How Can I Teach with Books that are Two Years Above Student Reading Levels?

  • challenging text instructional level guided reading complex text
  • 12 October, 2024
  • 36 Comments

Blast from the past: Originally posted February 2, 2013; re-issued October 12, 2024. Over the past 15 years, I have issued several blogs concerning the value of teaching students to read more challenging texts than we have used in instruction in the past. Despite a growing body of evidence showing that teaching students at their “instructional reading level” provides no learning benefits – and that sometimes it limits learning – most teachers continue to avoid challenging text by moving kids to easier text, reading texts to the students, or replacing texts with other sources of information (e.g., videos, teacher presentations). Given that I thought it would be a good idea to reissue this one. Oh, and by the way, I just completed writing a book on this topic. It will be published by Harvard Education Press early in 2025.   

RELATED: When Sisyphus was in First Grade or One Minute Reading Homework

Teacher question:
I teach 4th-grade general education. I have read several of your articles the last few days because I have a growing frustration regarding guided reading. I believe a lot of your ideas about what does not work are correct, but I don't understand what you believe we SHOULD be doing. I am confused about how to give students difficult textbooks to read without reading it to them. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I do not know how to scaffold science or social studies text for students that are 2 years behind without reading it to them. I also feel pressure in these subjects to read it to them because I thought it was more important for them to understand the information thoroughly by reading the text aloud, having thoughtful discussions, and follow up activities. Every time I think I know what I should be doing, I read another article and realize that I am doing that wrong too. So, please give me guidance on how to best to teach nonfiction and fiction text to my class whole group. What strategies and types of activities are the best?

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain. What would it look like to scaffold a fourth-grade lesson from a social studies book with children who are reading at second-grade level? There are several possibilities.

First, I would “level” (pun intended) with the kids. I would not try to hide from them that I was going to ask them to read a book that in the past we would have avoided. The point here is motivation. People like a challenge and kids are people. When you ask them to take on something hard, let them in on the secret so they can take on the challenge with the right mindset and so they can be proud of themselves when they manage to meet the challenge – and we will make sure that they meet the challenge.

Second, it is essential that the teacher read the chapter before the kids do. We need to identify the linguistic, conceptual, and textual features that may be the source of their difficulty. Look out for ideas that you think will be especially complicated, subtle, or abstract, assumptions of background knowledge that you think your students lack, unknown vocabulary, complicated sentences, cohesive links that might be hard to track, organizational structure that students might ignore, and so on. Basically, you are trying to figure out what might make this text hard for your students to comprehend.

I’m willing to head off or avoid a problem if I think the students cannot surmount it. For instance, if there is a word that I think the students will not know and the author doesn’t define it, the context doesn’t reveal its meaning, or it can’t be figured out from morphology, then I am willing to familiarize the kids with it prior to reading. However, if it is possible to gain its meaning from the text, I will not try to avoid the problem. I’d rather that they miss it, which will allow me to teach kids how to take it on successfully. Teachers must decide which problems to solve for the kids and which to guide them to fix themselves. The real learning will come from the latter.

Third, the scaffolding described above will likely require some rereading—either of the whole chapter (fourth-grade science and social studies chapters can be surprisingly short, so rereading the entire chapter is usually not that big a deal). Thus, they try to read it; I question them and help them work through the problems; and then they reread it (perhaps more than once), to see if they can figure it out the second or third time.

Fourth, if your kids’ reading levels are more than a year or two below the level of the book that you are trying to teach, consider starting with fluency work. Have those students read the text aloud, once or twice before the lesson aimed at comprehension of the text. This can be done many ways (e.g., having partners practice reading the social studies text during their ELA fluency time, getting parents involved, including this kind of practice in a Tier 2 intervention). The point of the fluency work is to reduce the amount of basic reading struggle – the reading of the words – that these students may face. Once they have engaged in the fluency practice, these students should read the text along with the rest of the class. They will benefit from the same comprehension scaffolds noted above.

What you are trying to do with this encouragement, fluency work, and comprehension scaffolding is to enable the students to read the text that they are sure to struggle with. You can monitor their learning by how much improvement you see in their reading of each text. But remember your goal is not to avoid difficulty but to enable students to surmount difficulty. That means that you don’t shift kids to texts at their supposed levels, you don’t read the texts to the kids, and you don’t go around the text by telling them what it says.


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Shanahan, T. (In press). Leveled Readers, Leveled Lives. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

 

Previous Comments 

 

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Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Mark Pennington Oct 12, 2024 01:05 PM

How much of the new book will flesh out the scaffolding you summarize in today's post, Tim?

What ages or skill levels will the book address?

Deb Oct 12, 2024 03:09 PM

Scaffolding, at times, appears to be the biggest struggle…specifically how to scaffold the text while still allowing students to do the work. Is there a previous blog or resource you can suggest that provides additional support on how to scaffold a grade level text for students that are 2 years below grade level?

Jessica Jones Oct 12, 2024 03:25 PM

Can you share more about what you mean by familiarizing students with vocabulary? I work with a lot of multilingual learners and more recent research is promoting in text/context vocabulary support to replace preteaching vocab by giving a definition, asking students to use the word in a sentence, frayer or other vocab learning models. You also mentioned replacing text with video, but wondering how video might be used to build or activate background knowledge about the topic to be followed by the text reading you described.

Dr. Theresa Seits Oct 12, 2024 01:30 PM

Yes! Yes! Yes! I remember when I was in the classroom (years ago) and I reluctantly raised the bar and tried what you were suggesting. I was truly amazed with the results. My students made incredible gains and I became a loyal Shanahan groupie. :0)
Incidentally, I had conversation with a former student who I ran into recently. He is now what most would call a very successful professional. He told me that he was not a “reader” before 4th grade. He thanked me and praised the very strategies that I implemented based on your suggestions and recommendations (meaningful on level texts, rereading/close reading, book clubs, morphology, etc.).
Keep preaching Dr. Shanahan! You're changing lives!

Rob Oct 12, 2024 02:04 PM

Tim’s response makes sense, but what does it look like for a gr 4 teacher who has 24 students. Are all students doing initial reading for fluency with partner? What are the higher readers doing?

Kerrin Oct 12, 2024 02:16 PM

What about students that are 4-5 years behind due to decoding, but listening comprehension skills are solid? Or those with decoding and conprehension skills both significantly below (lang.learning disabilities scoring consistently below 5%)?

Elana Gordon Oct 12, 2024 02:18 PM

Thank you for re-posting this blog! This is exactly one of the areas we are grappling with in my school and my district. Teachers are reading the grade level texts to students because they are not proficient readers yet. This will really help add to the conversation. I am also wondering about what more your book will provide, or if you could post a part 2 with more ideas on how to scaffold texts for teachers. That is what they are looking for. Ways in which this can be accomplished. Thanks!

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 02:48 PM

Kerrin-
There is no limit to the distance between text and reader that cannot be scaffolded successfully. However, circumstances will not always permit that in a given instructional situation. Fortunately, most kids have not been allowed to lag behind as far as you note (though, sadly, it does happen). With those whose decoding skills are the main problem, the scaffolding would focus heavily on fluency activities with the text to be read and a certain amount of word study focused on the reading of words from the text. I would also encourage -- in a case like that -- the use of texts that have a lot of word overlap (so that the study of words in one text, helps with the other); having students read multiple texts on the same or similar topic can facilitate that. If students struggle with both decoding and comprehension -- then scaffolding will require both the kinds of fluency/word supports noted, but also supports aimed at vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, text structure, use of metacognitive strategies, and use of prior knowledge all can be helpful (it will depend on the text, not the text's level).
tim

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 02:50 PM

Rob--
At fourth grade, I expect almost everybody to require at least some fluency work, so the difference among students in this regard will likely be about which students do a small amount of that work and which will need it as a scaffold for preparing them to read a particular text.

tim

MARY EILEEN MCDONNELL Oct 12, 2024 03:54 PM

I have a question about the following : “ We need to identify the linguistic, conceptual, and textual features that may be the source of their difficulty…ideas that you think will be especially complicated, subtle, or abstract, assumptions of background knowledge that you think your students lack, unknown vocabulary, complicated sentences, cohesive links that might be hard to track, organizational structure that students might ignore, and so on. “ I cannot help but think of a teacher tool that would help guide teachers in identifying the above. Have you included one in your book?

