How Should We Plan Reading Comprehension Lessons?

Teacher Question

As my teachers continue learning together about text-centered planning, I would love your help with a quick reflection. When you sit down to plan a unit:

1. How do you decide which comprehension standards the anchor text naturally requires?
2. What steps do you take to analyze the text before identifying standards?
3. How does the text guide the sequence of lessons and questions?

Shanahan Responds:

I’ll answer your questions.

But before I do, let me try to fend off some of the defensive comments my response is sure to elicit.

First, yes, I understand that teachers are busy and can’t design every lesson themselves in depth. No, I am not out of touch with reality, I’m aware there are only so many hours in a day, and that teachers have lives not just jobs. Got it.

However, if you are going to design comprehension lessons, or even just adjust textbooks to your students’ needs (which is what I recommend), you need to understand how to build such lessons from scratch. Try this with a few selections, and then home in on portions of it with future lessons.

With practice, it gets easier.

The best way to ease the pain and vouchsafe quality, try doing this with a colleague or two. You can even use those textbook lessons – comparing their version to yours. You’ll end up with a deeper understanding of the support such lessons provide, as well as their weak spots – where you need to focus your efforts to ensure maximum learning.

Second, no, there is not research showing the best way to design lessons. I’ve reviewed the research on lesson planning, and it is mainly descriptive – summing up what teachers do, rather than evaluating the outcomes of the various approaches.

Relevant research is cited throughout this piece, but none has undergone the kind of causal, experimental analysis that I would prefer.

The lack of such study matters. Often professors discourage teachers and prospective teachers from relying on textbooks lessons, disdainfully treating that as a lack of creativity, dedication, caring, or even intelligence. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but without any evidence those efforts to discourage textbook use seem dopey to me (an insight I gained as director of reading in Chicago – not from my stints as a textbook writer).

The guidance offered here is not meant to supplant those textbook lessons, but to strengthen how well teachers use them. Personal experience tells me that mindless fidelity does as much as harm as good. Research shows that often when teachers stray from those lesson plans, there is a tendency to lower the textbook demands, which does not serve students well (Brown, 2012). My hope is that the guidance here will help teachers to strengthen, rather than weaken, the textbook plans. 

Here goes…

Don’t start with the standards, start with the text that you will teach students to comprehend.

This may seem crazy. Studies show that teachers often think little about the goals when planning lessons (e.g., Hopkins, 2018), focusing on activities rather than learning. Nevertheless, I start with the text because it determines what can be taught. Most of the time I want to teach with a text the students cannot already read reasonably well. My instruction will be aimed at enabling them to comprehend this text successfully – without my reading it to them or telling them what it says. Also, I’ll guide students to consider the possibility of using with future texts whatever insights, skills, or methods allowed them to conquer this one.

We don’t want learning to be ignored, and that emphasis on enabling success should solve that problem. We also do not want the standards to dominate since their relevance depends entirely on the specific demands of a text and how it matches to what the students can already accomplish without teacher guidance. When text is an afterthought, like the distant cousin you almost forgot to invite to your wedding, learning will usually be inhibited.

Read the text. 

With a story, determine its plot or story grammar elements, key features of the characters, and one or more themes. For an informational text – what’s the point? Is it to explain the dangers of forest fires and how to prevent them? Then think about the key ideas and the structure of the article. Perhaps it specifies each danger, the cause of each, and then proposes solutions that can disrupt those cause-and-effect chains. Persuasive or argumentative text aims to make a point, it argues for or against something. Identifying the issue and the author’s take is essential. This argument will usually be supported by a series of claims, each with some kind of evidentiary support.

Knowing this information, you can design or select worthwhile questions that focus students’ attention on the major ideas. Asking about these will reveal whether your students are comprehending or not.

Then, in your planning, be attentive to the text’s affordances. An affordance is any information or text feature that may facilitate comprehension. Perhaps that forest fire article includes a table that summarizes or repeats the text information, arranging each danger, cause, and solution. A piece of fiction may describe characters and their actions using vocabulary like uncomfortably, hesitated, desperately, and humiliated. These words collectively should help readers to understand a character and, perhaps, why that character responds to a situation in a particular way. Students must not only obtain the key information from a text, but they should be aware of how they know what they know about the text. Encouraging the use of text evidence is a good idea (Buffen, 2019), and it fits nicely with recognizing a text’s affordances. Students may recognize that a character is timid, but they should also know that this was an inference that they drew based on those vocabulary words noted above.

