Shannon and Mary wrestle with understanding the nature of the comprehension process. They discuss ideas from the Blueprint for Reading Comprehension and Executive Skills and Comprehension to understand the different cognitive processes and executive functioning required for students to extract and construct meaning from texts.
RESOURCES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE
Shannon and Mary wrestle with understanding the nature of the comprehension process. They discuss ideas from the Blueprint for Reading Comprehension and Executive Skills and Comprehension to understand the different cognitive processes and executive functioning required for students to extract and construct meaning from texts.
RESOURCES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE
6.6 The Comprehension Process
Shannon Betts: [00:00:00] Hey Mary, we are in the sixth season of the podcast and I finally feel semi ready to tackle the topic of comprehension through the lens of science of reading. I've all, obviously, I have 20 something years of experience teaching comprehension, but I've never really fully understand the reading research behind comprehension and I've been doing a lot of learning about that and I'd like to unpack some of that with you.
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Okay, so both of us have done some preparation for this episode and we've been like, specifically we'd added some books to our personal libraries about comprehension and the book that I have been just like. Reading from cover to cover taking so many notes in the margins and so many notes on separate sheets of paper is the reading comprehension blueprint, helping students make meaning from text by Nancy Lewis Hennessy with the forward by Louisa notes and this book is dense and amazing learning so much I feel like I'm in a college course just reading this book.
Mary Saghafi: I was thinking about our intro to and how you know, we're ready to [00:02:00] finally approach this. And, you know, when you teach a topic, you have to feel really comfortable with that topic before you are chatting about it and teaching or, or summarizing. So I don't know if you've ever had a purpose before to really like.
And that's just the way we have to teach teachers comprehension.
Shannon Betts: Right. So. No, because we've been very clear and that because our role mostly in our experience has been as interventionist and step one in intervention is always to tackle the decoding. And the phonemic awareness first. And sometimes we only have a year with the students.
And by the time we have, you know, met the decoding goals. Then they're ready to like move them on. And then sort of the next teacher has to. You know, work more on the comprehension and the fluency. And so I have, I do have some experience working on comprehension, obviously when I was a homeroom teacher mainly with my third grade classes, which were more at the early part of my career.
And I did do some good practices, but as I'm [00:03:00] learning about the reading research and understanding what comprehension is, I realized like I definitely could have. And so I feel that way, too.
Mary Saghafi: I feel the same way. I think that, yeah, this, it's almost like, okay, let's put out the fire. Where's fire. I am going to, oh, we want kids to comprehend.
Well, they're not going to comprehend if they can't read that text. So let's focus on Let's get them to reading word sentence level right now. And so I feel that way, too.
Shannon Betts: Well, in some of our intervention students, I know you've seen this is that one of their coping skills is that they are actually pretty good at listening comprehension and they've had to be to, like, cope in the classroom and keep up with that, especially if, you know, they're in 3rd, 4th, 5th grade and can't really read independently.
They're, they're really good at listening comprehension to keep up with the flow of the classroom, but they're not necessarily as good at independent reading comprehension when they're suddenly reading.
Mary Saghafi: Right. And also with, with a lot of [00:04:00] students with a diagnosis of dyslexia and have like appropriate accommodations and modifications, some of those modifications might be read aloud accommodations.
Shannon Betts: So they have experience getting that read aloud.
Mary Saghafi: Right. And, and for some students that is. But I think in general right now, we're going to kind of like do more of a wider view, right?
Shannon Betts: We're looking at comprehension as if with the student was reading the text on their own, because what we're realizing as we're learning about comprehension is that there, it is so complex, and so many things happening in the brain at one time, that Now I get why students have to have automaticity and decoding to have full comprehension, like if you do not have that first half of this, of the simple view of reading like you cannot do that language comprehension, you know, like, yes, because it's just the brain it can't do both things at once like it would explode so let me tell you the first thing I've [00:05:00] realized from all this reading is that comprehension is a process.
Like, it's actually something that's happening in the present as the students are interacting with the text. And unfortunately, we spend most of our class time working on the product of comprehension, like answering comprehension questions or completing a reading response activity. That's happening after that process has already occurred.
