“Now they had something to write about” | Reading Comprehension Revisited

In the last episode of "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited", you heard from three teachers – Abby, Deloris, and Kyair – who talked about their experiences using some of the knowledge-building literacy curricula that have recently been developed. In Episode 4, you’ll hear from them again, and you’ll meet Cassidy Burns, a 3rd grade teacher from Louisiana. They describe how these newer curricula incorporate writing instruction, and how that differs from the standard approach.

In the standard approach to literacy, writing is often kept separate from reading, just as both of those things are kept separate from building students' knowledge of the world. When it's time for writing, students generally drop whatever they've been learning about, and try to respond to a disconnected writing prompt about, for example, a personal experience, or a topic in a separate writing curriculum with its own content. But the evidence indicates that students learn best when reading and writing are connected to each other. And both should be connected to a curriculum that is rich in content.

Writing instruction can be a game changer at all grade levels. It can help  identify the misunderstandings or gaps in background knowledge that are preventing students from doing grade level work and also make it easier for students to learn and retain new information. As Abby, Deloris, Kyair, and Cassidy will tell you, it is not only possible to teach writing this way, it’s preferable – for students and for teachers.  In this episode you’ll hear how knowledge-building has changed their approach to teaching writing, and the difference it made in their classrooms.

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  

People are like, "Well, when do you guys do writing?". I'm like, "We do writing when we're learning about content". And that, that I feel like is very hard for people to grasp, and I think it was for me too. Prior to knowledge building, that was hard.

Natalie Wexler  

Welcome to Episode Four of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. I'm Natalie Wexler. That was Abby Boruff, a first grade teacher in Des Moines. 

In our last episode, we heard from three teachers, including Abby, who talked about their experiences using one of the knowledge-building literacy curricula that have recently been developed. In this episode, we'll hear from them again, along with one other teacher. This time, they'll be talking about how these newer curricula approach writing instruction, and how that differs from the standard approach. 

I have to confess I feel conflicted about devoting a separate episode to writing instruction. That's because one of the problems with the standard approach to literacy is that it tries to separate writing from reading, just as it tries to separate both of those things from building students' knowledge of the world. 

With the standard approach, when it's time for writing, students generally drop whatever they've been learning about, and try to respond to a writing prompt that has nothing to do with it. They might write about a personal experience they've had like a trip to an amusement park, or a topic in a separate writing curriculum with its own content. But the evidence indicates that students learn best when reading and writing are connected to each other. And that both should be connected to a curriculum that is rich in content. 

Here's Kyair Butts, the seventh grade English Language Arts teacher in Baltimore, we heard from in the last episode, talking about how he used to teach writing with a separate curriculum.

Kyair Butts  

I would be teaching "Tuck Everlasting" or "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon", and we would go through and compare and contrast, or character development, and we would spend so much time looking at figurative language within that book, but when it was time for the writing block, we would end up reading about an earthquake in San Francisco so that we could do is this sort of exploded moment, if you will, right. So we would literally change texts, put the "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" book away, and we would switch to something else.

Natalie Wexler  

An "exploded moment" means that students tried to go into great detail about a small moment, writing about what it looked like, sounded like and felt like. That can be hard to do if you don't actually have much information about the moment. 

Having kids write about random topics is also a wasted opportunity to build kids' knowledge of the topics we actually want them to learn about: the topics in the core curriculum. Studies have found that when students write about what they're learning in any subject, and at any grade level, it increases their ability to understand and remember the material. And Kyair says that just having to switch from one topic to another made it harder for his students to write.

Kyair Butts  

For some students, getting out of one car to get into another car when you're ultimately going to the same destination can be a bit much, right? So having the same vehicle and in this metaphor, text is incredibly helpful for a lot of students to just stay in that text and learn skills in that text.

Natalie Wexler  

Several years ago, Baltimore switched to a new literacy curriculum, "Wit & Wisdom". Like other knowledge building curricula, it asks students to write about the books and topics they've actually been studying. For example, in Wit & Wisdom, the first unit in sixth grade is on "Resilience and the Great Depression". It includes a novel called "Bud, Not Buddy", about a 10 year old boy in the 1930s, who is searching for the father he's never met. 

The first real writing task is to write one paragraph about what made Bud a survivor. A few years ago, when Kyair taught that unit to sixth graders, he had a student named McKinley. At the beginning of the year, McKinley’s mother had warned Kyair that she struggled with writing. She had a mild case of cerebral palsy, and sometimes she had to dictate her writing assignments and have her mother write them for her. So when McKinley handed in that first assignment about Bud, Kyair's expectations were low.

Kyair Butts  

And I've told the story before but McKinley wrote three pages – and I will note, college-ruled – and she just had so much to say about what made Bud a survivor. And as I was reading, it wasn't just rambling to ramble, so I can write for three pages and brag to my classmates. It was a cogent piece of writing that demonstrated that she knew How to write a topic sentence, that she knew how to pull evidence from various chapters of the text. And she could put it all together to tell me what made Bud a survivor. And I was impressed.

