Some initial thoughts...
I wanted to start this 'last' blog post around the pillars, by clearly saying although the visual represents the different components as independent, they of course are/should all taught in an interactive way. Vocabulary, should of course be taught in the context of comprehension and as I have added to the bottom of the pillars, rests on a bed of oral language (expressive and receptive) and background knowledge.
I would not want anyone to think that we would teach these components as seperate and it is also important to understand that comprehension is one of the most complicated things we do on a daily basis and it does not only happen in the context of reading. Narrowly focusing on reading, as it is presented in the visual, is not useful to anyone.
I have taken this straight from the transcript of the podcast I have linked to this post.
"Comprehension is not a skill that you can learn how to do it and then apply it to different contexts, because it depends upon what you're reading, what the purpose of reading is. I've used the example. It's not like swimming, where you learn how to swim and then you can swim in any body of order. It's heavily dependent upon what it is you're reading and the purpose of that reading. And that's why I and others are beginning to argue that it's best taught within a meaningful context that in school involves learning or appreciating literature, understanding about how stories are told and what's involved in poetry or whatever it might mean. It's a meaningful context that where comprehension is best taught.
But by treating this comprehension the focus is on understanding for the purpose of learning or for the purpose of enjoyment, appreciation, whatever it might be there, and then alphabetics and fluency would still be taught.
I think it's more important to think about what the goal is of the instruction and in one case, the goal is going to be understanding how the alphabetic principle works and how to become more efficient at using that principle so that kids can learn to read more words, can be more fluent in their reading and then, with comprehension, focus on the purpose of the comprehension activity."
Hugh Catts
I am not going to even attempt to claim any expertise when it comes to comprehension.
I have read a lot, listened to a lot and there have been some common ideas coming from what I have engaged with, that have shaped how I 'enact' the comprehension pillar in my classroom (again, not a fan of the pillar visual.). In essence, I am still trying to comprehend, comprehension.
I guess the reason I have separated the areas out in the way I have done in this blog post series, is to show what each component looks like for me and spark some thinking about how it looks for you.
I have found that the gift the 'Science of Reading' as a body of research has given to me, is the deliberate lens I apply to everything I do in my classroom now, that why, how and what have become so incredibly important to my practice.
I also say, that this is what it currently looks like, because everything evolves, we learn more, we do better, we tweak, we change, we base what we do on the needs of our class. To do this however, it is crucial we have the understanding ourselves first.
I have quite a few blog post topics spinning around in my head at the moment, so don't want to go into any great detail about teacher knowledge, but I will say, that I hold great fears around the current speed we are implementing programmes, without knowledge, in my opinion, we are setting ourselves up for failure. If we place such a huge importance on developing the background knowledge of our children, should we not prioritise our own as well?
The gift my learning journey has given me, is time to understand, apply, change, learn more, tweak, learn more, change...over and over again. I would like all teachers to have that same gift.
More about that another time. However I will say, what I do in a classroom, is dependent on the needs in front of me and how I know best (right now) to respond to these needs, what I am doing for the class I have now, is quite different at times from what I did last year and the year before that. Not only because I know far more each year, but because the children in front of me have different needs.
Comprehension...the point of this post.
Firstly let me say, that from the reading and listening I have done, I think that the five pillars visual, although it is helpful to show the facets that make up our approach to teaching reading, doesn't serve to represent the process as effectively as it could.
Because the pillars are represented in the way they are, they look independent of one another, what we know is this is not the case, that they are interwoven. To me I wonder if a better representation would be of a weaving, with alphabetics and fluency woven through comprehension. I am thinking of the way flax is woven, each strand important, but reliant on the other to stay together.
As the pillars are all the same size, it also appears that they carry the same weight, of course, we know that at different times, we will be needing to give different weights to each area, when a child is learning to read, decoding and the learning of the code, will be vitally important and therefore is likely to carry much more weight in the first few years.
I don't sum this up very well, but it is summed up really well by Hugh Catts in this 16 minute podcast here with Melissa and Lori, it is well worth a listen.
High Catts - The five pillars
A bit straight out of one of my old blog posts...
Comprehension...this is a massive area, and there is currently a big problem with how the majority of teachers interpret comprehension. If you are anything like me, you had come to think of comprehension of something that happened at the conclusion of reading...a product of the reading so to speak. Summed up, comprehension could be labelled as the questions you ask at the end of the text, that largely rely on what existing knowledge about the topic the reader had when they started reading.
You'd probably also been under the understanding that comprehension is a skill that can be taught, but finding a main idea and summarising are strategies that will look different according to the text.
That led me to the work of Hugh Catts, who among many other well known experts of comprehension speaks about the value and role of knowledge. The need to tell children what they need to know, to stop all the pre-knowledge activities. He goes on to talk about the fact that knowledge gives us a place to put incoming information and that reading then allows us to add to or modify our existing knowledge. It is our knowledge that helps us to organise and inference. I love the way he says that reading comprehension is thinking with a book in your hand.
Hugh Catts also says it is not possible to think critically unless you have knowledge about something. He advocates strongly (as do many others) for teachers to give background knowledge before reading, so that children have a place to tie the new details on to, it is important we understand our working memory is overwhelmed by too many details. (which is possibly what I am doing to you via this post.)
Hugh Catts says popping comprehension amongst the pillars in the way that it is presented above has led us to think it needs to be measured, remediated or instructed in the same way as the others and this has led to teacher misunderstanding. It has also led to a lot of classroom learning tasks that do very little to increase comprehension skills.
The problem here is that our system largely embraces 'discovery' over knowledge.
In fact I sit in an interesting world, where I actively advocate for play, which innately is based on discovery, but then am here saying, yep I also believe in building knowledge, and in in explicit teaching.
