October 22, 2024 – Knowledge Matters Podcast
When’s the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought, “Hmmm, what was the main idea?” Competent readers don’t ask themselves this question. They’re too busy focusing on the text itself, not the component strategies that help us understand them.
But that’s not how traditional curriculum and instructional practices work. Instead, they teach reading through a strategy-first approach that focuses on skills like making inferences and predictions, not the text itself.
That’s the subject of Episode 3 in our “Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension” podcast season. In this episode, David and Meredith Liben explore what Meredith calls “the tail wagging the dog” in reading comprehension, including examples from personal experience, insights from research, and stories of how they learned to do things differently. The Libens also highlight the costs of a strategy-first approach: missed opportunities for students to engage deeply with the ideas and implications of a text, and activity prompts that ask kids to check their brains at the door as they complete inauthentic exercises.
Two guests join the conversation:
- Literacy expert Margaret McKeown discusses how strategy-focused instruction is still all too common in classrooms. It’s tangible–and is doomed to fail.
- Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrissey shares his firsthand experience piloting two ELA curriculums – one that centers on novels and read-alouds, and one that uses book excerpts on a common theme and tests on target strategies. The differences are stark.
In other words (these are McKeown’s):
“I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, kids, today we’re gonna learn to do a summary.’ What I would do is: in a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, ‘Very nice, you gave us a good summary of that, and move on.”
This episode concludes with a brief discussion of a habit of mind the Libens will discuss later in the season: the standards of coherence. Readers expect they will understand a text, and if it doesn’t make sense, they go back and do the mental work needed to make meaning from what they are reading.
New episodes of “Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension” drop every Tuesday through mid-November. You can catch up on episodes 1 and 2 on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website, and read up on the research, studies, and artifacts mentioned in every episode by checking out Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.