Kelly Cartwright
To the Classroom: Episode 1
February 20, 2023
Today’s guest is Dr. Kelly Cartwright. We’ll talk about her invaluable work around executive skills and reading, and the ways that executive skills undergird reading engagement and comprehension. We’ll also discuss her 2021 paper with Dr. Nell Duke titled “The Science of Reading Progresses” about The Active View of Reading framework, which incorporates current research on executive skills and explains critical “bridging processes” connecting word reading and language comprehension, which are critical for successful reading. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Darren Victory and Lainie Powell for a conversation about practical takeaways.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Dr. Cartwright, welcome.
Kelly Cartwright:
Hi. