“That cloud looks like an anvil” | Reading Comprehension Revisited

In Episode 3 of "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited" you’ll hear from three teachers who’ve experienced the before and after of the shift to using a knowledge-building curriculum in their classrooms.

Abby Boruff, Deloris Fowler, and Kyair Butts are three classroom teachers who are, in some ways, very different. They teach different ages, and different subjects, in different parts of the country, but in other ways they have a lot in common. All three were skeptical when their schools switched to new knowledge-building literacy curricula. Curricula like these give all children in the classroom access to the same complex, grade-level texts, building their knowledge and vocabulary through read-alouds and discussion, instead of limiting them to books they can decode themselves.

At first Abby, Deloris, and Kyair worried that the curriculum would be too challenging, too restrictive of their autonomy, or that the topics wouldn’t interest their students. And, the biggest challenge of all, as Deloris explains, was not understanding “the why” of the changes they were making. But once they saw the dramatic benefits for their students, that “why” became clear and all three came to embrace a new approach to teaching literacy.

For more information about the information in this episode, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Transcript

Abby Boruff  

And I remember thinking, we just talked about these two words in EL last week. Why am I not using the word stalactite, and stalagmite with all of these kids? And it definitely gave me big pause. And I had to go back and I didn't immediately throw away everything I had done. But I remember thinking, okay, I can probably use this caves book with everybody. Instead of just that one group, we can all probably access this text because they know the vocabulary in here. And I don't need to call everything a rock because they can decode that one word.

Natalie Wexler  

Welcome to Episode Three of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. I'm Natalie Wexler. 

That was Abby Boruff, a first grade teacher in Des Moines, describing something that happened after her school district switched to a new kind of literacy curriculum, one that gives all children in the classroom access to the same complex texts, building their knowledge and vocabulary through read-alouds and discussion. Instead of limiting them to books they can read themselves. 

Abby is one of three teachers we'll be hearing from in this episode. All three have made the switch from using the standard kind of literacy curriculum, to one that builds the kind of knowledge that's needed for reading comprehension. They're all using different knowledge-building curricula. There are now six such curricula that have been identified as effective by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy organization. In alphabetical order, they are ARC Core, Bookworms, Core Knowledge Language Arts, EL Education, Fishtank ELA, and Wit & Wisdom; you can find detailed information about all of them at the campaign's website, knowledgematterscampaign.org. 

All but one of these curricula include systematic instruction in foundational reading skills like phonics and the early grades, because of course, that's important too. The publisher of Wit & Wisdom – the one that doesn't have a phonics component –recommends that schools pair it with a foundational skills program. 

As you'll hear all three teachers were skeptical about their new curriculum at first, but what they saw and heard in their classrooms helped change their minds.

Let's start with the earliest grades. Over the past 17 years, Abby Boruff has taught at levels ranging from preschool to second grade, including 10 years and kindergarten. The Des Moines school where she now teaches first grade has a challenging population. All students come from low income families. Most are members of historically disadvantaged groups, and about 50 to 60% are multi-language learners. Abby got good training in decoding instruction, teaching kids how to decipher written words using phonics because one of her degrees is in special education. But she didn't learn anything about building kids' knowledge to enable them to understand written text. 

Abby used to teach reading the way most elementary teachers do. Three times a year she tested her students to assign them an individual reading level. She would first listen to each of them read a short book, part of a testing kit, and monitor how well they decoded the words. Then she would ask them comprehension questions. Finally, she would use a formula to determine their reading level. Generally, the level at which a child can decode at least 95% of the words in a book used for the test, and answer at least 80% of the comprehension questions about it. 

The reading levels determine which other books a child is allowed to read. If, for example, a child is assigned to Level C, she'll be directed to a basket or shelf of books at that level. The books are assigned levels on the basis of factors like word length, and sentence length. They're not organized by topic. 

One problem, Abby now says, is that the reading level assessments weren't accurate. The testing kit had only two books for each level. So if kids were repeatedly tested using the same books They would eventually just remember or guess at the words. At the same time, some of the books had words kids didn't know, even pretty basic words. That could also affect their scores.

Abby Boruff  

I mean, how bad is this, that 10 years out from doing this, I still remember these books. The level C, expository text was the book called shopping. And they go to the grocery store, and half of the food words in there, yeah, if kids didn't have those in their vocabulary, they weren't, they weren't going to read that book.

Natalie Wexler  

It wasn't just kids still learning English who had problems with the vocabulary. The book used the term "shopping cart", for example. And not everyone uses that phrase to describe the thing you push around a grocery store. And some kids didn't know the term grocery store, because they call it a supermarket. 

The "Shopping" book was also supposed to assess whether kids had learned the comprehension skill of "making an inference". The little boy in the story gets a box of cookies at the end, and the kids have to infer that it's a reward for helping his mother do her grocery shopping.

Abby Boruff  

But I mean if getting cookies at your house isn't special, I'm not sure how you're going to infer that?

Natalie Wexler  

A lot of the reading instruction in a typical classroom focuses on comprehension skills. At the beginning of a lesson, Abby used to read aloud to the whole class for 10 or 15 minutes from a simple book that was supposed to teach a specific skill. She remembers one book she would use to teach the skill of making inferences. It's called "The Wednesday Surprise" by Eve Bunting.

Abby Boruff  

A little girl goes to her grandma's house. They read together. You don't really, you know, get too much into the inferring there. But by the end of it, the surprise is that the little girl taught her grandma how to read, and they surprise her dad – so her grandma's son – "Oh, I taught grandma how to read", and he's so happy, and it is – it's a wonderful book.

Natalie Wexler  

The point is to get the kids to infer that grandma can't read, before that fact gets revealed at the end of the story. But most kids weren't able to do that, Abby says. The follow up activity was to have kids write about a time they surprised their own parents. That didn't have much to do with making inferences, and it didn't have much to do with understanding the book either.

Abby Boruff  

Yeah, they could have ignored the entire story and the entire premise of the story and heard that word, "Have you surprised-" or that phrase "Have you surprised your parents?", "Oh, yeah!" But nothing related to it at all,

Natalie Wexler  

Then students would practice the strategy of making inferences on books at their individual reading levels... or try to:

Abby Boruff  

There's nothing to infer in a level eight text. So then I'd also be having them go read books that they can't read, using a skill that they probably don't know how to use. Oh, I don't know. It's so cringy now. I hate, like, hate to even think about it, but yes.

Natalie Wexler  

Like many teachers who have made the switch, Abby finds it uncomfortable to talk about how she used to teach. But she was doing the best she could with the training and materials she had. At the time, she didn't feel there was anything wrong with the approach she was using. She was guided by the data she collected, which showed her students were making progress. 

They probably were making progress in decoding. But looking back, Abby isn't sure their comprehension was improving.

Abby Boruff  

I was still very data driven. Not sure my data had any meaning, but I was very data driven.

Natalie Wexler  

When the school system adopted the EL Education curriculum several years ago, at a time when Abby was about to start teaching second grade, she wasn't happy about it. Rather than covering a wide range of topics, while focusing primarily on comprehension skills, it would go deeply into just a few.

Abby Boruff  

When we first got told we were going to do EL, and in my brain, I heard "Well, Abby, you're now you're in second grade, you're gonna go teach three, you're gonna teach about three things this whole year, you're gonna teach about school, dinosaurs, and pollinators and that's it, nothing else". And I was like, "Oh, I can't believe I have to do this!"

Natalie Wexler  

But she began to notice that her students actually liked spending more time on a topic instead of jumping from one to another. In first grade, which is what Abby now teaches, two of the three modules are about birds. And Abby has a particular problem with that topic.

Abby Boruff  

I mean, I'm terrified of birds. So the irony is deafening. It's it's, it is. It is like the mockery of everything. Yeah. terrified of them. Um, so it's been a, it's been a long journey with me and there's these birds for half the year.

Natalie Wexler  

But Abby has found there's a lot that kids can learn about through birds, like the different habitats they live in. When they learn that birds use their beaks as tools to do things like crush nuts, they make the connection to the way people use tools, which is the topic of the first unit of the school year. And it turns out, the kids are fascinated by birds.

Abby Boruff  

When I'm writing down another lesson about birds I'm like, "Oh, but they do love these birds, man, they love these birds."

Natalie Wexler  

Abby also realized, as we heard at the beginning of this episode, that there's no reason to limit kids to books they can decode themselves. Her second graders had all learned about stalagmites and stalactites through read-alouds and discussion. So why should she let only the higher ability students read a book that used those words, while the book for the lower ability students only used the word "rocks"? 

And going deeply into books actually enabled kids to do the things that Abby had been trying to teach as abstract skills, like making inferences. The EL curriculum has second graders read a book called The Invisible Boy, as part of a module on schools and community. It's about a boy who feels ignored at school, but then makes a new friend. At first, the illustrations show the boy in black and white. But as his confidence increases, he's gradually portrayed with more colors.

Abby Boruff  

And so a lot of the theme in that book is the light and dark portions of the illustrations. And so I partnered that with a text about Syrian refugees that were leaving, and we had spent a couple of weeks doing some close reads of The Invisible Boy., and talking again, a lot about accessing school and what that looks like and, you know, barriers that people go through. And my kids within like three pages of this book were like "Oh, well, everything behind them is dark, and everything in front of them is light. So they're going towards things that are better and leaving behind things that are dark". I mean, within like three pages, my kids could get that. And there's no way that prior to doing that knowledge building, those inferences could have happened.

Natalie Wexler  

Let's move up to third grade and meet Deloris Fowler. She's now an instructional coach in Cookeville, a small city in Tennessee, helping other teachers implement the knowledge building curriculum her district adopted several years ago. But before that, she was a classroom teacher in the district. She spent 30 years teaching at the same elementary school, which served a mostly affluent population along with some children from lower income families. 

Natalie Wexler  

As a veteran teacher, Deloris had seen a lot of initiatives come and go. But there was at least one constant: reading comprehension was taught as a set of skills. In the early years of her career, teachers would decide which books to use to teach the skills. Later, the district adopted a reading textbook called a "basal reader", which came with its own texts at different levels for different reading groups. When she first started teaching, Deloris accepted the idea of leveled reading. At the time, she was teaching first grade.

Deloris Fowler  

You know, I was fresh out of college and I thought I'm doing what I've been told to do. This is the right thing to do., these are these people are experts. My college professors are experts. They know, they know what they're doing. I felt it was right. But as time went along, I just felt inside it was wrong. I mean, when my kids and my first graders are saying to me, "Am I always going to be in the low group?" you know, and I knew I was like, "Okay, this is not a good feeling. This is just not a good culture to have where kids feel like they're trapped in that."

Natalie Wexler  

About nine years ago, after Deloris had moved up to teaching third grade, an administrator asked her to help pilot a new kind of curriculum, one that focused on building knowledge. It was called Core Knowledge Language Arts or CKLA. Like Abby, Deloris was skeptical.

Deloris Fowler  

I think I went to one of the initial trainings and they started talking about these units in third grade like the Vikings and Ancient Rome, and just early explorers of the Americas. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, this is too much like... Third graders should not be learning about the Vikings. I mean, like, this is ridiculous, you know, this is too much, they'll never be able to do this, this text is too difficult for them. What about my students who have special needs, you know, that might be going to special education, or my lower readers?" Like, I just felt like it was ridiculous, the whole thing. That you would do like a read aloud portion, and then you would have like a skills or a writing portion, it was just so different than anything I had ever done.

Natalie Wexler  

And she didn't think her students would be interested in the topics:

Deloris Fowler  

At first, I was like, they're little, they're third graders, they're, you know, eight years old. They don't care about these things. You know, some of the science units I thought, yeah, I mean, they're, you know, astronomy, that kind of thing. I thought, yeah, but the history... the history, I mean, I just thought they won't, they won't ever be interested in that.

Natalie Wexler  

But she figured the new curriculum couldn't be worse than the basal reader. And she gave it her best shot, being careful not to communicate her lack of enthusiasm to the kids. Even if she wasn't particularly interested in a unit, she would read the texts as though they were the most interesting things in the world, she says, and often, she would find the kids were a lot more interested than she was. Still, the first two years didn't go well.

Deloris Fowler  

And I think part of the problem was, number one, I still did not believe in it. Number two, it was so different from anything my students had ever done before that it was kind of a shell shock for them, when they were having to sit for like 30 minutes for a read-aloud. They were, you know, inattentive, they were like, interrupting me all the time. And, but what happened was, I found they had a lot of questions. So that's why they were interrupting me. And I would stop and answer all of their questions. And then it would go too long. 

Natalie Wexler  

The other teachers in the pilot felt the same way. Deloris says they hadn't gotten much training in how to implement the curriculum. And no one had explained why it was set up so differently from what they were used to.

Deloris Fowler  

I wasn't given any direction on “why are we going this way?”, you know. Why, why are we doing this new knowledge-based thing? But so I continued the second year, but I was still grumbling and complaining about it thinking, "This is not working for my kids". And it really did not hit me, why we needed this change until I read "The Knowledge Gap". And when I read the knowledge– and I wish, and I've told now in the position that I'm in, I've told everyone, all teachers that are teaching this need to read the knowledge gap before even starting, because that is the "why".

Natalie Wexler  

I'd like to make it clear that I did not know Deloris was going to say this. The next year, Deloris had students in her class who had been identified as needing special education. 

Deloris Fowler  

So I thought okay, this is going to be the year where I really see if this, you know, this whole knowledge-based thing, if it's really you know, where it's at, and everything. So I had these two little girls in my classroom, and I'll just call them like Abby and Sarah. And the special ed teacher told me at the beginning of the year, in third grade, they were reading on about a kindergarten level. 

And she said they get no help at home. They were both in, you know, pretty bad situations, you know, outside of school. And so she was concerned, I was concerned like, are they going to be able to handle this, you know, this is way over their head. They haven't been exposed to any of this, like they had never, they didn't have any of the background knowledge like some of my students who, whose parents were college professors and had taken them to Europe and taken them places. These little girls didn't have that.

Natalie Wexler  

But Abby and Sarah seemed fascinated by the read-alouds. They would sit in the front row and ask lots of questions.

Deloris Fowler  

It seemed like they were even more invested than other students. And now looking back on it, I know it's because they probably had not been exposed to any of this before.

Natalie Wexler  

Later in the year, Deloris had what she calls an "Aha!" moment. In a unit about the Vikings, there was a story about a blacksmith who used an anvil. And Abby and Sarah had asked what an anvil was. Deloris showed them a picture.

Deloris Fowler  

Well a little bit later in the year, we're doing a unit about weather, about the clouds. I think it might be in the astronomy unit. And so pulling up pictures of different clouds and we're talking about how you can use clouds to determine the weather. And one of those little girls Abby said, "You know what, that cloud looks like an anvil!" And this was like two months later, and I wanted to cry like I wanted to just say "Everybody! I need to go in the hall for a moment and have a little cry", because she retained that, like she knew that and she knew how to apply it. And she knew what an anvil was, she could, you know, apply to a different situation that stuck with her. So I saw it exposed her to vocabulary she had never been exposed to before. And it worked.

Natalie Wexler  

By the end of the year, Abby and Sarah had grown from a kindergarten reading level to a second grade level.

Deloris Fowler  

And then I kept checking on them because they're very near and dear to my heart. So I kept checking on them in fourth grade, and their fourth grade teacher said they continued, they just continued to grow. 

Natalie Wexler  

The higher achieving students were also benefiting from the curriculum, Deloris says. All the kids love the units on historical topics. And some students were able to go more deeply into them.

Deloris Fowler  

And third grade, one of the favorite units is the Vikings, which as you remember, I told you, I was very skeptical about that unit to start with. But they loved it, and they wanted to know more about it, and so the high students are writing about it, they are checking out, you know, they go to the library and ask the librarian, the librarian had to order more books. She actually came to me and said, What are the topics you're teaching in CKLA, because I want to order more books, because the kids are asking for these books on these topics.

Natalie Wexler  

Now, as an instructional coach, Deloris works with teachers in high-poverty schools in the district, some of which mostly serve students who are still learning English. She's now helping teachers at those schools see the "why". 

And now that she's able to see the curriculum as a whole, she can explain to teachers how it builds knowledge in a logical sequence.

Deloris Fowler  

The reason we're doing Colonial America in third grade is because they're going to learn about the American Revolution in fourth grade. And so that's why they're doing this. And they're like, "Oh! Okay, I mean, I can see the overall, I can see the big picture".

Natalie Wexler  

And Deloris can see that the curriculum is working for the kids in those schools, just as it worked for her third graders.

Deloris Fowler  

In one of my schools, they finished the American Revolution unit in fourth grade. And as part of that unit, they have to write a multi-paragraph essay about the causes and effects of the American Revolution. When the teachers show me their essays, and they have them posted on the wall, and these are ELL students, are they perfect? No. But do they have great background information? I mean, can you tell that the children are comprehending what they're reading and that they know how to put it into words? And they understand cause and effect? Yes. So I was like, blown away. I mean, I actually took pictures of it because it was like, wow, so you're saying that this is a fourth grade student, ELL wrote this paragraph about the American Revolution.

Natalie Wexler  

Let's move on to middle school. Kyair Butts is a seventh grade English Language Arts teacher in the Baltimore public school system. Over his nine or ten years of teaching, he's taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade ELA as well. The schools he's taught in serve mostly low income African American families. Before the district adopted the Wit & Wisdom curriculum several years ago, Kyair said the approach to literacy was disjointed.

Kyair Butts  

We had a separate writing curriculum, we had a separate building vocabulary curriculum, we had a separate Foundational Reading Program. And we had a separate comprehension program. And from my experience, you know, professional development Wit & Wisdom, that is disconnected and it's not integrated, right? Just thenI named at least four or five separate areas that teachers had to manage. And if you can imagine then me being a first year teacher back in those days, we're talking the 13-14 school year, managing all of that was difficult, in addition to also teaching fourth and fifth grade.

Natalie Wexler  

Kyair would teach novels, but the emphasis was on comprehension skills and strategies.

Kyair Butts  

It was just sort of about how do we get through this book? And how do I make sure that students have basic comprehension strategies? We did a lot of annotating. I do recall that when MSDE came, Maryland- Maryland State Department of Education, and they did some training specifically at our school, the big focus was on annotating the text, annotating the text and metacognition, there was so much emphasis put on annotation, and metacognition, and I value that, but there wasn't a whole lot of emphasis on the vocabulary piece, on phonics for students who weren't quite there yet.

Natalie Wexler  

Still, when Kyair heard that the district would be adopting Wit & Wisdom, he was dubious. One reason was that like many teachers, he thought a more detailed curriculum would interfere with his autonomy. But his main concern was something else. 

Kyair Butts  

I was– I wasn't– I was certainly a little worried for sure that it was going to be just a little scripted. I was, because I thought, you know there were some really cool things that I was doing before in terms of lesson design.

Kyair Butts  

My initial reaction was, I, you know, I don't really think that this curriculum belongs in Baltimore City. Maybe Montgomery County, maybe more affluent county, but certainly not not Baltimore City,

Natalie Wexler  

Kyair felt that the curriculum would be too challenging for the students he taught.

Kyair Butts  

Because, you know, but I can't speak to anybody else's truth. But my truth was, is that I did have students in sixth grade, who, while they could read and while they could write they were performing at a kindergarten or first grade level. So when I looked at the materials, I thought to myself, these are grade level standards, right, there's a.. there's an expectation that students are being held to. And I was a little worried about that.

Natalie Wexler  

But that changed after he participated in some training provided by the curriculum publisher, and began trying the lessons in the classroom.

Kyair Butts  

The more that I sat through the PD, actively engaged and participated, and then gave it a fair shot. I thought to myself, "Wow, Kyair, shame on you. What does that say about you? That a high quality, standards-aligned, research and evidence-based curriculum doesn't belong at Baltimore City? What does that really say about you? Are you not capable of teaching it? And, or do you really think that your kids can rise to the occasion?" And that was a real gut punch for me, just thinking to myself, like, wow, you of all people so passionate about your kids, always like willing to fight if anybody says anything bad or badly about Baltimore City, what does it say about you and your mindset?

Natalie Wexler  

Kia says that Wit & Wisdom goes deeply into the content of the novels in the curriculum, rather than treating them as just a means to an end: comprehension skills. It also connects the books to broader topics. One sixth grade unit, for example, is on resilience in the Great Depression. It includes two novels set during that era, "Bud, Not Buddy", and "Out Of The Dust", which is about a teenage girl living in the Dust Bowl.

Kyair Butts  

Now, my initial inclination was, "What in the heck" – we'll use school appropriate terms here – "what the heck do black kids in Baltimore have in common with a 13 year old white girl from depression-era Oklahoma?" And it's my job as a teacher to sort of figure out, “How are my students going to connect?” you know, because in an era of CRT and culturally responsive this and pedagogy that you do want to make sure that there's a hook for your students. 

So I at least talk to my students about the themes of loss, the themes of triumph, the themes of grief, because those all come up in "Out Of The Dust". And I'm telling you, when students care about a character, and when they realize that Billy Joe lost her mom and her baby brother, Franklin, they are hooked. They want to keep reading "Out Of The Dust". And it's in that moment that you realize, yeah, black kids in Baltimore do have something in common. 

Kyair Butts  

I'm sorry, there's a fire drill for whatever reason. 

PA  

May I have your attention, please…

Kyair Butts  

Yeah, let's pause.

Natalie Wexler  

Kyair was at school when we recorded this interview. At this point, he moved into a storage closet to try to find a quiet spot with a new curriculum. Kyair says his students were more engaged and had more to say.

And like Deloris Fowler's third graders, Kyair’s students got so interested in the topics in the curriculum that they wanted to know more. After a seventh grade unit on language and power, one student told Kyair he typed that phrase into a website called News ELA and found some articles.

Kyair Butts  

When students acquire the knowledge, they also then acquire the confidence and the competence to participate in a lesson by raising their hands, contributing, encouraging other classmates, right. And you ultimately see that. Something I should trademark at this point, but I really do talk about how knowledge is a party. Everybody wants to get an invitation. Everybody wants to be seen and everybody wants to show up and sort of glam out. And in a classroom, when you see a knowledge party and students sort of buzzing in that white noise in the classroom of kids getting excited to talk. That's what a knowledge-building curriculum can do. Because he said I think I'm gonna read a couple of these when I get home because I'm just really interested in learning more about how language can be really powerful.

Natalie Wexler  

He's also noticed that students are using the vocabulary they've learned through the curriculum, not just in class, but in their conversations.

Kyair Butts  

Another teacher would come up to me and say Mr. K. and from and these are from students who might have an IEP, or, or have low reading ability, and the teacher came up to me and she said, Mr. K, did you know that Sanchez and Simone were talking about this commercial and how it was “persuasive” and “manipulative”? And again, those are vocabulary terms, and I hear I am thinking man, anytime you can you can get a seventh grader talking about something that is not Tiktok or Instagram or social media, I'm going to chalk that up as a win as a teacher.

Natalie Wexler  

And Kyair found that the curriculum didn't interfere with his ability to add his own touch to the lessons as he had feared.

Kyair Butts  

Yes, there are lessons that are written. But I was able to bring in, for example, a Great Depression rap that's on YouTube, that's about four, four and a half minutes long. It's really catchy. The kids look forward to it all the time. They always asked me to play it again.

Natalie Wexler  

In fact, he says, rather than interfering with his autonomy, having a defined curriculum relieved him of the burden of starting his lesson plans from scratch.

Kyair Butts  

The more that I planned, the more that I internalized the material, I actually thought to myself, Wow, this is actually really freeing. Before I had to make the map myself and plot the destinations. Now the destinations are already plotted for me, but I can still sort of create the map. So it was really nice to still have that sense of freedom, but have a really sound sort of guide for where I was going.

Natalie Wexler  

Abby, Deloris and Kyair also saw changes in student's writing after they switched to a knowledge building curriculum. That's what we'll be talking about in our next episode. I hope you'll join us. 

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters website linked in the show notes. This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about their work at knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search the knowledgematters hashtag and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with me personally, you can contact me through my website, nataliewexler.com