“These texts were just oozing information” | Know Better, Do Better

Have you ever read something and then realized you didn’t totally understand it? That’s the hallmark of a challenging text, and it’s something students encounter all the time.

In this episode, David and Meredith Liben discuss three ways to connect students with sophisticated texts, even if they can’t yet read or comprehend them on their own: juicy sentences, explain your answer, and structured journaling.

First, linguist and language scholar Lily Wong Fillmore shares the origin story of her “juicy sentences” strategy, where teachers divide content-rich sentences into “chunks” and help students build vocabulary and knowledge through focused instruction and discussion. 

The Libens then share personal examples of two other instructional techniques that foster reading comprehension and the metacognition that supports its growth: explaining the answer and structured journaling.

Explaining the answer is just that: asking students to answer a question and explain their response using evidence from the text. The magic lies in choosing questions based on a careful pre-read of the text at hand, not a learning standard. Students learn to identify what they do and don’t understand, and then practice returning to the text to re-read. 

Finally, the Libens discuss structured journaling, where a teacher chooses an important section of the text and students respond to four questions:  

• What are the most important ideas here? 
• What don't I understand? 
• How does this connect to what we've been discussing in class - or other texts that we've been reading? 
• Do you have any reflection (aka ‘I wonder’) questions? 

These techniques focus students on the text while also helping them expand their thinking about what they have read. For example, David recalls how a second-grade student wondered why the author of The Tale of Despereaux described certain settings as light and dark, which sparked a class wide discussion about symbolism. 

The discussion probes connections between these classroom techniques and cognitive science. Rachel Stack, a former teacher at the school the Libens started and now at Great Minds, shares a compelling story about how she worried her students would get tired of explaining their answers, but they never did.

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.

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

Lily Wong Fillmore
I just learned so much about instruction from the principals I worked with these incredible assistant principals who are in charge of instruction. From the teachers - going in and seeing, you know, how ideas could be turned into instructions. That was magical. Downright magical.

Meredith Liben
I am Meredith Liben.

David Liben
And after 75 years, I am still David Liben. Welcome to Episode 5 of the Knowledge Matters podcast. You just heard from Lily Wong Fillmore, a linguist and language expert who is known for her work on juicy sentences. 

Meredith Liben
Juicy sentences are an anytime anywhere approach that unpacks rich syntax at the sentence level, which is at the heart of reading comprehension. 

David Liben
In this episode, we are going to talk about more practical ideas for classroom instruction - which, as Lily just put it, can be downright magical. 

Meredith Liben
Lily worked for many years as a linguistics professor and language researcher at UC Berkeley. But when she retired from that career, she launched into another one. She happened to be a teacher’s aide and chose to work with multi-language learners in all settings - elementary through high school. That launched her into really thinking about how to help kids break down reading at the sentence level. The joyous approach she’s developed since then is known as the juicy sentence protocol. Here’s Lily: 

Lily Wong Fillmore
My work, you know, has always been focused primarily on language learning - the learning of second languages to be exact - in school settings. 

My work with the younger kids was to help them with reading and to keep them from getting trapped in the IEPs that went nowhere - that took them nowhere, really. My work with the older ones was to help them pass the high school exit exam so they could graduate. 

You know, and in working with those kids, I realized that although they had learned to decode reasonably well - you know, they could sound things out. They could read the words. They didn't always know how to pronounce the words, but they could, they could decipher. Okay? They just didn't know that it meant anything. And they - you know, frankly, I didn’t - I don't think they thought that it should mean anything. It was just the act of pronouncing the words was reading.

And so as I got into all of that and tried to help them figure out, you know, that there were pieces of meaning tucked together in, in all of this - these texts that they we - were reading. That these texts were just actually just oozing information. You know, so much stuff packed together in these texts, that um, you know, I began to think about it all. [laughs] How do you make all of this more meaningful to these kids?

Meredith Liben
When you bear down at the sentence level, and really give them this finite challenge of unpacking the sentence, not by learning the grammar, but by actually understanding the work - that, I think, is the magic you were bringing to the students. So can you talk a little more about that?