Natalie Wexler  

One reason McKinley was able to write that essay is that she knew a lot about the book. So she had a lot to say. But another is that the curriculum explicitly covers the mechanics of writing, things like how to create a topic sentence, how to come up with details that relate to it, and how to write a concluding sentence. Like most teachers, Kyair didn't get much training on how to teach kids to write. But he says the curriculum provided the guidance he needed.

Kyair Butts  

But there are also explicit examples of how to teach, embedded in the curriculum. So like, I'm not making materials or sort of frazzled about what I'm going to do that day. It tells me how I'm gonna work on a topic statement. And it also refers to a particular chapter that I can go back and reread with students so that they feel safe practicing the topic statement.

Natalie Wexler  

When Abby Boruff looks back on how she used to teach before switching to a knowledge building curriculum called EL Education, the thing she feels worst about is writing. She used to teach kindergarten.

Abby Boruff  

Now that I also am in first grade, and I've taught first grade, I think back to some of the stuff kids that I– skills that I sent kids with to first grade and I'm like, "Oh my god, they were nowhere near ready". Like I didn't, I didn't do enough for them then.

Natalie Wexler  

The writing programs that she used put more emphasis on just getting kids to write than on teaching them how to do it. One was called "Six Plus One Traits of Writing".

Abby Boruff  

So you know, just oh, conventions or that little teeny tiny piece and let him write, let him go write all the things just go send them out, go have him do all this writing. But actually, how to write, how to form sentences, how to put ideas to paper, no, not at all.

Natalie Wexler  

Then her school switched to a writing curriculum that is sometimes called "Units of Study", and sometimes called "Writer's Workshop". Often, it's just called" Lucy Calkins", after its lead creator.

Abby Boruff  

Prior to using EL we, I was using Lucy Calkins. So it was really about volume, not at all about quality, or even, even coherence. Making of sense. Like it was just I feel like it was like, "Oh, God, they have 9000 pages of unintelligible writing, you're amazing!", Um, and I never felt good about that.

Natalie Wexler  

Now, her students are writing about topics in the curriculum. And Abby feels that's actually where most of what she considers comprehension work gets done. That's when she'll typically work with small groups of kids, rather than the whole class,

Abby Boruff  

Getting that idea back out, you know, what was it, what was the story all about?

Natalie Wexler  

For example, when students learn about birds in first grade – which, as you may remember, they do for about half the year – they read a book about "Pale Male", a red tailed hawk, who built a nest near Central Park in New York City. As part of the unit, students write a paragraph arguing either that the nest should be left up, or that it should be taken down. 

Abby believes that students should also have opportunities to write about their personal experiences, or whatever they feel like writing about. She just doesn't think that should be the focus of her instruction.

Abby Boruff  

Of course I let kids write. But my instruction is happening in content and topics that I know about, so that I can help them write. And so if I have a student that's going to go write about going to Grandma's house, I didn't go to her grandma's house. I don't know what she did at Grandma's house. I can't help her with that. But I do know what we talked about in science. And so when it comes to that writing time, I can help her with that, because I was there and I know what we're doing there and I can help her with that, you know, actual writing piece.

Natalie Wexler  

Still, Abby feels that writing is one aspect of her teaching that could be improved. She believes her students would benefit from more explicit instruction in basic things, like how to construct sentences.

Abby Boruff  

Well even until last year, content writing was still the one thing that I really felt like I was not doing my best and that was still something that I personally struggled in. I felt frustration in it sometimes. So I actually went back, I've done, I did a lot of the webinars from “The Writing Revolution” during the pandemic, and I had all this great information from that, and all these things. I just haven’t done anything with it in three years, mostly because, you know, the recovery of COVID, for our kids. That was just not my focus was, to be honest, you know.

Natalie Wexler  

But this year, she feels kids have bounced back. And she's had a chance to try out some of what she's learned.

Abby Boruff  

And using some of that was that again, back to that sentence level instruction. How are we going to form these things? How are we going to get that idea out? How does that look in your writing? I'm not just saying "go add more". How are you going to add more? How are you going to tell me more? And that has been very helpful.

Natalie Wexler  

This is probably the time to mention that in addition to being the author of a book called "The Knowledge Gap". I'm also the co-author of a book called “The Writing Revolution”. That's also the name of a nonprofit organization that provides training for teachers and how to adapt “The Writing Revolution” method to whatever curriculum they're using. Those are the webinars Abby was referring to.

Deloris Fowler, who we also heard from last time, was an elementary school teacher in Putnam County, Tennessee for 30 years. Before her district adopted her curriculum called Core Knowledge, Language Arts, or CKLA, the writing assignments she used were pretty random.

