"The kids are not all right" | Know Better, Do Better

In today’s reading classrooms, too many kids are not alright. One of the biggest challenges is comprehension–or rather, its absence. Students don't understand what they read well enough to think deeply, connect what they are learning to the wider world, and prepare for the futures they want. 

On this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben break down reading comprehension: they explain what it is and how it works in the mind of the reader, based on cognitive science. They map this understanding to the classroom experience and share specific ways to support children to read and understand texts. Guests Margaret McKeown and Rachel Stack join the conversation and explain why centering the text is the cornerstone to comprehension.

McKeown, one of the originators of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 vocabulary, talks about why centering the text is more important than a series of comprehension strategies. Stack, a former teacher and co-creator of Wit & Wisdom, describes a critical moment in her classroom: seeing her students mine the text for understanding. This episode ends with an excerpt from a discussion the Libens had with a dozen school district leaders, hosted by Curriculum Matters. 

The research and artifacts mentioned in this episode are all posted on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. 

Key quote: “We want them in the text all the time, thinking about the text, and what they have to do to make sense of that text. That's really the heart of it.” (McKeown)

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

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

Transcript

Meredith Liben
As we're talking here late in the 2024 school year, the kids are not alright. There are lots of reasons why, lots going on with public schools, but the one we're freaked out about - and know you are too or you wouldn't be here - is that too many don't comprehend what they read well enough to have the futures they want.

David Liben
Welcome. My name is David Liben.

Meredith Liben
And I'm Meredith Liben. We're your hosts for the second season of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. This season, which is entitled Reading Comprehension, Know Better, Do Better, follows the campaign's highly successful first season hosted by Natalie Wexler, that introduced a new way of thinking about reading comprehension. 

David Liben
There are times we think we've made more mistakes than most people in education. Actually, what it is, is, we've admitted the mistakes we made. And that's extremely rare in any field, including ours.

Meredith Liben
Maybe what we are good at is admitting when we're wrong, and then going to look for the best available answers and trying to spread the word.

David Liben
Which is a lot like know better, do better. 

We’re learners. We’re Learners by nature, and we believe most teachers are. Curiosity about how the mind learns to read, and then what's going on in the mind when the reader is understanding - that's the focus of our new book, Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension. How the mind actually comprehends text.

Meredith Liben
We know you know that teaching strategies and then making them fit whatever book is in front of the kids is just an awful thing to do to kids into reading. Yet too many of your materials, too much teacher-ed coursework, and too much of the top down pressures that mandate what we have to do in classrooms is causing this and it needs to change.

David Liben
No kid goes home and talks to their parents about: main idea, key details, or standard three, the interaction standard. But they might go home and talk to their parents about things like, the speed of light is actually a speed limit in the universe. Or that the insect world is in fact full of zombies. These are the kinds of things that kids go home and talk to their parents about. 

Meredith Liben
And that kind of curiosity and access to why you actually read in the first place - to learn about yourself or the world is the point of reading. And we need that to be centered and that kind of common sense approach to come back to classrooms. And the research on how the brain learns to read demands that too. So we're glad you're on this journey with us when we know better, we do better. So let's learn to do better for the kids and for the state of reading in America together.

David Liben
So in today's episode, we're going to be looking at comprehension: what it is, how it works in the mind, and how we can all do better in designing classroom experience that supports children in learning to read deeply and with understanding. 

Meredith Liben
If we understand what it is and what's going on in the mind of a successful comprehender, then what we do to help develop it all will make more sense to you.

David Liben
Most of the attention in the last few years has gone into first, phonics - structured phonics - and that attention was sorely needed. And recently, to knowledge - and that attention was sorely needed. But there is more to reading.

Meredith Liben
One of the other things that's gotten completely neglected is what's going on in text that students have to pay attention to and notice in order to comprehend each particular text. We are going to argue for that strenuously. It is really different than what we're doing now. And it means that the text itself has to stay centered when we think about classroom instruction to help students be successful comprehenders.

David Liben 
We spoke with Margaret McKeown, one of the originators of tier one, tier two and tier three [vocabulary], used by hundreds of thousands of teachers. And we talked to her about why centering the text is more important than a series of comprehension strategies. In general, she's been a huge influence on our approach to teaching reading.

The question is, why not focus instruction on comprehension strategies and the stuff that make up reading standards?
 