Melissa Hostetter Oct 12, 2024 04:06 PM

I teach 7th grade science. My issue would be classroom management. When the kids are given a challenging task, they begin to act out in order to avoid the work. I think I will start small and ask them to read paragraphs on their own and move from there.

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 04:27 PM

Melissa--
That claim has been widely made and, yet, research has not been particularly supportive of the idea. There does appear to be less on task time (but some of the research indicates that isn't misbehavior, but kids thinking about the work). I would not recommend placing students in particularly difficult materials or tasks entirely on their own. It makes sense when you are guiding kids to read their science textbook -- not when you send them off to read it on their own. Trust your kids, they won't act out any more than normal.

tim

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 04:29 PM

Mary Ellen--

I know of no such tool, though I suspect over time, AI will provide some help along those lines (it can do some of that now -- by identifying certain kinds of sentences, for instance). In my experience, this is something that teachers get better at and that they do better in pairs or groups then on their own.

tim

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 04:33 PM

Jessica--

If I am preparing students to read a text that I believe will be hard for them, I might choose to familiarize them with some of the vocabulary (words that I think are important to understanding the text, that the kids will not know, and that I think will be unlikely to be solved through a use of context or morphology). I am not going to necessarily teach those words thoroughly but will tell the kids ahead of time what they mean. Depending on the level (age and linguistic), I might provide them with a dictionary or I might not just tell them those words, but provide a list with the definitions). If I want the kids to really know those words, then after we have dealt with them in the text, we might spend considerable time getting those words into their vocabulary and activities like Frayer can be helpful with that.

tim

Harriett Janetos Oct 12, 2024 04:37 PM

Tim, you are largely responsible for convincing me five years ago of the importance of teaching all students grade-level text. I cite you extensively in this piece: From Play-doh to Plato: All students need to grapple with grade level text (https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/play-doh-plato-all-students-need-grapple-grade-level-text) and end with this:

One student in particular, who had strong vocabulary knowledge but was reading two years below grade level because she struggled so much with decoding, exemplified this need for support. Once she decoded a multisyllabic word—which was never an easy task—her vocabulary knowledge paved her way toward comprehension.

Timothy Shanahan asks: “If low-performing fourth-graders are to be taught from second grade books, when do they catch up?” Certainly, this was the question I kept asking myself about my struggling students. Another one of my third graders had come to my second grade intervention session mid-year reading at the kindergarten level—basically a non-reader. However, she was a diligent worker, and she ended third grade with a CAASP ELA score of 2/4, “approaching proficiency.” Without the push and practice from grade-level text, she would have been lost trying to navigate that arduous assessment.

The answer to the old joke—How do you get to Carnegie Hall?—is also the answer to how you get students to read at grade level. Practice, practice, practice—with grade-level text.

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 04:41 PM

Theresa and Harriet--
Thanks. Since preparing this, Jill Barshay has reported on a new data analysis of 27,000 schools the student bodies of which are below level. Of those schools, about 1300 make better than average annual learning gains. One of the things that distinguishes those high flyers is that they teach English and math on grade level, rather than dropping back to the level at which the kids enter school. That's just correlational evidence, of course, but it does suggest that the experiences that you have had are surprisingly common.
We are simply not giving students a sufficient opportunity to learn.
tim

Harriett Janetos Oct 12, 2024 06:14 PM

Today's post by Alex Quigley, "Adaptive teaching and the power of anticipation" (https://alexquigley.co.uk/adaptive-teaching-and-the-power-of-anticipation/?ref=the-3rs-by-alex-quigley-newsletter), relates to this discussion. At the end, he provides resources and links for further investigation.

Related reading:

‘Adaptive Teaching: What is it anyway?’
‘Adaptive teaching and vocabulary instruction’
‘Adaptive teaching: Scaffolds, Scale, Structure and Style’
‘Adaptive teaching or reasonable adjustments?’

Joanne E Hamann Oct 12, 2024 07:19 PM

Tim, when you're talking about fluency first before diving deep into the meaning of the text and you have students several years below grade level in decoding, would that include choral reading or echo reading of the text with the teacher or making a recording of the text? Or would it be best to have them try partner reading with a peer that decodes fairly well? Just trying to understand what this might look like as I try to guide pre-service teachers. I always look forward to your blog! Thank you!

