Episode Transcript
[00:00:35] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travelers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast reading Road Trip. Welcome to the fourth episode of season three.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit, and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
Along with this acknowledgement, and in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of an Indigenous artist. And this week we are sharing the picture book Walking Together by Elder Albert D. Marshall and Louise Zimanyi, illustrated by Emily Kewageshig. This came recommended to us on Twitter X by Patricia Revelle this innovative picture book introduces readers to the concept of Etuaptmumk, or two eyed seeing, the gift of multiple perspectives in the Mi’kmaq language, as we follow a group of young children connecting to nature as their teacher, a poetic, joyful celebration of the lands and waters. As spring unfolds, we watch for Robin's return, listen for frogs croaking and wonder at Maple Tree's gift of SAP, grounded in Etuaptmumk, also known as two eyed seeing, which braids together the strengths of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing, and the Mi’kmaq concept of Netukulimk, meaning to protect mother Earth for the ancestors, present and future generations. Walking together nurtures respectful, reciprocal, responsible relationships with the land and water, plant life, animals, and other than human beings. For the benefit of all, add this one to your home or classroom library today.
In each episode of this season, we're also going to share a review for reading road trip from the Apple Podcasts app. And this week we want to thank Slinky Girl for so kindly posting the following single best episode of a reading podcast ever. Just listen to season one, episode eight with Doctor Carolyn Strom. I'm a trained dyslexia interventionist and have taught kids to read for over 30 years. She answered questions I've had for years and presented the clearest explanation I've heard about how the brain learns to read. If you need a way to explain this to parents, give this a listen. Thank you so much, slinky girl. And everyone who leaves us a rating and or a review. Every single one is so appreciated. And now on with the show.
I'm so thrilled to introduce today's guests on Reading Road Trip, Meredith and David Liben. The Libens have taught, written, and collaborated together for the past 38 years. Their teaching and work has spanned every grade and most school types, though it has been predominantly in urban centers, mostly in Harlem. Both David and Meredith have worked in rural schools and in community college and teacher prep programs as well. They coordinated the project designed to provide the best information and tools to educators around questions of defining the text, complexity and range of reading called for by the Common Core state standards. During the first decade, they were in widespread use. During the past several years, the Libens have been working to support teachers, students, and instructional materials makers by teaching about the practical implications of reading research. Most recently, their collaboration has resulted in two books, Know Better Do Better: Teaching the Foundations So Every Child Can Read, and Know Better Do Better Comprehension: Fueling the Reading Brain with Knowledge, Vocabulary and Rich Language. That one is hot off the press and we will be talking a lot about that today. Welcome to both of you. I'm so pleased to be speaking today.
[00:04:24] Meredith Liben: Thank you very much.
[00:04:26] Kate Winn: The original Know Better Do Better - it came out in 2019, and that was actually one of the first books I read when I started my science of reading journey. And it's such a great practical one for teachers who are new to all of this. I always find it funny, you know, in the Facebook groups, people will say, what book do you recommend? I'm totally brand new. And somebody will suggest Mark Seidenberg or somebody will suggest Speech to Print. And honestly, those were two of the first ones I read as well because that was the advice I got. I was not ready for those when I first read them. But then when I discovered your book, it was like, oh, hallelujah. This is actually teacher-friendly, practical information. So it was really wonderful. I'm wondering, what was the reaction to that first book, and how do you think things have evolved in the reading world since?
[00:05:12] Meredith Liben: So I'll start.
We were, we wrote that book to tell our story of the same journey and to draw attention to the importance of foundational skills for kids to feel good about themselves just as important to be able to do all the rest of reading and be independent.
And we were really pleasantly surprised at how well it was received. Very surprised, because we had no idea 100 people would read it or. Or whatever. And it ended up selling, we think, as far as we know, it sold about 35,000 copies, which is amazing. It is newly in print under our copyright, which we're very happy about. So it is again available after being unavailable for a year. So we self published through Amazon. And so that's, I wanted to get that out because people ask us about it, and I'd been hoarding our last five or six copies, and I sell them. If people have a good reason, I really need to do this. But now people can get them for the same price. It's the same edition.
So anyway, I just wanted to get that out there.
[00:06:19] Kate Winn: How do you think things have evolved in the reading world since that first book came out?
[00:06:24] David Liben: I would say the shift towards a systematic approach to foundational skills in general and phonics in particular, has continued to accelerate. I can't give a number of the percentage of schools that do it now, but it's pretty high.
There's very few materials that come out now in the market that do not have some kind of systematic approach to foundational skills. And my goodness, even Lucy Calkins does now.
Maybe terrible, but you could call it systematic.
So that's one, I think, two. There's now beginning to be, beginning to grow an emphasis on the importance of knowledge. It turns out you have to know something about the world to be a literate person. Who would have thought the research for that is 35 years old in the cognitive science world, but it's now just getting into education.
Well, to be fair, there were people who talked about it ten or 15 years ago, but some knowledge is now just beginning to get an emphasis as well. And I think the rest of the literacy, the rest of what goes into learning to read, which is the most complex thing we ask children to do by far, hasn't gotten much attention. But I think since our first book came out, that would be. That would be how the literacy world has changed in some. The. The attention to systematic foundational skills has continued to grow and is beginning to get some attention to knowledge.
There are probably some other things, but those are the most important.