Finally, be sensitive to potential barriers to comprehension. Authors’ affordances sometimes miscarry. Instead of bolstering understanding, they may serve to impede readers’ comprehension. A simple example of this is an apt vocabulary choice that derails readers who don’t know the word’s meaning. A description of a historical figure that includes the word “compassionate” may miscarry with audiences ignorant of that word. Keep your eye out for words your students may be unfamiliar with that could block their understanding. (Since this is a comprehension lesson, don’t worry for the moment about unknown words unlikely to get in the way of understanding the instructional text.)

Syntax can be another barrier. Some texts try to increase readability by breaking complex ideas into a series of simple sentences. Others may employ longer sentences to explain complex ideas or relations among ideas. A famous example of these:

Text 1:                    The king raised taxes. The people revolted.

Text 2:                    Because the king raised taxes, the people revolted.

Text 1 may be easier to “read”, and readers may gain the two key facts (what the king and the people each did). As simple as those sentences are, the overall meaning may be obscured by their separation. To get the point, readers must infer a causal connection between the actions and making this kind of inference depends on prior knowledge, how people feel about higher taxes.

In Text 2, the key facts are stated along with an explicit connection between them. This version may trip some kids up because the sentence length and need to coordinate three ideas puts a greater load on memory – and the sentence construction complicates this a bit, by first providing the causal connection and then the parts to be connected.

Don’t get me wrong. One of these isn’t necessarily better than the other. The issue isn’t one of quality but accessibility or effectiveness. To comprehend these, readers must either infer or recognize the reason for the people’s action. Some readers may accomplish that with either version, while others may miss the point with one or another.  

A final example of a barrier is an author’s use of metaphor. Here is a doozy (or three doozies) from William Faulkner, one of my favorite authors. In describing mosquitoes, Count No ’Count wrote: “Across the Southern sky went a procession of small clouds, like silver dolphins on a rigid ultramarine wave, like an ancient geographical woodcut.”

Thank goodness for that first metaphor, I know what small clouds look like and can easily connect a swarm of mosquitoes with that. Although I’ve seen wild dolphins, I’m ignorant of “rigid ultramarine wave[s].” I not only was not benefited by my prior knowledge of dolphins but had to intentionally suppress that knowledge – I doubt Faulkner meant that the mosquitoes were flying in single file. The allusion to an “ancient geographical woodcut” left me bereft, too. I asked AI for help with that one. It provided examples of such woodcuts. Perhaps Faulkner meant for me to think they looked a bit like black and gray smudges on dirty white paper. If metaphors are supposed to connect an author’s ideas with a readers’ experiences, the first one worked for me, the second disrupted my comprehension, and for the third I needed to already know what swarms of mosquitos looked like to connect them to woodcuts – the opposite of how such metaphors should work.

Each of these examples shows a potential barrier a text may pose to comprehension. Teaching students to recognize these problems and how to surmount them should be a big part of comprehension teaching.

Teachers (and textbook publishers) should read instructional texts with a gimlet eye to identify words, morphemes, figurative language, metaphors, embedded clauses, elaborated phrases, passive sentences, subtle or confusing cohesive links, organizational schemes, genre features, graphic features, literary elements, or potential mismatches between a text and kids’ prior knowledge (Connor, et al., 2014).

If you think some of those may interfere with your students’ understanding of a text, then anticipate the problem by designing questions that will reveal if they were tripped up. (Questions like “why did the people revolt?”, “how would you describe Sally?,” or “how would you describe what the mosquitoes looked like on p. 87?” should accomplish this nicely).

If the students can answer such questions, then that information or text feature wasn’t a problem. There is nothing more to do. But if they can’t, then teaching will be needed to show them how to deal with issues such as the importance of recognizing causal connections, the use of adjectives and adverbs in identifying a character’s traits, or how to recognize and use metaphors. Such “on the fly” adaptations are essential when it comes to comprehension instruction (Howerton, 2011).

Think about what you should do if your questions reveal incomprehension or miscomprehension.

If it were the first time we’d dealt with an issue, I’d likely point out the problem, take the kids back to that portion of text to reread it to them, and I’d use a think aloud to demonstrate how I’d deal with this portion of text.

On the other hand, if this had already been so addressed, then I might try to guide the students to solve it themselves. “What did we say it meant when a sentence begins with ‘because’? Can you find the two ideas the author was trying to connect?” And still later: “What do we do when a sentence begins with ‘because”? I would fade the scaffold over time. Research shows that such scaffolding leads to learning (Montanaro, 2012).

This kind of teaching requires a “gradual release of responsibility” approach… starting with direct telling and modeling, followed by guided practice, and then a reduction of support (McMichael, 2020).