The crux of the problem here is that we think there are two camps and that we can't be in both. In reality we can and should be in both camps...each has a very well deserved place in every classroom. In my opinion magic and science combine to make deep learning.
In fact in our space it is the curiosity that is palpable through play that often feeds the knowledge and vice versa, I see a very symbiotic relationship here.
Tim Shanahan says - Education should both nurture curiosity and provide the means to fulfil it – increasing what kids know about science and social studies (and literature and the arts, too.)
I have learned so much about comprehension over this holidays, too much to put it all here, and a lot of it, is swimming around in my mind, trying to find some knowledge to attach itself too, but what I do know is that in the majority of our schools there is a lack of understanding of the Science and that is a problem.
I have tied this learning strongly to what I had already learned about schema and the building of knowledge and vocab in a classroom. It has certainly given me loads of ideas!
This podcast with Anne Lucas discusses micro-skills and it is a must listen in my opinion. It will change how you think about comprehension
Quotes from Anne "The more tools we give to kids to grapple with texts and concepts, the better they’ll be able to do it.”
“Background knowledge is incredibly important and is something that we need to integrate into instruction and curriculum.”
And back to now...
So if we understand that comprehension is not a set of skills that we can teach, but instead strategies, then what are these strategies?
I like this summary and found it really useful.
I think the most important part is that we know comprehension is developed in the context of the text and is also very reliant on the background knowledge and vocabulary that they bring to that text.
So, what does this actually look like in my class right now?
I apologise for my very long winded way of getting to the actual point of this post.
How do I encourage my children to make sense and meaning while they read...in essence to comprehend?
I teach a year one and two class, they are still largely learning the code, learning to decode and working on developing their fluency. In these terms I very much dedicate a lot of our time here, because it is incredibly hard to comprehend a text if you can not read it.
This visual image demonstrates how important the foundations, leading into fluency, assist with being able to comprehend whilst reading.
1) Sentence level comprehension
- I use my 'character' texts here. These are texts, that are 70-80% decodable for the majority of my class. I have blogged a little about these in several blog posts. Here are a couple if you are interested.
We read these stories in parts. Children read, we then read together and buddy read. The sentences give us a chance to discuss what is happening, in some cases infer and apply what we know in context, they are also written in a way that require some form of prediction. We summarise what is happening together and children will ask and answer questions. Children will then go away and demonstrate their understanding of the days sentence, by drawing a picture to go with the text. The pictures below show some examples of how their pictures express their understanding.
Children are constantly coming up with new characters and new adventures for these characters and delight when they see these added into our next stories.
2) Play
We work through a pedagogy based on play. Comprehension is naturally developed through talk, children share their wonderings, their interests and we explore these together, they ask and answer questions and share their ideas. These are all important foundations of comprehension. Of course these situations are great for vocabulary development and an important link to the development of background knowledge.
3)Read Alouds and Storytelling
As children are still learning to decode and build fluency, a lot of our comprehension is developed through read alouds. These read alouds can take the form of a chapter book, a non-fiction text, a fairy tale, a quality picture book or a shared text. These are used deliberately to focus on using comprehension strategies in the context of the text. To look at those micro-skills that Anne discussed in her podcast, to develop vocabulary and knowledge.
I also use storytelling in my class, sharing my own stories, so children can think about similar experiences they may have had and tell their own stories, this obviously has a strong link to writing. I always start these stories with "Have I ever told you about the time....."
Puppets occasionally make an appearance here too.
Dramatic inquiry is woven through some of the picture books we read, and this is a super powerful way of building contextual understanding, of course when we start our 'portal maths' this imagined world opens up a whole new experience.
4)Knowledge building
Really this is woven through everything that we do, but I do use our knowledge spine, that is woven togtether with our SEL curriculum and our reading spine, to layer knowledge.
I will look at the knowledge we are deliberately trying to develop, pick a range of texts, videos and podcasts and go from there. Layering this knowledge, building vocabulary and linking to new areas of knowledge. Children will draw understandings, respond in written form, writing facts about a topic, we will generate questions, answer questions, summarise understandings. This is a process that works really well for us.
Whatever knowledge we are developing, I will weave it into our reading and our writing, with strong links obviously to other curriculum areas.
5)Language and Listening Comprehension
I intend to blog a little more about this in time, but the fact is, all over our country, children are entering school with skills in expressive and receptive language that are far below where they used to be. Obviously this is a massive area of discussion, COVID had a role to play, but sadly this was happening long before COVID, as the declining oral language levels was what launched my journey into play over ten years ago.
It is incredibly hard to work on reading comprehension if this is an area of struggle.
So we spend a lot of time on this, in all the ways listed above. I don't lower my expectations, we listen to podcasts, we listen to chapter books, we discuss quite complex scientific concepts, but the amount of scaffolding I do has increased. I share my thinking out loud, I model what I am doing when I am thinking about a topic, I break our learning into bite sized amounts and more importantly, we regularly review and revisit what we have been discussing, making explicit connections to new areas of learning. We also use pictures a lot, looking at a picture, talking about what we can see and notice, inferring what could be going on. What could have just happened? What might happen next? Children generate questions and answer questions, they then write sentences from this picture. We do the same using silent animations. These are incredibly powerful for developing comprehension overall.
Over the past two years I have been learning more about language struggles and about DLD (developmental, language disorder) which is said to be as prevalent as dyslexia. It is something we know little about, but when it comes to assisting our children with literacy, it is crucial we start catching up.
And so this brings me to the end of my little series on the pillars. I hope that there have been some ideas that have sparked some thought. This of course is not the end, it is but the beginning, I share, not because I perceive that I am an expert, but because I think sharing is the most powerful thing our profession can do.
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