[00:08:02] Meredith Liben: I have one more thing that I think it's been very interesting watching the arc through my inbox, through Twitter x and reading the dialogue. I feel, and somebody just said this to me yesterday when we were planning a meeting with teachers that there is more widespread knowledge, and there's even the sort of heavy handed legislative approach to sort of trying to create guardrails, which I understand. I worry about that from non educators largely trying to craft legislation, but I understand it, and I am glad that people are concerned that children learn to read.
That feels very important to us. Spent our whole career trying to do that. But I also think there's also a tinier community that's getting very, very knowledgeable and almost fussy in their demands or their worries. Now, in a way that makes a ton of sense for kids who have legitimate learning disabilities and may need really specialized attention, but it doesn't necessarily make sense for classroom teachers who need to get their kids going.
Everybody knowing about fricatives, I'm not sure everybody has to know about fricatives to be successful classroom teachers. So I worry. I worry about the fussiness of it and that that may scare people. So that makes me doubly glad that we wrote a book that is straightforward and teacher friendly and doesn't point fingers or lay blame for sure.
[00:09:37] Kate Winn: So you had that amazing first book. Things have evolved since. Now you have this new book, Know Better Do Better, focused on comprehension, and we're going to talk a lot more about that. Something I love about your writing in general is that you're really honest. And I know in this book you include reflections, like, over the years we've made some mistakes and even some whoppers quote, as you call them in the book. I know I've seen some people question the use of Maya Angelou's no better, do better line in this educational context, as if in some way it attacks teachers for not knowing better. You know, somehow is putting them down. How important do you think that humility piece is if we're going to take reading instruction in the right direction?
[00:10:16] David Liben: I think it's very important.
I had a discussion with Karim, who was one of your previous participants, and, you know, there are many literacy people, including ourselves, going around and saying, well, we need to do this, and we haven't done this, and we did that.
Well, some of those people must have made the same mistakes, because almost nobody was teaching systematic phonics, like when the standards came out, for example, around 2010 in the US. Yeah, in the United States.
And so a lot of the people who are telling teachers to do XYZ made some of those mistakes, and that goes for knowledge as well. It seems important to acknowledge that, to get buy in from people and to understand that the process of learning about the most complex thing that we ask kids to do is, in fact, requires people to continue to learn, and that includes the people who go around the country talking to people like us and everybody else. Unfortunately, I think we lead. I don't know if it's. I guess it's. Unfortunately, we lead the world of literacy in the United States in acknowledging the mistakes that we made. I can't. I don't think I've seen anyone anywhere else say, we got this wrong, and here's how we learned about it and here's how we addressed it. So I think it's a good thing.
[00:11:41] Meredith Liben: Yeah. And I. I would push back, you know, that. That Maya Angelou quote is giving permission for people to grow and, you know, the second half of the quote, you know, and then you do better, you know, the longer quote than we shortcut it. And, I mean, my goodness, we are, you know, we are creatures of trial and error as a species. We're curious and stubborn, and we stick our nose in things and get murdered, you know, whatever, all through the ages. And, yeah, I think our first person accounting helps when we ask people about, you know, approaching this, we were worried about this topic because it's much more complicated and the brain science, there's just more moving parts, and it's a little more abstract, and it's inside the rain. And what you do about it is more subtle and a paradigm shift, equally much is going from balanced literacy to structured literacy. So there will, there's going to be the same dislocation and discomfort if people start to look at the research and understand what to do about comprehension.
So it feels really important to say, we did that. We did these things with our kids, too.
And you have to wake up and forgive yourself and move on. You just have to. So I feel like if we don't model that, then we have no business opening our mouths in the space.
[00:12:55] Kate Winn: No. And I feel like I do a lot of PD and presenting and things like that myself, and I think it helps, helps the audience when I'm able to say so, when I came to kindergarten, I was sending home the use your eagle eye and look at the picture to guess the word right, that I made those mistakes, too, because I didn't know better. And to be able to move on from that, you start the book with a chapter outlining the role of knowledge. And I want to ask the popular question, is teaching stuff really necessary when kids can just Google facts? And I would love to say, oh, I'm just being the devil's advocate, or I'm sort of tongue in cheek, but I think I fell for that, that idea for a while, because that was sort of what we were being fed, that, oh, we just want critical thinkers and they don't need to know stuff and they don't need to know facts. And so I think a lot of us teachers kind of did buy into that. Why is it not good enough that we can just google the facts?
[00:13:48] David Liben: Well, what I'm going to say might not be true now, but it was certainly true 14 or 15 months ago. You could ask a question like, who were the first three explorers to let to land on the North American continent? And it'll be pretty easy to Google the answer to that. But the point is also, why are you asking about the people who came to North America? Why did they come here and what did they, what were the results and what was the outcome of them coming here? Now, that would be harder.
14 or 15 months ago, before chat GPT, that would have been difficult to just get the Google answer to. But even now, even now, with chat GPT, you have to be able to read the answer. You have to be able to understand the answer to the question. So you need to have enough knowledge to know what questions to ask. You need to have enough knowledge to evaluate, including with chat GPT, the answers that you see, but you also need to be able to read those answers.
I suppose chat GPT could. I know chatGPT could read the answer to you, but again, why are you asking? What's the purpose of asking and why did you decide to ask, and what do you do with these results, and how does it reflect the rest of the world?
So there's still enormous advantages to being able to read.
Theoretically, someone could not be able to read, and if they wanted to find out about the world, and we're curious enough, they could ask all kinds of questions and save the answers that chat GPT gives them and put together in their mind in some better understanding of the world. But that's pretty far fetched. So reading, as Marilyn Adams said long ago, is by far the most efficient way to learn about the world.