Margaret Mckeown
Well, the short answer to that is strategies don't represent how we read. You know, it's often said that, “Well, good readers are strategic.” And that's true. But that's different from kind of following strategies. An accomplished reader doesn't go into a text thinking, okay, what - uh, I've got to find the main idea, what inferences am I going to make? What predictions am I going to make? They just go into the text, attend to the text, and look for what's important, put those ideas together as they, as they move along, and come up with a representation.

So that's not what strategies are structured to do. Focusing on strategies really tends to take the reader's attention away from the text, because it's more thinking about, okay, how do I, how do I construct a main idea or a summary? Okay, it's got to be who, what, why, where? No. We don't want them doing that. We want them in the text all the time, thinking about the text, and what they have to do to make sense of that text. That's really the heart of it.

Meredith Liben
How do we get comprehension instruction, right? We need to know what's going on inside readers’ minds when comprehension is successful. And we have to understand the ingredients of rich text too.

So what we're talking about here is a theory developed by Walter Kinch, who was a cognitive psychologist who developed this theory in the mid 1980s, which is the theory of comprehension. And that's the name of his most well known book. He's considered the father of comprehension. 

David Liben
The basic model for comprehension that we're going to describe that grew out of Walter Kinch’s work has not been challenged since, since that time in roughly the mid 1980s. There's been expansions and somewhat different ways of looking at it but the basic model that we're going to describe still stands.

Meredith Liben
Fasten your seatbelts because this is the wonkiest part of this entire podcast series. We're talking about how text is represented in the mind. And it exists at three levels. We'll say this a few times, because it's important, these things we're talking about all are in play simultaneously. 

The first level is called the surface level. It is literally the surface of words on - against whatever background on the text. So screen, print, whatever the medium, the surface level is what's printed on that surface, with its punctuation, etc. David will go into this in more detail. The second level is the text base level, and it splits into two parts: the macro structure and the microstructure. The third and culminating part - but again, these are all simultaneous - is called the situation model. It is what happens when the whole is successfully integrated.

David Liben
So we can think of the first level, the surface level, as foundational skills. The ability of students to recognize words automatically and to string those words together with fluency. So that they can read out loud and they pronounce the words correctly, you hear them and you know what they're saying. That's the surface level. You can just think of it as foundational skills. 

The second level is called the text base. And that's, that's considerably different. There's two parts to the text base, the macro structure of the text and the micro structure of the text. The macro structure of the text is what we're - most of us are pretty familiar with as text structure. Is it a narrative text with characters plot outcome, etc? Or is it an informational text that can have a structure of problem solution? Or a goal-action-outcome? Or a chronological structure? It can also have a mix of all those structures. 

Meredith Liben
And there's lots more. These are just examples, not the universe.

David Liben
A good way to think about it is a textbook. A textbook has a variety of structures. It can switch from chronological to problem-solution to even narrative. That's one of the things that makes textbooks difficult often for kids to read. So that's the macro structure. I's part one of the text base. 

Part two of the text base is the microstructure. And the microstructure is the ideas in the text, what cognitive scientists call propositions. You could think of the micro structure of the text base as the network of propositions, or the network of ideas in a text and how those ideas are connected to each other. A good way to understand propositions and ideas in a text also is that a sentence can have only one idea, or one proposition, such as: Jose went into the store period. One idea, one proposition.

Meredith Liben
But you can take that same idea, and create much more complexity: Jose took himself to the corner store, but he ran into his ex-girlfriend, and bolted out of a store, period. That's a complex sentence. We all know complex sentences and how much trouble they give to kids. And that has lots of ideas in it. 

David Liben
Ideas are propositions. Jose went into the store - that would be one. Jose ran into his ex-girlfriend - that's a second. A third is he changed his plans in some way, because of the second proposition. 

Meredith Liben
So those ideas that you may have communicated to students for a long time - I know I have - that a sentence is a single idea that starts with a capital and ends with some kind of end punctuation - I communicated that to kids for many years. We have to throw that out the window, because sentences can be complex and contain lots of ideas, as David just illustrated.

David Liben
And we think of stories as not being dense with information. But that's not true. There was a lot of information in that one sentence. A student reading that one sentence how to integrate all that information into his long term or short term memory, in this case, in order to understand what was happening.

Meredith Liben 
And you as a mature reader are gathering that information in and don't need us to parse it this carefully. But think about a kid, a young reader, encountering that text in print, having to fire up all the processes of decoding it with automaticity, reading it fluently, and then parsing all those separate ideas.

