on that team.

You know, you could have, you never know, you could have one administrator that's making the decision that, you know, may or may not know the differences between like a bookworms and into reading, which. we heard the sales pitches one after the other. And I said it was the biggest juxtaposition I've ever seen. Just when you hear the Bookworms presenter talking about the research.

why during shared reading there's a lot of choral reading, a lot of repeated reading, a lot of eyes on the page, why that sentence composing. is in with interactive read-alouds and they're taking sentences right from the books that they're using versus like you can and I honestly probably saw like 150 different slides from into reading where, well, you can do this. This has this. This has this. And it was just like overwhelming. And, you know.

both presenters talked about authentic text. But if you didn't, like, that's the thing. If you didn't know, well... In bookworms, the authentic test revolves around novels. You know, you're talking about 8, 10 novels in fifth grade at minimum. I think there's probably more. There's probably like 15. that all the students read together or you hear during read-alouds. And into reading, like their authentic texts are excerpts. I kind of chuckled like...

One of the workbooks was passed around for fifth grade. I opened it up for interreading and the page was airborne. So I know the book well, but it was 15 pages of his book. the student consumable. I don't know how you define authentic. To me, that's not really authentic. But, you know, it's a stark difference. It's very stark. And the text and to reading aren't coherent.

Because they're not topics, they're themes. So they're a topic of sportsmanship. So you read one text on soccer, one text on baseball, and one text on track. And you don't get a chance to build up the knowledge coherently. And you don't get a chance to build up the academic vocabulary because you're not going to have that knowledge that supports the development of academic vocabulary.

And then they do see this thing, which is really nasty. They huge lists of words for foundational skills. I just looked at this today. So they're doing the OI diphthong. And they've got things, words like joist and hoist. And this was third grade. There's a lot of kids who don't know what a joist is or what hoist means. Yeah, I didn't know what a joist was until just the other day because we're taking a part of our bathroom.

I think one of the, one of the like stark differences of when you think about like knowledge building, like say a bookworms versus like the interreading that I, that I've seen.

And this is the challenge if teachers and administration don't have the background knowledge and the differences there. So with Interreading, they talked about... the tests that go along with it so they have like weekly tests that focus on standards like find the main idea and when the kids take it on the computer like all of that data like over time it'll show if a kid's like oh doing really well and find the main idea or not and what's really hard with that is for those that don't

know that that's a that's a pretty terrible idea it sounds great oh then we could like practice find the main idea with a different type of text which there's been so much written about it. It's just sort of a waste of time that we should just be building knowledge. And if we're asking kids to find the main idea, it's in a knowledge building unit in the text that you're...

you know, that you're working on. No argument here. Cause that is, that is the tail wagging the dog for sure. That's all folks, but stay tuned for more to come. Next time, we'll talk about practical ideas you can use in your classroom, like the power of read aloud in improving reading comprehension for your early elementary students.

There's no forcing anything. The kids are coming with so many ideas from these beautiful rich read-alouds that we're giving them that they truly are sitting on the rug and they are having a conversation with each other. And they're figuring out the answers by themselves. For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters website, linked to in the show notes. This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

You can learn more about their work at knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow them on Twitter slash X, Instagram, and Facebook. Search the Knowledge Matters hashtag and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with us personally, you can contact us through our website at readingdoneright.org. We get into how we've been teaching reading comprehension all wrong, and it is a doozy. How do you spell doozy? D-O-Z-Z-Y, or I-E. E-Y. I don't know.

You just don't sense doozy anymore. I mean, even if you did a word frequency check, you would get like more than you get doozy. And that's the difference between you and me.