October 15, 2024 – Knowledge Matters Podcast
In today’s reading classrooms, too many kids are not alright. One of the biggest challenges is comprehension–or rather, its absence. Students don’t understand what they read well enough to think deeply, connect what they are learning to the wider world, and prepare for the futures they want.
That’s the starting point for the second season of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, hosted by David and Meredith Liben and called “Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension.” Over six episodes, the Libens share how teachers and administrators can transform reading comprehension for their students by centering the text during instruction.
This episode examines comprehension itself: what it is, how it works in the mind, and how we can design classroom experiences that foster deep reading and understanding.
David and Meredith are bullish on the built-in motivator that young children have in spades: curiosity. While no kid goes home from school and talks to their parents about main ideas or key details, it’s easy to picture an elementary schooler sharing what they learned about the speed of light or the insect world at the dinner table. (Did you know that the insect world is full of actual zombies?)
That kind of curiosity—to learn about yourself or the world—is the point of reading. We need that to be centered in classrooms, and the research on how the brain learns to read demands that too. Cognitive science research by Walter Kintsch in the 1980s, called the theory of comprehension, holds true today.
In the brain, text exists at three levels, all in play simultaneously:
- Surface level (screen, print, etc.).
- Text base, which has the macrostructure (structures like narrative or informational) and the microstructure (network of propositions).
- The situation model, which is when a reader’s experience or previous knowledge is applied to the text to create a fuller understanding.
Margaret McKeown, one of the originators of tier one, tier two and tier three vocabulary, shares why centering the text is more important than a series of comprehension strategies. “We want them in the text all the time, thinking about the text, and what they have to do to make sense of that text. That’s really the heart of it.”
Then Rachel Stack, co-creator of Wit & Wisdom, tells a story about a light bulb moment as a teacher. She saw all the levels of comprehension come together for her students while doing a close reading of Maniac McGee with David at the Family Academy, a school in Harlem where Rachel first taught (and that the Libens co-founded).
This episode ends with an excerpt from a discussion the Libens had with a dozen school district leaders, hosted by Curriculum Matters. They focus on this question asked by Brent Conway, an assistant superintendent in Massachusetts: “How do we get better comprehension instruction into the classroom in an effective and efficient way on a school-wide level?”
David and Meredith offer two concrete steps leaders can take: help teachers identify the tricky parts of the text, so they know what will probably trip kids up, and pare down the curriculum. Teachers and kids need time to read and explore a text, linger over their questions, and build new understanding.