Lily Wong Fillmore 
Yeah, It was just one little element though. You know, this, this wasn't just the sentences. It was really about teaching richly integrated instruction, not just standalone texts. We're talking about content instruction that focuses on topics related to science and history and social studies and literature. And learning from juicy, grade level, appropriate, complex texts you know, was a prominent part. 

I think it was really, when I started working in the New York City schools, you know, in about 2007, that I actually had to think about what all of this complexity meant in literacy. But thinking about it with the school administrators made me really face what, in terms of instruction and in school - in formal instruction, one could do to support students in, you know, understanding, really comprehending what they were reading, what they were writing, and how to improve instruction around that. 

You know, these would be three week, month long units of instruction, you know, that were being created. And where the texts that teachers were reading were often, you know, often more complex than the kids could read themselves. I was just amazed at how even kindergarten kids - even kindergarten babies, you know, 6-year-olds - could manage and understand these incredibly complex tests that were being used in the classroom. 

So they weren't reading those texts, but by gosh, the teachers were guiding them to figure out what these pieces, chunks in the text were saying. And, and they worked out such incredible um devices for doing it. You know by color coding phrases, for example, tucked within these very long, complex texts. And asking the kids to think about this: Now, what could that mean? You know, who was doing this? What was happening? And when was it happening? And why did they get excited? And so on.

You know, there were all kinds of talks, you know, in these instructional experiences. There was pure talk, partner talk, teacher to group talk, and teacher to whole class talk. And in fact, the work in juicy sentences were always worked as whole class, so everyone, irrespective of where they were in learning to read and, and how they were doing in class, everyone participated in that. And that was the, the really powerful thing about this, this work.

So juicy sentences was a part of juicy teaching, you know, juicy content. Materials that engage kids in thinking about things that they might not otherwise ever have had any contact with. You know, this teaching could transport kids back in time, forward in time, you know, into environments that they had no way to experience directly. But through the magic of instruction, they could become familiarized, say, with rain forests, with um the tropics, with the Arctic, under the ocean, you know, where sea creatures lived. You know? That’s, that’s the magic of instruction. 

Meredith Liben
In essence, what we're talking about in this episode is: you need to figure out how to point student attention and point classroom time and discussion to the aspects of the text - those features and those interactions that are likely to present difficulty. If the text has been analyzed for you by the publisher, they may actually have written a paragraph describing the text that helps you with this. But nothing shortcuts the most practical thing of all you can do: read the text yourself, annotate it, underline it, make notes to yourself, plan for where you know students are going to get tripped up. And you're not going to do the work for them. You're going to point them squarely there. Their - the bow of their boat is going to hit those rough waves, and you're just going to help them steer through them. That's your work. 

David Liben
The other thing. If you're asking questions based on standards or comprehension strategies, and not on what are the elements of the text that are causing difficulty, you're also asking less questions based on knowledge of the world and based on knowledge of words.

This is the nail in the coffin for a approach to comprehension instruction that prioritizes standards or comprehension strategies. So for example, if you're gonna prioritize - because it's the focus strategy, or the focus standard of the day or the week - something to do with character. But the character is very well portrayed in the text. His motives are very clear. It's just not that difficult, yet, you're asking questions about character. So not only do those kinds of questions when they don't fit, not develop comprehension as an ability. But also, there's a limited number of questions that we can ask kids about what they read.

Meredith Liben
And limited amounts of time. 

David Liben 
Exactly. 

Meredith Liben
If the questions you're asking are external to a careful analysis of the text, you're gonna be wasting all your time on those. Getting skilled at those kinds of questions are not what makes kids better readers. It is actually making their way through the text itself, that will. And the truth is, those strategies and standards aren't - they're not based on nothing. They are the real things that, that readers do when they get stuck. So why not let the text be the driver of when standards are activated and when strategies um should get called forth? That's what we're talking about. Not neglecting them, but letting them take their proper place in service of comprehension. Instead of trying to structure comprehension as if it's some kind of exoskeleton. It's just not. It happens inside the brain. And it happens in relationship to students - to readers encountering text.

David Liben
So we have to think a little bit differently about the kinds of questions and tasks we address to the text.