David Liben 
Here's the third, which Meredith referred to, the situation model. The situation model is unique in so many ways. It's the final and enduring understanding that you have of a text that you've read. What that means is, you take the text base and based on your knowledge, or based on your experience, you add to that understanding or you enrich that understanding without invalidating the text base. That's very important.

The example we use in the book of - of an informational text on hibernation. What hibernation is. How hibernation helps an animal survive through the winter or through a cold spell. How metabolism slows down during hibernation. And also the risks of hibernation because you're more exposed to predators. That's some of the propositions in the text base. 

But a, a student or a reader who has, for example, read a great deal about bears or has been very interested in bears, or who ran into a grizzly when they were camping - as I once did - they might have a little bit of a different sense of hibernation that would enrich their understanding of the text base. Not invalidate the text base, but enrich it.  Even in students who - a younger student who was going on a walk with his grandfather and came across a turtle that was hibernating in the mud that accidentally got exposed, they'll have a richer sense of a text on hibernation. If you connect it to your relevant knowledge, then you enrich the text without invalidating the text base. 

Meredith Liben
This can run awry and I think as teachers we've been perhaps overly welcoming of kids who bring wacky ideas into a - into the text base understanding and would build an erroneous situation model. 

So we're going to stick with this hibernation example. If some student volunteers that his- that his uh grandmother takes long naps and snores in the afternoons. And he says, “That's like hibernating.” It's not like hibernating, it's somebody taking a nap. So the - [sighs] this is a little tricky, because you don't want to - you're not - now, I'm not talking about being mean or shutting a kid down. But you do - the - that idea that the knowledge has to be relevant to the text and has to not invalidate the text is really important, because we've gotten away from that. And that's part of centering a text - is does the text really, really connect to a grandmother taking a short nap? It probably doesn't in this case.

David Liben
We talked to Rachel Stack, who was a teacher who worked with us at the Family Academy, a school that we started in Harlem. Rachel's insights were extremely illuminating, because she talked about how kids had internalized what we've been teaching in our reading classes.

Meredith Liben
At the time of this next story, Rachel was a brand new teacher. She was actually observing David doing a reading group. This was a close reading of Maniac McGee, one of David's favorite books. So Rachel hilariously reminded us of where David was: in an old janitor's closet that had been repurposed as an art and music supply closet. Here's Rachel.

Rachel Stack
And you started that - like everyone packed in, they were ready to go and you - you - the beginning of the book starts with, ‘They say Maniac McGee was born in a dump.’ And you just looked at the kids and said, “Who are they?” And all the kids are pouring over their texts, right? They're trying to - they're close reading, they're trying to find the text evidence. And finally you said, “You're not going to find it. There's no text evidence that defines ‘They.’ You have to know it.”

And so you then went into a series of questions about, like, how people in the community would gossip or talk or, like, the grannies at the picnic, or the folks at the corner store with like, create a wild idea that people would believe. So you went, like, right into their lived experience. 

But so my takeaway then, before I knew any of this research - and you know, this was a while ago, I knew nothing yet [laughs], about research. My takeaway from watching that first literature group was: wow, those kids, like, they know how to mine the text. They're like in the book. Like they poured over those pages, they were underlining. But like, you also helped them really like understand that, like, there was so much in the text, they had to start there. But they also had to, like, connect to what they know. And so they had to be in the text and build their knowledge, but then also, like, connect on the knowledge that they had already built.

David Liben
Here's what's remarkable about reading - there are so many things that are remarkable about reading. But all these levels of representation in the mind that have been studied by cognitive scientists roughly since the early 1980s, they're in play simultaneously, beginning with either the first sentence of the text or the title of the text.

So surface level, foundational skills, word recognition, fluency, that's happening as you read that first sentence. Connecting the propositions in that first sentence that are part of the microstructure, that's happening as you read the first sentence. You might have some sense as you start reading, even in that first sentence, or in the title, um what the structure of this is. If the title of the text is All About Ants, you probably have a good sense that this is a descriptive structure all about ants. And then you go into that first sentence, and you start parsing the propositions or the ideas in that first sentence. Both of those are happening simultaneously. 