When it comes to reading comprehension instruction, the text needs to be king (or queen). It should determine the questions to be asked and the stopping points where guidance and teaching can take place. The standards have a more general purpose – to guide the choice of texts (in terms of challenge levels and genres) and to stress the importance of gaining an understanding of both what a text says and how it works.

You might have noticed that many of those potential barriers listed above were about language.  That is not an accident. Although state education standards usually require the teaching of English language skills, these treatments tend to separate language from writing and comprehension. That’s unfortunate and may explain the lack of payoff from such teaching (e.g., formal grammar instruction). Studies reveal that except for vocabulary, teachers rarely focus on linguistic affordances and barriers in their comprehension lessons (Flory, 2021).

I don’t know what standards you are working with, so I’ll focus on the Common Core standards, a reasonable choice because many states still use them or have at the very least retained their basic structure. These reading standards are divided in four parts: (1) key ideas and details, (2) craft & structure, (3) integration of knowledge and ideas, and (4) the range of text and text complexity.

The standards included in that first category match well with my content category above.

Likewise, the affordances idea is especially relevant to the standard’s “craft and structure.” Both of those emphasize encouraging students to consider an author’s choices (Klingelhofer, 2014) and how we might use those.

I’m ignoring the third category here, “integration of knowledge and ideas,” since it is more about connecting multiple texts and using text info – not reading comprehension, per se.

I’ve already dealt with the fourth category – choosing the right text – text worth knowing, text demanding enough that students will benefit from working with it, text that represents a genre we want kids to know. The text determines the information and text features that students will confront. But there is more to it than that.

With directed or guided reading, you need to choose where to stop so discussions can take place and guidance can be offered.  Some authorities recommend students read a whole selection, then rereading it together in parts. Others seem to think that all guided reading texts should be divied into digestible chunks.

My advice is to decide this based on how hard the text will be for your kids. If it will be relatively easy, it might be read through with minimum support. If it’s very challenging, you might want to give it a “close reading” treatment, reading it multiple times to address key ideas, craft and structure, and potential barriers separately. These rereads could be of the complete text, or students may be guided to revisit a sentence here, a paragraph there, and any of these excerpts may be read multiple times. We want both to enable students to understand this text and to learn how to solve future texts. We reread when and in ways that will help us accomplish those goals.

Design questions that get at each the text’s content, craft and structure, and barriers – not based on the standards. Then, compare your questions with the standards. Perhaps you’ll see something that you think you missed. It’s reasonable to add questions based on the standards if they really fit the text.

Remember, our purpose isn’t to give kids practice answering certain kinds of questions, we are trying to get them to comprehend the text. If a question helps kids to notice something important that a text says or how it says it, then it’s a good question. Also of value, are those questions that uncover misunderstandings. They can identify skills and abilities that would benefit from teaching.

Teaching students how to overcome barriers and make sense of a challenging text – a text that may not easily be connected to their prior knowledge, a text that might outstrip their current decoding and/or language skills – should be the major point of those guided or directed reading sessions.

References

Brown, M. T. (2012). Instruction for struggling adolescent readers and the limited influence of curriculum materials. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University.

Buffen, L. (2019). Coping with text complexity in the disciplines: Vulnerable readers’ close reading practices. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Connor, C. M., Phillips, B. M., Kaschak, M., Apel, K., Young-Suk, K., Al Otaiba, S., Crowe, E. C., Thomas-Tate, S., Johnson, L. C., & Lonigan, C. J. (2014). Comprehension tools for teachers: Reading for understanding from prekindergarten through fourth grade. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 379-401. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10648-014-9267-1

Flory, M. (2021). Investigating recommended language instruction of complex literary texts: A content analysis of close reading lesson plans for elementary grades. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Utah State University.

Hopkins, L. J. (2014). Planning for reading comprehension instruction with core reading programs: Elementary teachers’ processes and plans. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University.

Howerton, W. S. (2011). Teachers’ adaptations during planning and instruction, their vision for teaching and their students’ understanding of reading comprehension. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Klingelhofer, R. R. (2014). Text-based discussions and functional grammar analysis: Scaffolding understanding and rich participation for English Language Learners. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan.

McMichael, E. A. (2020). District implementation of the gradual release of responsibility model situated within the reading workshop instructional framework: Lessons learned from a collective case study of exemplary primary teachers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of West Georgia. 

Montanaro, E. A. (2012). Instructional behaviors and student reading outcomes in a scripted tier 2 intervention for fourth grade struggling readers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland.