Reading Beyond the Basics by Solution Tree

Key Routines for Engaging, Research-Informed Instruction in Grades 2–6

READING the BASICSBeyond

Catlin Goodrow

Materials appearing here are copyrighted. With one exception, all rights are reserved. Readers may reproduce only those pages marked “Reproducible.” Otherwise, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of the publisher. This book, in whole or in part, may not be included in a large language model, used to train AI, or uploaded into any AI system.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goodrow, Catlin, author.

Title: Reading beyond the basics : key routines for engaging, research-informed instruction in grades 2-6 / Catlin Goodrow.

Description: Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2026] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025007968 (print) | LCCN 2025007969 (ebook) | ISBN 9781962188210 (paperback) | ISBN 9781962188227 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Reading (Elementary) | Education, Elementary--Research. | Active learning. | Effective teaching.

Classification: LCC LB1573 .G576 2026 (print) | LCC LB1573 (ebook) | DDC 372.4--dc23/eng/20250605

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025007968

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025007969

Solution Tree

Cameron L. Rains, CEO

Edmund M. Ackerman, President

Solution Tree Press

Publisher: Kendra Slayton

Associate Publisher: Todd Brakke

Acquisitions Director: Hilary Goff

Editorial Director: Laurel Hecker

Art Director: Rian Anderson

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Content Development Specialist: Amy Rubenstein

Associate Editor: Elijah Oates

Editorial Assistant: Madison Chartier

This book is dedicated to my mom and dad, Frances and Larry Goodrow, who raised me to be a reader.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, this book would not exist without all the amazing teachers, coaches, and students I’ve had the opportunity to work with, observe, and teach throughout the United States. Each of them has contributed to the experiences that led to this book.

This book also would not exist without the incredibly supportive efforts of my acquisitions editor, Hilary Goff. Hilary saw the potential in my internet musings and helped me shape them into the book you are now holding. Along the way, Hilary maintained the importance of our older elementary readers and providing practical tools for their teachers. Thanks also to senior production editor Sue Kraszewski and the rest of the team at Solution Tree for their support in bringing this book to life.

I’d especially like to thank the teachers who contributed their wisdom directly to this book: Abby Boruff, Sean Morrissey, Elana Gordon, Mariela Rubio Mensik, Amy Bonanno, and Nicole Peterson. While I haven’t had the opportunity to meet all of you in person, you’ve been so generous in sharing your insights with me. I look forward to our continued collaboration over space and time—if reading is a sort of telepathy, then so is social media.

In addition, my science-of-reading group chat buddies have pushed my thinking and been willing to debate the finer points of effect sizes and advocate for all readers. Thanks to Callie Lowenstein, Nathaniel Hansford, Michele Caracappa, Kate Peeples, Kate Winn, Margaret Goldberg, Tisha Rajendra, Elizabeth Reenstra, and Kata Solow.

Thanks also to my family, who are my biggest cheerleaders—Dad, Peggy, Ana, Oliver, Scott, Henry, Claire, and my extended family—but especially my mom, who let my cleaning chores slide and put up with my weird schedule as I finished this manuscript. I also owe a shout-out to Kelly McCord Millner, Keith Millner, Darcy Dycha, Waynel Sexton, and the rest of the crew at the Texas Reading First Initiative, who traveled with me in the early days of my reading research journey.

Finally, thank you, the reader, for all the work you do for our students, for your dedication to learning and growth, and for creating communities of shared wisdom and empathy. I hope I can visit more of your classrooms in the future.

Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:

Janet Gilbert

Principal

Deer Valley Unified School District

Phoenix, Arizona

Shauna Koopmans

Instructor, School of Arts and Education

Red Deer Polytechnic

Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

Erin Kruckenberg

Fifth Grade Teacher

Jefferson Elementary School

Harvard, Illinois

Kathy Perez

Professor Emerita, Education St. Mary’s College Moraga, California

Merary Ramirez

Third Grade Teacher

Spradling Elementary School Fort Smith, Arkansas Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in

PART III: Conditions for Learning

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catlin Goodrow is an intervention teacher and instructional coach at the Spokane International Academy in Spokane, Washington. Previously, she worked as a first- and second-grade teacher in Houston, Texas, and as designer of professional development for teachers, instructional coaches, and other instructional leaders. As a statewide coordinator for the Texas Reading First Initiative and a designer for Teach for America, Goodrow had the privilege of observing classrooms across the United States, developing her vision for high-quality instruction. This vision is centered on building literate communities, culturally responsive and research-informed education, and support for educators in developing their practice.

Goodrow has presented throughout the United States on topics ranging from reading comprehension instruction; instructional vision for leaders; and explicit, systematic instruction. She has also written curriculum for students as young as preK and up to eighth grade, designing clear and coherent lessons that put research principles into the hands of teachers.

Goodrow received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Whitworth University and a master’s degree in teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education.

To learn more about Catlin Goodrow, visit www.evidentlyreading.com or follow @EvidentlyR on Bluesky, Threads, or X.

To book Catlin Goodrow for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.

Introduction AN ORIGIN STORY

Origin stories are all around us—in comic books, history, movies, and TV shows. These stories tell us how individuals become who they are. Some of the most iconic stories come from superhero tales. Peter Parker was just an ordinary teen until he was bitten by a radioactive spider and acquired its powers (Lee, 1962). In Patty Jenkins’s (2017) film Wonder Woman, the Amazon princess, Diana, lives contentedly on an island, hidden from the wider world, until she learns that the rest of the globe is embroiled in World War I. She feels compelled to leave the safety of home and help Earth’s citizens. In these stories, there is a before and an after. In the after, characters understand new knowledge and can’t go back to the way things were before.

While they may not involve gaining superpowers and saving the world, we have origin stories too. If you’re reading this book, it’s possible you have an origin story about how you came to be a teacher or why you are passionate about literacy. For many teachers of reading, their origin stories explain how they realized they needed to know much more about instruction to truly reach all their students.

I have such a story. My transformation began in a hot, cluttered summer-school classroom as a student looked up at me, waiting for me to tell her the word on the page in front of her.

That summer, in the early 2000s, I had just finished my first year as a classroom teacher. My home school didn’t need summer-school staff, so I’d transferred to a different campus for the six weeks of summer classes.

During the academic year, I’d taught first grade just a few miles away from where I taught summer school, and both campuses had similar populations: a large percentage of students who qualified for free and reduced-price lunches in historic Latino neighborhoods

in Houston, Texas. However, I was going to learn that the two campuses had different approaches to teaching reading.

Like many new teachers, I hadn’t had much training in teaching reading. However, I had been taught a few things in my teacher preparation experience and pre-service classroom observations: Students should spend a lot of time reading “at their levels,” we should spend time in small groups reading more little books “at their levels,” and I could teach students about letters and sounds by infusing instruction into morning messages where I left letters out of the message and the students shouted out which letters I had “forgotten.” I remember reading about phonics, but I didn’t really know how to teach it.

All this emphasis on independent reading warmed the cockles of my hippie-girl heart. I had fond childhood memories of curling up in our rocking chair with a book about pioneer kids, while deer frolicked out on the misty lawn (as well as the occasional bear or wild turkey in my rural childhood). What I had learned about teaching reading reminded me of my reading life as a child. If it was good enough for me, I thought, surely my students would benefit from it.

However, when I got to my home campus to start that first year of teaching, I came down to reality. I would be teaching with a highly structured program in letter-sound correspondence, along with a standard basal reader for teaching vocabulary and comprehension skills. Our diagnostic assessment did not even communicate a reading “level.” I was flummoxed. This was nothing like what I had learned was best practice for young readers during my teacher preparation courses.

