How Can I Teach with Books that are Two Years Above Student Reading Levels?

challenging text instructional level guided reading complex text
12 October, 2024
35 Comments

Blast from the past: Originally posted February 2, 2013; re-issued October 12, 2024. Over the past 15 years, I have issued several blogs concerning the value of teaching students to read more challenging texts than we have used in instruction in the past. Despite a growing body of evidence showing that teaching students at their “instructional reading level” provides no learning benefits – and that sometimes it limits learning – most teachers continue to avoid challenging text by moving kids to easier text, reading texts to the students, or replacing texts with other sources of information (e.g., videos, teacher presentations). Given that I thought it would be a good idea to reissue this one. Oh, and by the way, I just completed writing a book on this topic. It will be published by Harvard Education Press early in 2025.

RELATED: When Sisyphus was in First Grade or One Minute Reading Homework

Teacher question:
I teach 4th-grade general education. I have read several of your articles the last few days because I have a growing frustration regarding guided reading. I believe a lot of your ideas about what does not work are correct, but I don't understand what you believe we SHOULD be doing. I am confused about how to give students difficult textbooks to read without reading it to them. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I do not know how to scaffold science or social studies text for students that are 2 years behind without reading it to them. I also feel pressure in these subjects to read it to them because I thought it was more important for them to understand the information thoroughly by reading the text aloud, having thoughtful discussions, and follow up activities. Every time I think I know what I should be doing, I read another article and realize that I am doing that wrong too. So, please give me guidance on how to best to teach nonfiction and fiction text to my class whole group. What strategies and types of activities are the best?

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain. What would it look like to scaffold a fourth-grade lesson from a social studies book with children who are reading at second-grade level? There are several possibilities.

First, I would “level” (pun intended) with the kids. I would not try to hide from them that I was going to ask them to read a book that in the past we would have avoided. The point here is motivation. People like a challenge and kids are people. When you ask them to take on something hard, let them in on the secret so they can take on the challenge with the right mindset and so they can be proud of themselves when they manage to meet the challenge – and we will make sure that they meet the challenge.

Second, it is essential that the teacher read the chapter before the kids do. We need to identify the linguistic, conceptual, and textual features that may be the source of their difficulty. Look out for ideas that you think will be especially complicated, subtle, or abstract, assumptions of background knowledge that you think your students lack, unknown vocabulary, complicated sentences, cohesive links that might be hard to track, organizational structure that students might ignore, and so on. Basically, you are trying to figure out what might make this text hard for your students to comprehend.

I’m willing to head off or avoid a problem if I think the students cannot surmount it. For instance, if there is a word that I think the students will not know and the author doesn’t define it, the context doesn’t reveal its meaning, or it can’t be figured out from morphology, then I am willing to familiarize the kids with it prior to reading. However, if it is possible to gain its meaning from the text, I will not try to avoid the problem. I’d rather that they miss it, which will allow me to teach kids how to take it on successfully. Teachers must decide which problems to solve for the kids and which to guide them to fix themselves. The real learning will come from the latter.

Third, the scaffolding described above will likely require some rereading—either of the whole chapter (fourth-grade science and social studies chapters can be surprisingly short, so rereading the entire chapter is usually not that big a deal). Thus, they try to read it; I question them and help them work through the problems; and then they reread it (perhaps more than once), to see if they can figure it out the second or third time.

Fourth, if your kids’ reading levels are more than a year or two below the level of the book that you are trying to teach, consider starting with fluency work. Have those students read the text aloud, once or twice before the lesson aimed at comprehension of the text. This can be done many ways (e.g., having partners practice reading the social studies text during their ELA fluency time, getting parents involved, including this kind of practice in a Tier 2 intervention). The point of the fluency work is to reduce the amount of basic reading struggle – the reading of the words – that these students may face. Once they have engaged in the fluency practice, these students should read the text along with the rest of the class. They will benefit from the same comprehension scaffolds noted above.

What you are trying to do with this encouragement, fluency work, and comprehension scaffolding is to enable the students to read the text that they are sure to struggle with. You can monitor their learning by how much improvement you see in their reading of each text. But remember your goal is not to avoid difficulty but to enable students to surmount difficulty. That means that you don’t shift kids to texts at their supposed levels, you don’t read the texts to the kids, and you don’t go around the text by telling them what it says.

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Shanahan, T. (In press). Leveled Readers, Leveled Lives. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

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Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Mark Pennington Oct 12, 2024 01:05 PM

How much of the new book will flesh out the scaffolding you summarize in today's post, Tim?

What ages or skill levels will the book address?

Deb Oct 12, 2024 03:09 PM

Scaffolding, at times, appears to be the biggest struggle…specifically how to scaffold the text while still allowing students to do the work. Is there a previous blog or resource you can suggest that provides additional support on how to scaffold a grade level text for students that are 2 years below grade level?

Jessica Jones Oct 12, 2024 03:25 PM

Can you share more about what you mean by familiarizing students with vocabulary? I work with a lot of multilingual learners and more recent research is promoting in text/context vocabulary support to replace preteaching vocab by giving a definition, asking students to use the word in a sentence, frayer or other vocab learning models. You also mentioned replacing text with video, but wondering how video might be used to build or activate background knowledge about the topic to be followed by the text reading you described.

Dr. Theresa Seits Oct 12, 2024 01:30 PM

Yes! Yes! Yes! I remember when I was in the classroom (years ago) and I reluctantly raised the bar and tried what you were suggesting. I was truly amazed with the results. My students made incredible gains and I became a loyal Shanahan groupie. :0)
Incidentally, I had conversation with a former student who I ran into recently. He is now what most would call a very successful professional. He told me that he was not a “reader” before 4th grade. He thanked me and praised the very strategies that I implemented based on your suggestions and recommendations (meaningful on level texts, rereading/close reading, book clubs, morphology, etc.).
Keep preaching Dr. Shanahan! You're changing lives!

Gaynor Oct 13, 2024 02:38 AM

I fully support Dr Conrad' s comment and especially like his use of the word 'alchemist' w r s t many current reading methods

As I have mentioned ad nauseam on this site the ideal and practice of Universal Literacy needs to be promoted. This means having every child with an IQ over about 80 , who is not blind nor deaf achieving at the correct reading level for their age.

My mother in low social and economic status state schools in Scottish Dunedin , NZ was exposed to this ideal and practice in the 1930s and 40s as an infant teacher ( children aged 5yrs to 7years) . She experienced how this was achieved and never lost the determination and methods even when teaching privately in the 1970s -20000. It is an absolute slog to achieve and requiring total commitment and refusal to consider failure. Every child's reading was heard every day and any sign of failure to be at the correct level was remediated immediately in the teacher's spare time and the parents were also informed and encouraged to help since the reading books were also home based.

Of course, intensive phonics was the method she applied which fits under the umbrella term of structured Literacy and complied with the present SoR., No child in classes of 30, was to fail to have the correct reading age for their chronological age by seven years old. School inspectors were used to examine whether this had been achieved and if not the teacher lost grading. No excuses were accepted.

My mother maintains she never saw a dyslexic child , in her classes, but only children who read more slowly. There were many supplementary texts for reading and testing and comprehension questions were asked. She did have a cousin with dyslexic tendencies.

The exact numbers of 'dyslexic 'children is not well defined and I believe it is often being used as an excuse for the defective 'alchemistic ' teaching. There have always been children from difficult home situations and in the 1930s there were many labouring jobs not requiring literacy so parents kept children home ,frequently, to help with the laundry and other household chores before home appliances were available..

When I was at school in the 1950s , in classes of 50 students , every child could read the set text in the class. In round robin reading I observed a few children did read more slowly and stumbled on a few difficult words in the texts. Having large numbers of children in a class who are years behind is intolerable . My mother had remedial students in the 1970s-2000s, even six to seven years behind in their reading . I read somewhere , it takes many times more work to remediate those students, who are even two years behind compared with younger ones. My mother was able to have her remedial students increase their reading age by two years or more in one year. She used your excellent intensive phonic Heilman workbooks combined with your Ginn 100 workbooks and texts which are both very suited to parents using daily. She used almost entirely imported American texts and workbooks at a time when phonics was condemned in NZ because of ( damn) Marie Clay's influence . The Ginn workbooks with their controlled vocabulary and some slow phonics were however also used in NZ classrooms in the 1960s -80s for the lower half of the class for students who had not achieved fluency , in the common sight words

I am sure there will be many teachers in the States who have similar beliefs in Universal Literacy and the way they achieve this in practice with classroom management etc is well worth investigating alongside examining research. Schools are failing if they have classes with so many students years behind.