Meredith Liben
Now the great reveal. We are going to give you the single most powerful technique that we have to offer in terms of building comprehension across a group of students. And that is very simple and simple to execute. It is explaining your answers. and the “your” there is, your students explain their thinking, when they answer a question, based on what they saw in the text that led them to believe that was the right answer.

David Liben 
And in doing that, they're gonna inevitably go through the features of the text. They're going to point to the sentences that inform their answer. They're going to point to connecting different propositions or ideas in the text. They're going to point to where they had to make the connection to relevant knowledge that they had. Or they're going to point to a place where they made a connection to relevant knowledge that they did not have but they figured out that relevant knowledge that they needed. In other words, the explanation models the thinking that the students did, and it uses the features of the text to explain that thinking. And by doing it out loud in a group, they're sharing it with everybody.

Meredith Liben
So let's look at the universe of possibilities here when a student is - has answered a question, and is explaining their answer in front of their peers. The student either got the question right, and it was a lucky guess, which will quickly become apparent when you ask them to explain their answer. Or they got the question right, and they had really good insights and really good evidence for why that was the right answer, and they will be able to explain and elaborate on that when they're talking out loud. Or, most valuable of all, perhaps, they actually got the question wrong. 

Now, if their thinking went astray, and they were brave enough, or unlucky enough to be the one answering, it probably went astray for other students - in a whole range of other ways, but connected to that student's error patterns. And in asking that child to go back into the text, and reveal how they come up with that answer, they themselves are going to see what they missed, and be able to correct - or you can help them, or other students can fill in and say, "Wait a minute, I didn't read that that - this way. This is what I thought there." And you create this discussion, that is open to everybody, because the text is the universal variable that they're all sharing. 

So explaining their answers does so much with just this one technique. It's a diagnostic for the teacher to see who gets it and who really is seeing the text for what - for what's there. And who isn't and needs some coaching or needs some modeling through the peer discussion. In a way that - going back to that boat metaphor - everybody is on the boat for the ride through the rough surfaces and rough waves to deepen their understanding. If you do nothing else, change your practice to have students explain their thinking when they’ve answered a question. 

David Liben 
Which you can do with any program you are using or if you are doing this on your own without a core ELA program. 

Meredith Liben 
With grade level rich and complex text. A passage or chunk of it that’s really worth this kind of close and careful attention because it’s important or there’s a lot going on there. 

Well, Rachel Stack will tell us in a minute, about being astonished that the kids at the Family Academy very matter of factly always explained their answers, knew they had to. And she kept wondering: When are these kids gonna get tired of explaining their answers, and demonstrating the textual evidence that led them to those answers.

David Liben 
Rachel, can you, can you talk about what we now refer to as explaining your answer - which at the family Academy we called proving your answer, which was really the same same thing - as, as a must do practice in close reading?

Rachel Stack
Yeah, it was like, I always feel like we were trying to build a muscle of the, you know, proving your answer. Both in the literature groups, right, when they would be full length text, and then we would read the - you know, like more knowledge building articles and passages. There were two parts, right. They had to first get in the text, right, and point to their specific reference. 

David Liben 
Yep.

Rachel Stack
And then they had to share, like, what they thought about it, right, connect it to the question. 

David Liben 
Exactly right.

Rachel Stack
You would think it would feel rote. Like I remember grappling with like, okay, they - I have to make them do this every time. So are they going to every time be like, “Ugh, we have to do this.” But they weren't. Like, they were just thinking about it. And the texts were rich. And the texts were interesting. And it, it always felt like the textual analysis, and the literature groups, those periods were never rushed. 

You know, you're a teacher, like, everything's always rushed, right? Like you're trying to get them to lunch, and you're getting to the assembly, and you're getting them to after school, and you're get - you're moving through your lesson plan. And you - it's all, like - timing, right, of course, is what you're always thinking about. But I remember feeling like, ever - since every answer had to be explained, every answer and to be proven, it’s like we just didn't, we didn't rush. Like at the expense of sometimes I didn't get through it all, right. But you spent time in the text, and they knew that was important. 

So I remember entering a lot of those, you know, moments being like eventually, they're just gonna be like, “Stop making me prove my answer. It's too mu -” But it just had this, like, feeling when we get into that practice, almost like, like we were in flow. Everybody just knew that that's how we were going to be with text.

