S3 Ep25 - Shifts to move to a structured approach in Years 3 to 6 Part 2

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Well hello. Thanks so much for joining me in this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, which is part two of our two-part series about shifts to make in a structured approach to literacy in years three to six.

In our last episode, I shared guidance for adjustments that we can make in word-level knowledge and spelling instruction and in how we choose text and run a reading lesson. In this episode, we'll continue our exploration of shifts in practice, focusing on reading comprehension and writing.

If you haven't listened to part one of this series, pop back after this episode so that you get the full picture. In the previous episode, I mentioned that rich, age-appropriate texts are key to helping students improve their reading in years three to six. Yes, students who are still working on independent decoding will need the support of decodable texts, but they still need to engage with rich texts as well. In these texts, we help students learn about characters, text structure and language devices and support them in building vocabulary and content knowledge. We also help students learn to independently decode and manage more complex texts.

Without stretch, there's no learning.

When it comes to comprehension, rich texts are critical.

In the past, and still in many schools, comprehension was managed through instruction in a series of strategy lessons, where we taught skills or strategies such as summarising, finding the main idea, making connections and inferring. We focused on one strategy a term, often with a series of short texts, and had the students practice applying these strategies across the term, with the belief that they would be able to transfer use of the strategy to new texts they read in the future. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't align with evidence about how we comprehend texts.

No, the strategies haven't gone anywhere.

Yes, the strategies themselves are evidence-based.

And you might be asking where the shift is, well then, that would be fair.

The difference between instruction in the past and recommendations for instruction now, is that in the past the strategy was the focus and the text was somewhat incidental. Now we want the text to be the focus and the strategy to be the support to engage with that text.

Evidence does not support long-term instruction in strategies as if they were skills, but it does support helping students apply them in the context of authentic, rich texts. We put the strategies to work, not teach them for years. The other part of the picture here is that the ability to understand a text, including making inferences, is heavily dependent on background and vocabulary knowledge. If you don't know anything about the subject matter of the text and you don't know what the words mean, no strategy is going to help you.

So the shift here is to take the time we were spending on strategy instruction and reallocate it to actively and explicitly teaching background knowledge and vocabulary for the text we're reading. The repeated and/or wide reading mentioned in our Teacher's Guide to the Upper Primary Literacy Block is focused on decoding and fluency, not building deep understanding of the text. That task is tackled as we give students rich, engaging text to read as part of our text-based unit. You can download the Teacher's Guide to the Upper Primary Literacy Block from the show notes at jocelynseamereducation.com.

5:37

Discussions of comprehension inevitably lead us to questions about assessment.

If we don't find the book that's at the student's level through a benchmark assessment and we aren't asking them comprehension questions, how can we assess comprehension? I'm sorry to say that a benchmark assessment was, at best, hit and miss when it came to comprehension. When we use a benchmark assessment and a student can't answer the inference focus questions, we have no way of knowing if that was because they couldn't infer in general, or because they just didn't have the background and vocabulary knowledge to comprehend that text.

Comprehension is domain specific, it's specific to the text you're reading. This is why there aren't comprehension questions in the DIBELS and Acadience assessments.

In my view, deep comprehension inference is best assessed through a text-based unit where we know we have taught the background and vocabulary knowledge needed.

6:36

There are many other aspects of comprehension, outside of being able to answer questions, to consider as well. The Understanding Texts section of the ACARA Literacy General Capabilities lists the following as indicators that students can comprehend.

Locates information or details embedded in the text.

Distinguishes between fact and opinions in texts.

Interprets creative use of figurative language such as metaphor, simile and onomatopoeia, and evaluates the accuracy within and across texts on the same topic.

All of these points can be part of a robust text-based unit, and if you are a Resource Room member using our text-based units, you can rest assured that these are the points we consider when we design a unit and we create a summative task.

Comprehension is so much more than just answering questions, and those questions we were asking have never equated to a grade. It can feel, though, when we take them away, that the rug has been pulled out from under us, so it's a perfectly understandable reaction to feel a little lost without those questions. I'm so sorry, but they were never doing what we thought they were doing.

7:48

The second area of instruction that we are making a shift in is writing. Traditionally, our literacy block has been divided into two sections: reading and writing. These sections very often were different in their focus.

Writing instruction focused on text-level writing with a focus on modelling writing, shared writing and independent writing. The whole language-based belief was that, through rich, engaging experiences and a workshop model that included a 10-minute mini lesson to unpack a writing concept, students would come to writing, they would develop it, they would pick it up.

Some did, but many didn't.

And while there hasn't been as much research done on writing instruction as on reading instruction, we do have guidance from research to help us make shifts towards evidence-informed practice.