[00:15:45] Meredith Liben: And I think the other tragedy in that idea, and I was stumped by that question for quite a while because I was like, gee, I guess you could. And you can, if you just want to go surface deep, you know, and get this quick answer, or this. I mean, and even with Wikipedia, which I actually like as a resource, you could, you need to read it and digest it.
But the fact is that that reading is this one of the miraculous things about reading is that it transcends time and space. It can let you travel through time, even forward in time, with science fiction. And, and through space, you can go to outer space, you can go under the world, you can go to any, any other setting on the planet, on the surface of our planet. So. And those are depthful experiences. And everybody who writes at length about these things has some assumptions in their mind about who their reader is and what their reader knows and if their reader.
Exactly, yeah. You still have to say who, who you are or what, what you're looking for. And if you, the reader, don't know the connections and don't know the references and don't understand what's behind some turn of phrase, you are lost again. So knowledge creates a situation where the environment becomes more comfortable for people who possess that knowledge. And they can take all those authors cues, they can, they can build on the references that the author was assuming they had and go deeper and further than they could. If they didn't have those. And too many of those references unknown, they get lost. So you could read with a book in one hand and your phone in the other, I suppose, and keep looking it up, but your brain would short circuit in the crisscrossing. So you need knowledge of words in the world in order to read successfully. And we think that reading is a valuable, slow enterprise where you can go deep and wide and go wherever you want.
[00:17:43] David Liben: Yeah. And to put more bluntly, whether you google your answers or you chat GPT them, etcetera, if you don't know the meaning of the words and the response, it's hard. Or if you can't parse it in a number of ways, even if it's read to you, you need to know the meaning of the words. Here's a good example. In the first year of COVID our eldest grandson was, I think he was in kindergarten, but there was no school, so he was home. Fortunately, he has four grandparents. We did different things. And I read, I went through the history of the United States and I said something along the lines of the Vikings are considered, were considered a very violent people.
And he stopped and he asked, well, why are they more violent than anybody else? Now that's a profound question for a four year old. Five.
[00:18:29] Meredith Liben: Yeah, young.
[00:18:30] David Liben: All right, there's five.
I'm not sure how much of a difference five is from four to that kind of question, but nevertheless, I would say most 16 year olds won't come up with that kind of question. What goes into a five year old asking that kind of question. He'd been read to for months and months before. Before COVID and during COVID he'd been getting this American history, which, by the way, took me like 3 hours a day to prepare. And I've taught history in college, in community college.
And so he had like, it was like an hour or an hour and a half a day.
He gradually built up knowledge of the world. That enabled him to have a profound question. And he's not a genius. He's a thoughtful kid.
And that's probably the main reason you have to build up over a period of time, a somewhat coherent knowledge of the world. And that doesn't just happen by opening up chat GPT and Google that comes from reading or being in the younger grades, being read to.
[00:19:36] Meredith Liben: And then David, who didn't know, had to go find out himself. And it was a really interesting.
[00:19:39] David Liben: Oh, yeah, that was interesting. That was really interesting.
[00:19:42] Kate Winn: Lifelong learning. Over the past couple of years, I've really, in terms of knowledge building, started to embrace what I've learned about the idea of text sets. So, I mean, trivia is great, right? But we're not just trying to throw random facts at kids all over the place to build knowledge. And I know I've read some. Some things you've written about that, Meredith, and even the importance of topics over themes. So we are right now undergoing revisions to our Ontario kindergarten program. We've just done the grades one through eight language program in response to our right to read report. And kindergarten is being worked on right now. In our previous program document, it was very much recommended that we don't cover topics like the rainforest or topics such as dinosaurs. Like, we wanna do more of the broad theme kind of things. Right. Why are. You can talk either about text sets or about the idea of topics versus themes. Why is this all important for knowledge building?
[00:20:34] Meredith Liben: So I'll start with topics versus themes because I think there is lots of confusion around that. And again, nobody in this conversation is saying themes are bad. Justice, friendship, love, loyalty.
These are great, important ideas, but they're very abstract and they tend to take lots of different form and have sort of an amorphous.
They're hard to get your head around. So I would argue that they are way more valuable in secondary. The older students get and, you know, and think with passion and have the knowledge to approach these ideas that they really belong in, in secondary and certainly in high schools. But what a topic is.
A topic focuses on some aspect of the world or one's body or one aspect of history. The narrowness of it, we think, should be a factor of how much time is going to be devoted to it. So a topic can also be giant. You can have US history for, you know, six or 500 years. That's a broad. That's a topic, but it's broad. Or you can have much smaller slices of that. You can have the bering land, you know, the land bridge or, you know, when did dogs get domesticated alongside humans? Or whatever. Any. Any one question that would be slightly more narrow. What happens when you. When you investigate a topic is you slowly gain expertise in that topic. You go from sort of an introductory level knowledge of it, where the ideas are simple and the concept. The concepts and ideas are simple and straightforward, and you're slowly building some sense of that to more expertise where you're getting into the nuances of the topic. Nuanced ideas and nuanced facts come packaged in complex sentences, and we tend to use specialized vocabulary in that content, not, you know, tier three words that name that content, but we also describe them and modify them with tier two words. And those tier two words travel across all the topics. When we talk about variety or simultaneous or, I don't know, any one of tier two words, those tend to travel with more and more. The more complex they get, the more sophisticated syntax and ideas they're representing.
So kindergarteners are very interested in the world and how it works. They're less interested in friendship as a big global idea. I mean, friends are important to them. Family is important to them. All about the neighborhood is important.