Deloris Fowler  

Honestly, like the writing that we did was like, "my favorite vacation", and "if I were a penguin, I would 'blank'." Or if we were reading the story about basketball, it'd be maybe like, "My favorite basketball player is... ". You know, that kind of writing. And so it wasn't deep. It was just, and it really wasn't equitable, either.

Natalie Wexler  

The school where Deloris taught mostly served children from more affluent families. But there were some kids whose families didn't have much money.

Deloris Fowler  

If you're writing about my favorite vacation, and you have a child that's never left Putnam County, Tennessee, then they don't really have a lot to write about, if they've never been on a vacation. It's not equitable. But if the whole class knows if they've just done a unit on astronomy, and they all know about it, then they can all write about it.

Natalie Wexler  

After Deloris' school district adopted CKLA, her third graders began writing about the content in the curriculum. When they were learning about the Vikings, for example, they might get a prompt like, "How did living by the sea influence the Viking people's lives?" Or they might be asked to compare and contrast the Viking civilization with the ancient Roman civilization, which they had studied in a previous unit. And Deloris saw a change in their writing.

Deloris Fowler  

It blew me away. Like previously, like I said before, it was just like a two or three sentence little blurb or you know, maybe a paragraph. But then when we switched to knowledge based, the writing got much deeper, much more complex, you know, you can see the writing skills really coming out in the students because they had something to write about.

Natalie Wexler  

But there were still inequities. Deloris' higher achieving students were now more enthusiastic about writing. But others seem to feel apprehensive. 

Deloris Fowler  

I don't know, I think there's this fear of writing for children, and for some adults, honestly. I mean, like, they're afraid they're going to do it wrong, or something, or they don't know how to do it. They don't know the steps to do it. And so they just don't know how to even start.

Natalie Wexler  

There's a good reason for that. Writing is hard. It's much harder than reading. But we basically expect kids to just pick it up. Many of them never do. 

On national tests in writing, only about a quarter of 8th and 12th graders score proficient or above. For some students, it's enough to just give them access to rich content, as knowledge building curricula do, and ask them to write a paragraph or an essay drawing on what they've learned. But for most kids, that's not enough. To become good writers, they also need explicit instruction in how to write.

Deloris Fowler  

So I feel like all students need a plan for writing. Like you can't just give them a topic, throw it out there and expect them to write a cohesive paragraph, you know, without any guidance. If you give them the plan, it takes - that way, they're able to use the knowledge that they've built with this curriculum and put it into that plan, you know, some type of graphic organizer or something like that.

Natalie Wexler  

Deloris is now an instructional coach in her district, and two of the schools she works with serve a low income population that includes many students still learning English. Teachers there see that their students have ideas about what they've read, but struggle to express those ideas in writing.

Deloris Fowler  

So they feel like their kids have something to say, they just developmentally can't organize it. They can't get it out.

Natalie Wexler  

Cassidy Burns teaches third grade in Monroe, Louisiana. The school where she works is both racially and economically diverse. Her experience with teaching writing has been similar in many ways to the other teachers you've heard from. She got little training in how to teach it.

Cassidy Burns  

So it was just really like a hodgepodge. And so then you get out into the real world and you're like, "Okay, how am I going to teach these eight year olds how to write and respond to essays, especially to prepare them for a state test?"

Natalie Wexler  

The various writing programs she used over the years weren't much help. Then several years ago, Cassidy's district adopted a literacy curriculum called "Guidebooks" created by the state of Louisiana. It's a content-rich, knowledge-building approach that is now used in most schools in the state. 

As with other knowledge-building curricula, the writing activities are integrated into the curriculum. So kids are writing about topics they've learned about. Cassidy did see some improvement in children's writing.

Cassidy Burns  

There were some changes then. The problem that we still had, though, was– so, the "Guidebooks", you know, have these great writing prompts now that were aligned to what the children were reading. However, there was still the issue of how do we teach them to write? How do we teach them to respond to these prompts now? And then that's where TWR finally came in, for us.

Natalie Wexler  

TWR stands for “The Writing Revolution”. The Monroe school district started experimenting with the method in 2016, and eventually got intensive training and coaching from “The Writing Revolution” organization. Then a team of educators from the district worked to adapt “The Writing Revolution” strategies to the “Guidebooks” content. And now those strategies are embedded into the published curriculum from third grade through middle school. Cassidy was part of that team. One thing they did, she says, was to make the writing prompts in the curriculum more accessible.

Cassidy Burns  

Yes, like in the Guidebook, for example, they would give, you know a writing prompt for the students to write about the central message of the story. And I'm talking on like lesson three. So I'm talking your third lesson of third grade, eight year olds, and they're expected to write a full essay about the central message of a story. Well, they're, they're not ready for that at that time. So you know, they, we were able to look at areas of the Guidebook like that, and instead of having them write a full essay on their third day of third grade, when they're eight years old, you know, we would take that out, and we backed up to a sentence level activity because we have to make sure that they can construct and write beautiful complete, moving into complex sentences before we can expect them to write paragraph responses to a writing prompt.