Even as my mentor teacher assured me that my first graders would be reading by January, I remained skeptical. This skepticism wasn’t based on any research or knowledge of how students learn to read. The program just didn’t feel like me

Once I got started, I had to admit that the students seemed to enjoy the rapid-fire, explicit phonics lessons, which were accompanied by a puppet lion. (However, the furry puppet was much too hot for the weather in Houston, so he went on vacation to the “puppet hotel” and had so much fun he never came back.)

But me? I found the whole program to be at odds with the practices I’d learned about and my own vision of who I would be as a teacher. I wrangled my schedule to include reading workshop time and used the guided reading methods I’d learned in my training, which included prompting students to use the first letter of a word, along with the picture, to guess words. I told the kids that they were reading, even if they were making up stories to accompany the pictures in a book.

I swore that if I had a choice, I would abandon the structured curriculum, even as my students persisted in learning to read.

Fast-forward to that summer school at another campus—a campus that had not used the structured program I’d been required to teach. I was astonished that, every time they came to a word they didn’t know, my new students simply looked up at me, away from the letters on the page.

“Say the sounds,” I said, a prompt that would have had my own students using their lettersound knowledge to begin blending the word—although my own students hadn’t needed much prompting by the end of the school year.

Even with the prompts, my summer-school students looked at me blankly.

I realized at that moment, my students didn’t know the sounds that letters and letter combinations represent. Therefore, they could not attack unfamiliar words with meaningful strategies. I wasn’t sure exactly what they’d learned during the school year. I only saw the results. In contrast, the explicit and systematic instruction that I had complained about was actually a gift I’d begrudgingly given my students.

My first year of teaching was the before of my origin story, and I’ve been living in the after ever since that summer-school classroom (although with zero superpowers and a lot of constant learning to do). The experience set me on a path of investigating how to be a better reading teacher. When my school became part of the national Reading First initiative two years after I started teaching, I learned about what we then called “scientifically based reading research.” Created by Congress in 2002, Reading First was a program to support schools in using research-informed practices to teach reading. I eventually became a statewide coordinator for the program, and I was immersed in understanding how young children learn to read and how effective instruction is most often explicit and systematic in nature—just like the program I’d taught with my first graders.

Over the years, I’ve worked in professional development, instructional coaching, and curriculum writing, continuing to grow my knowledge of research-informed best practices. I also began working with older students—first teaching second grade, then coaching teachers of upper elementary and middle schoolers. I was faced with a new set of questions applicable to these students.

• Should students spend most of their time reading at their “reading level?”

• Should all students be reading different books?

• Where does word-reading instruction fit once students have the basics?

• Are we building enough background knowledge so students can comprehend texts?

The overarching question driving me was this: What does research tell us about teaching reading to students who have acquired a base of foundational skills? Unfortunately, the answer to this question can be elusive. Much of the discourse about research-informed instruction centers on those very foundational skills that provide a base we can build on. Just as you can’t lay a foundation and say you’ve built a house, you can’t teach phonics and phonemic awareness and say you’ve got a reader. While the full blueprint of researchinformed reading instruction is still being drafted, we can draw some conclusions about best practices from the studies that have been done to date. Over the years, I’ve tried to use research and my own experience to answer the question of how to effectively teach older readers once they have basic foundational skills. The chapters in this book are the current form of my ever-evolving answer to that question.

What This Book Is and What It Is Not

While writing this book, I was a reading interventionist and literacy coach for students in grades 3–5 at a small charter school in Washington state. In this book, you’ll find strategies that I—and other teachers—have learned, adapted, and developed from exploring research and using trial and error to figure out how to use that research in the classroom. I’m not a scientist, a professor, or an administrator. I’m a teacher who tries to stay on top of new research, who collaborates with other teachers, and who asks students what works for them.

The strategies in the following pages are specifically geared to elementary students who have a grounding in basic foundational skills—students who are reading at or above a second-grade reading level. Many of these strategies might also be useful, with some adaptations, with other students. Whenever possible, I share examples of practice from grades 2–6 classrooms.

The strategies in this book are aligned with what many currently call the science of reading (SOR). If you were an educator in the early 2000s, you might have known this as scientifically based reading research (SBRR). You may also be familiar with the term structured literacy (SL). All of these acronyms refer to pedagogy that attempts to consider research about what author Louisa Moats describes as “how we learn to read, what goes wrong when students don’t learn, and what kind of instruction is most likely to work the best for the most students” (as cited in Stuart & Fugnitto, 2020).

Throughout this book, I refer to the strategies and practices found here as research informed rather than SOR, SBRR, or SL. I do this for two reasons (aside from the obvious desire to retreat from the proliferation of education acronyms).

1. These terms have become charged through the popular media, people’s experiences with literacy policies, and social media discussions. Because what comes in the following pages might not meet readers’ assumptions about those terms, I will only use them when others use them in a specific way.

2. Scientific research isn’t always clear about what the practical implications might be for an actual classroom. Many of the strategies you’ll read about are ones I’ve adapted through my experiences teaching and coaching. For this reason, I consider them informed by research rather than jumping directly out of the pages of scientific journals.

Finally, this is a book that is specifically about reading instruction and, more specifically, how we read texts with students for comprehension, enjoyment, and to improve their reading abilities. Literacy has many components, and I don’t claim to address all of them. You will, however, find links to other components of literacy throughout the routines and strategies in these pages.

How to Use This Book

This book includes three parts that are designed to take you from research-informed principles to the practicalities of lesson planning and execution before wrapping up with a discussion of the cultural elements that enable growth, joy, and community. It can be read from cover to cover to get a clear throughline from planning to executing instruction. You might also choose to dip into sections that seem relevant to your needs and try a single routine with your students before trying another one. The following sections provide a breakdown of each part.

Part I: Preparing and Planning

In part I, chapter 1 grounds this work in five research-informed principles. These days, educational companies have rebranded many products as “science of reading aligned,” but how do we know if they truly are? How do we know which of our practices we should continue and which we need to shift? Focusing on broad principles rather than programs can help us make these decisions. These principles are as follows.

1. Students should receive explicit and systematic instruction in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, concept knowledge, and comprehension strategy use.

Explicit instruction involves clear explanations and step-by-step teaching that gradually leads students from introduction to and modeling of material, through practice, to independence.

Systematic instruction is carefully sequenced with new concepts and skills that build on each other over time.

2. Background knowledge is a key element of reading comprehension and, therefore, should be built with intention.

3. All students, regardless of reading ability, deserve and benefit from teachersupported access to on-grade-level texts.

4. Effective teachers are responsive to students’ needs, strengths, interests, and cultures.

5. Research-informed practice changes as new research contributes to the field of teaching.

In chapters 2 and 3, we’ll turn our attention to a critical part of reading instruction— selecting and evaluating texts for instruction and analyzing those texts with readers in mind. Whether you have wide latitude to select readings or have a structured program you are required to teach, being intentional about how you prepare to teach a text allows you to put these five research-informed principles to work in the classroom. The Texts Worth Reading Framework is a lens you can use on any text to determine whether it is complex, relevant, and knowledge building for your students.

Part II: Structuring Reading Lessons

In part II, chapters 4 through 6 take you through planning and executing reading lessons, using a before-reading, during-reading, and after-reading structure. You will find key routines (marked with a key icon) in each of these chapters. These simple routines can be applied across texts of all different types. The routines are accompanied by examples of how they have been used in real lessons and how they can be scaffolded so students can use them independently after practice.

In many classrooms, more time is spent preparing to read than actually reading. (I should know; in my early years of teaching, I was the queen of the laborious picture walk, which gave away all the details of a text that would have been delightful for students to uncover on their own.) Chapter 4, “Before Reading,” provides routines that support students in being successful with complex texts while also giving them the responsibility for reading and thinking.

