By Laura Robb

“Comprehension” is a word that teachers use all the time: Jake’s comprehension is weak; Talia can’t comprehend nonfiction; David comprehends everything he reads. In this blog, I’ll look at recall, the basic step in comprehending a text—a step that provides readers with information that enables them to determine important details, infer, identify themes, and analyze a text’s meanings. And I’ll provide ideas for helping students move from recall to those more sophisticated reading strategies.
Recall Is Basic Comprehension
A common sense belief I always share with teachers is that it’s pointless to ask students to read and reread a text they can’t learn from—a text at their frustration level. Recall implies that the learner is able to decode the text, and understand and remember the information. That can only happen when the student has enough background knowledge and the text is close to his or her instructional reading level.
Classroom Snapshot: Tasha
Recently, I administered an Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) to Tasha, an eight grader. Before plunging into the assessment, we spent time chatting about her interests, and she volunteered this statement: “I hate reading. I suck at it.” Her reasons were logical and on point. Reading three years below grade level, and required to read and reread grade level texts, she said: “If I have to read again and again and can’t understand it, what’s the point?” She shrugged and added, “I get nothing from it.”
After completing and analyzing Tasha’s IRI, I suggested two actions that could improve her reading:
Have her read and learn from material at her instructional reading level—preferably books she chose. Not only would she recall information, but she would also be able to practice inferring, determining importance, identifying themes, and at the same time enlarge her vocabulary and background knowledge.
Accelerate her reading stamina and achievement by having her self-select books for independent reading. Researchers Richard Allington and Steve Krashen agree that 40 books a year can enlarge a student’s vocabulary and background knowledge, build fluency, and most important, develop a love of reading that will sustain Tasha.
Scaffolding Suggestions Recalling Details
Have the student reread if the book if it is at his instructional level.
Place the student in a book in which he or she has enough background knowledge to recall its details.
Find another book that’s more accessible.
Have the student reread a few paragraphs, and then stop to think and check his or her amount of recall. If recall is solid, have the student read on. If it’s not, have the student reread or close read.
Moving Students From Basic Recall to Analytical Comprehension
You can move students beyond basic recall to analyzing texts by using the three strategies that follow: determine importance, make logical inferences, and identifying themes. In addition, when you use these reading strategies, you’ll move students beyond recall to high level thinking.
Use your read aloud text to explicitly model how you apply the strategy.
Set aside time for guided practice as you circulate to offer students’ support, answer questions, and acknowledge what’s working.
However, it’s also important to note that with skilled readers, reading strategies work in teams. For example, I can infer and determine important details at the same time. Or I can compare the protagonist to antagonists and settings. To help students understand, apply, and absorb reading comprehension strategies, teach them one at a time initially—and gradually move toward showing students how to integrate them.
Determine Importance
This strategy applies to fiction and informational texts. With fiction, good readers decide the events, conflicts, and decisions that are significant and can explain why. Determining importance also helps them understand literary elements, such as protagonist, and genre, such as science fiction.
With informational texts, good readers separate nonessential from essential information. They set a purpose for reading because it helps them focus their efforts on specific, essential information. As they read and reread, they also figure out the information and vocabulary that are important to helping them infer and understand themes.
Classroom Snapshot: Mikel
Paul Green gives a group of fourth graders a short article on the Amazon Rainforest and asks them to set purposes for reading by studying the two photographs and captions and by reading section headings. Here are two purposes students offered: Read to find out why deforestation is bad. Read to see why the Amazon Rainforest is needed for fresh water. Paul explains that having different reading purposes will make their discussion richer.
However, while Paul circulates among students as they read, he notices that Mikel does not have a purpose written in his notebook. Mikel says, “I never set a purpose. I read it.” Later that morning, during independent reading, Paul meets with Mikel and has him read a different article without setting a purpose and then reread it after setting a purpose. Then he asks Mikel, “Which reading helped you figure out key details?” Mikel grudgingly agrees that setting a purpose helped.
Scaffolding Suggestions for Determining Importance
Help students set a purpose for reading for informational texts.
Help students set a purpose for reading fiction. For example, a purpose for reading Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins could be to monitor the problems Gilly, the protagonist, faces in the first three chapters. .
Ensure that students understand the diverse sub-genres of fiction. For example, a purpose for reading The Giver by Lois Lowery might be to explore what makes the book a dystopian novel.
Model how you set purposes by reading aloud. First, set a purpose: To determine the structure of folk tales. Then, as you read, think aloud and pinpoint the essential details that help you meet your purpose.
Make Logical Inferences
To infer from text, students first have to understand what an inference is: an unstated or implied meaning. Making inferences that are logical means students have to use details in texts they are reading as support.
Inferring is a strategy that you should model many times during the year because it is difficult for most students to grasp, absorb, and apply to their instructional and independent reading. From my experience, with practice, inferring becomes automatic for most students between eighth and tenth grade.
Classroom Snapshot: Sam
Sam, a fifth grade student is reading Ruby Bridge’s Through My Eyes and experiencing difficulty inferring from the text. His teacher switches gears and invites Sam to use details in the book’s photographs to infer. Once Sam shows that he can infer from photos, his teacher moves him to text and says: “Words and phrases in the text give you details similar to what you saw in photographs.” She supported Sam by selecting words and phrases and inviting him to infer. Then she provided an inference and asked Sam to find supporting details. The teacher gradually released responsibility for inferring to Sam until he could apply the strategy on his own
Scaffolding Suggestion for Making Logical inferences.
Invite students to make inferences based on events in their daily lives. For example, they can infer the temperament of a dog from its behavior or the mood of a friend or sibling from his or her words and actions.
Think aloud and share your inferring process using a read aloud text.
Have students make inferences based on photographs and illustrations in books.
Help students transfer inferring from events in daily life, photographs, and illustrations to inferring from text details by first providing them with target words and phrases and asking them to infer. Have students practice with you and/or a peer until they can work independently.
Identifying Themes
Themes are tough for readers to identify because, like inferences, they are unstated. But by using informational text details and literary elements students can identify themes that not only apply to the text they’re reading but also to other texts. Here are three steps that can help students pinpoint themes in fiction and nonfiction:
Identify the big idea or general topics in the text and talk and/or write about them.
In fiction, explore what characters do and say that relate to that big idea or general topic. In nonfiction, explore information and details that relate to that big idea or general topic.
Create a theme statement that expresses the author’s message about the big idea or general topic. Encourage students to avoid using character’s names or the names of places mentioned in a text. An effective theme statement applies to people, characters, and ideas across texts, not just the text in hand.
Classroom Snapshot: Ricardo
Ricardo, a sixth grader, can name specific characters and places in the book he’s reading, but he can’t use the information to state themes. His teacher, Ms. Krieger, meets with Ricardo on three separate occasions for five minutes as the rest of the class reads independently. Her plans include modeling how she uses what characters say and do to arrive at a theme and discussing her process. Then, she’ll provide Ricardo with a theme and have him find the details in the text that support it.
Scaffolding Suggestions for Identifying Themes
Have students watch a video and identify its theme. Then ask them to talk about how the same strategy can be applied to a text.

Give students the details from a text that they need to identify a theme and have them compose a theme statement.
Show students how you pinpoint a general topic in fiction and link it to what characters do and say. Then model how you use the information to compose a theme statement. For example, the general topic is the pain and anger that a child experiences when he realizes his parent commits evil acts. In The Giver, Jonas feels shock, intense anger, and deep pain when he watches, on video a feed, his gentle and nurturing father kill a “newchild” who doesn’t meet the growth standards of the community. To transform the father’s unspeakable action into a theme, the reader has to think beyond Jonas to all young adolescents: Disillusionment occurs when an adolescent sees that a beloved parent is capable of evil.
Pair up students who have read the same text and have them work together and identify one to two themes.
Work backwards: Give students a theme statement and ask them provide the text details that support the theme statement.
Document Teacher-Student Conferences
A five-minute, one-on-one conference can support a student’s needs; one meeting might be enough, but more likely, you’ll need two or more meetings. It depends on the extent of the student’s needs and the level of the instruction you’re providing.
You can schedule a series of conferences over several days while the rest of the class reads or writes independently. Keeping conferences short and focused allows students to practice a strategy over several days and provides the time students need to absorb how the strategy works and how well it’s working for them.
Hold these five-minute conferences in a quiet place in the classroom. Use a small table or use an extra student desk and meet away from other students to ensure privacy. I recommend documenting these conferences using a form at the end of this blog. The filled-out form provides a record of what you planned and what you and the student discussed, practiced, and accomplished. It can also inform the focus of future conferences and teaching decisions.

