“The tail is wagging the dog” | Know Better, Do Better

When’s the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought, “Hmmm, what was the main idea?” Competent readers don’t ask themselves this question. They’re too busy focusing on the text itself, not the component strategies that help us understand them. 

But that’s not how traditional curriculum and instructional practices work. Instead, they teach reading through a strategy-first approach that focuses on skills like making inferences and predictions, not the text itself.

In this episode, David and Meredith Liben explore what Meredith calls “the tail wagging the dog” in reading comprehension, including examples from personal experience, insights from research, and stories of how they learned to do things differently. The Libens also highlight the costs of a strategy-first approach: missed opportunities for students to engage deeply with the ideas and implications of a text, and activity prompts that ask kids to check their brains at the door as they complete inauthentic exercises. 

Two guests join the conversation:

• Literacy expert Margaret McKeown discusses how strategy-focused instruction  is still all too common in classrooms. It’s tangible–and is doomed to fail.
• Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrissey shares his firsthand experience piloting two ELA curriculums - one that centers on novels and read-alouds, and one that uses book excerpts on a common theme and tests on target strategies. The differences are stark. 

Finally, the conversation turns to a habit of mind the Libens will discuss later in the season: the standards of coherence. This is a habit of mind where a reader expects they will understand a text, and if it doesn’t make sense, they go back and do the mental work needed to make meaning from what they are reading.

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.

Key quote: “I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn't say, ‘Hey, kids, today we're gonna learn to do a summary.’ What I would do is: in a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, ‘Very nice, you gave us a good summary of that, and move on.” (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

David Liben
I have to tell you a story. New York City has 36 school districts. Um, the school that I ran was in one of those districts, and they had a monthly meeting, which the district usually tried to coincide as much as possible with rush hour. So I'm on the bus for a long time. 

And I'm next to this little girl who's looking at a sign. And she asks, “What's that word after ‘No.’?” And the mother says, “Spitting.” And the child goes, “Ooh.” Then she goes back to the text. And she says,”You mean some people need to be told that?” And the mother patiently explains, “Yes, there are some people who need to be told that.”

And she says, “Who put that sign on the bus?” And the mother explains, “Not the bus driver, but people who make the rules for the city.” And once again, she goes back to the text, and she's clearly thinking, and she says, “I don't think that's going to work. If there's people who need to be told not to spit on the bus, they need to put a policeman on the bus.” 

But let's think about that for a minute. That child in those brief three minutes or so focused on a text, asked a question, visualized because after she heard where the word was spitting, she went, “ooh.” Made an inference to her - a relevant inference to her knowledge. She knew that people in her family did not spit on buses. And then she synthesized all that information and made a conclusion: they need to put a policeman on the bus. 

How often do we have to teach those strategies if that, in fact, is what a thinking human being does at the age of three or four - because this child was not in school, school hadn't started. I know, I was principal. She looked at the text. She asked questions. She visualized, she made inferences. She synthesized. She drew a conclusion.

I’m David Liben.

Meredith Liben
And I’m Meredith Liben. Welcome to Episode 3 of the Knowledge Matters podcast.

So these processes that David witnessed on his long bus ride downtown, from our school to the district office, are part of what humans do naturally to make sense of the world - why on earth do we spend so much classroom time teaching them as discrete skills to our students? We've done it - and “we” here really does mean us too. We spent a lot of years teaching comprehension strategies because we didn't understand the nature of comprehension and how our brain integrates and interprets what it sees.

David Liben 
I was the head of the Vermont Reading Institute, which was completely devoted to comprehension strategies. Know better, do better.

Meredith Liben 
That’s right. So we are not blaming any classroom practitioner for this. We think there's some policy issues that bring to bear on this that are maybe bigger than all of us. We want you to understand it so you can know better and do better in your classrooms.

And another little story here. We were hired at one point by a big district that um had been underfunded for a long time and had a rush of new leadership. And they asked us to do an audit of the curriculum, the materials that had been - been in place for probably 14 years at that point. 