• Key Routine 1: Setting a Purpose for Reading A strong purpose for reading sets students up to comprehend but doesn’t give the text away. (“No spoilers,” as my students like to tell each other.)

• Key Routine 2: Using a Strategic Preview By keeping a preview short, sweet, and strategically focused on what students most need to know to comprehend a text, students can spend most of the lesson at the heart of their work—actually reading.

Chapter 5, “During Reading,” offers routines to support students in checking their own understanding as they move through a complex text.

• Key Routine 3: Decoding Multisyllabic Words As students move beyond foundational skills, they often find it tricky to put their basic phonics knowledge into practice. With a few simple tools, they can attack longer words.

• Key Routine 4: Generating Gist Statements Knowing what is important in a text, and remembering it, can be a challenge for inexperienced readers. The gist routine scaffolds them in finding those main ideas that so many students find elusive.

After students have read a section of text, or an entire text, routines give them the opportunity to make meaning collaboratively with others. Chapter 6, “After Reading,” will suggest three simple, low-preparation activities that can consolidate students’ thinking.

• Key Routine 5: Discussing Sentences and Words Students dive into the meaning of specific sentences and words in a guided discussion that helps them understand the text’s big ideas.

• Key Routine 6: Discussing Student-Generated Questions Students lead the discussion through sharing their questions, selecting peers to answer, and collaborating to build understanding.

• Key Routine 7: Utilizing Text Tracking Using graphic organizers or shared anchor charts allows students and the teacher to share their evolving understanding of a text over time.

Part III: Conditions for Learning

While many of the key routines can be introduced at any point during the year with little preparation, it takes time to build a culture where students (and teachers) are free to experiment, try new things, and make mistakes. Chapter 7, “Classroom Culture for Growing Readers,” includes practical tips for crafting this type of culture, from beginning-of-theyear conversations to celebrations of growth, progress, and milestones (such as finishing a longer text). In the book’s epilogue, you’ll consider how you can continue your own development, persisting through the challenges of implementing new practices or refining those you’ve done many times.

What’s Your Origin Story?

At the beginning of this book’s introduction, I shared the origin story of how I came to spend my career seeking out the most effective ways to help students become better readers. The journey has taken me from my first classroom in Houston, Texas, across the United States; I have visited hundreds of classrooms from Las Vegas to Chicago and from North Carolina to the Rio Grande Valley, right on the border with Mexico. I’ve met teachers who are at various places in their own stories. Some are just beginning to explore researchinformed practices, while others are deeply invested and seek to refine their own skill sets. What brings all these practitioners together, however, is the desire to do the best for the students in front of them every day. Wherever you are in this journey, I invite you to ground yourself in your own story of how you came to read this book. You might ask yourself these questions.

• What do I hope to learn or be able to do after reading this?

• What needs do my students have that might be addressed by new strategies or routines?

• What is the origin of my journey to continuously improve my practice, and how does that story impact how I approach my own learning?

My hope is that, however you answer these questions, you will find strategies in the coming pages that support you and your students in reading texts together in ways that bring joy, energy, and greater skill and achievement.

PART I

PREPARING and PLANNING

Chapter 1 FIVE GUIDING PRINCIPLES

In 2020, like many people, I took up a new pandemic hobby. For me, it was birdwatching. I lived five miles from a national wildlife refuge, and outdoor recreation areas had few health restrictions at the time.

I added a trusty birding app to my phone and ordered myself a pair of binoculars. I read a few reviews before plunking down my (digital) cash on the binoculars, but I didn’t investigate my options too closely. After all, I wasn’t sure if my pandemic hobby would have staying power.

A year later, I was still traipsing across the basalt palisades of Eastern Washington and identifying birds. My starter binoculars were no longer enough for me, though. I was already able to identify the most common and distinct birds. I now needed to be able to discern fine differences in patterns, colorings, and wing shapes.

This time, I did more research and found an article by an ornithologist recommending a pair of binoculars for around $100 that he said were as good as his $2,000 pair. I hurried to order them.

What a change! Everything was brought into sharper focus with my new binoculars. I could now expand the world of creatures that I could identify—glimpsing not just birds but coyotes, ermine, porcupines, and moose. (OK, I didn’t need the binoculars for those guys, but they did help me keep my distance—moose are dangerous when riled!) I could see a freshwater otter toss a fish into its mouth and distinguish between ducks paddling in a large group.

As teachers, we are asked to do so many things and are given so much advice that we often need to sharpen our focus. Research-informed instructional principles are like that

second pair of binoculars—they help us zoom in on what’s important in our planning and instruction.

I rely on five research-informed principles as the lenses through which I view instruction.

1. Students should receive explicit and systematic instruction in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, concept knowledge, and comprehension strategy use.

Explicit instruction involves clear explanations and step-by-step teaching that gradually leads students from introduction to and modeling of material, through practice, to independence.

Systematic instruction is carefully sequenced with new concepts and skills that build on each other over time.

2. Background knowledge is a key element of reading comprehension and, therefore, should be built with intention.

3. All students, regardless of reading ability, deserve and benefit from teachersupported access to on-grade-level texts.

4. Effective teachers are responsive to students’ needs, strengths, interests, and cultures.

5. Research-informed practice changes as new research contributes to the field of teaching.

You may notice that the principles primarily impact different aspects of instruction. Principle 1 is the how of instruction, while Principle 2 and Principle 3 apply to the what of content and texts. Principle 4 and Principle 5 connect to the teacher’s mindset. Figure 1.1 shows how these principles relate to instruction, content, and the teacher’s mindset.

s tudents achieving

These principles have sharpened my teaching. For example, when I first started my role as a reading intervention teacher, I had no materials and little guidance from campus leadership regarding what was expected of me. While such trust is appreciated, I would have been lost without instructional principles to focus me as I put together a system for intervention. While many intervention students are taught using materials at their “reading levels,” my principles grounded me in the need for building students’ background knowledge and

Figure 1.1: Relationship between the five guiding principles.

exposing them to complex texts (including scaffolding so they could read the text themselves once they had a base of foundational skills). I created lessons that included explicit instruction and systematic knowledge building, using simpler texts to provide basic content knowledge and extending our reading into more complex texts as the unit went on.

Grounding my work in research-informed principles also provides me with courage when I’m feeling discouraged or as if things aren’t quite gelling in the classroom. I can return to what our best information tells us about teaching and learning. As Principle 5 explores, this doesn’t mean that what we know is static or unchanging, but it gives us a place to start.

I’ll explain each of these principles in greater depth in the following sections, along with the research that informs them and how you can apply these principles throughout the book.

Principle 1

s tudents should receive explicit and systematic instruction in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, concept knowledge, and comprehension strategy use.

e x plicit instruction involves clear explanations and step-by-step teaching that gradually leads students from introduction to and modeling of material, through practice, to independence.

s y stematic instruction is carefully sequenced with new concepts and skills that build on each other over time.

Perhaps as long as humans have tried to educate children, we have questioned how to do so effectively and efficiently. Should we explicitly teach students new skills and knowledge or set up situations where they can construct skills and knowledge on their own? It would not surprise me if Neolithic parents argued about whether to let little Rocky experiment in creating his own stone tools or if he should be taught specific methods for chipping and sharpening. Novice educators often learn about the history of various thinkers’ views on education—these include Socrates’s questioning methods (Schneider, 2013), Rousseau’s child of nature (Bardina, 2017), and Skinner’s behaviorism (Janak, 2019). Today the dichotomy between more and less adult guidance is summed up in the invocation of the “sage on the stage” (explicit teaching) and the “guide on the side” (constructivist teaching; King, 1993, p. 30).

So, which works best? Well, like most things in education, the answer is that it depends.