8:40

The first shift is that, instead of having reading and writing sitting in separate sections of the literacy block, we can bring the two together.

We read a rich text, discuss it, comprehend it and then we apply what we've explored in the context of writing. Each lesson covers both reading and writing. We develop one central body of knowledge and view it through multiple lenses. That way, the vocabulary and background knowledge we build to serve reading also serves writing.

9:15

The other shift in this space is around where our focus is in varying levels of text. Texts begin at word-level, build up to sentence-, paragraph- and then whole-text level.

In previous instruction we spent a considerable amount of time providing instruction in paragraph and text level considerations, with cursory or incidental attention paid to word- and sentence-level.

Research supports explicit instruction at word and sentence level. In fact, we know that for text-level writing to be successful, students must have automatic handwriting and spelling and fluent sentence production. If you have a pen, write that down.

I'm going to say it again:

Students must have automatic writing and spelling and fluent sentence production.

We also know that these things take explicit instruction and practice to make them stick. That means we need to be devoting considerable time to them.

10:10

One of the worries that teachers have in making this shift is that in spending more time in spelling and sentence work, we end up spending less time at paragraph- and text-level. That's just a natural consequence. They're concerned that students aren't writing enough. What they mean is that students aren't necessarily writing a multi-paragraph piece every week.

My take on this is to consider this question: when should students write multi-paragraph pieces?

The answer is: when they can.

10:41

When it comes to reading, yes, focus on multi-paragraph text for comprehension continuously.

When it comes to writing, students need that time spent at word and sentence level to build up to writing great text.

I'm not saying not to have students write longer text, but that they need the underlying skills and knowledge to make it happen. Spending time building nuts and bolts at word- and sentence-level is the path to strong text-level writing, particularly when we're helping students build knowledge of this, when we have a knowledge-rich approach. So give time to these endeavors whenever and wherever it's needed, and it will pay dividends in the long term.

Now, the nice thing about all the time we're spending building understanding of words and sentences is that it also serves comprehension. So anything you teach students to write, whether it's at the spelling-level, the sentence-level or the text-level, is going to positively impact their reading comprehension, and this is why we need to bring these two things together, because they serve one another. But spelling and writing serves reading way more than the other way around, so it's not wasted time.

11:53

Over the past three episodes of the Structured Literacy Podcast, we've explored how we can support our three to six teams to board the bus, and we've spent time thinking about the shifts that are needed across word-level instruction, reading and writing.

There are no quick fixes here.

There are no magic wands or overnight solutions.

There are no magical programs that are going to do everything for you. 

12:21

There is guidance and support, though. If you're working with your three to six team to help them bring their literacy block onto the bus, why not join me for a completely free program called Literacy Success in Years 3-6?

Starting July 22nd 2024, each day that week, you'll receive an email with a short clip exploring an aspect of helping your 3-6 team build an evidence-informed literacy block. It all wraps up with a live session on Sunday, July 28th, at 11:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time.

You'll walk away from this free program with a plan for simple actions to support your team's development.

We have a prize draw during the live session and you'll have the chance to ask whatever questions you have about Upper Primary Literacy. I'll stay online for as long as it takes to have them answered, so don't worry, you won't miss out.

If you're listening to this episode after July 2024, don't worry, you haven't missed out completely. You can't join me live in the wrap-up session, but you can access the five-day course on demand by visiting jocelynseamereducation.com and clicking on the Professional Learning tab. By the way, that's how you could join me for the free course in July as well. I hope that you have a marvellous week ahead.

13:32

I know that making this shift, that bringing our team onto the bus in years three to six, can have its challenges, and in some ways, these challenges are greater than for the early years, usually because we've got this big range of students we need to serve.

I don't have magic answers for you, there aren't any, but what I do know is that explicit, robust teaching is the path forward. I've seen it with my own eyes in the schools that I have worked in and led, and I see it in the schools I work with now as a coach.

You don't have to be an expert, but we do have to make some changes, and I hope that I can be a part of that journey for you.

Thank you for bringing me into your world. I don't take your trust lightly. Until I see you in the next episode of the podcast. Happy teaching everyone. Bye.

References:

ACARA Literacy General Capabilities. Understanding texts. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/resources/national-literacy-and-numeracy-learning-progressions/national-literacy-learning-progression/reading-and-viewing/?subElementId=50915&searchTerm=multimodal+texts#dimension-content 

Other Useful Things

S3 Ep24 - Shifts to move to a structured approach in Years 3 to 6 Part 1

S3 Ep23 - Supporting Your Year 3-6 Team to Board the Bus

Teacher's Guide to the Upper Primary Literacy Block

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