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The Value of Tackling Complex Text
When supporting readers who are not yet at grade level, it can be tempting to avoid complex texts or provide so much help that students miss the opportunity to build independence. Research shows it’s essential that students engage with grade-level and above texts, while also receiving the right amount of support to grow as readers. Simply placing struggling students into challenging texts without scaffolds, however, is not effective. That’s why it’s important to use research-based strategies to guide their progress. Each month, we’ll share a practical scaffolding tip you can adapt and apply directly in your classroom. But, always remember to pair comprehension strategies with vocabulary and the building of background knowledge.
Scaffolding Tip of the Month
Scaffolding Tip of the Month
Have you tried Discussion Round Table? This scaffolding activity helps students discuss with peers, share ideas, and gain a stronger understanding of complex texts in a low stakes environment. And better yet, this scaffold can easily be adapted for almost any grade level! It comes from Fisher & Frey's new book: Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers (134).
Directions:
Provide the question/task. As students make sense of their academic reading through discourse, use specific prompts.
Working alone, students take notes on a text or chunk of text in the upper left-hand box.
Then, in a structured group students take turns speaking, listening, and taking notes about the other’s input writing peer comments in the other boxes.
Once they have spoken to their group or partners, they write an independent summary about the text based on their own understanding as well as the explanations and notes from their peers.
Connect-Extend-Challenge:
Students discuss what concepts in their text they already knew and what those concepts could connect to from other texts.
Students discuss what in the text extended their thinking, and what challenged them with concepts they didn’t quite understand.
Give students the opportunity to verbalize connections and metacognitively to determine what concepts are hard to grasp.
Require textual evidence or use vocabulary in responses.
Spotlight on Literatue:
Spotlight on Literatue:
Diverse Book Guides
Each month we will share out new diverse book guides developed by fellow educators to use and share in your elementary classrooms. Each guide will have a brief summary, target vocabulary, and age appropriate questions to adapt and use as needed within elementary classrooms.
Classified - Oct.pdfPlatanos - Oct book.pdfRetold Oct book.pdfResources You Can Use
Book Information and Review
Book Information and Review
There are many adolescent readers who, for a variety of reasons, find it difficult to connect with written words and have fallen behind on their foundational reading skills. Thankfully, it’s never too late to give these necessary skills a boost and help students find joy in reading and learning. Armed with equity, empathy, evidence-based research, and practical application, Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers provides classroom practices teachers can use with the whole class or with small groups to integrate reading support seamlessly with grade-level content learning.
Bestselling authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, along with Sarah Ortega, Kierstan Barbee, and Aida Allen-Rotell, creatively organize the book around a metaphor: adolescent literacy is a battery―when all the parts are connected, working together, and fully charged―literacy can thrive.
Personal Review: The Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers book is a rare and valuable resource that focuses specifically on adolescent readers—an often overlooked age group. It offers strong, practical advice that educators can immediately apply in their classrooms. I was able to read it in an afternoon and came away with several annotated pages of ideas to revisit and implement. I especially appreciated the authors’ use of the battery metaphor, with each step and strategy representing another level of a student’s understanding. If you or your school are seeking an effective, research-based resource to support middle and high school readers, this book is an excellent addition to your professional library.
Book Information and Review
Book Information and Review
Top-rated by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), this bestselling, user-friendly guide to effective reading instruction is solidly grounded in the science of reading.
Combining the best features of an academic text and a practical, hands-on teacher’s guide, the Teaching Reading Sourcebook comprehensively covers the scientific basis and instructional elements of the five essential components of effective reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. To facilitate comprehension and learning, the Sourcebook is organized according to the guiding questions behind explicit instruction (what? why? when? and how?).
The 3rd Edition includes a new section on reading instruction within a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework.
Personal Review: I have found this sourcebook an incredibly user-friendly and practical resource for educators. Its clear organization allows you to quickly access any component and find valuable, research-based strategies for all grade levels. I especially appreciate how the content is laid out by progression and explicit instruction steps, making it easy to apply in real classroom settings. As a former high school teacher, I found the sections on fluency and comprehension particularly insightful—not only for secondary students but for supporting readers at every level. This book is truly a “go-to” resource that I would highly recommend to any educator looking to strengthen their reading instruction.
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