It turns out, it matters whether our students are novices or experts in an area—students in elementary school are typically novice readers of challenging, grade-level text (more on challenging text in Principle 3). In an often cited article, educational psychologists Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller (2012) write, “Decades of research clearly demonstrate that for novices (comprising virtually all students), direct, explicit

instruction is more effective and more efficient than partial guidance” (p. 6). Students in grades 2–6—those who are the focus of this book—benefit from instruction in which the teacher is strongly involved in the modeling, pacing, and scaffolding of content. The reason is linked to the cognitive architecture of our brains. Cognitive load theory, which deals with processing novel information, is a useful framework for thinking about explicit instruction. Our working memory—where new information is stored before being solidified in longterm memory—is extremely limited. We can only hold a few chunks of information in working memory; research suggests three to four distinct units can be held at a given time (Cowan, 2014). Our long-term memory, however, has an almost unlimited capacity and can be drawn upon without taxing our working memory (Sweller, van Merriënboer, & Paas, 2019). Therefore, students seem to benefit from instruction during which “cognitive load is . . . managed in such a way that cognitive processing irrelevant to learning is minimised and cognitive processing germane to learning is optimised” (Sweller, van Merriënboer, & Paas, 2019, p. 262).

Scientists theorize that this is particularly true for what researchers have deemed biologically secondary information, which includes reading. Biologically secondary information is content that the culture has determined is important but wasn’t required for survival in the evolutionary environment (Snow, Weadman, & Serry, 2023). Being able to distinguish a hungry tiger from a pet dog—essential for early humans’ survival. Being able to read Wuthering Heights—not essential for early humans’ survival (but possibly essential for dealing with your first big breakup).

Biologically secondary information must usually be taught because the brain hasn’t evolved structures that specifically enable its learning. John Sweller, Jeroen J. G. van Merriënboer, and Fred Paas (2019) identify this as the reason that “despite reading and writing having been invented thousands of years ago, few people learned to read and write until the advent of modern education very recently” (p. 271). It turns out that learning to read and write usually requires explicit instruction, which decreases the need for students to focus their limited working memory on stimuli that aren’t critical to the content being learned.

Many teachers have heard explicit and systematic instruction discussed in the context of phonics, because the Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000) describes effective phonics instruction using these terms. However, explicit instruction is effective in other areas of reading as well. For example, studies show the following.

• Explicit text structure instruction is effective for expository comprehension (Hall-Mills & Marante, 2022).

• Explicit strategy instruction can improve the application of comprehension strategies (Pilonieta, Hathaway, Medina, & Casto, 2019).

• Explicit interventions in decoding and comprehension benefit first- and second-grade readers who are at risk of reading difficulties (Denton, Fletcher, Taylor, Barth, & Vaughn, 2014).

• Explicit instruction in decoding multisyllabic words improves such decoding (Toste, Capin, Williams, Cho, & Vaughn, 2018).

• Explicit instruction improves academic vocabulary for both monolingual English speakers and students learning English; those learning English did not benefit from less explicit instruction in word learning (Gallagher, Taboada Barber, Beck, & Buehl, 2019).

While these examples are only a small glimpse into the studies that show the benefits of explicit instruction, they demonstrate the range of reading content that is effectively taught explicitly and systematically. While studies explore various approaches to explicit instruction, and its components have been described in various ways, it is usually characterized by the following common features (Rosenshine, 2012; Smith, Sáez, & Doabler, 2016; Vaughn & Fletcher, 2021).

• Clear explanations and modeling of content and strategies

• Content that is broken into manageable chunks and intentionally sequenced

• Scaffolds that support students’ initial understanding and are gradually removed as students gain more independence

• Frequent practice opportunities that are monitored by the teacher, who provides real-time feedback and coaching

However, many of the common practices in elementary reading instruction don’t incorporate these features and, thus, don’t adequately account for the implications of our cognitive architecture. For example, consider the typical reading workshop structure. The teacher introduces a strategy or concept during a minilesson, modeling its use in a read-aloud text. Then, students are released to practice independently, finding a text in their book boxes or from the classroom library. The intent is that students will practice the new strategy in their independent reading text.

This structure leaves many aspects of explicit instruction to chance. Assuming that the strategy explanation and modeling are clear in the minilesson, students may still miss out.

• Students may not select a text that provides opportunities to practice the strategy.

• If the teacher does not conference with students during the lesson, students may not get feedback in a timely manner. Practicing without corrective feedback could mean misconceptions are filed away in long-term memory.

• Even though students do have conferences with the teacher, the book may be unfamiliar to the teacher. Any feedback, then, may not scaffold students in improving their use of the strategy.

Unless the teacher has carefully accounted for how each element of explicit, systematic instruction will play out during the lesson, some students may not receive its benefits. But what about student engagement? Many teachers fear that shifting to more explicit instruction and away from balanced literacy or reading workshops will mean students will

be bored by a flurry of worksheets. “Drill-and-kill” practices or one-size-fits-all lessons are not required for instruction to be explicit and systematic, but opportunities to practice are required. Practice can mean many things. For example, a rich discussion of an authentic text can provide opportunities to practice summarizing, asking questions, and synthesizing ideas. In a review of strategies that support learners in integrating new content into longterm memory, researchers Logan Fiorella and Richard E. Mayer (2016) cite research on engaging and interactive practice activities, such as drawing, concept mapping, teaching others, and acting out. All of these can fit into explicit and systematic instruction.

Explicit and systematic instruction also does not require scripted programs or purchased lesson materials, although many states and districts mandate specific programs. Researchers Sharon Vaughn and Jack Fletcher (2021), two of the most well-known proponents of explicit instruction, state that such instruction “does not have to be scripted, manualized, or prescriptive, as long as the lesson plan is organized, and students receive support geared to their individual needs” (p. 5). Explicit, systematic instruction can be just as autonomous and joyful as other approaches while better meeting the needs of novice readers and writers. If you are wondering how you can bring more explicit and systematic instruction into your classroom, you can find examples in the following chapters.

• Chapter 2 (page 33) discusses systematically sequencing texts to build knowledge over time.

• Chapter 3 (page 61) focuses on analyzing texts prior to teaching—a crucial first step in preparing to teach explicitly and systematically.

• Chapters 4 (page 97), 5 (page 123), and 6 (page 157) focus on explicit and systematic routines to use with a variety of texts that aid students in putting their cognitive effort into comprehending those texts.

Want to Learn More About Principle 1?

The following readings provide more information about explicit instruction.

“Putting s tudents on the Path to l earning: The Case for ful ly Guided ins truction” (Clark et al., 2012): This article provides a clear and succinct explanation of the importance of explicit instruction.

“Principles of ins truction: Research-b ased s trategies That a l l Teachers s hould K now” (Rosenshine, 2012): o f ten referred to simply as “Rosenshine’s principles of instruction,” this article accompanied the previous resource in the spring 2012 issue of American Educator . in it, educational psychology researcher b arak Rosenshine lays out concrete principles that teachers can use to make their instruction more explicit.

“ e ig ht Ways to Promote Generative l earning” ( f iorella & Mayer, 2016): This article reviews research on strategies that promote students’ integration of new knowledge into their existing knowledge and describes eight promising strategies.

Principle 2

b ackground knowledge is a key element of reading comprehension and, therefore, should be built with intention.

Early in my teaching career, I learned that I should activate students’ background knowledge prior to a reading lesson. As a novice, I wasn’t entirely sure what this should consist of, so I usually started the lesson by asking something like, “What do you know about [insert topic of the basal story of the week, such as fossils, bats, or school]?”

My students would clamor to volunteer facts and experiences, and with that background knowledge activated, we’d read the day’s selection.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this; although, it wasn’t effective at making the connections that would help my students understand our reading. Sometimes, there were selections for which my students didn’t have a lot of applicable background knowledge. Occasionally, students volunteered information that was incorrect or extraneous to the text we were about to read. In these cases, I wondered if what I was doing helped at all.