And that process might have broken down. You know, where the students didn't understand what they were reading. And so then they're not going to be successful at that after the reading task. And so we need to spend more class time. We as teachers, first off, need to understand really what the Comprehension process is and then we need to spend more class time making that invisible, those invisible thinking processes of constructing meaning happen.
We need to make them more visible for the students of like, okay, I am a good [00:06:00] comprehender when I am reading. I am constructing a mental model. I am getting the author's message when I read what are what are all the things that I'm doing in my brain to make make that happen. And then we have to like a weekend that thinking and the students.
Mary Saghafi: And I think that when we think of this, it's natural for interventionists, especially, but all teachers to think of what are their weakest students doing or not doing. And I think that The key word here is the invisibility of what comprehension is for, for most people. And so there are some assumptions that can be made on the part of adults or on the part of even, you know, other students like, Oh, well, everybody else looks like they're doing this.
So I'm going to mimic the same behavior, which is reading word by word, keeping my finger on the page.
Shannon Betts: And they think that's the sum goal of reading. Just reading the words. Some students think that's it. And they don't realize that it involves a lot more [00:07:00] interaction between their own thinking and their own personality with themselves on the text.
Mary Saghafi: And I think that you can really see this when you have kids.
Who are actually really strong comprehenders, even from a really young age, who can consume and listen to read aloud easily and and put themselves in there and make predictions at a really early age you also may encounter similar peers in that classroom who.
Are really disinterested in reading on their own because they are still spending so much time decoding that they're not quite there to, to get that, to get to the secondary piece, the addition of the language comprehension. And when I say that it's not a read aloud, it's not listening comprehension.
It's there the voice inside their head saying the words to them and, and projecting that picture inside their brain. Right. And that involves a lot of executive functioning skills. [00:08:00]
Shannon Betts: Yeah, so let's like talk about the meaning of what comprehension is as we start and then I'll share some of the other things that I've been reading about.
So, first off in this book by Nancy Hennessey, she goes through sort of the definitions that a lot of different reading researchers use to define comprehension. It's not like one specific. Definition, although most of them have similar phrases within there, and I've already said some of that, which was that we're constructing meaning.
That's a big part of it. So comprehension is one of the people's definitions. I only wrote the ones that really resonated with me. I didn't write them all down. But one of the ones I wrote down was that the reader reconstructs the mental world of the writer. Using a lot of cognitive and linguistic operations.
Another one that I wrote down was that it's the making of meaning as the reader processes through the text within the condition set by the text and context. [00:09:00] So I think if I was going to use just like the shortest phrase possible, I would say constructing meaning. Mm hmm. I would agree, but it's not just that,
Mary Saghafi: right? Because I like, I like the constructing part because it allows for the scaffolding, right? When
Shannon Betts: students doing an active process. Yes,
Mary Saghafi: yes, exactly. And I think that the, the constructing of meaning also helps me kind of visually understand. The students are also taking the position or understanding of the author, whatever that purpose is.
Yeah. And. Yeah. Yeah. I okay. So I, I think, yes, let's keep focusing on the constructing meaning.
Shannon Betts: Well, and also Nancy says like in her blueprint, which she that's the sort of the how to get the students to be better comprehenders, which we're going to talk about in a future episode. But she, she actually says to improve the students ability to extract and [00:10:00] construct meaning from text.
I like that, because you're extracting the author's message, but then you're also constructing that meaning. Because when we read, we're not remembering word for word what words the author wrote. Like, when we read a paragraph, and then we try to summarize it in our mind, we're not, we're putting it in our own words.
And when we do that, we are constructing the meaning. Like, we are adding our own background knowledge to that, and we are getting our own understanding of the text. From the words that the author used to convey that message. And we're hopefully building that message in our own words. Yes, it's really complex.
I mean, when you think about it, I mean, it's like a conversation that's written down and a conversation is very dynamic. You have to like read body language. You have to make eye contact. You have to. understand tone. And we're, we sort [00:11:00] of are doing all those things automatically as humans, because we have a lot of experience, you know, talking aloud to each other.
But then when you're reading, you're having to do that same thing, but only with symbols on a page. Right.