Five-Minute Intervention Conference Form
Name____________________________________Date______________________
Directions: Complete this conference form and use the information it contains to inform your practice. Store in the student’s assessment folder to consult later as necessary.
BEFORE THE CONFERENCE
Focus the conference topic:
Points to discuss with the student:
The kind of scaffolding I’ll try:

AFTER THE CONFERENCE
Note important comments the student made:
My observations of the student:
Negotiated goal for the next conference.
Date of the next conference:

By Evan Robb

Changing your staff’s attitudes toward educational practices takes time, but it’s something that you can accomplish through continual communication. Staying in touch with your teachers means attending all meetings, sending them short articles that build their educational knowledge base, providing positive feedback after walkthroughs, and meeting one-on-one with staff or in small groups to have meaningful conversations about best practice. The fifteen tips for creating change that followed enabled me to develop a school culture that made independent reading an important part of the middle school curriculum.

1. Share the research: Before asking teachers to weave independent reading into their teaching schedule, invite them to read and discuss articles on the power of independent reading of self-selected books. Without the practice that independent reading provides, students’ progress in reading and their ability to comprehend complex texts will be limited. Moreover, when students regularly read self-selected books at school, they develop a love of reading that lasts a lifetime!
2. Speak at faculty meetings and to individual teachers: Purchase, for teachers, the book whisperer by Donalyn Miller (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and invite them to organize book study groups. Extol the benefits of independent reading: students enlarge their vocabulary, build background knowledge, practice applying strategies teachers model, and find pleasure in reading about people and places from the past, present, and in the future.
3. Set aside funds for books: Each year offer teachers funds for building their classroom libraries because access to books can bring students into the reading life. Encourage the PTO to do one or two fundraisers for classroom libraries annually.
4. Encourage student self-selection of books: Explain to teachers that permitting students to choose their independent reading books means students invest in their reading.
5. Read aloud to students: Make appointments to read aloud each week to a different class.
6. Become a role model: Discuss a book you love at assembly or during a school wide broadcast.
7. Have students share books on the school’s morning broadcast: Invite teachers to choose students to share a great read with the entire school. Peer-to-peer advertising of terrific books is a topnotch way to interest other students in reading.
8. Drop into classes during independent reading: Catch students reading and loving it! Praise students and show them a book you’re reading. If you have time, join the class and read for ten to fifteen minutes.
9. Designate a weekly independent reading time for entire school: This shows students and teachers how serious you are about reading self-selected books.
10. Encourage teachers to read while students read: Explain that when teachers model that they have and enjoy a personal reading life, they inspire their students to emulate them.
11. Invite teachers to share successes: They can do this during full faculty meetings and at department or team meetings.
12. Track reading scores: Do this to show that when students have a rich, independent reading life, their scores in vocabulary and comprehension start to reflect what they do. Share progress with teachers so they feel the changes and adjustments they’ve made are supporting students’ progress.
13. Feature a student’s recommendation for independent reading in school’s newsletter: This lets parents know how much you, teachers, and students value independent reading.
14. Commend teachers and students in writing: Don’t overdo written notes, but when you see independent reading flourishing in a class, write a note to the teacher and his or her students. Noticing positive reading practices inspires teachers and students to read even more.
15. Inform parents: On back to school night let parents know the benefits of independent reading so they can foster it at home.
Evan Robb, Principal Johnson Williams Middle School and author of:
The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook, Scholastic, 2007.
Follow Evan Robb on Twitter: @ERobbPrincipal
Sign up for the Daily Robb Review—it’s free!
www.therobbreview.org

An example of the good….