A few years later, while researching for a professional development session I was writing on making connections to background knowledge, I came across a study that filled in some of the pieces of my own background knowledge about . . . well, background knowledge.

You may have heard of the study, which is informally known as “the baseball study.” Since I first came across it in 2008, the study has become better known, and the role of background knowledge in comprehension has gained more attention. But when I first stumbled on it, the research was already twenty years old. Researchers Donna R. Recht and Lauren Leslie (1988) first published the results of their ingenious study in the Journal of Educational Psychology. While others had experimented to understand the salience of background knowledge in adults, Recht and Leslie were some of the first to do so with younger readers, specifically seventh and eighth graders. In addition, they did not look only at the impact of background knowledge on comprehension but how it interacted with students’ reading abilities.

The researchers asked students to read a passage about a baseball game and then complete some comprehension and recall tasks. Some of the students knew a lot about baseball

already—the researchers gave students a pretest—and some knew only a little. If comprehension was primarily a function of reading ability or comprehension strategy use, the results would have shown that the higher-ability readers did better than the lower-ability readers, even if they didn’t know much about baseball.

But that’s not what the study found. Students who were in the lower-ability reading group, who also knew a lot about baseball, did almost as well on the comprehension tasks as the higher-ability readers who also knew about baseball. And the higher-ability readers who didn’t know about baseball? Their results looked similar to the lower-ability readers.

The instructional implications seemed clear to the researchers. Recht and Leslie (1988) determine, “In light of the importance of adequate prior knowledge, strategy instruction and the knowledge base should be equally considered in the design of instruction” (p. 19).

In 2008, when I first started telling everyone with the patience to listen about “this really cool study about baseball,” reading instruction still had not adequately taken these findings into account. Because the influential Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) addressed activating prior knowledge rather than building it, the focus remained on activation despite Recht’s and Leslie’s (1998) findings.

Today, more people know about the baseball study and the importance of knowledge for reading comprehension. If background knowledge is essential for comprehension, and not all students have access to opportunities to build academic background knowledge, schools will need to provide it.

Despite the importance of knowledge of the world, the time spent building content knowledge is scant in many classrooms. One study shows that an average of 8.6 percent of the instructional week is spent on social studies in third grade, with 8.8 percent spent on science (Hoyer & Sparks, 2017). In the English language arts (ELA) block itself, we still often see what reading education researchers HyeJin Hwang, Sonia Q. Cabell, and Rachel E. Joyner (2023) dub “traditional ELA instruction,” in which “the content of a previous session [lesson] (e.g., quokka) is often disconnected to that of the following session (e.g., spacecraft), while the sequence of sessions is primarily determined by literacy skill progressions” (p. 166).

Hwang and colleagues (2023) studied a different type of ELA instruction—conducting a meta-analysis on programs that integrated literacy and content teaching. They found that these integrated approaches had positive impacts on vocabulary linked to the topics under study, as well as on reading comprehension. Another large study by research professor David Grissmer and colleagues (2023) also finds positive impacts of building knowledge for students who attended charter schools that had a knowledge-rich curriculum. While the sample of students from low-income communities was small, the study showed promising results in closing gaps in achievement between students from higher- and lower-income communities.

To understand why knowledge has such a powerful impact on students’ abilities to read and understand new content, it’s helpful to think back to the theory of cognitive load, discussed in conjunction with Principle 1. Recall that working memory is severely limited, but information from our long-term memory can be drawn upon in vast quantities. The process

to comprehend a text is better supported when we can integrate new information into that which already exists in long-term memory (Smith, Snow, Serry, & Hammond, 2021).

Background knowledge also supports comprehension in the following ways.

• Allowing readers to “chunk” information (Willingham, 2021): Chunking, or combining elements together into a construct that can be held in working memory, frees up space for other information. For example, consider the following passage: “The bird had a plump, round body, with a pale underside that blended into darker coloring on the head. It hopped in the snow below the bird feeder, collecting seeds that had fallen.” A reader like me, who is an avid birder, can combine all these details into one construct—a dark-eyed junco—thus leaving more room in working memory for other details.

• Helping readers infer from text details (Catts, 2022): Many teachers tell me that teaching inferring is one of the most challenging aspects of their instruction. However, the issue may not be how they are teaching the strategy of making inferences but the background knowledge that students use for a given text situation (Smith et al., 2021). If I read, “It was a bright fall day, and many of the birds had vanished from the pond,” I can infer that they are migrating south for the winter. If I didn’t have knowledge about migratory patterns, I might wonder: Did some catastrophe occur? Is this a fantasy, and the birds were spirited away by magic?

• Facilitating the building of more knowledge (Catts, 2022; Lewis & Strong, 2021; Willingham, 2021): Readers who have an existing schema for a topic can more easily place new information within that schema. Take our birding example. Our avid birder might read about regional differences in dark-eyed juncos—some are pale underneath, others are gray all over, some have pink sides—and expand their conception of what a dark-eyed junco looks like. A reader who did not already have that schema for juncos would have to build a new concept from scratch, which is more effortful.

With these benefits, building knowledge should be a focus for those who seek to improve reading achievement—whether through an integrated program that builds knowledge of social studies and science during the literacy block or by making time for traditional science and social studies instruction. As noted earlier, however, this is often not the case. Social studies and science instruction remain a small part of the instructional week (Hoyer & Sparks, 2017). And as more U.S. states pass SOR laws and mandate curricula (Schwartz, 2022), many approve traditional basal textbooks alongside knowledge-building curricula. These basals are often selected over integrated knowledge-building curricula (Zimmerman, 2023).

Even without a specific knowledge-building literacy curriculum, individual teachers can help students grow their knowledge through making time for social studies and science, creating topic-focused text sets, and using teaching strategies that explicitly build vocabulary.

What About Comprehension Strategy Instruction?

a s more educators have become aware of the power of knowledge in reading comprehension, many have asked if that means we should no longer teach comprehension strategies like summarizing, visualizing, or finding the main idea. i f, as Recht and l e slie (1988) show, knowledge explains much of the variance in comprehension, are strategies worth the time?

The answer is yes! Research shows that teaching comprehension strategies does benefit readers, but that instruction can be relatively brief. onc e students understand how to use a strategy, the benefit of further instruction recedes (Castles, Rastle, & nat ion, 2018).

Researcher Hugh W. Catts (2022) recommends rethinking how we deploy strategy instruction. Rather than focusing a lesson on how to use a specific strategy, he writes:

s trategies are best selected and taught based on their relevance to what is being read and for what purpose. The nature of texts and purposes for reading vary across subject matters, and thus, the strategies that may be most advantageous will vary as well. (p. 31)

We don’t have to choose between strategies or knowledge building. b o th benefit the readers in our classrooms, particularly those students who find reading difficult ( f i lderman, a us tin, b oucher, o ’ d onnel l, & s wanson, 2022).

If you’re interested in making choices that support students’ knowledge building, look in the following chapters.

• Chapter 2 (page 33) provides a framework for selecting texts that include knowledge and vocabulary building.

• Chapter 3 (page 61) focuses on analyzing texts to better understand what knowledge students will build—and which knowledge the text assumes.

• Chapters 4 (page 97), 5 (page 123), and 6 (page 157) include key routines for before and after reading to support students in building their knowledge.

Want to Learn More About Principle 2?

The following articles provide two different views on the impact of background knowledge.

“How Knowledge Helps” (Willingham, 2006): This article has become something of a classic because it clearly explains how background knowledge assists learning—not only during reading but also across many situations.

“Rethinking How to Promote Reading Comprehension” (Catts, 2022): While d aniel T. Willingham’s (2006) article is more general, Catts describes how knowledge specifically supports reading comprehension.