Mary Saghafi: And it needs to move from conscious to almost subconscious so that you can move all of those things kind of simultaneously so that it feels more natural.
Shannon Betts: Yes. So we have to help students when we're teaching comprehension, we have to guide the students into how to construct that mental model.
And I, I've spoken about this before where I've said I had that sign in my classroom called reading is thinking. And I think that's one of the first steps is just helping the students understand thinking is involved, not just reciting the words on the page.
Mary Saghafi: I think that's really good. And I like how you keep tying that true, [00:12:00] like tying that back because it's true and it's definitely been a theme throughout our podcast career here that reading is thinking.
. And I think that that first part is it requires the engagement when you require kids to think Mm-Hmm, , they need to know what are they thinking about? Why
Shannon Betts: Yeah. So no, that's huge. So that is another big aha that I learned from the research and prepping for this episode is that I did not realize that comprehension is an interaction between the reader, the text, the task, which is the purpose of the reading, and then the context in which they're reading.
And I feel guilty because sometimes I think I have given text to kids in the past and just say, go read this. And I haven't given them a purpose for that and that what that did is by removing the purpose for from the [00:13:00] comprehension I'm actually like affecting the level of comprehension that they're going to have because for example, if you were in an emergency situation, and you are.
putting out a kitchen fire and you're not sure what to do to put out a grease fire on your stove, you're going to read some instructions on Google very carefully to make sure, like, life or death, my house doesn't burn down. I'm going to read this with close attention to the text and make sure that I get the author's message so that I follow those directions precisely.
That's different from just sort of casually reading a cookbook like I do sometimes on a Sunday afternoon. I'm my purpose is different and the level of comprehension I get is going to be different. I'm probably going to remember the grease instructions forever. I'm not going to remember that recipe forever.
I'm going to have to read it again, unless you told me you only get to read this recipe one time and then it's going to go away. Then my purpose will be wow, I need to learn this This recipe and I'm going to have [00:14:00] a stronger purpose for that comprehension and I'm going to want to comprehend that and put it in my long term memory.
Mary Saghafi: I think that this kind of like goes to so if we kind of tie it back to what does a good reader do when they approach text and what is a person who struggles with reading comprehension do we can kind of talk about that a little bit. So I would say it is an assignment in the class. Let's say that the students are going to go read let's say something that has to do with the solar system and maybe it's an article like a national geographic for kids, something like that.
Let's just kind of imagine that. And so you say, okay, I want you to go sit down and I want you to go read through this article and you, you don't set the purpose. I think with. a student who is struggling with reading comprehension, they are not going to preview the text. They're not going to first even start to notice that there might be some like graphic images of the solar system and maybe, oh, something new is happening in space and they've discovered [00:15:00] something new or maybe it has to do with whatever the purpose of the the text is.
These graphics are going to support it. Then they're also going to kind of like look through and see how long. Is this, is this text?
Nope, mm mm. What always happens when I meet a kid who does this, they look at it and no matter what the length is, it's too long.
Shannon Betts: And they'll just skim it. You know, they'll just sort of like flip through the pictures and skim some of the headings and be done with it.
But if you gave them a purpose to say, find something interesting that you, about the solar system that you want to share with your elbow partner. That's going to be a purpose that might excite them and maybe at least make them read one paragraph. Doom. You know, find something interesting,
Mary Saghafi: or hey if you are the person on the right side of the desk, then you tell your partner to vocabulary words that we learned in our lesson yesterday about the solar system and person on the left give a [00:16:00] different task to still related to the article that even sets the tone for the purpose, but then I think additionally.
You may need to even spell out a little bit more. This text is also going to have some, some really good features to it that have big titles and subtitles. Those subtitles are critical in understanding the definition of this word. Giving some sort of context to that is really key. Or, I really need you to understand this part about whatever is in this article so that tomorrow in our discussion you can link back to this as evidence.
For what we're learning about tomorrow, even a statement like that still gives purpose. And I think as adults, it's understandable to sometimes forget that students don't have that. initial ability to just, like, look at a text and, and figure out what category does it automatically go to.
Shannon Betts: Yeah, or make up a purpose for what their reading is, you know?