Encouraging teachers to continually observe and interact with students during guided reading and independent reading and writing can enable them to pinpoint students who need help with high level thinking. You can support this teaching and learning belief by inviting teachers to share their observations, interventions, and scaffolds at department meetings and at full faculty meetings. Doing this shows your commitment to continually supporting students so they progress as readers. In addition, you can complete walkthroughs (for growth not targeting)during reading instruction in ELA and content classes and celebrate what worked well!  We are always told to lift students up- let’s make sure we do it for each other too!

Equally important, you’ll want to enlarge teachers’ knowledge of interventions and how to determine them by organizing book studies around this topic. Part of growing and being an effective language arts teacher is learning many different strategies to meet the needs of learners.  Differentiating, in my opinion, has been an over used term. But great differentiating is made more effective as teacher learns more and more effective research strategies while maintaining strong personal efficacy. Commit to great instructional reading that integrates the strategies to help students become better readers! Commit classroom libraries and independent reading.  Commit to passing on you passion for reading and writing to students.

Now for the bad…

The counter to this belief and commitment to improving actual teaching skills is the big business of education.  Many of us are sheep as we go into expos or meet with sales reps to be sold kool aide for us to drink. We drink and believe that new programs or new computer programs that will make it all better and good sales people can be very convincing. School divisions pay huge money for such programs and many staff see them as a solve or a fix.  Education is not improved when people have a fix it mentality and a belief that does not honor the most important, our teachers, who work with children every day. Fixing will always be a process- we do not fix by inserting a program. I will admit that some programs can integrate into a classroom but  none can replace the teacher. The often used method of throwing “stuff”on a wall to see what sticks is not in the best interest of students, teachers, and it can be costly.

I have and always will put my belief into teachers coupled with an understanding that professional development is critical as we work improve pedagogy.

Below are two books to investigate:

RTI From All Sides by Mary Howard, Heinemann, 2009.

The Reading Intervention Toolkit by Laura Robb, Shell, 2016.

 

Evan Robb, Principal Johnson Williams Middle School and author of:

The Principal’s Leadership Sourcebook, Scholastic, 2007.

Follow me on Twitter: @ERobbPrincipal

Sign up for the Daily Robb Review—it’s free!

www.therobbreview.org

By Laura Robb

“Build prior knowledge.”

In the Common Core era, these three familiar words of advice cause frustration in teachers, and their frustration trickles down to students. Why? Because many state education departments have requested that teachers not build students’ prior knowledge before reading.

The Common Core recommendation that supports this stance is that students need to engage in close reading to comprehend unfamiliar, complex texts. “Let students read a text three or four times—even more if necessary—reading closely until they can unpack its meaning.” That’s the advice teachers hear today.

This strategy, reading without prior knowledge, developed because the Common Core’s goal is for students to be able to read grade-level complex texts by the end of the school year. But it is untenable. As P. David Pearson points out:

“It is not as though prior knowledge was an ‘optional’ cognitive move that one could turn on or turn off at will. A reader cannot build a text base or a situation model without invoking relevant prior knowledge; there is nothing voluntary about it.”

(from “Research Foundations of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts, p. 255, In Quality Reading Instruction in the Age of Common Core Standards, Newman & Gambrell, Editors, 2013, International Reading Association).

To Build or Not to Build Prior Knowledge

Catherine E. Snow, professor of education at Harvard Graduate School, calls reading unfamiliar texts with no prior knowledge “cold close reading.”

Dr. Snow tried cold close reading on an unfamiliar topic. Here’s what she said about her experience:

“…cold close reading was often unproductive. It was discouraging. I found I couldn’t read about the unfamiliar topics for more than a few minutes at a time, and that I was exhausted at the end of such efforts.” (Reading Today, June 6, 2013).

If Catherine E. Snow – a brilliant researcher, teacher, and writer – had difficulty with cold close reading because she lacked prior knowledge, why have the framers of the Common Core recommended this reading practice for elementary, middle, and high school students?