But these ideas, they're much more interested in learning about stuff, about how things work, how things go together.
And then the last thing I'd say about this is all of us who occupy this space, you know, the committees that are. That are revising, the teachers that are in the kindergartens, all of them read to their children and explain the world to their children on the night, at night, mornings, weekends, holidays.
So they are teaching their kids about sophisticated things. And then somehow we walk into the schoolroom door and we think that that group of kids can't handle knowledge building and an explanation of how things work. So there's a weird disconnect. You know, it's like when you read, when you don't read chapter books at school, but you'll read chapter books to the same age kids at home. So there's some things that we don't. That should transfer in educated families right into the classroom that don't always do it, because somehow we think this group of kids isn't as perceptive as our one kid that we have contact with at home. So, you know, we're trying to challenge that and recreate inside the classroom that kind of richness and access to how the world works and how things go that we would do for, you know, that is important, and the research base is impeccable around it. So the younger you start, the more words you know and the more things you can name, and then you have all those knowledge connections we were talking about earlier.
[00:24:51] Kate Winn: So listeners have likely heard of the Matthew effect, referring to the rich getting richer, that phrase from the gospel of Matthew, and how that connects to the idea of the more you read, the better your reading gets, generally speaking. And you write about the importance of reading volume for that. And I'm wondering if you could just quickly share some of your suggestions for how teachers can help increase that reading volume.
[00:25:12] David Liben: Well, the biggest difficulty, first of all, the reading volume that we talk about is ideally a series of texts on a topic, as we've been discussing, as opposed to only free choice reading. It's hard to get on your soapbox and be opposed to free choice reading because that helps, too. But to maximize growth of vocabulary, tier two vocabulary, and to maximize growth of knowledge. The research is clear that reading a series of texts on a topic is the best way to do that.
[00:25:45] Meredith Liben: But we also want to make clear that a full length book, like historical fiction or informational book, a full length book is a text set the best possible because it's coherent. It does gradually get deeper and deeper. So we a text set or a full length book both serve this purpose. So I just. Text sets, you know, in some ways are really hard to make perfectly coherent and flow upward into complexity. Whereas author of a nonfiction or historical fiction or something that has lots of lots and lots of information in it, that person did do the work of making it coherent and to sequence it carefully. So we're big fans of whole full length books.
[00:26:28] David Liben: I would say in K to 2, the most helpful thing I could say is to read aloud series of texts on a topic. In other words, don't just read a book about sea mammals and then go on to reptiles, or then go on to the explorers, etcetera. Read it. And I'm talking K to 2, and read aloud books. Read a series of books on explorers or a series of books on sea mammals, etcetera. And then a great resource for that is on students achievement partners website. It's called the Read Aloud Project. It's hundreds of suggested read alouds, just like I described, that begin with a more complex text to read aloud and a deep, deep read of that book, looking at the language carefully, looking at the ideas, and that's followed by three texts that are not delved into as deeply. So you'll have an original book, the first book about bats, and you'll really learn how they navigate, how they're mammals, where they live, what's happening with white nose fever here, and so forth. That'll be a deep read. That might be a week or even more.
And then there's three books that follow it, or two or three books that follow it that are also about bats. And you don't go into those as deeply. And there's scores of those made by teachers around the United States for the Read Aloud project for grades three and up. It's a little more, it's not more complicated.
The problem is finding the time to, for kids to independently do that reading. It's important to understand that to grow knowledge, you don't have to have complex text. And simpler text is fine for growing knowledge. And that's often how kids, when they're learning it, when they're growing knowledge on their own, those that do start off with simpler text, like in the dinosaur effect, if you've heard about that, or the horse effect or the boat effect.
[00:28:17] Meredith Liben: Anything, et cetera, sticking with it.
[00:28:19] David Liben: And then there comes the question of having a library of books that's large enough so that in each of these areas that kids might be interested in, there's books at different levels. So if a kid's really gaga over motorcycles, there's some books that are relatively simple or very simple on motorcycles, and maybe some books that are not as simple, that move up in complexity and a time of maybe even a video or something that kids can do that the teacher knows.
These two or three kids are really reading a lot about motorcycles. They're really interested in motorcycles. Snowmobiles would work, too, since you're in Canada, and although there's not much snow even there when we go.
So the problem is it's some work to put these together, but also you have to be willing to devote the time to it. You have to be willing to devote this time of the day. There's these knowledge groups, or there's groups of kids reading a series of texts on a topic that has been chosen either from the curriculum or from their own interest. And there's a volume of books on that topic, and there has some degree, a range of complexity, keeping in mind that if a kid is really interested in motorcycles, they're going to be able to read books that are a little more complex and that the simpler books are going to help support the larger books. So that's the practical part of that. We've talked a little bit about the research part, but it also reminds me about Walter Kintsch, as we talk about in our book. Walter Kintsch is the first person that made a model of how comprehension works in the brain. And one of the things he talks about, and he talks about this process of building knowledge through a series of coherent texts. He says, also, by the way, isn't that what we ask kids to do when they get to high school or college, to use one text that they're reading to help them learn the next text that they have to read on, whether that's a book or a full length text. But we have not done that in k to twelve education at any point. So again, the biggest obstacle is finding the time.