[00:17:00] Yeah. And so, absolutely. If, if, if I learned just one thing from this, like, I, I'm always going to give a purpose for reading, no matter what print I put in front of students. I will always make sure that I've stated that purpose and that the students understand that purpose. Or if they're choosing a book, I want to understand their purpose for it, too.
Are you just grabbing a book from the media center because, like, time was up and we were about to go back to class? Or is this a book that you've continued the series and you love the character? Did you read the back of the book and get interested? Like, I want to understand the purpose for reading. I want that to be very clear always.
So I think this is a good time to read a quote that I really, really liked from this book. And this is from some Researchers Zwan and Radvansky from 1998. I think, I hope I'm saying their names right. It says, knowing what is expected, coupled with other factors such as motivation, supports the [00:18:00] reader's planning in the surfacing of necessary processes, including knowledge and the monitoring of effectiveness to accomplish identified outcomes.
And proficient readers, which you talked about, adjust their use of processes based on the demands of the text and the nature of the task itself. And so, there's a lot in what I just read. Which is why I thought it was such a good quote. I think it's good.
Mary Saghafi: I'll tell you, these are the words that I literally just wrote down.
Planning, monitoring, adjusting, and then I inferred shifting.
Shannon Betts: And all of those are verbs, right? Okay, those are actions.
Mary Saghafi: They're all associated with executive functioning. Yes. And and all of those are those like micro skills that you teach throughout life. You can learn planning and monitoring and adjusting and shifting by putting your shoes on every single morning, right?
That's it. Let's like get it done job, but you can [00:19:00] also apply it and know when to apply it when you're reading too. It's, it's the ability to adjust and shift your attention. But I think the key with planning is. Having the purpose, like, when you're planning something, that's how you initiate and start it.
Shannon Betts: Right. So, without a purpose, they cannot formulate the plan to then make that plan of attack. To then know which cognitive processes to kind of activate in their minds. Like, to make meaning up from the text. And so that really, it does start with a purpose, which again, that's why I wanted to read that quote at that time.
But then I also wanted to lead into what I learned about that comprehension is cognitive processes happening at the same time as language processing. So I'll talk about the language processing in a second, but the cognitive processes, I know, you know, a lot about these because that's your background, but I didn't really understand all these.
So all the cognitive processes are happening moment by moment [00:20:00] extracts and constructs meaning from the text. They're doing microprocesses, which is identifying and making meaning of idea units. They're doing integrative processes. Which is integrating ideas between sentences. They're doing metacognitive processes where they're monitoring.
This is basically that list of verbs you just listed. Like these are those thinkings they're doing. They're doing elaborative processes, which is integrating prior knowledge and inferencing. And they're doing macro processes, which is organizing the overall understanding from these discrete pieces. And all of this is affected by executive function.
Like you said, working memory. What else?
Mary Saghafi: Working memory the, the monitoring or like shifting from the inhibition, like using inhibition, making sure that you are...
Shannon Betts: Keeping your eyes on the text and not just reading that same paragraph three times and realizing, oh, I don't know what I, what I, what I just read.
Over and over when you read that sentence three [00:21:00] times and nothing is getting in. Yeah.
Mary Saghafi: Yep. And So, so yeah, and then the ability to then shift and, and prioritize what is the most important part. So I think that the biggest deal about executive functioning is that it's so pervasive, and I feel like we have not really talked about the explicit nature of executive functioning in teaching, and I feel like.
You know, um, I think that we have attempted to do it in, in many circumstances, but you can be a very strong reader and have really low executive functioning skills and struggle in, in the reading comprehension, maybe not listening comprehension, but in the reading
comprehension.
Shannon Betts: And tell the listeners which book you read to kind of prepare for this. So it's amazing. And I'm going to read it next.
Mary Saghafi: So that's a, that's the good part. It's executive skills and reading comprehension. And I have reference by Kelly, Kelly Cartwright, [00:22:00] Kelly B Cartwright. And it's been around for a couple of years. It is the Resource that I constantly pick up, come back, check and say, Oh, I have, and I guess it's also in the nature of, of my job as a private tutor.