Principle 3

a l l students, regardless of reading ability, deserve and benefit from teacher-supported access to on-grade-level texts.

As a beginning teacher, I spent a lot of time teaching my students to pick out “just right” books, which they kept in gallon zipper bags labeled with their names; reorganizing the classroom library (lovingly assembled from the fifty-cent bin at a used book store) so books were in bins according to reading level; and conferring with individual students about books that I was reading for the first time as they did.

I was going through alternative certification at the time, teaching a first-grade class while taking graduate classes in teaching. My literacy professor assured me that this was the way to create readers: Give kids books they can read easily, along with lots of time to read them. We were told that students would grow the most if they were taught at their instructional level and read independently at their, well, independent level

Different researchers have defined instructional level and independent level differently over the years, but both terms refer to texts that children can already read with a high level of accuracy—generally 95 percent and above for instructional level and 98 to 99 percent and above for independent level (Allington, McCuiston, & Billen, 2015).

The use of less complex text is pervasive: 61 percent of K–2 teachers in a national survey say they use leveled readers (EdWeek Research Center, 2020), and three out of the top five

reading programs encourage leveled reading (Schwartz, 2019). Another survey in grades 3–8 finds that only 17 percent of teachers say they primarily use complete, authentic texts like articles, chapter books, and novels (Sawchuk, 2024). Many more say they use basal readers (reading textbooks), which often use edited text excerpts rather than longer, more complex texts. Although it’s still too early to understand all the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our education system, a study by TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project; 2022) suggests that the use of below-level texts may be more prevalent than it was before the pandemic.

Given the fact that the practice of leveled and lower-complexity reading permeates our education system, we might infer that there is broad research evidence for the practice. Even professors and authors of professional development texts write that they believed the received wisdom regarding the value of leveled text. Researcher and prolific interpreter of reading science, Timothy Shanahan (2020a), was one of them. When he went looking for research supporting the practice of leveling texts, however, he found “research evidence has not been especially supportive of the approach” (p. 15). Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (2014), authors of dozens of books about teaching, also went looking for such research and discovered they “could not find any compelling studies suggesting that leveled texts beyond the primary years resulted in significant gains in achievement” (p. 348).

If the practice was not supported by research, why did we cling to it for so long? Why did reading instructional experts like Shanahan, Fisher (both Reading Hall of Fame members— yes, that’s a thing), and Frey think that reading levels were so critical?

This idea that students should read at independent level (when reading solo) or read at instructional level (when supported) seems to have originated in a 1946 reading textbook by Emmett Betts (Allington et al., 2015; Shanahan, 2020a). Betts’s idea was intuitive enough that his textbook has still been cited in articles in the 2010s (Allington et al., 2015; Strong, Amendum, & Conradi Smith, 2018). Influential leaders in literacy in the 1980s and ’90s, such as Marie Clay, Gay Su Pinnell, Irene Fountas, and Lucy Calkins, promoted the idea that students should spend a great deal of time reading at their independent reading levels (Hanford & Peak, 2022a, 2022b). These were the thinkers who were prominent when I first began teaching.

And there is research that shows more complex texts generally lead to lower comprehension and fluency in the moment (Allington et al., 2015; Amendum, Conradi, & Hiebert, 2018). This seems self-evident: If I read a difficult text on quantum physics, I will understand less of it than if I read a children’s picture book. The problem was the assumption that these easier-to-understand texts were ideal for instruction or led to optimum learning.

Around the start of the twenty-first century, however, researchers began looking into whether it was true that these levels promoted the most learning over time. Studies since 2000 have shown that students can learn as much or more when they read more challenging texts—as long as scaffolding is provided (Brown, Mohr, Wilcox, & Barrett, 2018; Kuhn et al., 2006; Lupo, Tortorelli, Invernizzi, Ryoo, & Strong, 2019; Morgan, Wilcox, & Eldredge, 2000; Stahl & Heubach, 2005).

In all these studies, scaffolding was the key to ensuring that students could read and comprehend texts that, in a balanced literacy paradigm, would have been considered at a “frustrational level.” That scaffolding doesn’t have to be unduly complex, though. In two studies, conducted by Alisa Morgan and colleagues (2000) and Lisa T. Brown and colleagues (2018), the scaffolding entailed reading with another student who was a stronger reader. In Brown and colleagues’ (2018) study, students read with a partner fifteen minutes a day from books at two, three, or four grade levels above their “reading level.” Every group made greater gains than the control, which received the same basal reading instruction and fifteen minutes of independent, self-selected reading time.

While these studies suggest the power that complex texts can have for students, it doesn’t mean that we can never use simpler texts for instruction. Kristin Conradi Smith and Elfrieda H. Hiebert (2022) write that providing a range of reading experiences “depends on attention to text diets—that is, all texts given to students over a school year and across the school years” (p. 9). For students who are still learning to decode, texts with more controlled language and predictable spelling patterns (such as decodable texts) are recommended when students are the ones doing the reading (Shanahan, 2019a).

Once students have basic foundations in place, however, their text diets should include “a broad range of genres, and challenging texts should be incorporated into the curriculum as part of the students’ own reading, not just as read-alouds,” write researchers Melanie R. Kuhn and Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl (2022, p. 29).

Ensuring this access is a matter of equity. In a study of thousands of student work samples, hundreds of lessons, and tens of thousands of in-the-moment student surveys, TNTP (2018) finds that students were working on grade-level content only 17 percent of the time. However, their study offers hope to those who might wonder how learners can engage in content above their “level.” Just providing more grade-level content closed gaps between those below grade level and those on level by seven months of learning, catching up to peers in five years—if strong, grade-level instruction continued.

If you’re ready to meet the challenge of complex text, you can find more information in the following chapters.

• Chapters 2 (page 33) and 3 (page 61) focus on selecting and analyzing complex texts to prepare for instruction.

• Chapters 4 (page 97), 5 (page 123), and 6 (page 157) include scaffolds that can make this text accessible to all learners.

• Chapter 7 (page 205) explores creating a culture in which students can thrive with challenging texts.

Want to Learn More About Principle 3?

The organization T n T P has released two influential reports on the impact of giving students below-level work, one prior to the pandemic and one after.

The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down—and How to Fix It (T n T P, 2018): T n T P reviews a truly massive amount of data about the assignments students are given in school and finds a large number do not meet grade-level standards.

Unlocking Acceleration: How Below Grade-Level Work Is Holding Students Back in Literacy (T n T P, 2022): in this report, T n T P looks at the reading assignments teachers gave prior to the pandemic and those after. i t f inds that students in low-income communities are more likely to get below-grade-level work—even when they show they can be successful at it.

in addition, check out Timothy s hanahan’s (2020a) article “ l imi ting Children to b o oks They Can a lready Read: Why i t R educes Their opp ortunity to l earn.” in it, he traces the history of leveled texts and explains what we know now about how their use impacts learning.

Principle 4

e f fective teachers are responsive to students’ needs, strengths, interests, and cultures.

Like many reading teachers, I’m a bit of a word nerd. OK, I’m a big word nerd, and I love online etymology sites. When I looked up respond, I found it is the sum of two parts: (1) re-, one of the first prefixes many students learn, meaning back or again, and (2) the Latin spondere, which means to pledge or promise (Respond, n.d.).

This, to me, is the perfect encapsulation of what it means to be a responsive teacher. Each time we respond to our students’ unique strengths and needs, or their cultures and communities, we renew our promise to them—that we will support their growth and help them flourish in our classrooms.

In a review of the global state of the teaching profession, researcher Andreas Schleicher (2016) finds that effective teachers show a range of responsive strategies: building relationships with individuals, progress monitoring, providing feedback, and differentiating. He also finds that these educators are “better able to read cues from students” (Schleicher, 2016, p. 26). However, surveyed students across the globe report what Schleicher (2016) terms student-oriented instruction less than a third of the time, meaning that students often find their classrooms unresponsive to their needs.

