Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted on August 13, 2022. There was no incident that led me to repost this on December 13, 2025, just my own sense that it would be a good idea to revisit this much neglected aspect of teaching students to understand text. Originally, there was no podcast of this and now there is, and this updated version includes both a link to that podcast as well as to the original blog that elicited 23 thoughtful comments. What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit ...

Teacher question: You say that we cannot successfully teach comprehension skills like main idea. But our standards require that we teach main idea, and our state tests ask main idea questions to assess whether our students are accomplishing that goal. I don’t get it, your advice on this is not helpful.RELATED: Should We Still Teach Sight Vocabulary? Shanahan response: For years, comprehension skills like “main idea” were taught by having kids read texts and answer main idea questions. The idea is that question-answering practice will improve the ability to answer the kinds of questions the students are practicing with. Often the question types themselves ...