Natalie Wexler  

One thing that sentence level instruction can do is help students understand the complex syntax of written language. If you've learned how to use something like a subordinating conjunction in your own writing, a word like "although" or "despite", which doesn't show up much in conversation, you're a lot more likely to understand it when you see it in a book. And that helps with reading comprehension. 

But in Cassidy's third grade classroom, kids aren't just doing sentence level activities. They're also learning how to construct single paragraph outlines called SPOs, and how to use them to write coherent paragraphs. 

There are still different levels of ability as there are in any classroom. Some kids might do a sentence level activity, while others are constructing an outline for a paragraph. Cassidy's team put those options for different students into the guidebooks curriculum too. But crucially, all students are writing and learning about the same content.

Cassidy Burns  

So same content, just different level activities there, to scaffold and, you know, differentiate for the different levels of, you know, learning and achievement levels of your students

Natalie Wexler  

At Cassidy's school, this kind of writing instruction isn't limited to English Language Arts. Teachers are also using it in science, social studies and math, and she thinks it's increased students' comprehension and learning in all those subjects. She also thinks this kind of writing instruction will help students on their study reading tests, which ask for written responses. When I spoke with her, her students were about to take those tests.

Cassidy Burns  

You know, I put a writing prompt up on the board this morning, a couple of stories that they've never read before they got to read the couple of stories and then I was like, "Okay, y'all just just show me. I just want to say that you know how to read these passages, read this prompt, and show me what you're going to do with that blank sheet of paper sitting on your desk". And they they know what to do and they feel good about– they they sit they know, "Okay, we're going to read this prompt, figure out which sentence is telling us what to write about." They go straight to that blank paper, topic sentence 1234 concluding sentence, and then they get started writing their topic sentence.

Natalie Wexler  

Cassidy says teaching writing explicitly, beginning at the sentence level, has given her students more confidence as writers.

Cassidy Burns  

Because when you're throwing something like that – to write a full essay at the beginning of third grade, when they're not even confident and writing a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate – they feel defeated. Like, they can't do that. But when you're showing them you know, just bit by bit, step by step, you know, first we're writing these beautiful, complete sentences. Then we're moving on into using our conjunctions and our subordinating conjunctions. Now, this is getting you ready to write these SPS and to write and craft these beautiful single paragraphs. It just builds their confidence as writers and it's just a beautiful thing to get to watch in your classroom. With these babies, you know, I teach eight, nine year olds, so to see kids just feel like they can do it? Like I said, it's just a game changer. That's the word I always use, because that's really what it's been for us in our classrooms.

Natalie Wexler  

Writing instruction can be a game changer, even at higher grade levels. Sentence level activities, if they're carefully constructed, can identify the misunderstandings or gaps in background knowledge that are preventing students from doing grade level work. 

Writing can also help new information stick even if kids don't have much background knowledge about the topic. You may remember hearing in Episode Two, that knowledge is like "mental Velcro": it sticks best to other related knowledge. But if a student is missing the other half of the Velcro, writing about a topic can help make up for that. In the process of writing, they're deepening their knowledge and making it stickier. But students need some knowledge in order to write about a topic in the first place. It's hard to read about a topic you don't have background knowledge for, but it's virtually impossible to write about it. That's why it's crucial to start with a content rich knowledge building curriculum. 

If the curriculum is jumping from one topic to another, because the focus is on teaching comprehension skills, students probably won't acquire enough information about any one topic to enable them to write coherently about it. 

Natalie Wexler  

But what if you're a teacher whose school doesn't use a knowledge building curriculum? There's still a lot you can do to build your students’ knowledge. 

You can choose a series of topics and find books on those topics to read aloud, or you can find books to supplement whatever content is covered superficially, in the curriculum you're using, or in your state's social studies and science standards. You'll need to make sure the text in the books you read aloud are complex, that they have rich content, and that you spend at least two or three weeks on each topic. You can also find other books on those topics for students to read on their own. And you may be surprised at what level they can read at once you've built their knowledge of a topic through read-alouds and discussion. And you can have students write about those topics further deepening their knowledge. 

But that's an enormous amount of work. Besides, there's a limit to what any individual teacher can do to build students’ knowledge.  That's because knowledge-building is a gradual, cumulative process that extends across grade levels. And no individual teacher can control what happens at other grade levels. 

So to really make progress somebody at a higher level – a district leader – will need to step in. 

In our next episode, we'll speak with two administrators who helped lead their districts through the shift to teaching reading in a new way, using a knowledge-building curriculum. 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