“It was like fireworks, right?!” | Know Better, Do Better

Explorers boldly venture into unfamiliar worlds, where confidence, curiosity, knowledge, and persistence are rewarded. When students approach texts like explorers, they bring these same qualities to the task—a mindset cognitive scientists call the “standard of coherence.” Such reading is purposeful, engaging, and expands the reader’s horizons. Reading anywhere, anytime is not just doable. It’s joyful.

In this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben discuss the key ingredients that power persistent reading and support students to apply the “standard of coherence” mindset when they read, including how the standard of coherence and related practices helped students accelerate their literacy development at the Libens’ NYC school.

The notion of “coherence” sets a high bar for a reader’s expectations of their abilities and the text. They expect that it will make sense, and if it doesn’t, they will know what to do. With this mindset, students immediately apply practiced strategies to comprehend a text: closely read and reread, account for and explain what they know and don’t know, and use evidence from the text to back up those assertions and ideas. Expert Margaret McKeown talks about the key role comprehension monitoring plays in the process.

The Libens then talk with three teachers who have experienced new curriculum and helped students develop the standard of coherence in their classrooms:

• Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrisey, who discusses strategies to preview texts and build fluency (spoiler alert: spend time with books, not screens)
• Patty Collins, a teaching veteran, compares her work as a watercolor painter to how she creatively engages students within the EL Education reading curriculum (which she calls “my medium”)
• Third-grade teacher Staci McDougall, who discusses how she and her students have grown, by changing classroom practice and building stamina and comprehension

David and Meredith also talk about the importance of building stamina to engage with texts. By giving students time to read closely and persist through comprehension strategies, like providing textual evidence, they can become strong and steady readers who can keep focused on complexities over time.

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

David Liben
I'm David Liben. If you’re not recognize me by now, you're probably in the wrong podcast.

Meredith Liben
And I'm still Meredith Liben. And this is the final episode of season two of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, based on our book Know better, Do Better Comprehension and the important ideas from that book. In this episode, we're going to continue the practical learning and ideas that we started last time and hear from educators who have made these changes and are doing things this way about how it feels to change practice, and what they see in their kids as a result.

David Liben
We became these National Literacy guru types, in part, because our school, we got the lowest reading scores in the city of New York. We pulled those scores up in a variety of ways, starting with foundational skills, and thanks to Marilyn Adams’s brilliant book, Beginning to Read. But also adding: everybody reads complex text, and everybody does close reading. And we grow knowledge. And because we were growing knowledge, we were growing vocabulary. And because we were growing vocabulary, we were growing knowledge. 

But there was something else. In those days, the New York state test was untimed. And therefore, kids took as much time as they needed. Well, when our kids answered questions, they were in the habit of proving their answer and explaining their answer. So on the day of the test for every single question, they - to themselves - explained or proved their answer. And when the school downstairs from us came upstairs to collect the test to bring it to the district office, not one single kid in our school, not one, had finished the assessment.

Meredith Liben
And 100% of the kids in their school had.

David Liben
They finished them a while ago because they collected them and brought them to the office and boxed them to bring to the district! And every single one of our kids was still reading!

Meredith Liben
So our kids had stamina. 

David Liben
They had stamina. They had standard of coherence, and they had the habit. They had internalized completely the state of mind that says, “I'm answering a question. I'm going to show myself how, how I answered this question and what it entailed.” And that was a huge reason why those scores were so much higher. 

Meredith Liben
But when we do assess kids, we need to assess that they themselves can do this work on their own by reading the text. And if we want them reading, we want a volume of reading - and this is a sticky hard problem in um, in American education right now, frankly, because we don't - we've stopped relying on homework. There's been pushback about homework.

David Liben
Well, because we can't get - it's hard to get kids to do volume reading at home. 

Meredith Liben 
Right. But also -

David Liben 
It always was and it's more difficult now. 

Meredith Liben
But it does point to one of the chicken and egg problems that we've spent our whole life trying to address. And that is, kids aren't going to read 
at home if they can't read well enough to make that a doable task. And unless we teach them to comprehend, and what that looks like, and how it feels, they're not going to read well enough to engage in a volume of reading voluntarily or involuntarily. It doesn't feel good to do things you're not good at.