Tim Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 07:32 PM

Joanne-
My personal preference is paired reading with close teacher supervision. How er, those all can work, and I might use all of them at. One time or another both for variety and depending on how heavy the lift is for the kids. Just remember kids tend to do significantly better on a second read even when no guidance or instruction is provided.

Tim

Dr. Bill Conrad Oct 12, 2024 07:54 PM

Your wonderful recommendations to support children with reading text that is 2-4 years above their reading level begs the question as to why so many children read below level.

We might want to tip our hat to the root cause problem of the failure of our early reading systems. The science of reading and evidence-based approaches to curriculum, instruction, and assessments have not been fully adopted!

Beyond Imagination!.

We will be in a perpetual state of reading triage until we systematically address our alchemistic education system!

Truth be told!

Timothy Shanahan Oct 12, 2024 08:02 PM

Deb-

Even better, if you look in my publications you'll find some articles with more details about that (especially the American Educator article). Click on Publications, written publications, and you should be able to find some useful resources.

tim

Jasmyn Oct 13, 2024 12:44 AM

This is an interesting study by Hogan & Salinger which investigated the effects of a 14-week intervention on pre-service teachers’ acquisition of specialized text knowledge and its application to text-based discussions. Modules taught participants how authors use discipline-specific text features and language patterns to convey meaning and how readers notice and evaluate these aspects of texts as they build textual understandings. A discussion planning tool is within the supplementary material, used to analyse text features and language with in a text https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/01626620.2024.2392727?scroll=top

Gaynor Oct 13, 2024 02:38 AM

I fully support Dr Conrad' s comment and especially like his use of the word 'alchemist' w r s t many current reading methods

As I have mentioned ad nauseam on this site the ideal and practice of Universal Literacy needs to be promoted. This means having every child with an IQ over about 80 , who is not blind nor deaf achieving at the correct reading level for their age.

My mother in low social and economic status state schools in Scottish Dunedin , NZ was exposed to this ideal and practice in the 1930s and 40s as an infant teacher ( children aged 5yrs to 7years) . She experienced how this was achieved and never lost the determination and methods even when teaching privately in the 1970s -20000. It is an absolute slog to achieve and requiring total commitment and refusal to consider failure. Every child's reading was heard every day and any sign of failure to be at the correct level was remediated immediately in the teacher's spare time and the parents were also informed and encouraged to help since the reading books were also home based.

Of course, intensive phonics was the method she applied which fits under the umbrella term of structured Literacy and complied with the present SoR., No child in classes of 30, was to fail to have the correct reading age for their chronological age by seven years old. School inspectors were used to examine whether this had been achieved and if not the teacher lost grading. No excuses were accepted.

My mother maintains she never saw a dyslexic child , in her classes, but only children who read more slowly. There were many supplementary texts for reading and testing and comprehension questions were asked. She did have a cousin with dyslexic tendencies.

The exact numbers of 'dyslexic 'children is not well defined and I believe it is often being used as an excuse for the defective 'alchemistic ' teaching. There have always been children from difficult home situations and in the 1930s there were many labouring jobs not requiring literacy so parents kept children home ,frequently, to help with the laundry and other household chores before home appliances were available..

When I was at school in the 1950s , in classes of 50 students , every child could read the set text in the class. In round robin reading I observed a few children did read more slowly and stumbled on a few difficult words in the texts. Having large numbers of children in a class who are years behind is intolerable . My mother had remedial students in the 1970s-2000s, even six to seven years behind in their reading . I read somewhere , it takes many times more work to remediate those students, who are even two years behind compared with younger ones. My mother was able to have her remedial students increase their reading age by two years or more in one year. She used your excellent intensive phonic Heilman workbooks combined with your Ginn 100 workbooks and texts which are both very suited to parents using daily. She used almost entirely imported American texts and workbooks at a time when phonics was condemned in NZ because of ( damn) Marie Clay's influence . The Ginn workbooks with their controlled vocabulary and some slow phonics were however also used in NZ classrooms in the 1960s -80s for the lower half of the class for students who had not achieved fluency , in the common sight words

I am sure there will be many teachers in the States who have similar beliefs in Universal Literacy and the way they achieve this in practice with classroom management etc is well worth investigating alongside examining research. Schools are failing if they have classes with so many students years behind.



