November 12, 2024 – Knowledge Matters Podcast
Have you ever read something and then realized you didn’t totally understand it? (Ulysses, we’re looking at you!) That’s not only the hallmark of a challenging text, and it’s also something students encounter all the time.
In this episode, David and Meredith Liben discuss three ways to connect students with sophisticated texts, even if they can’t yet read or comprehend them on their own: juicy sentences, explain your answer, and structured journaling.
First, linguist and language scholar Lily Wong Fillmore shares the origin story of her “juicy sentences” strategy, where teachers divide content-rich sentences into “chunks” and help students build vocabulary and knowledge through focused instruction and discussion. This approach, which she developed while working as a classroom aide, unpacks rich syntax at the sentence level and connects students of any age or literacy level with sophisticated, grade-level content.
The Libens then explore and share personal examples of two other instructional techniques that foster reading comprehension and the metacognition that supports its growth: explaining the answer and structured journaling. In both techniques, teachers center instruction on the text and prepare lessons by carefully reading the text and identifying passages where students are most likely to stumble.
Explaining the answer is just that: asking students to answer a question and explain their response using evidence from the text. The magic lies in choosing the best questions based on a careful pre-read of the text at hand, not a learning standard. Questions aimed at the most difficult parts of the text are most likely to support better comprehension.
This technique helps students learn to identify what they do and don’t understand, and then practice returning to the text to re-read and improve their comprehension. It is also a strong diagnostic tool when used for classroom discussion, because teachers can identify which students are reading and comprehending the text and which students need more coaching.
Finally, the Libens discuss structured journaling, where a teacher chooses an important section of the text and students respond to four questions:
- What are the most important ideas here?
- What don’t I understand?
- How does this connect to what we’ve been discussing in class – or other texts that we’ve been reading?
- Do you have any reflection (aka ‘I wonder’) questions?
These techniques focus students on the text while also helping them expand their thinking to the wide-ranging implications of what they have read. For example, David recalls how a second-grade student wondered why the author of The Tale of Despereaux described certain settings as light and dark, which sparked a classwide discussion about symbolism. Meredith shares this “wonder” question from a fifth grader reading an excerpt from Insect, a nonfiction text: If there were no insects on Earth, would something else have replaced them and their functions?
If all this text-based back-and-forth sounds exhausting, take it from Rachel Stack, a former teacher now at Great Minds. She worried her students would get tired of explaining their answers, but they never did–in fact, she saw students using these techniques in other classes.
Key quote: “Nothing shortcuts the most practical thing of all you can do: read the text yourself, annotate it, underline it, make notes to yourself, plan for where you know students are going to get tripped up. And you’re not going to do the work for them. You’re going to point them squarely there. The bow of their boat is going to hit those rough waves, and you’re just going to help them steer through them. That’s your work.” (Meredith Liben)