And I'm constantly looking and assessing and trying to understand the behaviors of my students. But working memory is a really big thing that I feel like I'm trying to dive very deep into and not just for myself, but explaining The behaviors that I'm seeing to parents and why they may be concerning for classroom.
Why is the reading breaking down and, and the big piece of this working memory. And I think that working memory is such a great way of explaining why comprehension is so complex and it's touched on all the things. If we think of, and this is a very basic way of explaining it, but if we think of your working memory as like the center of your brain or like the How would I like, like the internet, your internet browser, let's say your [00:23:00] internet browser is up and you have four files that you're working on and you keep cross referencing each of these files, you need to know what is the most important part.
What are you working on in this moment? When do you need to shift? When is the most important thing, keeping it in your short term memory? And understanding what is the most important information that needs to go into your long term memory, or if you're writing and typing a document and shifting between what is the most important that goes on your, on your paper that you're, you're working on writing.
Shannon Betts: Right, because if you were extracting and constructing meaning, you have to hold multiple ideas in your mind at one time to be able to kind of link those together and build them together.
Mary Saghafi: And sometimes, When you have a learner, adult or child, you get overloaded and you're just like a web browser gets overloaded and everything crashes, you start back over from the beginning.
And that's what happens with our. [00:24:00] Learners sometimes, and that can happen in any subject area with any topic. And so if we're talking about reading comprehension, it may become overloaded with just the decoding piece. It may be that they're proficient in decoding, but they are not able to initiate that language comprehension as they are fluently reading.
And that language is not processing the same way that you would hope, or maybe they don't understand the vocabulary that they're. reading. Maybe they don't understand the language structure of what they're reading. All of these skills have to kind of just be held up and juggled, I would say, with working memory.
So your working memory is the juggling piece. And so Oftentimes, when you see a student who is struggling with comprehension, it has a lot to do with working memory and and working memory, then it's it's the process by which you are taking the most important information and storing it into your long term and letting go of the.[00:25:00]
unNecessary information.
Shannon Betts: That's key too. Yeah, you gotta like filter out the not so important. I wrote down, I'm looking through my notes and I found a quote from your guy, David Kilpatrick. Gosh, I love him. So this is how he defines comprehension. And a mental or situation model that integrates vocabulary, syntax, which you were saying was like this complicated sentences, background knowledge.
Shh. and referential and logical connection found in the text. All of this has to occur within the limited attention metacognitive and working memory resources available to the reader.
Mary Saghafi: Man, David and I were on the same page. I love it. When he's basically, yeah, he should have a little juggler.
Shannon Betts: He should have a little juggler picture next to that definition of comprehension, but that's what good readers are able to do.
They're able to construct that integrated representation of meaning with rather than remembering the [00:26:00] exact words from the author, and they can only do that by sort of holding all those things, juggling them together, and then sort of piecing it together with what they already know and finding the language to sort of make it stick to their brain.
Yeah, they also have to establish like a lot of local coherence, they have to remember the ideas between the sentences, and then between them. Paragraphs and then between the whole text and that's complicated. We're going to link to some sources where Timothy Shanahan talks about that in the show notes.
Because that coherence piece is another thing that I wasn't really consciously aware of that it, you know, goes into comprehension. And then this, the reader has to, they have to incorporate their background knowledge and ideas and then make sense of all the details, even the ones that are only implicitly mentioned by the author.
I think that's another thing, they're having to sort of really pay attention very closely to the words of the author to realize like, oh. Was there some suspense there or some foreshadowing that, you know, or did the character like move settings by moving time or place and I didn't notice it, you know, was it a flashback?
And I didn't [00:27:00] check that. Like there's so much that the reader has to pay attention to, to, you know, activate that mental model.
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Mary Saghafi: No, I think that's it. That's the perfect way of describing it. I really like giving our listeners this giant [00:29:00] overview of the processes first, and I'll tell you why. All right. Find myself knowledgeable about this because I work on them discreetly, but I don't think that you even know how to approach how to do interventions with this or, or notice where the deficit lies, unless you really can see the big picture first.
So looking at the big picture, understanding all of these like finite processes that are happening, right. Then being able to say, Oh, this person is working, is having difficulty with working memory. Hmm. How do I even begin to adjust for that? Well, the answer is a lot of like explicit modeling and giving more, giving the invisible visibility with language.