So we looked at them. And they used the same series from kindergarten through 12th grade. So yay for coherence, and loyalty to a publisher. But they taught reading comprehension strategies from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade, over and over and over again in this mind numbing sequence.

David Liben
This was McGraw Hill. In the 13th year of this program, they were teaching high school students in the 12th grade: what an inference is. It was painstaking. 

Meredith Liben
Yeah, my analogy for this is if you want to be good at archery, you take that - you want to hit the bullseye, you take your arrow in your hand and and you run up to the target and you stab the center of the target over and over again think that that's what gonna make you a good marksman.

Let's take a few minutes to hear from Moddy McKoewn and our conversation with her, where we talk about the damage that can be done when instruction is strategies forward, and the text takes a backseat to an isolated list of strategies that um are on a pacing chart, let's say, or in the, in the unit that have to be covered. 

David Liben
Why has the use of strategies come to dominate the field? [inaudible] 

Margaret McKeown 
Ha, ha, ha. Um, I think for a couple of reasons. One is what strategies replace - mean strategies really were in advance. I mean, they did replace something that was even less good, which tended to be either reading a text straight through silently. And then the teacher would ask a bunch of questions at the end, um which were - lots of them were literal, they were more assessment based. Or, or sometimes there were some reading programs that actually broke the text up, and had the kids read in silent reading units. But still, it's silent reading. And then we talk about - we ask you about what you read. And basically, it was, you know, kind of quizzing the kids, uh, you know, who was the character? What did they do? So it really wasn't an assist for comprehension. 

And comprehension, really, by the time you get to the end of a text, either you've comprehended it or not. We can't build comprehension then. I mean, we can take you back into the text and, you know, work with some things you might have missed or whatever, but you've already done it. So because strategies work with text as it was being read, that was a real advantage, that was really good. 

And why have uh - has it stuck around? I think, because there's something tangible to do. You know, let's teach you a routine uh for making a summary. Let's teach you what you need to do to make a prediction. And that's something that's - you know, a teacher and kids can grasp onto. And so it makes comprehension somehow seem less, you know, fuzzy and complex, which it is. So we're, you know, we're sort of avoiding what comprehension really is, in order to adopt strategies. 

And it's, it kind of reminds me of, there's this old joke about, there's a guy who's searching for his lost watch under a lamppost. And a friend comes by and he - the guy tells him what he's doing. He said, “Oh, did you lose your watch here?” He says, “No, I lost it over there, but the light’s better here.” So that’s not gonna get you anywhere. But the light’s better. It, it's kind of - makes sense. It's easier to do. 

David Liben 
I won't dig - I don't dig the charter schools like I will publishers, but in a well regarded, well known charter school that I was helping, I walk into kindergarten. It was a read aloud. They, they were going through the book and every page, the teacher stopped and asked them, “Can you make a prediction? Can you make an inference? 

Margaret McKeown
Ah!

David Liben
They had not - I figured that would get you -

Margaret McKeown 
Oh god. 

David Liben
They had not finished the book when they were asked to do that. 

Margaret McKeown 
Yeah, yeah. That's the thing. Prediction is like a disease. I mean, yeah, first of all, they just asked for predictions willy nilly. So it teaches kids to just kind of say anything, “Oh, that guy might die. Oh, the, the - you know, that tree might blow up.” 

Um. Plus, there was a wonderful article - oh, maybe 15 years ago, that Art Grazer or did with somebody showing that you know, good - good readers, mature readers don't do a lot of predicting. Because that wastes resources. You know, there aren't really that many places in a text, where it's like, “Ooh, I know where she's going with this.” And you don't do that unless, unless stuff is stacked up, and it's pretty clear where the author is going to take you next. Otherwise you do not - you just don't predict. 

Meredith Liben 
Yeah. Equally horrible is we've seen situations, seen materials, where kids are asked to make predictions when they have read the entire text two or three times. It's like you check your brain - you're asking kids to check their brains at the door - 

Margaret McKeown 
Yeah. Yeah. 

Meredith Liben
And do this wooden, wooden exercise. So if that's what you think reading is, you sure as hell aren't going to like to read!

Margaret McKeown
Yeah, yeah. And then something I read this morning, I think it was on Twitter, said something about, you know, strategies and kind of overdoing strategies like that - the good readers are just gonna ignore it. You know, they’re gonna, they're gonna be put through that, but they're gonna ignore it because they know how to read. The struggling readers are going to kind of believe that this is what they should do, and then they'll never get there.

David Liben 
What would you say is the appropriate - is the appropriate role of reading strategies - or standards or skills um in - instruction? 

Meredith Liben
In instruction. 

David Liben
At all. 

Margaret McKeown 
Okay, well, this will be a very short answer. None. I just wouldn't - I wouldn't - [laughter] I wouldn’t teach strategies. None. Zero, zip. I just wouldn't. Um, I think - and now, again, some of those words are important. I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn't say, “Hey, kids, today we're gonna learn to do a summary.” 

What I would do is that, in a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, “Very nice, you gave us a good summary of that,” and move on. Or, “Wow, you made an in - you had to make an inference, because the author didn't tell us, you know, X and, and Y, so we had to put together ourselves. That's called an inference.” I'd use it as vocabulary. Um. But I would never teach strategies.

David Liben
I was observing a 10th grade class reading Oedipus. And there was a scene where the chorus states that it takes a lifetime to determine if a man is a good man. But if a man is evil, you can determine in a moment. And I thought that was really interesting. I looked at it and I started pondering it. Uh, I looked out at the class and there were a few kids who actually um, also stopped and were clearly pondering that. The teacher did not stop, the class did not stop because that did not have anything to do with this standard of the week. And that's one of the great losses. When you don't make text at the center, you can lose gems like that on a regular basis.

Meredith Liben 
And reading, of course, loses meaning for a student whose interest is, is piqued by something like that. They want to stop and think about it for a while. And they can't, because the instructional goals, the material has driven the teacher on, away from it.

David Liben
This is the essence of comprehension instruction, also, in balanced literacy. And balanced literacy, as a rule - whether it was from Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study or districts that were making their own version - the teacher would read aloud from a grade level complex text or above. And very often they were, they were excellent texts. For example, in one lesson - this is actually in Lucy's book - they're reading the biography of a well known artist.

And the idea was to get to character. And the students then go back to their individual books, and they find something having to do with character. But there's two prob - there’s a number of problems with that. One, their books might not be nearly as sophisticated, and an example as the one that was read from what's called the mentor text. Two, that portion of the text that they're reading, character might not be very important that day. Yet, they're supposed to look for character. 

Three, a strong reader ignores that. They read to absorb what the text offers. A weak reader is going to hop on that, like, like a life jacket. And they’ll say, “Okay, all I have to do even with this simple text is look for character.” By teaching that way, you are absolutely teaching the wrong way. We don't read that way. We don't go home and read The New Yorker or The Atlantic, and say, “This week, I'm going to focus on character. This week, I'm gonna focus on sequence. And I am psyched out of my mind, because next week we do theme.” 

That is not the way we read. But that the - that is the way it has been taught for many, many years. And what it boils down to, is we are teaching in terms of comprehension, the exact wrong way. This is key to why an approach that emphasizes a standards first approach or a strategy first approach is so unhelpful. 

Meredith Liben 
And doomed to failure. With all these stories, we do not blame teachers. Remember, we were the ones who taught this way, or who led the Vermont strategic reading initiative, etc. 

And I do think it's really important that there's a bigger picture here. With teacher accountability, and the assessment movement, all of these things started with good intentions to help students learn more and be better readers. But they have had this downward pressure of making - of creating incredible anxiety around the items on the test that students are going to have to master. 