David Liben
Rachel, do you remember any breakthroughs? Any spectacular breakthroughs from particular students?

Rachel Stack
When I began, you know, at Family Academy we had extended day, right, after school activities. And I co-taught that daily drama class. I'll never forget the first time I handed out scripts to middle school drama students. We were working on monologues, and they were in groups. And like, they kind of were like , “Can we write on these?” You know, like - different than a book, right, it was a handout. They went right to explaining their answers right when we started to talk about the different monologues. And basically all I had to do was provide like, the pens and the highlighters. 

And it felt like such a breakthrough because everything we worked on in the classroom, they weren't like, just steps for those kids to get through my ELA class. For those kids that was going to be a life practice. Like they were just out of the classroom, they were in drama, they were given a text, they were asked questions about it. And they just went right into the habits, right, they went right into close reading. And it was a natural state for them. And that was the goal, right? So for me, it felt like such a breakthrough because I watched it come out, like, of the walls of my classroom, and onto their experience on the stage.

David Liben
Another approach that we've used, really almost in every grade from second to graduate school, is something called structured journaling. In structured journaling, the responsibility for comprehending the text is put more on the student. Cus don't forget, when we ask a question, we're channeling the student in a certain direction. With structured journaling, that channel is much narrower. 

Works like this. For each section of the text, and the teacher would determine the section, the student responds to the following: What are the most important ideas here? What don't I understand - or don't I understand completely? How does this connect to what we've been discussing in class - or other texts that we've been reading? And finally, do you have any reflections or “I wonder” questions? 

Meredith Liben 
With structured journaling, the weight of figuring that stuff out is on the student. And for that reason, it is really demanding and tends to be something that um needs a lot of supportive modeling and group work. It forces this - the reader to do all the work of figuring out what's going on in terms of their own understanding themselves. 

But those four questions are really important paradigms for metacognition. So David, do you mind just revisiting them again? 

David Liben
Certainly. What don't I understand? What connections can be made here to what we've been discussing in class? Or what we've been learning or other texts that we've read? And finally, what reflections or “I wonder” questions do I have about this text?

Meredith Liben 
And David, David actually invented structured journaling when he was - when we were first teaching community college uh when we moved to Vermont, and we missed, we missed students. So we started teaching um - 

David Liben
The classes were three freaking hours long. [laughter] And, and it was once a week, and I knew if the kids didn't do the reading - which sometimes happens in college, as you might know - they would be really boring. 

So we eliminated - I eliminated all tests or anything like that. There was a final project that was a presentation. And they were graded each week on their structure journal. And it was really revealing about who understood what they were reading and who didn't. And I would say virtually all the students said they had never read like that at any point in their previous life. Structured journaling can be very powerful for any grade where you're actually reading the text on, on your own.

Meredith Liben 
I have to say our favorite of these is the “I wonder” questions, because that's when you get students just breaking through into brilliance. And we included um some examples of our favorites, and David's gonna read them to you actually now.

David Liben
While reading The Tale of Despereaux, a second grader wondered why the author, Kate DiCamillo, seemed to emphasize how dark everything was at certain parts of the text, but how light it was at others. This led to a lively whole class discussion on light symbolism in the book, and light symbolism in general. 

Meredith Liben
That's second grade talking about light and dark symbolism in the book, which I gotta say I've read The Tale of Despereaux and did not pick that up myself. 

David Liben
You should have done more structured journals, Meredith. [laughs] 

Meredith Liben
So a fifth grader after reading an excerpt from Insect by Lawrence Mound that explained the importance of insects to the environment, wondered if there were no insects on Earth with something else have replaced them and their functions?

David Liben 
Which is really freaking brilliant. 

Meredith Liben 
Yeah.

David Liben
Um. Following a read aloud of Marcus Spicer's Rainbow Fish, a first grader wondered how we can know when it's right to be proud. And when it's wrong to be proud. 

A fourth grader reflecting on the nature of change while reading about states of matter, wondered if there's anything in the world that doesn't change.

Meredith Liben
Which again, is an incredibly profound question. And would lead as, you can - might imagine, to pretty spirited classroom discussion. This is what we're talking about when we talk about an intellectually vibrant classroom that is intellectually rewarding.