So, so we have to be really, really good at explaining our own thinking and what we're doing and examining how our process is working for us as [00:30:00] really. Great
readers. Well, I think our audience will hear that. That's what I was going to say. In our next episode with the fabulous Dr. Molly Ness. Yes.
Shannon Betts: And how she explains how to do that using read alouds in a way that just makes it much more than just story time on the carpet.
What makes it a way to make this comprehension process more of an, you know, the instruction happening about the process of comprehension rather than the product. So, and she uses Read Aloud as a tool, and she shows us how to do that too, and it's just incredible. And then we're going to follow that episode with another episode of, again, more things that you as a teacher can do to Help build the comprehension with your students wherever whatever level it's breaking down at whether it's at the executive functioning level, whether it's at some of this language processing or the cognitive processing, but we wanted to wrestle with this together and also for you guys and also for us to really get that full picture understanding of like, what [00:31:00] comprehension is, what is the ultimate goal that we're trying to do? Because I think that when you have this understanding too, it makes, it makes you a lot more intentional where like, you're not just going to do some little coloring project after a read, after a book that you've read, because does that really help with the comprehension?
Or is that just, you know, keeping the kids quiet for 20 minutes? You know, like you can, you get really more intentional about like the activities that you're choosing to do to help the students. First off, build their background knowledge about text structure and also about vocabulary and just, you know, schema in general.
So that they can become better comprehenders and have more ideas in their mind for You know, the idea of forming marks and stick to it. You're right. Right. But then also then, you know, when to also, do we need to teach comprehension strategies because. And we as proficient readers are able to like pay monitor that comprehension.
Like you said, and then they will activate certain [00:32:00] strategies when glitches are happening. Like when the breakdowns are happening, good readers are like, Oh, Yeah. Like even just as simple as like what we were saying, like if you're at the doctor's office and you're reading a magazine article and you kind of daydream and you realize you read the same paragraph three times.
We as readers. As proficient readers go, Oh, I just read this three times. I wasn't paying attention. And we go back and reread and we do more intentional reading and we might activate, you know, we might go back a few paragraphs just to kind of get back in the flow of the article or whatever. We activate certain comprehension strategies to make that meeting happen.
We need to show students how to do that. And so we're going to make instructional decisions. As teachers to like bring about helping students become better comprehenders with this understanding that comprehension is a process. It's a really complicated process that involves so much. And so, like I said, it just makes us having this understanding is definitely for me going to make me a lot more [00:33:00] intentional about the activity choices.
I'm going to be doing with the students in the future. Right.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. The big takeaway for me is and maybe this might be something that could be like a motto or something that you keep on your wall, but like make the invisible visible. Over teaching those skills can actually be critical for some students.
They really need to hear it again and again until they can initiate that process on, on an independent level. So it's part of building, building the big scaffolding for assisting all readers. And so make the, yeah.
Shannon Betts: And that book. When I first started teaching, I've mentioned this before, that like my second year of teaching, I found the book Strategies That Work, which is just so amazing by Harvey and Goodvis.
And it helps teachers understand how to teach the comprehensive strategies. And I did almost all the lessons in that book and continue to do them most of my career. But it starts with like [00:34:00] the simplest one, which is the students just. With a little sticky note, like it has the word, huh, on it with a question mark.
And like, just paying attention to like, huh, when do I feel a little
confused?
Right? Like, did I not know that what that word is? Do I not know what this sentence is saying? Do I not know who this character is in a dialogue? Do I, am I not paying, am I not sure like which character's talking? If it doesn't say the word somebody said, you know, like all of those, that's just the simplest level of where that glitch might happen.
And we need to have the students start paying attention to that. And then paying attention to the more complicated problems that might happen. But even just that's a simple one to just get the students. And then, and then just start asking questions about what they read. And not just like a KWL chart, but like really, you know, asking good questions.
Like why is the character moving there? How is the character feeling? Or what's going to happen next? Where is the character going? Why is the setting here? You know, all of those are really good [00:35:00] questions that the character, that the reader can ask to them. Like, Make their comprehension because as soon as what I would tell the students is as soon as you ask a question in your brain, your brain starts looking for the answer.
Mary Saghafi: So I like that too. Yeah. Yeah.
Shannon Betts: That's your brain on a quest.
Yeah. It that's a making the invisible visible. It's giving them a mission. So one setting the purpose, but also it gives them a mission. And oh, my brain is supposed to ask questions. Okay.
And then that builds that metacognition like, Oh, I'm paying attention to my brain asking questions and then that's making me understand the text better.
Mary Saghafi: And yeah, I think I'm super sensitive this year to third graders. I just have to happen to have a big crop of third graders this year. And I'm really noticing
Shannon Betts: you have one at home.
I do have one. Yeah, that's true. That maybe that probably flows with it too. So I would say that they're so at that age level, the eight and nine year olds, they are constantly looking at one another and trying to understand and predict what the others are thinking.
And this is [00:36:00] like social constructs and in the classroom. And so a lot of times they are very inaccurate and what they are predicting that their peers are thinking, feeling and saying. Especially when it comes to academics. And so you know, I used to preach like the smartest people ask the best questions and you know, so I don't think that I'm noticing as much bravery and maybe this is just the group that I have right now, but they are very shy about feeling inadequate about it.
Not understanding. And so they are not the ones who are going to raise their hand and ask a clarifying question. But I feel like if we can let them know, Hey, everybody is sort of struggling with figuring out what their brain is supposed to be doing right now. So I'm just going to make it. We're going to just talk about it a lot.
And I'm going to explain why my brain is doing what it's doing. And if you feel comfortable, let's share with me what your brain is doing right now, too. I think that, you know, again, it [00:37:00] creates a safe classroom.
Well, and they might say my brain's not doing anything. And then you say, well, your brain might be whispering.
So pay attention to the whisper. What is
it whispering? Yes, exactly. And my brain might be distracted and looking around and imagining what other people are doing rather than thinking about the task that I'm supposed to be starting right now.
But then you can read that paragraph one more time to them or have them read that paragraph one more time and then say, what is just something that's popping out at you?
From this paragraph to just get that comprehension kind of jump started while you were sharing that I was just like transported back to like 20 almost 20 years ago. Can I tell you about a student? I had.
Mary Saghafi: Oh, I can't wait. I love student stories.
Shannon Betts: I'll call her Diane. I had been, I think I had her my third or fourth year teaching.
And, um, that year I sent out postcards to the students over the summer to say, I'm so excited. You're [00:38:00] my class. So she comes to, like, back to school night and she says. I'm so excited. You know that you're going to be my teacher when I got that postcard like I knew that you're friends with teacher a teacher B teacher C, and you drive this color car, this kind of car, and you usually do this, and I mean she told me like my like whole like school lifestyle.
Okay. And I was like, Whoa, she knows a lot about me. And I just met this person.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah. Right. Celebrity. You are a teacher.
Shannon Betts: Look out. But she was, she was very in tune with people. Okay. So she was like that with her classmates. Like she knew all the gossip about them, you know? Okay. So she was in SST for comprehension.
She was like the first student ever had that was an amazing decoder. She could decode any word you put in front of her, even if it was like from a. Yeah. Yeah. You know, medical text. She couldn't have sounded out all those words, but zero comprehension. And so I told her, you know, Oh, I remember, you know, you knew all about me.
I was like, [00:39:00] that's what you have to do for the characters. So I made her like, make this like gossip book. I kept her on fiction for a long time and like Jimmy Jones and all these other books. And I made her like makeup gossip, like. Stats about the characters, just kind of how she knew about me, you know, and that helped her comprehension a lot.
Like, and so I think maybe that's showing looking at through the lens of what we're talking about today is that first off I gave her a purpose for the comprehension because I was like, learn about these characters the way you know about these people in real life. And then also. You know, like the context and like our own personality affects our comprehension and so I was, I gave her some strategies that like worked with the person that she was and the way her brain and mind and personality work.
And so that helped improve her comprehension.
Mary Saghafi: I think it's perfect. I think that that's a really great way of you know, just capitalizing on something that she's already good.
Shannon Betts: Yeah. I mean, and she really, she really did get better. Did we ever get to nonfiction comprehension in that [00:40:00] year? I don't think we did.
Like hopefully in all the future years of teachers, she got that from, but it was at least a starting point, you know? And anyway, I was only a third or fourth year teacher at that time. I didn't know any of this stuff yet about science of reading, but just instinctively, that's what I tried as a strategy and ended up helping her.
But. Anyway, just kind of in summary I think we'll get into the next episode. We'll talk more about the language processing and just sort of how to build better comprehension, because I think that we've covered a lot already in this short amount of time of just what goes into the students. having to construct the mental model.
Extract and construct that mental model, like how much complicated thinking goes into it, and then why it's so important that students have to have that fluency and automaticity in order to then be able to comprehend their own independent reading. Because the brain could, there's no way the brain could, you know, do all those connections with like sound [00:41:00] similar correspondence and everything.
If these words weren't in their letterbox, and then, you know, being able to then activate all the other parts of the brain to do all this comprehension thinking. Oh man, I,
Mary Saghafi: I think that this is a really good episode and I hope that our listeners really take this like broad picture from it because these are complicated processes and, and vocabulary words and you know, the, the life in the classroom sometimes looks different than the jargon that the teachers are sharing about these processes.
And so yeah, I think that As professionals developing this and having talks about where the frustrations lie for our students and then once you start that conversation, you start to share more personalized stories about how you do address it with with specific learners. So I can't wait for more.
Shannon Betts: Yes. And so just to take away, I think it's just as as reading teachers, like form your own understanding of what [00:42:00] comprehension is. Yes. I would suggest you take a look at this form your own, like look through all the lesson plans that you've done in the past and the ones you're going to do in the future.
And, you know, Analyze, like, are you, are we spending enough time as reading teachers working on the process of comprehension? You know whether that is through guided reading, whether that's through shared reading, read aloud, Coral reading, independent reading, all a mixture of all those. You know how are we really.
I'm hoping to build help helping to show students to make that invisible thing visible to them so that we and also that the students even understand that comprehension. They're, they're not just supposed to read the words on page that they're they have to involve their own thinking to extract and construct a mental model like that, you know, survey your class.
Do they even understand that? That that's a goal of reading.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah. And I think when you are saying, you know, look back at your lessons too. You're also saying [00:43:00] how much time are you just requiring products or how much time are you spending on teaching the process? So I just want to like clarify that part again,
Shannon Betts: because you can't measure the process always like you can't get a grade from it.
You know, it's, it's, it's difficult, you know, it's a balancing act. We understand that. We do need to spend a good bit of our classroom time. I mean, how else are the students going to get better at this? You know, like, that's why you know, the science of reading community is saying, like, we can't just do sustained silent reading with no purpose.
You know, like, if the student, because then the kids just might be flipping through the pages and not really working on building their comprehension. Exactly. Exactly. So the other thing is just, again, always give a purpose for reading. Make sure the students notice the purpose of reading because that will affect their planning and the strategies that they use.
It's going to affect their comprehension. Love it.
Mary Saghafi: All right. This was great. I'm looking forward to some concrete strategies to [00:44:00] use next.
Shannon Betts: Yes, and check our show notes. We have a lot of great resources linked for this episode, including there's a free chapter available from this reading comprehension blueprint book, and then some webinars that the author generously shared and then we're going to share some other articles and really good resources that we found about reading comprehension.
And this is going to be the first episode in a series about comprehension as we try to understand it better through the lens of the science of reading. And we we're just getting to know better and do better ourselves. So this is not, I mean, I, I am not an expert. I don't think I could like go and teach a speech about this or anything like that.
I'm just getting to understand this. And I'm going to have to just apply this in my own teaching practice as I learn more about it.
Mary Saghafi: The good news is that you do a really nice job of sharing this information. I really enjoy our talks like this. It, it, I think it's motivating for professional content.
Shannon Betts: Well, I, you know, I understand things [00:45:00] better when I talk it out, so I appreciate having you to talk with, so.
Thanks for meeting me in the Read Teacher's Lounge!
Mary Saghafi: Anytime! Come join us!