There are numerous reasons why teachers are not as responsive as they might be. In the United States, these include curriculum mandates and laws limiting how certain subjects can be addressed in classrooms. These reasons may also include inadequate data, time, and training. Even with these constraints, the promise we’ve made to our students requires us to be as effective and responsive as possible. Responsiveness can be described in three different ways.

1. Informal, in-the-moment

2. Planned

3. Embedded in community and context

Informal, In-the-Moment Responsiveness

When a student comes to a word they can’t read automatically and they are trying out different sounds, the teacher is faced with a choice: respond now or wait.

When a student insists—as one of mine did—that “snuggly is not a word,” the teacher has a choice: How in depth will we go, in this moment, to talk about the -ly suffix?

Every day a teacher is faced with such choices, and how we respond and give feedback in the moment can have big implications for students.

Researchers call this type of responsiveness teacher noticing (Bastian, Kaiser, Meyer, Schwarz, & König, 2022; Gibson & Ross, 2016; van Es & Sherin, 2021). While there are different theoretical conceptions of teacher noticing, it can be described as three phases.

1. Perceiving what students are doing and how they are responding

2. Interpreting what is noticed

3. Adapting instruction based on this interpretation (Bastian et al., 2022; van Es & Sherin, 2021)

To go through these phases effectively and efficiently, teachers must be able to discern whether a classroom event merits a response (Reuker & Künzell, 2021). They must also have a deep knowledge of content and pedagogy (Smale-Jacobse, Meijer, Helms-Lorenz, & Maulana, 2019; van Geel et al., 2023). For these reasons, newer teachers may find such in-the-moment responses to be a challenge. With experience, teachers’ responses come to better match the situation and the desired outcomes (Reuker & Künzell, 2021).

However, being reflective can assist teachers in developing the quality of their responses at all stages of their career. According to researchers Sabine Reuker and Stefan Künzell (2021),

teachers can compare the actual outcomes of their responses to what they intended. We can use this reflection to analyze how to respond more constructively next time, but we can also plan our opportunities to respond to students’ needs and strengths.

Planned Responsiveness

Based on data, we can determine how best to meet the needs of individuals, groups of students, or the whole class. We have likely all gotten to the end of a whole-group lesson, looked at students’ work, and found that they were not following where we were trekking. In these moments—whether considering the needs of one student, five, or twenty-five— we carefully plan how to adjust instruction so students can be successful in the next lesson. Often, this means reflecting on the other principles described here, asking the following questions.

• Were my explanations clear and explicit enough?

• Did I scaffold so that students could grapple with a complex text, gradually releasing responsibility and checking that they were ready for more independence?

• Did my students have the requisite background knowledge and vocabulary necessary to take on independence?

In contrast to informal responsiveness, in this case, we spend time making a conscious, specific plan to adjust our instruction: to reteach with more clarity on a subsequent day, to implement certain scaffolds, or to preteach necessary vocabulary and background knowledge.

However, it is critical in this work of differentiation that we don’t view the concept of meeting students where they are as an invitation to lower expectations. Instead, we should view it as a call to scaffold so students are able to engage with challenging content. Annemieke E. Smale-Jacobse and colleagues (2019) write, “Differentiation is a philosophy of teaching rooted in deep respect for students, acknowledgment of their differences, and the drive to help all students thrive” (p. 1). If we simply make content easier rather than more supportive of challenges, students’ ability to thrive is undermined.

Differentiating well requires “that teachers continuously try to obtain a valid picture of the extent to which their students are progressing towards the learning objective(s), and adapt their teaching based on that picture” (van Geel et al., 2023, p. 724). It also means that we are knowledgeable about our students’ lived contexts.

Responsiveness Embedded in Community and Context

Teaching reading is all about making meaning, and as Maggie R. Beneke and colleagues (2023) write, “Children’s meaning making is inherently dependent on the classroom communities, local educational contexts, and institutional power arrangements of which schools are a part” (p. 366).

How I understood a text as a little girl growing up in the North Idaho woods is different from the way my students in Houston, with a school embedded in a historic Mexican American neighborhood, would understand it. It is different from the way my current students— from a diverse array of backgrounds and cultures, including Russian; Ukrainian; Marshall Islander; Afghan; Japanese; El Salvadoran; and rural, urban, and suburban American—will understand a certain text. In fact, even the idea of a text can change from one culture and generation to another. Some cultures rely more on oral texts, while the current generation of students relies on texts in the form of short videos and visuals. Navigating the waters of changing literacies can be a challenge.

Being responsive to the elements of students’ contexts has been conceptualized in several different ways: culturally responsive, culturally relevant, culturally sustaining, and critical pedagogy. While each of these orientations has a slightly different emphasis, they all involve deeply knowing your students, their families, and their communities and how you are positioned in relation to students’ contexts.

While there have been fewer quantitative studies of culturally responsive practices than the other principles discussed in this chapter, the research shows benefits for students’ academic achievement (López, 2016; Peterson, 2014), motivation and views of self-efficacy (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Peterson, 2014), and engagement with challenging content (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Peterson, 2014; Vlach, 2022).

Despite its benefits and its popularity in undergraduate education coursework, cultural responsiveness, in practice, has often been framed in shallow terms. Pedagogical theorist and teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings (2014), who originated the term culturally relevant teaching in the mid-1990s, reflects on her work and its impact, writing, “The fluidity and variety within cultural groups has regularly been lost in discussions and implementations of culturally relevant pedagogy” (p. 77), referring to the ways in which culture is always shifting. Young people in a given culture may have a different experience than elders; for this reason, getting to know our specific students—rather than holding onto generic assumptions about a culture—is critical.

Ladson-Billings (2014) identifies a second way in which culturally relevant teaching could be more impactful than it often is in practice. Her original conception of culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995) includes three facets: (1) academic achievement, (2) cultural competence, and (3) critical consciousness. In looking back over how culturally relevant teaching has been operationalized in schools, she has often seen this third component left out. She wrote that even teachers who incorporate the other two aspects of academic achievement and cultural competence “rarely pushed students to consider critical perspectives on policies and practices that may have direct impact on their lives and communities” (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 78).

While this may be the most challenging way to respond to students’ contextualized experiences—particularly given our polarized political climate—the rewards are great. Regarding teachers who created opportunities for students to critically question the status quo, assistant professor Saba Khan Vlach (2022) explains that these teachers “teach their students that the world is not finished, that it can change for the better, and that they had

agency and could be part of the change” (p. 40). Cultivating this awareness in our students and in ourselves is to truly take our promise to students seriously.

You can read more about Principle 4 in the following chapters.

• Chapter 2 (page 33) provides information about selecting texts that are responsive to students’ interests and cultures.

• Chapters 4 (page 97), 5 (page 123), and 6 (page 157) give examples of how to introduce scaffolds and implement a planned sequence of withdrawing scaffolds to work toward independence that are responsive to students’ needs.

• The epilogue (page 223) considers how to cultivate your own reflective practice to better respond to students’ needs.

Want to Know More About Principle 4?

The following articles explore Gloria l ad son-b i llings’s seminal work.

“ bu t That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” ( l ad son-b i llings, 1995): This classic article outlines the characteristics of those educators who were successful in teaching a f rican a mer ican students.

“Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a .k .a. the Remix” ( l ad son-b i llings, 2014): a lmo st thirty years after her original article, l ad son-b i llings looks back on the impact of her work and how her thinking about culturally relevant teaching has changed.

i f you want to learn more about teacher noticing, the chapter “a d apting Teaching to s tudents’ n eeds: What d o es i t R equire from Teachers?” (van Geel et al., 2023) can be found in the open-access book Effective Teaching Around the World .

