How Should We Plan Reading Comprehension Lessons?

Tim Shanahan

Teacher Question

As my teachers continue learning together about text-centered planning, I would love your help with a quick reflection. When you sit down to plan a unit:

1. How do you decide which comprehension standards the anchor text naturally requires?
2. What steps do you take to analyze the text before identifying standards?
3. How does the text guide the sequence of lessons and questions?

Shanahan Responds:

I’ll answer your questions.

But before I do, let me try to fend off some of the defensive comments my response is sure to elicit.

First, yes, I understand that teachers are busy and can’t design every lesson themselves in depth. No, I am not out of touch with reality, I’m aware there are only so many hours in a day, and that teachers have lives not just jobs. Got it.

However, if you are going to design comprehension lessons, or even just adjust textbooks to your students’ needs (which is what I recommend), you need to understand how to build such lessons from scratch. Try this with a few selections, and then home in on portions of it with future lessons.

With practice, it gets easier.

The best way to ease the pain and vouchsafe quality, try doing this with a colleague or two. You can even use those textbook lessons – comparing their version to yours. You’ll end up with a deeper understanding of the support such lessons provide, as well as their weak spots – where you need to focus your efforts to ensure maximum learning.

Second, no, there is not research showing the best way to design lessons. I’ve reviewed the research on lesson planning, and it is mainly descriptive – summing up what teachers do, rather than evaluating the outcomes of the various approaches.

Relevant research is cited throughout this piece, but none has undergone the kind of causal, experimental analysis that I would prefer.

The lack of such study matters. Often professors discourage teachers and prospective teachers from relying on textbooks lessons, disdainfully treating that as a lack of creativity, dedication, caring, or even intelligence. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but without any evidence those efforts to discourage textbook use seem dopey to me (an insight I gained as director of reading in Chicago – not from my stints as a textbook writer).

The guidance offered here is not meant to supplant those textbook lessons, but to strengthen how well teachers use them. Personal experience tells me that mindless fidelity does as much as harm as good. Research shows that often when teachers stray from those lesson plans, there is a tendency to lower the textbook demands, which does not serve students well (Brown, 2012). My hope is that the guidance here will help teachers to strengthen, rather than weaken, the textbook plans. 

Here goes…

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