David Liben 
And possibly one, one of my favorites. This was done with uh, I think, 11th graders. In a discussion, uh on a unit on the 1898 Spanish American War, said, you know - I can actually see her saying this - you know, I actually wonder if men were not allowed to vote then and women were allowed to vote if we would have had all these wars.

Meredith Liben 
That's a great “I wonder” question. 

David Liben 
I call that the mother of all “I wonder” questions. Well, maybe I should call that the father of all I want the questions. 

Meredith Liben 
No, I think “mother” is right. 

David Liben
Okay. [laughs]

Meredith Liben
So the question arises, how do the structure journal paradigms go back to  Kintsch, his model, the mental modeling of what comprehension is in the brain?

David Liben
That's a really good question. Meredith. Um, if you're reading The Tales of Despereaux in the second grade, and you're asking me a question about why the author constantly refers back to how light the room is in this excerpt and how dark it is here, you're clearly absorbing what's going on. And you're absorbing it, you're comprehending the text base, you're working at the surface level. And you also have some sense of a situation model that's evolved. You couldn't possibly have that kind of reflection, unless all of  Kintsch's elements of how comprehension is represented in the mind were not in place. 

Meredith Liben
So in other words, that kind of fulfills what students have developed as their own situation model of the text. The other three categories really tie-in to other aspects of the model. If you are tracing um what you think the most important parts of that section of text are in your structured journal, you're making decisions about what the author's purpose is, you're figuring out how characters are changing and shifting. You're figuring out what events in that section - if it's, if it's about erosion, or some other geologic feature - are most salient. So you actually are making decisions about what the author is trying to communicate at its heart.

In tracing what you don't understand, you are doing comprehension monitoring, which is a really powerful metacognitive strategy or skill - uh practice, really, it's, it's almost a practice to monitor your comprehension. You're noticing what you don't understand. And in the discussion in class, you'll hear about what your classmates did, and you will know next time, what there was in the text that you yourself missed. 

Making connections is the other element of structured journaling that has a clear line back to promoting and strengthening comprehension. In the Kintschian model that we talked about. Making connections is between parts of the text to each other, which is exactly what you do when you're, when you're tying propositions together and comprehending at the micro structure level of the text base. But making connections to other knowledge, bringing in what you already know or what you've already read, in other places -

David Liben
Relevant knowledge.

Meredith Liben
Relevant knowledge. Yes. For example, if the insect example that David read about the “I wonder” question, if that is part of a whole unit on insects, that student clearly has a lot of knowledge about the roles that insects play as pollinators, as cleaners of the environment, as spreaders of disease -

David Liben 
As mixing up soil, so it's easy to fertilize

Meredith Liben 
All kinds of functions. And that student is as - in displaying the “I wonder” question, that student is actively also only able to do that because of all the connections they've made to their learning about insects. So the structured journal is not only a great way to say, Oh, my students have achieved independence and look at the great discussions I'm now able to have. It is actually giving students responsibility for all the work of creating that mental model of comprehension in their brain, which is again, what we all want our students to be able to do. 

David Liben 
It doesn't mean that the other methods we've talked about, reading the text carefully to create questions that address the, the features of the text that make it difficult are not also valid. They're mutually reinforcing, reinforcing. 

Meredith Liben
The trick here is you need to achieve the conditions for comprehension success in real time in your classroom, by any means necessary. That could be the question based approach that really is the nature of close reading. It could be through structured journaling, or some composite or better way that you have in your classroom - in which case we really want to hear from you. And you've heard about how good this can feel, how intellectually satisfying it is from the various teachers that piped in during this episode. 

Next time in our final episode, we're going to talk more about how to achieve that high standard of coherence we talked about earlier, and how to create your own flow around the English Language Arts in your classroom.

Sean Morrissey 
The class has to revolve around books. I mean, that's the first thing when kids come in my classroom, you know, you can see like, the only thing you see is books. Because it's wall to wall books. 

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 #knowledgematters 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're sharing that as - you want me to print my own, given that I printed this one? [laughter]

David Liben
We’ll figure out a way to share. You passed in kindergarten. I was held over, so I didn't learn **** about sharing.