Principle 5

Research-informed practice changes as new research contributes to the field of teaching.

Late in 2023, prolific researcher Nell Duke appeared on an episode of the podcast The Literacy View, hosted by Faith Borkowsky and Judy Boksner. The podcast, with its lively

tone, is well-characterized by its tagline: “Real teachers . . . letting loose” (Borkowsky & Boksner, 2023). Duke was responding to an article in which she’d been cited as a researcher who counters the science of reading. This was much to her own confusion as, well, a scientist in the field of reading research. She says on the podcast, “One of the things that should be true of researchers is that they change their mind over time if new evidence comes to pass” (Borkowsky & Boksner, 2023).

This should hold true for research-informed practitioners as well.

One of the hallmarks of science is that it is constantly developing. In my career of more than (cough, cough) two decades in education, I’ve seen some major shifts in what many practitioners understand about how to implement research-informed practices in the classroom.

• From teaching phonological awareness (the awareness of and the ability to manipulate the sounds of language) as an oral-only exercise to an exercise accompanied by letters

• From teaching a broad range of phonological awareness skills in a static sequence to focusing on those skills (phoneme blending and segmenting) that are most critical for decoding and encoding

• From teaching comprehension strategies as generic approaches to be applied to any text to understanding that without background knowledge and vocabulary these strategies have limited effectiveness

• From believing readers will learn more when restricted to “just right” texts to acknowledging the role of complex texts

Granted, not all the research that led to these shifts was conducted recently. For example, the Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) discusses the value of pairing phonological awareness activities with letters. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the impact of background knowledge on comprehension began to be understood in the late 1980s. However, sometimes, research takes time to make its way into the field.

When research does reach the classroom, and districts begin to require changes in units and lessons, teachers often refer to these shifts as pendulum swings. In my experience, some teachers are attracted to this idea because it provides psychological insulation from having to shift their practices. I’ve frequently heard some variation of, “The pendulum will just swing back this way in a few years, so I’m going to close my classroom door and do what I’ve always done.”

Researcher and former teacher Timothy Shanahan (2019c) has written on his blog in response to such statements, referring to the “opportunity cost” of sticking with our preferred methods of teaching: “No teacher can ever know what her kids are missing from staying with the current approach that seems so satisfying.” Shanahan (2019c) goes on to say, “Research is the only tool we have that allows us to determine the kinds of teaching most likely to advantage our students’ learning.”

It can be tricky, however, to know exactly which practices are informed by research. As the SOR movement has progressed, publishers put stickers on their materials that say

“SOR-aligned” without changing the underlying programs at all. How can teachers know which claims are reliable? Consider the following strategies.

• Follow trustworthy interpreters of research on social media: These include Nell K. Duke, Timothy Shanahan, Matthew Burns, Zaretta Hammond, Nathaniel Hansford, Mitchell Brookins, Sonia Cabell, and Jan Hasbrouck. Then, follow the people they follow. You’ll find that researchers don’t always agree, and you’ll learn from the conversations they have with each other.

• Listen to podcasts that host researchers: The Literacy View, cited previously, falls into this category (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-literacy -view/id1614519794). Other podcasts that interview researchers include Pedagogy Non-Grata (https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/pedagogy-non -grata/id1448225801), Melissa & Lori Love Literacy (https://literacypodcast .com), and Reading Road Trip (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast /reading-road-trip/id1691166511). You can find others by Googling the name of a favorite researcher + podcast. (I can’t be the only one nerdy enough to have favorite researchers, can I?)

• Attend webinars: One of the few good results of pandemic life is that there is now a wealth of professional development available online. I attended a webinar with presenters logging on from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Prior to the advent of online meetings, that would never have been possible.

• Read research articles: Many libraries now have online applications that allow cardholders to access research collections. This has made peer-reviewed articles accessible to more people.

By exploring research, we can make considered shifts in our practice—not pendulum swings, but a continuous journey to support our students in increasing their reading achievement.

Throughout this book, you will read about research-informed shifts that myself and others have made to our practice. In the epilogue (page 223), you will read more about reflecting on and shifting your own practice.

Want to Learn More About Principle 5?

There are many books that outline research about teaching and learning. The following are three readable standouts.

Researchers d ougl as f is her, nancy fre y, and John Hattie’s (2016) book Visible Learning for Literacy: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning applies meta-analysis to literacy research to find out which strategies have broad support.

a no ther book that relies on meta-analysis is nathaniel Hansford’s (2024) The Scientific Principles of Teaching: Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research , which includes a chapter on being a reflective practitioner.

Climbing the Ladder of Reading and Writing: Meeting the Needs of ALL Learners, edited by educational consultants nanc y Young and Jan Hasbrouck (2024), includes research about working with a range of readers—including accelerated readers, who often don’t get as much attention. The book also includes suggestions on how to think about research, given that our knowledge of best practices is continually expanding and changing.

Focusing Our Practice: Reflecting on the Five Principles

If you have been teaching reading, it’s likely that some or all of the ideas represented in these principles are familiar to you. You may be guided by these ideas in your own teaching and want to refine your practice. Or you might have heard about some of the research behind these principles and wondered how it could possibly work in your own classroom. The following reflection in figure 1.2 (page 32) is meant to allow you to try on the fancy yet affordable binoculars of research-informed practice and consider how these principles might sharpen your focus on your work, before you read more about how they inform the instructional routines throughout the book.

Reflecting on Research-Informed Principles

Take notes to record your early thoughts about these principles.

Principle How it currently shows up in my work

Principle 1: s tudents should receive explicit and systematic instruction.

Principle 2: b ackground knowledge is a key element of reading comprehension and, therefore, should be built with intention.

Principle 3: a l l students, regardless of reading ability, deserve and benefit from teacher-supported access to on-gradelevel texts.

Principle 4: e f fective teachers are responsive to students’ needs, strengths, interests, and cultures.

Principle 5: Researchinformed practice changes as new research contributes to the field of teaching.

Questions, wonderings, and concerns

Figure 1.2: Reflecting on research-informed principles. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Early thoughts on how I might apply it

“Books about teaching reading to upper elementary students can be overwhelming and complicated. Catlin Goodrow understands the struggle and has crafted a manageable, easy-toread book that makes the task less daunting.”

—Merary Ramirez

Third-Grade Teacher, Spradling Elementary School, Fort Smith, Arkansas

“Educators can integrate the versatile, innovative, and motivating research-informed techniques and strategies in this book into almost any reading program. Goodrow has crafted a welcome addition to any professional library.”

—Kathy Perez

Professor Emerita of Education, Saint Mary’s College of California

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in this book.

Research in literacy instruction offers much support in terms of teaching the fundamentals of reading, but how do teachers nurture continued student progress once those fundamental skills are established? In Reading Beyond the Basics: Key Routines for Engaging, Research-Informed Instruction in Grades 2–6 , literacy coach Catlin Goodrow shares her knowledge and expertise in helping older elementary students flourish from basic reading capability to active engagement with increasingly complex, diverse, vocabulary-rich texts. Incorporating modern research and personal reflection on her own teaching experience, Goodrow offers effective strategies, tools, and templates to foster students’ interest and investment in texts that are purposefully selected to build their reading capacity while expanding their exposure to different kinds of literature. With a reliable lesson structure to engage students before, during, and after reading, teachers, reading specialists, and literacy coaches who read this book will enrich students’ continued literacy development and personal growth.

Readers will:

• Shape literacy instruction around flexible principles instead of prescribed programs of practice

• Analyze and select meaningful texts that both foster literacy skills and encourage personal reflection

• Develop literacy lesson structures that support students before, during, and after reading

• Implement simple reproducible exercises as grounding routines for reading engagement

• Create safe learning environments where students can engage in and explore their reading