And we have - the tail is wagging the dog here in all this instruction in ways that are dangerous and damaging for kids. Because it's not mastery of standards that makes students competent readers, it's actually learning how to navigate um, all the things that texts can do, which is why we keep talking about centering text and the unique features of each text. 

David Liben
And in that way, you can use the strategies or you can use the standards when they fit, as opposed to fitting the text to the standard or the comprehension strategy.

Meredith Liben
Oof, we've been throwing a lot of tough stuff at you in this, in this particular episode. And I know if, if you're like we were for years after we learned some of these things weren't great, it doesn't feel so good. We want to leave you with more hopeful ground, we are getting to solutions. Um. But we have - we have a thought experiment for you, um in the meantime, to get - to get back into the nature of reading and what it takes the brain to do, to read well. 

David Liben 
Einstein wasn't the only one who does - did thought experiments. So, you know, it worked out well for him. Let's do, let's do one here. 

You've been working diligently over the course of years, asking questions based on comprehension strategies or standards. In some cases, actually teaching those standards, outside of the context of the text, even. And in many other cases, crafting questions to align with the standards. 

Comes the day of the test, students still un - unable to comprehend the text that they're asked to read with enough facility to pass the reading test, despite this work with standards over the course of all these years. Why is that the case? What happened? And what can be done about it?

Meredith Liben
So we've been talking a lot about what not to do. What do we do?

David Liben
We start by looking at those things that underlie - those concepts that underlie comprehension. And that is, of course, foundational skills. If you don't have those as a basis, you can't, you can't comprehend. But there's also developing breadth of vocabulary, meaning the number of words in your long term memory, and depth of vocabulary, how much you know about words. 

And then growing students’ knowledge of the world, from extensive reading. Especially a volume of reading on a series of topics, which helps grow knowledge, and helps grow tier two vocabulary. Reading is not the only way to grow knowledge of the world. But as Marilyn Adams said, long ago, it's by far the most efficient. 

And then, there's also the idea that students develop an expectation that what they read will make sense. And not only that what they read will make sense, but they will work to do it when they don’t - when it doesn't make sense? And actually, cognitive psychologists have a whole theory for this called....

Meredith Liben
Standard of coherence. [laughs] 

David Liben
Thank you, Meredith. We work well together, don't we? Standard - standard of coherence: the belief that you will understand everything that the text has to offer, and that when you don't, you will work to achieve it.

Meredith Liben
There's a huge irony in what we're just talking about now. The “you will work to do something about it when it doesn't make sense” - that, “what you do” is a reading comprehension strategy. You re-read, you question, you monitor for understanding, so that you notice when you don't understand. Those are the reading comprehension strategies that do make sense, as long as they're called up for the sake of comprehension. 

David Liben
Which is really interesting. Comprehension monitoring is a strategy, and in the right context is useful. It's not the same as standard of coherence. Standard of coherence is not a strategy. It's a habit of mind. It's the habit of mind that you enter into a text, expecting to understand everything, and will do all the work necessary to do that. That's the difference between standard of coherence and comprehension strategy.

Meredith Liben
Absolutely. And you're even annoyed when you don't understand, and that's why you want to go back and repair understanding. 

We're going to talk more about standard of coherence versus comprehension monitoring later in the season. Right now we want you to hear from middle school teacher Sean Morrissey. You heard from him last episode on vocabulary.

David Liben
When his school was piloting some of the new ELA programs, we had a - quite a lively discussion about what works, what doesn't, and why when it comes to curriculum. 

Sean Morrisey 
So, right now, um we're in the process of reviewing and piloting um p-programs and in the future, about a year from now, um adopting. So I think we had uh enough educators that had a good kind of lay of the land of the different types of programs out there. So, the teachers in my district, I think, knew the difference between, like some of the knowledge building programs and sort of the bloated basals. So it's not by luck, that teachers kind of knew. 

But, I think, with districts I think sometimes adoption is sort of by luck, based on who's on that team. Um. You know, you could have - you never know you could have one administrator that's making the decision that, you know, may or may not know the differences between like a Bookworms and Into Reading. Which um we heard the sales - kind of the sales pitches like one after the other. And I said, it was the biggest juxtaposition I've ever, I've ever seen. Um. 

Just, you know, when you, when you hear like the Bookworms presenter talking about the research, why during shared reading there's um a lot of choral reading, a lot of repeated reading, a lot of eyes on the page. Why that sentence composing is in - with interactive real - read alouds. And they're taking sentences right from the books that they're using. Versus, like, you can - and I honestly probably saw like 150 different slides from Into Reading where: well, you can do this. It - this has this, this has this. And it was just like, overwhelming. 

And, you know, both presenters talked about authentic text. But if you didn't - like that's the thing, if you didn't know, well, in Bookworms, the authentic texts revolves around novels. You know, you're talking about 8, 10 novels and fifth grade, at minimum. I think there's probably - it's probably more, it's probably like 15 - that all the students read together, or you hear during read alouds. 

And Into Reading, like the - their authentic texts are excerpts. I kind of chuckled, like one of the um workbooks was passed around for fifth grade, I opened it up for Into Reading and the page was Airborne. So I know the book well, um but it was 15 pages of his book in the student consumable. I don't know how you define authentic. To me, that's not really authentic. But, you know, there's - it's a stark difference.

David Liben
It's very stark. And the texts in Into Reading aren't incoherent. It - cus they're not topics, they're themes. So the topic of sportsmanship. So you read one text on soccer, one text on baseball, and one text on track. And you don't get a chance to build up the knowledge um in - coherently. Um. And you don't get to build - a chance to build up the academic vocabulary because you're not going to have that knowledge that supports the development of academic vocabulary. 

And then they do this thing which is really nasty, they - there’re huge lists of words for foundational skills - Um, I just looked at this today. So they're doing the O-I diphthong. And they've got things - words like joist and hoist. Well - and this was third grade. There's a lot of kids who don't know what a joist is or what hoist means -

Meredith Liben 
Including you, including you. 

David Liben 
Um. Yeah, I didn't know what a joist was until just the other day because we're taking apart our bathroom.

Sean Morrisey
I think one of the, one of the like stark differences when you think about like knowledge building like say, a Bookworms versus like the Into Reading that I, that I've seen and - and this is the challenge if teachers and administration don't have the background knowledge and the differences there. 

Um. So with Into Reading, they talked about um the tests that go along with it. So they have like weekly tests that focus on standards, like, find the main idea. And when the kids take it on the computer, like all of that data, like over time, it'll show if the kids like, ooh, doing really well and find the main idea or not. And what's really hard with that is, for those that don't know that that's a, that's a pretty terrible idea, it sounds great. Oh, then we could like practice find the main idea with a different type of text - which, you know, there's been so much written about it, it's just sort of a waste of time. That we should just be building, building knowledge, and if we're asking kids to find the main idea, it's a knowledge building unit in the text that you're, you know, that you're working on.

Meredith Liben
No argument here, cus that is - that is, that is the tail wagging the dog, for sure. 

David Liben
That's all folks, but stay tuned for more to come. 

Meredith Liben
Next time, we'll talk about practical ideas you can use in your classroom, like the power of read aloud in improving reading comprehension for your early elementary students.

Desiree Garcia
There's no forcing anything. The kids are coming with so many ideas from these beautiful rich read alouds that we're giving them. That they truly are sitting on the rug, and they are having a conversation with each other. And they're figuring out the answers by themselves. 

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 knowledge matters campaign.org and follow them on Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook. Search #knowledgemattershashtag 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 
We get into how we've been teaching reading comprehension all wrong. And it is a doozy.

David Liben 
How do you spell doozy?

Meredith Liben 
D-O-O-Z-Y. Or, I-E? E-Y Why? I don't know. 

David Liben 
Who says doozy anymore? I mean, you can if you did a Word Frequency check you would get like a [beep] more than you get doozy.

Meredith Liben
And that's the difference between you and me. [laughter]