David Liben
Even the situation model is happening. If you don't like ants, that's going to affect your reading of the first sentence. If you recently stepped on an ant, because - or found one crawling up your arm, that might. On the other hand, if you've been reading informational texts in the past about insects, and you're fascinated by insects, uh then that's going to affect your situation model. So just -  

Meredith Liben 
But - but David, don't forget that the, the, the source of information - that article all about ants can build a robust situation model even for a kid who doesn't have direct experience with ants. We believe in text. We’ve worked on reading for a long time. So yes, experiences can enrich or sometimes distort, as I said before, the - your situation model. But you can build a robust situation model without any, any prior knowledge. It just does change and enlarge it if you do have that prior knowledge. But I don't want to downplay the ability of text itself to teach us and for us to learn and, and develop all these ideas.

David Liben
Are you saying I'm not a text-based kind of guy?

Meredith Liben
Well you're starting to sound like you're not.

David Liben 
That's - that’s just - that's like saying I don't like mothers and apple pie! [laughter] I'm definitely a text based kind of guy! But Meredith's point is, is well taken. It's a - it's a subtle - it's subtle. Because there used to be - and I think Meredith alluded to this also - there used to be this text-to-self thing, where kids who didn't understand anything about the text base would start talking about some totally irrelevant knowledge from their life. Um. And then the next student would start talking about it. And it would be who can - who can top who on the most relevant knowledge connected to the text.

Meredith Liben
Or not. 

David Liben
So it has be that relevant knowledge. But that's a good point. But I am a text-based kind of guy. I believe in mothers and apple pie.

Meredith Liben
[laughs] And I want to make one other point here. For kids who are pre decoders - and I'm talking your own two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and then preschoolers right on up, including newcomers or kids who are multilingual learners who may not have their ability to decode and read with fluency intact yet. They access the surface level through oral comprehension. So their oral comprehension is a rich and robust source of developing situation models too. But we don't - we don't want to set aside - we don't want to pretend this is something that only starts to happen after a kid can decode. It happens way before, when kids get read to. Here's a great example of situation model combining with um prior reading.

David Liben
And combining with a text base. Everything working simultaneously. In this case, it's telling a story aloud - but that's text. 

Last night, we were at a friend's house. And Meredith first told a story of how a brick smashed a finger when she was helping her father um carry bricks down a staircase. Um I told the story of how my leg was broken and the bone broke through the skin when I was coming down from climbing Mount Rainier as the car rolled off the cliff. And we're relating the story to a four-year-old -

Meredith Liben
Who was pretty into blood and guts, as you might imagine, or these might not have been the stories of choice.

David Liben
I don't know. I think, I think he was into knowledge, really. And then, attention turns away from, from the child. And he comes back with an anatomy book that had been read to him - or he had looked at the pictures! Um. 

Meredith Liben
He's had it for two years, and this kid was only four and a half. 

David Liben
And he points to the - points to the pictures of where a bone is split. And he says - he doesn't put it in the interrogative, he did not ask a question. He says, “This is what happened to you, David.” Um, it was really fascinating on a number of levels. But one thing, his - this kid's knowledge, uh, absorption of the text base, um and development of a situation model actually exceeded his expressive language. Not his receptive language, but his expressive language. So he had to, like, really work in, literally, almost in between each word. But it was very clear that he went to the book, he found the page, he showed a picture of exactly what happened to my, to my bone. 

And that's an example of the text base - in this case, the telling of the story. The uh - well, the surface level doesn't come in here, because it's a spoken text, but he understood the words. And the situation model, he was interested in it enough. He had some background, and he was able to make it a richer, more enduring understanding because of that. 

And it's also important to say, a child who does not have the experience, or who does not have the background, who does not have the emotional connection, that does not mean that they can't absorb the propositions that make up the micro text base, that they can't comprehend the text, and that they can't succeed, for example, in answering questions about that text. 

Meredith Liben
So I think you're - it's true that external knowledge and experience fold into situation models and enrich them. But I also - I want to hold on to this idea that just the reading you do in school, between the walls of your classroom, between the four corners of the book, if you can really process at all these levels simultaneously, you're going to learn a lot and you're going to become a good and successful comprehender.

We're going to end this episode with a great discussion we had this summer hosted by Curriculum Matters. We joined a few dozen school district leaders to talk about our book, Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension. We appreciated the insights they had. 

David Liben
Brent Conway, an Assistant Superintendent asked us a super important question about, how do we get these ideas into the classrooms in an effective and efficient way?

