CrowdED Topic Two, Week Two: Comprehension Skills and Strategies

Good Morning Jeff and Colleagues!

We are continuing our Build Your Own Toolkit with CrowdED discussion this week with an emphasis on comprehension skills and strategies.  As we build upon our previous discussions with focuses on Evidence Based Reading Instruction (EBRI), using leveled readers to provide instruction, and aligning instruction with standards, we want to discuss what exciting activities are taking place in classrooms and how resources are being used.  Please be sure to continue to contribute to the Comprehension Resources Collaboration document where participants are sharing thoughts and idea about the three resources featured, CommonLit, ReadTheory, and Readworks.

Jeri

Comments

Thank you, Jeri!

During Week 1 of this topic, we explored a selection of freely available resources that are particularly well-suited for providing leveled reading opportunities for students at multiple levels—ReadWorks, CommonLit, and ReadTheory

As Jeri mentioned, we have been using this Group Sharing Document to gather information about each. This document will remain live, and you are encouraged to add what you know so others can learn about and compare the features of each of these resources to better understand which might work best for their learners. It also is helpful because much of the input was provided by educators who currently are using the resources, so there are helpful insights included. 

For Week 2 of this topic, we are now going to shift our attention to strategies for incorporating resources such as these into your curriculum, with a focus on developing comprehension. If desired, you can make a copy of this document to review the information below and to capture your thinking around this topic before contributing your ideas to the community. 

Providing Authentic, Relevant Reading Opportunities

The process of developing learners’ ability to comprehend what they read is informed by a number of factors. These factors influence 1) the content and structure of texts we select; 2) the skills and strategies we promote to students before, during, and after reading the texts; and 3) the levels of the texts such that they are accessible to the learner based on his or her reading level. The following resources from LINCS can provide guidance related to all these factors:

  • Adult Learning Theory | When considering reading opportunities for adult learners, we should be certain to provide relevant texts for which learners can see value in the information and/or for which learners can relate to and draw from their own personal experiences. LINCS provides this great overview of Adult Learning Theories

  • Evidence-based Reading Instruction | Comprehension is one of the four components of evidence-based reading instruction. Although these components are integrated and each should be developed as often as possible (as is relevant) with each learner engagement with text, comprehension is the end goal of reading. LINCS provides this guide, Comprehension Research and Teaching Strategies, which includes research along with assessment and instructional strategies for developing comprehension skills.

  • College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education | In addition to developing comprehension skills and strategies, we also must provide texts at the appropriate levels of complexity that both challenge and accommodate developing readers. The CCRS include guidelines (Reading anchor standard 10, page 21) for appropriate text complexity at each level. The full standards can be accessed on LINCS.

Developing Skills Along with Leveled Reading Opportunities

As noted during your exploration, CrowdED Learning has developed alignments for two of the three resources that were explored last week—ReadWorks and CommonLit. These are intended to provide guidance to instructors to find readings at the appropriate levels and, to some extent, the domains that are most prominently touched upon within the text and corresponding assessments. 

CCRS Domain 

Reading Anchor Standards

Key Idea and Details

  R1, R2, R3

Craft and Structure

  R4, R5, R6

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

  R7, R8, R9

CrowdED Learning has not provided such alignments/filters for ReadTheory as this program is personalized based on learner levels. Because of this, the readings that learners engage with is based on performance to that point and constantly adjusts based on ongoing performance.

Discussion Questions

The core concept we are discussing this week is how you might use resources such as ReadWorks, ReadTheory, and CommonLit to provide adequate reading practice to strengthen development of comprehension skills & strategies. Use these questions to guide your thinking. 

  • What methods and resources do you currently use to teach and model reading comprehension skills and strategies? If you work with learners at mixed levels, how do you provide differentiation (both related to skills and strategies and complexity of texts)? 
  • How do you assess learner comprehension of what they are reading? What specific skills do you assess? How do you monitor learner mastery of the CCRS reading standards within the domains of Key Idea and Details, Craft and Structure, and Integration of Knowledge and Ideas?
  • Considering your current methods for developing comprehension and the resources we have been exploring, what are some ideas you have for how you would integrate these free reading resources into your current instruction? If you already use one or more of these resources, what are your strategies for integrating them into your instruction?
That last question is pretty key! As you share—particularly if you use one of these three resources—you are encouraged to provide details regarding what features you believe would be (or are) particularly helpful for teaching, developing, practicing, and assessing comprehension skills and strategies. I'll do my best as the conversation ensues to share what I know as well!

In your recent post, Jeff, you asked us to "provide details regarding what features you believe would be (or are) particularly helpful for teaching, developing, practicing, and assessing comprehension skills and strategies." I use CommonLit in my HSE Prep class, which is multi-level, multi-subject. CommonLit is useful for lots of reasons, not least of which is I often don't have enough textbooks to go around, so the online resource is helpful.

Many students request extra work to do at home, so I assign level-appropriate CommonLit readings for them to complete outside of class. This is in addition to the class-wide CommonLit readings and question sets I assign that we then discuss as a class. I like this feature - that I can assign specific texts to specific students at their grade level OR assign texts to the whole class. I can even set different due dates for these.

The other feature I really like is the assignment report that shows me data on all student responses, plus whole-class data indicating highest scores, overall percent correct, etc. There's even a chart that breaks down by question who got it correct. That chart includes the standard code for each question, so at a glance, I can see which standards/skills the majority of my class is struggling to grasp. On a recent assigned text, everyone in the class missed Question #1, marked as RL.3, so I could pinpoint the skill they needed to review. 

Because CommonLit has a variety of primary source texts in Science and Social Studies (and there is a search feature allowing you to identify these easily), I regularly integrate texts from this source into other lessons all the time, as supplemental readings. 

I look forward to hearing how others are using these resources! 

 

Anita,

Thank you so much for your thorough response!!! This is absolutely perfect! I'm going to take some of the things you shared in here and add them to the collaborative doc (if you have not already done so.)

I like how all three of these resources provides some degree of evaluating student performance against the standards. For example, with ReadTheory—which is completely individualized and student readings are based on previous performance—learners and instructors can see a graph that shows student performance against the three CCRS Reading Domains—Key Idea + Details, Craft + Structure, and Integration of Knowledge + Ideas. 

This is so helpful for pinpointing areas where learners need additional instruction and support. Here’s a sample graph from ReadWorks, where I intentionally had incorrectly answered two questions:  

I have two quick questions related to your response just so I have a clear sense of how students are engaging with CommonLit:

  1. Do you ever allow students to select the texts/topics they want to do independently? (Is that even an option?)
  2. Do you know HOW students are accessing the readings? Are they accessing on a computer or on a mobile-device? Or, do they ever request for printed versions and then answer the questions when they are in class and have access to a computer? Just hoping to provide guidance to others on the logistics around differentiation and access :)

Thanks again for the great share!!! Would love to hear how others are using CommonLIt, ReadWorks, or ReadTheory as part of their reading curriculum!

Hi Jeff!

My students at this point are not allowed to choose their own texts, because I am assigning them to make sure the reading levels are appropriate. 

As for how they are accessing the texts, they are using computers in the classroom primarily, though a few times I have printed the text to send home and then have them do the questions when they have computer access. I don't know of anyone who has used a mobile device to date. We have discussed how using CommonLit on computer is simulating how they will read texts and answer questions on a computer for their HSE test, so it's good practice!