[00:30:29] Meredith Liben: Again. In the US, there's definitely a strong culture of not pushing kids to do much work at home, and that comes from parents. It's sort of a symbiotic thing that it feels like it's really crescendoing and like, kids shouldn't be burdened when they go home. If you're really a reader, if you can read, if you've been taught the foundations and you can read independently and you, and you love learning, reading isn't as much of a burden. And so it doesn't feel like it's oppressive. But until we fix, it sort of goes back to fixing, repairing the state of reading instruction in general. And I think kids who can read well and love to learn would willingly read at home, which would help us. And of course, the kids that do are soaring. So that's where there's more time. What we do, even at home, we tend to over program our kids right now so that you don't have time. They're too exhausted. So it really is an issue right now, and it worries us because it's not easy.
[00:31:24] Kate Winn: You do such a lovely job in the book, in your signature teacher friendly way of outlining the three levels of the mental model of comprehension. And I just like to walk through those quickly. So I'm just going to name one and then just have you quickly tell listeners what that is. So if we start with the surface level, what are we talking about?
[00:31:42] Meredith Liben: Foundational skills applied.
[00:31:45] Kate Winn: Okay, the text base.
[00:31:48] David Liben: The text base is the ideas that are in the text. Cognitive scientists call them propositions. And one sentence can have more than one proposition. But all those ideas or all those propositions need to be understood. They need to be read, understood and connected to propositions that came earlier or propositions that will come later in the text. So the text is really in the cognitive psychology world, it's a network of propositions. And the student needs to be able to each of those propositions, integrate them into their understanding of the sentence that they're reading, integrate them into the understanding of the text that they have at that point, and integrate them into their relevant background knowledge.
[00:32:32] Kate Winn: So we go from surface level text base and then situation model. Tell me about that.
[00:32:38] David Liben: The situation model is as intriguing as it can be problematic to understand.
Again, I always think with literacy, examples are helpful.
Let's take a very pretty straightforward narrative text like Winn Dixie.
So it's about a girl who's lost her mother, who lives with her father, who's kind of lost since his wife left.
And she comes in, I think she comes into a new town, is that right?
And she's essentially starting a new life. And she also happens to be fairly outgoing and fairly straightforward and fairly friendly. And you have a tale about that. There are ideas in that text about how, what's her name?
[00:33:29] Meredith Liben: Opal. But what's most important is she finds a dog inside a grocery store, which.
[00:33:34] David Liben: Oh, I forgot about.
[00:33:35] Meredith Liben: Well, I can't believe that. So the dog is going to be the glue that allows her to find a place and become less lonely and in the end.
[00:33:45] David Liben: But Opal also was a strong, outgoing, friendly character.
So two kids could read that and they could both absorb the text base. They know the role of Opal. They know how Winn Dixie was important. They have a good sense of Winn Dixie's personality, of Opal's personality, of the major events in the text. And these two kids can take, let's say, some kind of assessment on that text, and they can both do equally well. They both pass the assessment.
That doesn't mean that they both come away with the same depth of understanding or the same enduring understanding.
[00:34:24] Meredith Liben: And those two ingredients are the situation.
[00:34:26] David Liben: Model, essential to the situation model. So a child who's also lost their mother is going to have a somehow a deeper connection to that text. There's no way in the world. And Walter Kinch was very clear. All these things go into the situation model, including emotions.
A child who is just in love with dogs is going to have a different situation model of that text.
A child who thinks dogs are just a nuisance and they're not going to have the same situation model, their situation model of that text is going to be somewhat less rich and possibly somewhat less endurance.
[00:35:08] Meredith Liben: So a situation model, just to offer a definition, is that enduring understanding. I like to tell people that it's sort of what you want your students to remember. You hope they would remember three weeks later when they would talk if they were describing it to somebody else. And I want to underline, yes, all these other things can come do and can come in your feelings, your other experience, other things you've read or watched or seen or heard.
But you can build a completely more than adequate, a satisfactory situation model. If all you have are, is the text itself and you can learn from it and absorb it, you will have a good situation model, good solid one. It's just other things can enrich it. It's true. But you can get a good one, even if that's your first time reading about a little girl in rural Florida who makes her way through this town during the course of one summer with her unruly dog at her side. So all these things, the other thing about all three of these is they all are in play simultaneously. You are reading through, you are decoding the words, hopefully automatically and with fluency while you're making all the connections, while you're saying, oh, you know, that's why she named him Winn Dixie or some other revelation. And as you're building and adjusting your situation model, you get a situation model from the front cover. You start to, but it gets richer and richer and more developed as you move through the course of a reading. So situation model also is adapting and evolving all the time along with surface leven and text base.
[00:36:44] Kate Winn: In terms of developing some of this deep comprehension with students. You've got a great chapter called the power of close reading. And I probably what I love about this is that it can help students access, I'm going to say grade level. I know level is a very loaded word, but can help students access, you know, text. And we could spend our whole hour together talking about just your close reading, which I just want to spend a few minutes on it, but I'm just going to ask you about the before, during, and after. If you can just give a little bit of a skeleton of the things that you're thinking about or doing as the teacher. So if we could start with.
Start with before. Before you have your students doing a closed reading, what are the things quickly that a teacher would be thinking about or doing?
[00:37:28] Meredith Liben: So our favorite phrase for this is the teacher has to do intellectual preparation, even if she has the most marvelous program that they feel happy about and they're using. And the very good questions are there she or he. They must absorb the text themselves because they know their students, the materials producer, whoever made the curriculum cannot, doesn't know their particular classroom and they need to think through. Okay, what do I want their understanding to be their text based, if you, they're a situation model, if you will, and what's likely to interfere with it. And I don't know if they annotate the text, but they certainly read it and take it in themselves with their students in mind. So that's huge. In the before, is the teacher doing intellectual preparation and there's no escaping reading the text themselves that they're going to bring to the students. And it is shocking to me when I meet people that think they can just roll in on the day, you know, that morning and do the thing without, you know, just ask the questions and not really know the answers themselves.
[00:38:33] David Liben: Some of them know have three kids at home and no other support.
[00:38:36] Meredith Liben: I know, I know.
[00:38:38] Kate Winn: Sometimes I fake it a little bit with kindergartens. But I love how you mentioned, you know, like, you have to prepare your vocabulary words and how you're going to handle vocabulary words. You know, is there syntax that's going to be particularly juicy or challenging that you need to work with, you know, the knowledge building, what do they need to know? That sort of thing. It's great.
[00:38:56] Meredith Liben: And then in terms, sorry, I'm just, in terms of prep and I just, I wish we could give systems and I wish teachers could be freed up to spend the time they know something takes because close reading takes time. Learning to read well takes time. And so part of that preparation also should be being picky about because based on what those features you just said, Kate, what's the syntax? What's the essential vocabulary? What's the knowledge that I may end up need to bridging or the students need to discuss just to build a common understanding, what will I skip? What is less essential so I have time to do those really important things?
That too is a question I would love for us to give ourselves permission to ask every day so that our kids can have time slowed down around reading.
[00:39:45] Kate Winn: Okay. So the teacher has done their work in advance of. And then we go into the during. And you don't just recommend one read. Tell me what you recommend for during.
[00:39:55] David Liben: Well, the first read we believe should be found at fluent read teacher reads out loud. Or if there's fortunate enough at the right grade to have kids who sound like James Earl Jones when they read aloud, that's fine, too.
But someone reads aloud, and other students follow along with their pencils or their erasers or their fingers or whatever, because abundant research has shown that that improves fluency. But also, and equally important, it brings the kids into the text, the weakest of all readers, because maybe we should have said in the beginning, we don't know, and no one has come up with a system for every kid in the class to be able to be a part of a discussion about grade level text other than close read. And this first part, with the teacher reading out loud and students following along, brings everybody into the text. Then the second or third read, or sometimes even more, depends on how many of those questions that you answer, that you pose. Did you pose questions that help address knowledge? Because knowledge, as we said, is good. Did you approach questions that help, knowledge of words and knowledge of the world? Did you approach questions that did that then? Did you approach some questions that came out of the text itself, where you spotted some difficult parts of the text, of the text space, really where there were propositions that were particularly difficult, or where you needed to make a connection between or among propositions, and you could see that that might be hard because it all hinged on a pronoun reference, or it all hinged on any kind of reference.
Then ask a question about that. Not for Gotcha, as we said in the book, not to prove that the kid missed. You missed that sucker. Let's move on now.
But to help the kids see that this is what makes a question difficult. This is what makes the text difficult. So you've got questions based on knowledge of the world and knowledge of words. Then you've got questions on the elements, the features of the text that might cause difficulty, and then you can do some standards based questions.
So when you look at all three of these, you say, well, how many questions do I have here? And are they all really good questions? Then they will require, they will determine how many readings you have. And then what I think Meredith said earlier, what did you want the kid to get out of this text?
Even though they might not all have the situation model, you want them to have some kind of situation model that's meaningful. You want to say something here.
[00:42:22] Meredith Liben: Yes, and we want to really underline that. We argue for this to be socially constructed. You're building a communal, collective understanding, which, again, is for everybody's benefit. And the reason it takes time is that kids actually slowing down and talking to each other, proving their answer. So that's during class. You ask a question that is text based, hopefully you've provided through that first read everybody's access and whether the student quietly ponders it, whether they're in pairs, whether they're in linguistic partnerships, because you have a lot of english learners that you're dealing with, or french learners, kids that have a different language base.
You figure out a way for the kids to process, and then you elevate that to a whole, we believe, whole class discussion because it is marvelous what different kids bring, and you build a collective understanding of what the right answer is to that question sometimes by examining error patterns. It's funny that we have the beautiful Japanese lesson study in mathematics, and we have not thought to bring it into language arts, where it's so rich and generative, where you pursue wrong answers until there's a collective understanding of where thinking went awry. And that kid learns, oh, I missed that key word. That would have led me in this direction. I missed it. And now I know. Now I know better.
So all of this during is socially constructed. You're building a collective understanding. And again, that is how you can bring kids years below grade level into a shared understanding of a grade level text. Can they read it as well as the kid who reads four years above grade level?
[00:44:04] David Liben: Definitely nothing, right?
[00:44:05] Meredith Liben: But they have had access, and they are learning from that child who sees the evidence, who sees all the connections. They are learning how to do that, which is crucial.
[00:44:15] Kate Winn: So we've done all of this amazing during. And then in terms of after a close read, what kind of culminating assignment is worthwhile?
[00:44:24] David Liben: Well, it should be connected to what you wanted the kids to get out of the text, if you wanted the kids to get out of that part of Winn Dixie, that it was fortunate that, that Opal happened to be in the library. But also, it was fortunate that Winn Dixie was such a, that kind of dog that he was, and fortunate that Opal was such, was the kind of personality that she had. So you want to say, what are the things that came together in this part of the book that was, that was important and was important in Opal's life or important in the lives of the characters in the book? Then you create a question. It could be a constructed response that asks just that question, what happened in this book? What happened in this section of the book that was important for the characters or important for their future, do you think? Or it could be a dialogue based on. Based on what the kids have read.
Make up a dot. Make up a little skit between Opal and the librarian whose name I forget, or make up a name on that nasty kid whose name I also forget.
[00:45:39] Meredith Liben: She comes around.
[00:45:40] David Liben: What happens if she shows up in the next chapter? What do you think she's going to say? And what is Opal going to say and why? So there are different ways that you can have, like, culminating assignment like that. And they could be longer or they could be shorter.
They could be as short as: what did you like most about this chapter? Please explain why. It doesn't have to be extensive all the time and it.
[00:46:03] Meredith Liben: Doesn't have to be present all the time either. I mean, I don't want our students thinking that every time they read, they have to produce a product afterwards. Sometimes you read for the reading. And so I think we talk about work worth doing, I think.
And again, culminating assignments take time. I'd rather see them at the end of units like to tie ideas together and tie multiple texts together, but sometimes you need to know, okay, I don't know how if everybody understood all of this because we talked about it or because you read and actually had some epiphanies yourself. So maybe you want a sentence, a new question that everybody tries to answer as a, as a. As an assessment. I think it really depends on what the teacher needs to know at that point and what's valuable, if anything, to left to do.
[00:46:54] David Liben: Did we say that in the book?
[00:46:56] Meredith Liben: I don't.
[00:46:57] David Liben: I think so. I hope not.
[00:46:58] Meredith Liben: Really?
[00:46:59] David Liben: Yeah. Because a lot of teachers will think we drop down from some other galaxy for better, for better or worse. Teachers believe that there has to be some kind of exit ticket kind of thing, response kind of thing, culminating assignment. Because that's the, you know, rather than pure intellectual development.
That's the, that's the ethos that has been bequeathed to us, whether it's because of accountability, accountability or standards or who knows what.
[00:47:32] Kate Winn: Well, I think it's very freeing to think that maybe we don't have to. So thank you. You're giving all the listeners permission to not have to do something like that every time. I do have a couple last things I want to ask you. So, structured journals. I love your description of the use of structural journals in the classroom. And in fact, when I finished reading your book, I was wishing that I were not just in kindergarten. I mean, I know anything can be adapted for any grade, but to use structural journals, the way you present them wouldn't work exactly in kindergarten. But could you just share for listeners the structure of structured journals and how to use them in a classroom?
[00:48:04] David Liben: The basic idea is pretty straightforward. You find a passage, could be a passage of the length and complexity of a close reading passage. But that's problematic if you have a mixed-ability class and some kids have more ability than others. So you have to deal with the passage. If the passage is grade-level complexity, you're going to have to give everybody some support, or at least give your weaker reader some support before they do a structured journal that could be an additional read before they start, or that could be dropping in some more vocabulary. But you have to have a text that the kids could sort of read on their own for a structured journal. And then for each passage, or if you're using a full-length book, for each excerpt from the passage, you pick an excerpt that is high value, important, or interesting, and relatively in the name in the neighbourhood of grade level.
These complexity levels are not physics. They're not exact. We act like they are, but they're not.
And there's no cognitive scientist who says otherwise.
And then first have to teach first. You have to do this together with the kids a number of times. You don't just plop down the structured journal and have them do it. You do it as a class first, a number of times, which hopefully we said in the book, after you've done it two, three, four times together as a class with the same text, the kids go on their own and they write jot down. We usually don't recommend worrying about perfect writing or anything like that. What was the most important part here, do you think? Or parts, what do you think? Not the main idea, because although it's rather shocking, some texts have more than one important idea and jot down some of those important ideas, and the order here doesn't matter. Jot down connections from what you learned or read in this text to what we've discussed in class or other things that you've read.
Jot down what you don't understand, which is the hardest thing we found for weak readers from elementary school to college.
[00:50:09] Meredith Liben: Because there's too much.
[00:50:10] David Liben: There's so much they don't understand. So Meredith came up with a good idea of jot down two or three things you don't understand.
And then the fun part, the reflection questions, which, when I gave these, and especially in college, I always started with that, because really, it's very hard to understand text if you have an interesting and valuable reflection, if you didn't understand what the hell you read. So since grading them could take forever, I also often just graded based on the reflection question.
[00:50:38] Meredith Liben: And we call that the I wonder question.
These are. These are great for when students are ready to be freed from the support. Questions are scaffold because they are pointing your attention to a specific place or part of the text. So you don't have to think about the whole thing or decide for yourself these categories. But these are, these track with what you have to do to be a successful comprehender.
You have to sift out more and less important and really come up with. With what are the key ideas. And, of course, making connections within the text or across shows that you're actually learning and able to do that. So, and then tracking what you don't understand fully is what good readers do. They notice that, and then they go back and do something to, you know, they. To repair. To repair that understanding. They reread, they question, they do something. So you want kids noticing and being uneasy when they don't understand something. That's crucial. So these are a move toward more independent work. When students are ready for it, they are. They also make for incredible discussion because the students really have to read the text deeply and come. When I've taught remotely, these can become conversations, asynchronous conversations. So they also give more quiet, thoughtful students a chance to be more reflective and have their reflections heard or captured. So we think it's powerful.
[00:52:05] David Liben: Just to be clear, the connections are not the connections within the text. There's connections to other things that have been studied, other things that have been taught.
[00:52:15] Meredith Liben: Yeah.
[00:52:16] David Liben: They are different. They are time consuming to grade, and each teacher has to figure out how they want to deal with that if they. If they do this. Yeah.
[00:52:25] Kate Winn: I even love the idea of teachers considering this format for their own reading, you know, when they're doing professional learning or for, you know, educational book clubs and that sort of thing. Right?
