Comprehension Strategy Instruction Should be a Spiral

Raise your hand if you’ve ever wondered what exactly your comprehension instruction should look like.

If you’re raising your hand, friend, you are not alone! While it has become more clear over the last several years what our phonics-based instruction should look like, strategies for teaching comprehension and what that looks like have been a little less clear.

Let’s start from the top.

What is comprehension?

Comprehension is the ability to make meaning from information we hear (listening comprehension) or read (reading comprehension). So whether we are listening to information or reading information, we must engage in intention, problem-solving processes in order to comprehend.

What are the necessary components of comprehension instruction?

Comprehension instruction should be explicit and systematic. Let’s break this down!

Explicit Instruction

Research supports explicit teaching of comprehension strategies. The rationale for explicit teaching of comprehension skills is that comprehension can be improved by teaching students to use specific cognitive strategies.

Readers gain these strategies informally to some extent, but explicit or formal instruction in the application of comprehension strategies has been shown to be highly effective in improving understanding.

When we teach comprehension skills explicitly, we demonstrate the strategies for students until they can carry them out independently. In explicit instruction, we share why and when students should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.

First, provide direct explanation of the skill or strategy -

Here you begin by explaining to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy. For example, if we wanted students to focus on answering direct recall questions, we would say something like, “in order to pull important details from text we can focus on the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, and why) we can note each of these 5 Ws on our notebook paper or on a sticky note to help us recall important details.

Next, provide modeling -

At this point, you can model or demonstrate, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using. For example, after explaining the 5 Ws you could show them how they could mark or annotate the text or information you are covering in class.

Then, provide opportunities for guided practice -

Here you can guide and assist students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy. This can happen as part of small group instruction or through guided activities. A few guided activities to consider may include such as -

• “Think, pair, share” where students practice the activity independently and then work with a partner to share what they came up with during their independent time

• “Jigsaw learning” where students work in groups and each student takes part of the activity to complete (for example, one student could find the who, another could find the what, another could find the when, and so on)

• “Gallery walk” where students practice applying the strategy to their own topic or book and share as students walk through the room and learn about other topics

Of course, there are tons of activities that work well to support guided practice but you want to give students the opportunity to practice the skill before they move onto application.

Finally, you want to solidify the application -

At this point, you want students to practice the strategy until they can apply it independently. This requires consistent review throughout the academic year and over the course of their entire education. This brings us to the next point - our instruction should be systematic!

Systematic Instruction

Comprehension strategy instruction should also be systematic in that it begins with simple concepts such as identifying story elements and progressively moves onto more complex concepts such as determining the author’s message. However, comprehension strategies need to be taught in a spiral fashion meaning that the essential strategies are reviewed and practiced each year in school. This is so important for our students as they grow since their texts are changing and evolving with each grade level.

For example, it is important that a student can understand what the main idea of a passage is in first grade. It is equally important that the same student can determine the main idea versus the details in order to establish a theme in a fifth-grade text. Thus, the concept of the main idea must be circled back to, along with all comprehension strategies, as students grow and engage in more complex tasks.

How can I provide explicit and systematic comprehension instruction?

1 - Provide direct instruction in each of the 5 Levels of Comprehension

This is where students will learn to identify important information for direct recall, organize information (sequencing and main idea), make connections (background knowledge, text connections, compare and contrast, cause and effect), make leaps (inferences and predictions), and analyze the text. Click here to learn more about the 5 Levels of Comprehension.

2 - Provide systematic and cumulative instruction across the grade levels

We like to use “Comprehension Companions” to provide ongoing review and application. This approach allows students to systematically review each of the comprehension strategies using any text. By using one resource but applying it to different books and texts, they have the opportunity to systematically review those previously instructed concepts.

You can start by choosing a book, you can either have your entire class work on one book or you can have “book clubs” in which different groups of students work on different books provided at their reading ability level.

Students can have different jobs including:

• Word Finder (find words with a specific pattern)

• Definer (practice finding words to define)

• Recaller (practice finding key details in the text)

• Organizer (practice sequencing and finding the main idea in the text)

• Connector (practice making different kinds of text connections)

• Leaper (practice making inferences and predictions)

• Analyzer (practice thinking through and analyzing the text)

• Discussion Leader (think of questions that will make the class or group think)

You can use these same activities/packets each week so that students really solidify and apply the skills they’ve learned!

To grab the Comprehension Companions or learn more about activities that you can implement to provide systematic instruction for comprehension and the other core components of literacy, check out the 5CCL Activity Library using the link below!