Brent Conway 
And you know, I guess my question is, some of this is really hard, complex work for teachers to do, right. Um. So most of the folks in the room here today are leaders, instructional leaders, curriculum leaders. What are some other things that leaders could do to help teams of teachers and schools? To do this at a school level, rather than teacher by teacher level. So that they're - they have this understanding of how to teach comprehension without it being strategies driven first. That strategy is a part of it, but it's not strategies driven. It's text driven.

David Liben
That's a really, really good question. Um. A couple of things. In our school, we always found it effective to use the time, the time uh teachers were together to look at texts. And so one, one possibility here is, regardless of the program that's being used, to take a text and say, Look - read that text carefully, and then have the teachers: Where are the parts of this text that are going to throw kids because they're difficult? For whatever reason, whether it's vocabulary, whether it's syntax, whether it's a lack of coherence. But what are some parts of this text that could throw kids? And then have the teachers actually ans - You know, ask a question about it, and what would be a good answer, and explain their answer. 

Meredith Liben
I think the best thing you all can do - and it's hard, because we know the pressure is on you, maybe at a state level, or - wider district level, is give teachers permission to do more with less. And whether that's a collective where you control that and say, We're not going to do these because teachers and students don't respond as well to these units or these texts. We're going to - we're going to strip them out of the curriculum and slow things down so that this good work can happen. So we're not rushing through discussions, shutting kids up before they have a chance to process these ideas and learn from one another, because that's what - these curriculums are packed, right. If they have a fault, it's because - it's that they're overly stuffed.

And so I'd say, at a systems level, doing more with less would be the power move. Um. But to do that, you have to believe what we're saying about the fact that this is how reading comprehension actually improves, and it isn't racing through 15 or 18 iterations of main idea and then bingo, whatever main idea question they get on the state test, will - they'll get, right for sure. Well, we've seen that doesn't work. You gotta take these jewels of curriculums you’ve been handed and linger a little bit, you know? And if people don't finish the lesson in a day, they have to feel okay about that. If they had a great discussion that was, that was a good outcome. So that's, that's the hard truth of it. You're not going to - you're not going to do well with kids unless they themselves can linger and slow down and be the intellectuals that we want them to be. 

David Liben
So basically, if you boil the simplest message we're doing is: take a look at the text, read it carefully. And where are the por - parts that are going to throw the kids? Answer some questions about that. Have the kids explain the answer. Have an intellectual discourse on that. That is time that will go into making better reading. And then, as Meredith said, give yourself the freedom of time, so that you can - you can do that. The, the high quality texts are not far away from that. They're not drowning in standards, and they're asking questions about knowledge and they're asking questions - about vocabulary.

Meredith Liben 
And they’re focused on the text.

David Liben
We're asking to go - we're asking basically two things: go a further step. And also it would be good if we as a nation started to understand the science of comprehension itself. And I understand that that's not, that's not going to happen right away. Nothing happens right away in our - [laughs] nothing good happens right away in our world. But that's, that's another thing which I think is worthwhile. That teachers finally understand what cognitive scientists came up with all the way back in the mid 1980s, the models of comprehension and how they - how they work to understand the text.

That's it for this episode. 

Meredith Liben
Thank you so much for listening. I know - at least we hope - we've given you a lot to think about. Next time, you'll hear from a few teachers on the ways vocabulary instruction has boosted their students’ reading comprehension, and most important perhaps, boosted their self confidence.

Erin Hanrahan
And they'll do these research projects at the end. And sometimes kids will pick up on one term that was like a vocabulary term, like bail. Last year, I had a student say, “Well, I don't really get that because you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And so what is this idea?” And that turned into his whole research project. And we were looking at how, you know, New York State is thinking about doing away with bail. And he talked to someone from the National bail project. And I think it was really cool to see how deep he dove into that, basically, vocabulary word.

Meredith Liben
For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters website, linked to 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/X, Instagram and Facebook. Search the knowledge matters hashtag and join this important conversation.

David Liben
If you'd like to get in touch with us, personally, you can contact us through our website at readingdoneright.org.

[Outtake]

Meredith Liben
This will probably not make the cut into the podcast but it's fun to dump on them. 

David Liben
Why not?

Meredith Liben
Well, I don't -

David Liben
Why - why won't this make the cut? I didn't curse deliberately because of that.

Meredith Liben
[laughs] Oh man.