[00:52:33] David Liben: Yeah. That's a good idea.
[00:52:34] Meredith Liben: Yeah.
[00:52:35] Kate Winn: I want to ask you about working together. So you've written two successful books together. You've done so much together through the years. What are the pros and cons? How has it been working with your spouse? And I just think it's funny, even from the start of our conversation, the whole, was your grandson four or was he five? And just kind of back and forth and watching. The listeners can't see you, but I can see you while we're talking and even your body language, where David can tell and Meredith trying to jump in with her own. Her own answers. So what have you found to be the pros and cons?
[00:53:03] Meredith Liben: Yeah, it's been really a rich collaboration, but. And we have very different strengths. I mean, I am. I used to say that David would read all the research and digest it. But I was the one who would take these ideas into the classroom to see whether or not they were legitimate or not when I was teaching and he was school leader, which was most, almost the whole time of the family academy. So, you know, these implications, because that is sort of our value is that we read the research. Now lots of people are reading research and translating it.
[00:53:33] David Liben: Yeah, lots of people aren't reading the research.
[00:53:34] Meredith Liben: All right, well, the little universe of reading Twitter that I follow, people are reading the research.
[00:53:40] David Liben: A, it's small and b, it's all foundational skills. They're not reading any of the research we talk about with comprehension.
[00:53:47] Meredith Liben: Well, anyway, part of our value has been that we've taken, we've taken research out of cognitive science, all the hard stuff, all the hard-to-digest stuff and thought through the implications. And because we're practitioners or we were for so, so long, I mean, that's our hats off to you that you're in the classroom every day because we all know that's the hardest work. That is the hardest work, especially akin to God. So we, I mean, we, it is a lot of time together. I need more quiet time than did David does. I need more time alone.
So there's some adjustments and compromises or whatever, but we love it. And the years, the few years that I worked in high school and David was freelance consulting around Vermont, we missed it. We missed the collaboration and intellectual sparring and all of it.
[00:54:37] Kate Winn: So I think all couples are different because my husband and I were in the same school for two years and I was home on maternity leave for part of those two years, and that was enough for us. He got out of there.
I'm still here, but. But he moved on. Before we go, is there anything that we've missed? And did you want to maybe mention the Knowledge Matters podcast?
[00:54:56] Meredith Liben: Oh, thank you for that. Yes, we are. We are developing season two for the Knowledge Matters podcast is based on the ideas of our book.
So that look for that to be dropping sometime, I would guess early July because we did have a little bit of a hit with, with our producer. So that explores many of these ideas. We, our last interview is with Madeline McCowan next week. We've done all that. We've talked to some marvelous teachers who have shared stories of what it looks like when they do this kind of work with their kids. And that has been a great privilege for us. And then we talk through the ideas in the book and we really do.
We're taking head on what we've been doing wrong in comprehension strategies. This whole strategies first, standards first approach, as opposed to centering the text and the students as the point of curiosity and inquiry for us as teachers when we approach reading with kids. So look for that. We hope it will be provocative and worth people's time.
[00:55:57] David Liben: And when this podcast is done, we're going to have our own podcast, but it's going to be very different. I don't know if anyone like it. Maybe you do.
We're going to just take questions. You know, we're going to solicit questions from teachers who are in the classroom at any grade about anything. Literacy with literacy and language. Yeah, but literacy interacts with children and teacher and management and behaviour and so forth.
[00:56:23] Kate Winn: Wonderful.
[00:56:24] Meredith Liben: We haven't worked this out, but we want to solicit questions and then get a group of teachers that are work that have worked on it, you know, that have either the same problem, just talk together about how to solve that problem.
[00:56:37] David Liben: I want to do anything except me out.
[00:56:39] Meredith Liben: We're clearly worth still working out the details.
[00:56:42] Kate Winn: Well, I will be waiting for this and I will certainly be listening. That's very exciting. Thank you so much, David and Meredith Lieben, for being here with us on reading road trip.
Well, listeners, you just heard me wishing I could use the structured journal presentation procedure with an older grade class. And my good friend and grade seven eight teacher colleague came through for me again. While he would never want to be named, I do have to give respect to someone who is always willing to open their class up and try something new. Two years ago it was, hey, how would you feel about ditching DRA and trying a screener? We can do it together. Which then led to, hey, let's try a partner reading, paragraph shrinking intervention in your class. And now, hey, can I come in and try structured journaling with your kids? Which I did. And since I only had one period with them, they did it cold and I looked at it as a diagnostic and it was so fascinating to see their responses to the four quadrants. Really? Yeah, really cool and more exciting for all of you. Our ONlit team, with the blessing of David and Meredith Liben, has created a free, structured journal template for anyone to download and use with students, and you'll find that linked in the show notes for this episode. Thank you so much to our graphic designer MJ for her great work on that resource.
Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season three, episode four with Meredith and David Liben. And now it's time for that typical end-of-the-podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app, as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and your review might even make it onto an episode. Of course, we welcome any social media love you feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is this mom loves on Twitter and Facebook, and Kate this mom loves on Instagram. Make sure you're following the Reading Road Trip podcast in your app and watch for new episodes continuing every Monday throughout the summer.
We couldn't bring reading road trip to you without behind-the-scenes support from Katelyn Hanna, Brittany Haynes, and Melinda Jones. At IDA Ontario, I'm Kate Winn and along with my co-producer, Doctor Una Malcolm. We hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun. Join us next time when we bring another fabulous guest along for the ride on Reading Road Trip.