David Liben
Many teachers that you've heard on this podcast told us that their students’ confidence soared after they used better reading comprehension instruction. The kids were more excited to read, participated more in class discussion, felt better about themselves and built their knowledge of words and the world.

Meredith Liben
Sean Morrisey saw a huge improvement in his kids’ reading stamina. Here’s Sean.

Sean Morrisey 
You know, when we think about reading at home and how to build that, you know, I think like working on decoding and fluency in the classroom is helpful. Because I mean, you know, I can think of some years where I have a student reading 70, 80 words at the beginning of fifth grade. And then by the middle to - you know, in the springtime, they sort of broke that code and they're reading 140 or 150 words per minute. They're way more likely to read at home when you can read 140 or 150 words per minute compared to 80. 

Meredith Liben
And it’s not an agony. 

Sean Morrisey 
Yeah, I think there's little things too - is just how to use time, like, sort of as efficient as possible. Like, you know, showing a book trailer for three minutes to, to spark an interest in a book. You know, um, I think that's a very good use of three minutes. You know, versus maybe giving kids 30 minutes of independent reading every day in class - which, you know, if you have the time, if you have a really good extended day, I could even see myself doing that for sure. But our day is not long enough for that, for that to happen on a regular basis. 

Um so, like, how to, how to motivate kids or how to have independent reading a little bit that motivates kids more outside of school, but you're not using really precious instructional minutes doing so.

Meredith Liben 
Yeah, that's really interesting. Because it is - it definitely is a thorny issue.

Sean Morrisey 
Yeah, yeah. Because I think like, I think when we talk about like, love for reading, you know, there's sort of camps: well, do we really love reading? Or - and people are kinda - I think there's a middle - I think there's definitely a middle ground there. We want kids to enjoy reading, like that's just common sense. Um. And I think some things that we're doing in, in our systems we're taking, we're taking that away. 

Um. In one regard, I've become pretty anti-technology um in the last few years. So in my classroom, um eyes on a computer screen is, I would say, no more than 3% of the instructional day.

David Liben
There’s absolutely no research that’s, that’s shown um sustainable gains to scale coming from any of these technology programs.

Sean Morrisey 
Yeah.

David Liben
Even the ones in the beginning reading where you would think - you know, you could teach decoding, you could teach fluency. It just hasn’t happened yet. 

Sean Morrisey
Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, like - and I think you could build that stamina. You could build that stamina, even if you don't have like a 45 minute independent reading portion of the day. Like, today, we’re reading a chapter in One Crazy Summer. We did a lot of choral reading, we did some rereading of that. I actually had kids then break into little groups, and um they, they could pick a portion that they wanted to practice. And they did, like, a little reader's theater where they were just like, you know, being very expressive, you know, with their reading. But like, eyes were on a book for, you know, 30, 40 straight minutes of reading. I think that's key.

Like, my classroom just took a, a state science test. And, you know, it's very, very long. But the kids like, they were able to, like - you know, they spent three hours taking it. Literally, like, I had some kids over three hours, and they weren't just sitting there for 20 minutes staring off to space. It was just, the text was so dense. So, they actually had enough stamina. I mean, we could debate whether that was, like, kind of ridiculous or not, and I - um but so it can be done. But 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
So David, can you talk more about the difference between what we've alluded to but really haven't pounced on this idea of standard of coherence, which is a habit of mind in a reader. And how it connects to and how it's different from the strategy, the powerful strategy of comprehension monitoring.

David Liben
One, the difference between comprehension monitoring and standard of coherence, is that standard of coherence is not a strategy. It's a habit of mind. In other words, the student sets out right from the beginning to understand everything, they expect to understand everything. And then they work to understand something when it doesn't fall into place the first time through.

Meredith Liben
A standard of coherence means: I believe I can understand text. And when I don't understand it, I'm going to be kind of stubborn about doing something about it. 

David Liben 
Right, and comprehension monitoring is a comprehension strategy that asks students to stop and see if they really understand what they just read, and hopefully, to do something if they haven't.

Meredith Liben
I want to tell a story on myself about comprehension monitoring. I defined myself as a student all the way through high school and it carried into college, that I wasn't, quote unquote, good at science. And that is because I read science textbooks, the exact same way I read literature. I read them quickly, I read them for flow. I did not know, actually, how to monitor my comprehension. I didn't know how to stop and check for understanding because nobody ever slowed down and showed me that it was different and called for different skills.

So it had real consequences for me that I had to overcome as an adult. And now reading science is the only way I access science. So to me comprehension monitoring is in service of comprehension - it's in the name - but it's also that kind of discipline self-check for understanding.

David Liben 
We did a five or six hour course, called improving reading for older students, IROS. And one of the, one of the most frequent questions that we get about that is: What do I do to develop a standard of coherence? And you develop a standard of coherence, through the kind of close reading that we've talked about. And especially through asking students all the time to explain their thinking and go back into the text, and using the evidence to explain your thinking. 

When a student, or any of us, knows that we're going to be called on to explain our thinking, we inevitably read it differently. And if that is what students do, five days a week, 30 or so weeks a year throughout that K to 12 experience, that more than anything else is going to develop a standard of coherence. 

Here’s what vocabulary and reading expert Margaret McKoewn has to say on comprehension monitoring.

Meredith Liben
And of course you’ve already heard from her many times on this podcast.  

Margaret McKeown
Well, think, comprehension monitoring - I don't know if I'd say teach it explicitly. I think it's part of your taking kids through this process. So what I would say comprehension instruction - high quality comprehension instruction - is, is taking kids through text collaboratively interspersed, reading, you know, read some aloud, talk over and over and over and over again. So what you're trying to do is build the ability to go into a text. And during that that comprehension monitoring just occurs, because you have to do it sometime. 

You know, you get to a passage in - it can be a complex narrative, it can be a science passage, whatever and say, “Well, wait a minute, did we read about this before? Oh, I don't - we better go back and check. Because I -  because this is confusing me.” Or a kid might, you know, give an answer that, that uh, it's clear he's confused. So say, “Well, oh, that was really - Yeah, you pointed that out. That is confusing. Now what happened?” And then you have - you realize, you have to go back some time in text, and pick something up. Maybe make a different connection or pull - you know, apply some knowledge to it that you hadn't realized was, was irrelevant. So I think you just do comprehension monitoring. It's going to be part of the process. 

And again, I think you can label it. You could say, really, we do have to monitor what we're understanding, because sometimes we have to go back. And, and all readers do that. Even the best readers do that because they realize not every - not every text is the same. Not every text is going to be easy to understand. You might get to a point and go, “Mmm, uh, I don't know what's going on here,” and then you go back.

Meredith Liben 
Yeah, more organic.

David Liben 
We - we see that as standard of coherence.

Margaret McKeown 
Yes, yes. 

David Liben
Instead of comprehension monitoring, which is a skill or a strategy - standard of coherence is a - is a habit or a state of mind. 

Margaret McKeown
Exact - yes. Standard of coherence is such an important concept. I think that doesn't come up enough.

David Liben
That's not true, Moddy. It doesn't come up at all!

Margaret McKeown 
[laughs] Yeah. I know. Excuse me, I misspoke. Yeah.

Meredith Liben 
To me - because I love standard of coherence. I love the idea of it because I do believe it is - It can be inculcated as any good habit can be through practice. And, expecting that you're going to understand what text is saying to you, and when you don't, you do something about that, that misunderstanding.

 So it's a um both stick-to -it-ness. But it's really that almost getting irritated when text doesn't make sense to you so that you go back and do what you need to do, to make it make sense.

Margaret McKeown.
Yeah - Yeah. It's kind of an expectation of how well am I going to understand this, this text? And that is a good way to cast standard of coherence. It's, it's habit. It's your reading habit. My habit is to share what I read, you know. [laughs] And to know when I'm not understanding it and take it back a level.

David Liben
Comprehension is not more than the sum of its parts. It's far, far more than the sum of its parts. Both depth and breadth of vocabulary, as we discussed. Syntax, morphology, and knowledge. All of which underlies comprehension. Each text is different. Just as when you turn the knob on the, on the kaleidoscope, you get a different image. When you change to a different text, the combination of text features is different.

Meredith Liben
And the knowledge of vocabulary loads are going to shift.

David Liben
And this is why text must be at the center. How can you determine which of the features that are most difficult, and how can you craft questions and activities that address the most difficult features, if the text is not at the center?

It's a change. And it's a doable change.

Meredith Liben
In instruction and, and approach.

David Liben
But if you're using a high quality program that addresses knowledge - and if it addresses knowledge, it's going to address vocabulary - If you use a high quality program, it is far easier. But even if you're using a high quality program, you should take a look at the text. Look at the text features. And ask some questions that address those most difficult features. No program is perfect. And by doing that, you'll enhance comprehension instruction.

Meredith Liben
When we spoke with veteran teacher Patty Collins about making the switch to using high quality programs in her classroom, she offered us an elegant metaphor I’d never heard before to describe how these instructional materials actually helped her feel more creative, rather than confined.

David Liben 
Patty, an especially interesting question for a teacher who's experienced as you are. The district has been initiating and discussing some changes. Um. Can you just talk about how these have worked for you so far?

Patty Collins 
Yes, so when we began using EL Education, it was the first time anybody had ever handed me a body of evidence and scientific reasoning that explained to me how students - how people, all people learn how to read. And um how I could actually do something about it and make change within my instruction that would directly impact students. So I jumped full force.

I had been um trained and taught how to teach uh three cueing, balanced literacy. And I was doing everything I'd ever been taught to do, and I couldn't figure out why my students weren't growing. And I felt ashamed. I realized that everything that everything I had ever learned and been taught about reading and how children read was wrong. And was deeply flawed.

But it, it's really hard though when, you know, that those kids who are left by the wayside, they're not just this general sort of mass of people. I can put names to them. So I know those kids that I didn't have the skill and the knowledge to help. And that's the hardest part of it to accept is that for my entire career I could have made a difference if um we had had as a group, the knowledge that we have today and that changed our entire district.

Meredith Liben
Can you just explain what you said uh when teachers said they couldn't be creative if they used something like EL education?

Patty Collins 
A lot of teachers who value this autonomy that Vermont teachers experience and, and say they have to have, they would challenge this curriculum and say that these programs were killing our creativity. 

Well, I'm a painter, and I - my preferred medium is watercolor. And the watercolor is my - constrains me. There are certain things you can and cannot do with watercolor that you can do with other medium. And so my program is my medium. It is what I am going to function within but within my, my program, I have the endless um capacity to be creative. I'm creating within my medium.

David Liben
And when you move left or right, or diagonally, etc, within your program, you're doing things differently with your own creativity but you're within the bounds of the science of reading. That’s the big difference. 

Patty Collins 
Absolutely. So I’m, I'm using this terrific tool - I guess you can call it - that I don't have to make up. So  there's no way I can create something like that with the amount of time that I have. So instead of spending all of my time trying to create this masterpiece of a unit, I'm going to take this program, and I'm going to make a masterpiece out of my students by being creative in any direction that I want to teach them the skills and knowledge that they need to become readers.

David Liben
Next question. Any specific anecdotes that you would - with specific kids or with your own understanding that that - you know, an interaction a moment or anything like that? 

Patty Collins
So yes, there's one specific story I can tell you about a kid. He's uh, the kid who really changed everything at the beginning of this. And he was a non-reader at an age where I asked our um school psychologist, “How long do I have to teach this kid to read?” And she looked at me, she's like, “You have six months.” 

And everyone else in the room was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no. You, you can always learn.” And she's like, “No, he will begin to prune these neurons because they will no longer be useful. She has six months to teach him this skill.” 

But then I was gifted with access to a high quality knowledge based curriculum. We're working with EL, and piloted Wit & Wisdom. And this boy got both. It was, like, fireworks, right. This is the piece where it is going to have my students engaging with really rich dynamic text and background knowledge. There’s complex vocabulary. They're going to be discussing concepts in complete sentences. 

So the student that I had who entered was reading in the first percentile. After three years of working with me, he was reading in the 56th.

David Liben 
Wow. 

Patty Collins 
So the power of - like the combination of both of those pieces coming together, with me having the correct support to teach him and being also gifted with materials, really rich materials and program that I didn't have to just create and make up. Here's something that some really smart people have designed that you can implement. It might be hard, and there might be a learning curve, but if I was willing to persevere with the challenging tasks, then I was going to be able to teach my students to persevere with challenging tasks, and they were going to come out ahead. 

Meredith Liben
Let’s hear from Staci McDougall. She said her students - no matter their reading level - had the confidence to take on complex text, and the will to do it. 

David Liben
Your school and your district has made a bunch of changes based on the science of reading in the last year or two. Can you talk a little about how that’s gone for you in general and your class, and your kids, and yourself? 

Staci McDougall
For myself, personally, I was one of the early adopters. Not necessarily because I understood where we were going right away, but because I could see the amazing differences in a positive direction that our new curriculum had for us.

And so I started adopting the EL curriculum in a self contained program for our kiddos who were struggling with a variety of different things. So some of the kiddos were struggling with behavior, some of them were struggling with different disabilities. And it was in the throes of COVID, so I had a little mini cohort of nine. And we were trying to figure out not only how to do uh this new curriculum well, but how to do it well, for a variety of learners, some of whom were um pretty close to nonverbal. 

Um. So it was a high impact year right away because in order to do that strong differentiation you have to get very intimate with the curriculum and understand not only what a lesson looks like bird's eye view, but really get down into the nitty gritty of: if we boil down this lesson to its most essential elements, what would we want every single kid to come away with from a lesson? 

And so I - I had to get really familiar very quickly with it. But the impact was almost immediate. The kiddos that I had that first year were especially fond of the first unit that we do in third grade, because we were talking about students having limited access to education. And particularly for the students who were struggling behaviorally, but also for some of the kids who were struggling with their disabilities, it had never occurred to them that education might be a human right. And that it might not just be something that mean grownups make you do. 

So that high leverage curriculum, that deeper learning where we weren't kind of babying the kids and holding their hand. We were talking about real world issues at a young age, that was, I think, very impactful for kids’ willingness to approach what we were learning about and to work hard to become better readers and writers themselves. 

And it colored the dialogue around learning for the rest of the year for us. So we were able to talk over and over again about overcoming learning challenges and using high quality texts and taking a deep dive into them. Those were the more impactful parts right away for myself as an educator. 

David Liben
We often hear the term we want learning to be joyous. And I'm not anti-joy. I don't - are you anti-joy? 

Meredith Liben 
No, I love joy. 

David Liben
Neither of us are anti-joy. However, doing this work - um comprehending a text, putting together all these features. Sometimes there'll be bright moments of joy depending on the child and the text. But what should always be there is an intellectual process that's intellectually satisfying, which is different than joy.

Meredith Liben
And it creates an intellectual environment in your classrooms, which many of us really miss and has been sorely lacking. 

Everybody reads for a different purpose and that’s not always pleasure. So reading needs to be purposeful. And what's most important is to put that control in the hands of our students so they can figure out why, when, and where they read. But they will know that they're going to understand what they read. 

Thank you for taking this journey with us and we hope - we always hope that what we've said and shared with you is of practical use.

David Liben 
Know better, do better.

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 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
[laughs] Amazing. David survived! [laughs]

David Liben 
This is the final one?

Meredith Liben 
Yeah! There’s not seven episodes. 

David Liben 
Far [beep] out.

Meredith Liben 
[laughs] Mr. Get-you-some-food-and-tuck-you-off-to-bed-or-something. 

David Liben 
I already had my first nap.

Meredith Liben 
[laughs]