Having taught middle school students for more than 40 years, I recognize that if a task is too difficult and the material is not relevant to students’ lives, their attitude becomes “Why bother?”

Moreover, a close reading of the students in any public school classroom across the United States reveals a diversity of experience and reading expertise. Mandates among states for cold close reading not only frustrate and greatly diminish motivation and engagement for grade-level readers, but they are particularly damaging for English language learners, special education students, learning disabled students, and students reading two or more years below grade level.

I am all for raising the bar; I am for helping students think deeply about texts and explore multiple layers of meaning. I am not for discouraging students by pushing them to “read” texts with vocabulary, content, and syntax demands far beyond their instructional reading levels.

If we want to stretch students’ reading ability by developing their reading skill, then it’s important to set the stage for reading complex, unfamiliar texts by helping students build prior knowledge before reading, so close reading becomes a positive and engaging experience that’s within their reach. Snow calls this a “warm close reading.”

For our students, a warm close reading should also mean that they are reading complex texts at their instructional level—texts they can comprehend. Because we teachers know that if students can’t comprehend a text, they can’t learn from it.

Teach Students to Activate Their Prior Knowledge

After Common Core proponents announced that teachers should not spend time activating and/or constructing students’ prior knowledge, I felt frustrated and angry. Why? Because teachers and educational researchers recognize that prior knowledge and experiences, stored in the brain as schema, improve students’ comprehension.

Once my anger and frustration over the CCSS cold close-reading recommendations abated, I directed my energy to developing a method that would put students in charge of activating their own prior knowledge. As I tested the method among students, I learned from their reactions that they prized the strategy because it developed independence and supported the reading they did on mandated state tests.

Tips For Modeling the Prior Knowledge Lesson

Use an anchor or teaching text to think aloud and show students how you activate prior knowledge. Anchor texts are short and relate to the theme or topic you’re teaching. You can use a picture book, a short text such as a myth, or an excerpt from a long text. Throughout the unit, you’ll be able to return to the anchor text to review a skill or strategy you’ve modeled with students.

Follow the steps for activating prior knowledge listed below; you’ll also find a handout for students at the end of this article. I suggest that you immediately engage students in the lesson so they invest in the strategy and listen to your think aloud. Here’s how you can involve students in the model lesson:

• Read the title out loud. Ask: “Do I know anything about this topic?” If you don’t, then tell yourself to slow down the reading and reread confusing parts.
• Read aloud the preview sections: the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph if the text is nonfiction.
• Organize students into partners.
• Have partners turn and talk about all the details they recall from listening to the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph.
• Start writing the prior knowledge notes on chart paper or a whiteboard.
• Ask students to volunteer to add details to the prior knowledge notes.
• Have partners use their prior knowledge notes or the title of the selection to set a purpose for their first reading.

Model the process for students until you feel they can build their own prior knowledge with an instructional or independent reading text. Ask students to turn and talk about details recalled from the preview for three to four months.

Next, tell students that talking to a partner is a dress rehearsal for in-the-head conversations with themselves because that is what they will do on mandated reading tests.

I recommend that teachers stop paired conversations about three to four months before the state tests and have students practice in-their-head discussions independently. (You can also find the following handout on page 9 of this PDF.)

Closing Thoughts

Students can build their own prior knowledge and set purposes when reading longer texts as well. With fiction and nonfiction, they read the title, study the cover illustrations, and read the first chapter.

Not only does the strategy develop independence with learning, but it also offers students a way to build prior knowledge on a topic they know little to nothing about.

You’ll find guidelines for this lesson, 45 complex texts, teaching units for seven genres, and much more in Unlocking Complex Texts: A Systematic Framework for Building Adolescents Comprehension by Laura Robb (Scholastic 2013). See a MiddleWeb review here.

Laura Robb is a Literacy Coach at Powhatan School in Boyce, Virginia where she coaches teachers in grades K to 8. She also teaches students all year in public schools in and around Winchester VA. Robb is a veteran educator with over 43 years of teaching experience to her credit. Her many books weave classroom strategies with research-based practices. Visit her website.