Lynne Ord-Oraniuk Oct 13, 2024 04:45 AM

Thanks Tim
I am a principal of a school in Australia, and I have been trialling, with a group of above level Year 4 readers, a nonfiction book with prompts as they read, one student is reading a book on digestion. For example, what did you learn from the diagram on page...? After reading pages 14-16 why is the stomach important? What does x mean after reading page...? The book is a challenge and after one prompt the student response was- That was hard, yet he was able to do the work required. I am also doing this with fiction through the Lense of text structure (what the character wants and their motivations, setting and plot), vocabulary and themes. I have been really conscious of complex texts since reading your blogs and the so-called slump after year 2 where kids don't seem to progress at the same rate they do in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2. I would be interested in your thoughts, and on a side note, I am really looking forward to hearing you speak in Sydney next week.

Dee McWilliams Oct 13, 2024 11:26 AM

As a reading specialist working mostly with first graders, I do see the value of using leveled books, along with decodables, in supporting students’ developing fluency. Trade books and grade level texts are read aloud daily. In previous posts you have specified grades 2 and up for teaching with grade level texts. What are your thoughts at this point about using leveled books as instructional material with first graders and kindergartners? Thanks so much, Tim.

Timothy Shanahan Oct 13, 2024 03:30 PM

Dee-- It is fine to use "leveled books" at any grade. Leveled books aren't the problem -- leveled kids is. The idea of matching kids' levels to the levels of the books hasn't worked out, but with beginning readers it is important that the texts be easy. That means a combination of high decodability and high word repetition. Some beginning leveled books are a problem for teaching reading because they do not require that the students read. Here I am specifically talking about the patterned books in which a sentence pattern is repeated again and again and the kids use the pictures to determine the unknown words. Avoid those (those books can be fun when kids are on their own and they can be useful for supporting beginning writing).

tim

Timothy Shanahan Oct 13, 2024 03:45 PM

Lynne-
Sounds great to me. Your students' response shows both that they are happy to be challenged but also that they feel respected. Nice combination.

see you soon.

tim

Joe Mentesana Oct 14, 2024 01:04 PM

Thank you, again, for addressing this issue! I "re-preach" your thinking on this topic as much as possible, and promote dyad reading and other scaffolds that help students access complex texts. Anxiously awaiting the release of your book! Also, can you point to the Jill Barshay report? I'm not finding it.

Joe Mentesana Oct 14, 2024 01:04 PM

Thank you, again, for addressing this issue! I "re-preach" your thinking on this topic as much as possible, and promote dyad reading and other scaffolds that help students access complex texts. Anxiously awaiting the release of your book! Also, can you point to the Jill Barshay report? I'm not finding it.

Timothy Shanahan Oct 15, 2024 06:00 AM


Joe-- Here is a link to the Jill Barshay reporting:
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools/

tim

Jessica Ziel Oct 18, 2024 03:42 AM

Do you feel the same if they are younger grade students? 2nd graders, really closer to early 1st late Kinder?

Timothy Shanahan Oct 18, 2024 10:37 PM

Jessica--
No, that is an important point. The idea of teaching students to read with grade level text is not -- at this point -- appropriate for K-1. First, there is no research showing that to be the case (possibly some day there will be, but given the lack of research on that, I think it is best to be cautious). Second, there is good reason to believe that students need to develop the basics of decoding ability -- suggesting that students should be able to read like an average first grader towards the end of the year. Once students have reached that plateau, the benefits of teaching students at their level is dubious.

tim

Cheryl Szott Oct 20, 2024 01:00 PM

I am struggling with general Ed 4th grade students who are beginning readers— working on how to decode CVC words and basic high-frequency words. How would you scaffold for students at that level?

Timothy Shanahan Oct 20, 2024 07:59 PM

Cheryl-
If a student is reading at a first grade level or lower, you would teach basic decoding skills and you would have the student reading relatively easy texts (a mix of decodables and controlled vocabulary readers and language experience stories). You wouldn't try to teach that student at grade level.

tim

Charity Nov 25, 2024 09:05 PM

I am so glad I found this blog post. Like others I have thought "I am doing it all wrong." I think there needs to be more professional development on what beneficial scaffolding is. I think it is important for teachers to understand the process of productive struggle as well. Many students NEED to be challenged beyond what assessments or other data say they are capable of.

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How Can I Teach with Books that are Two Years Above Student Reading Levels?

36 comments

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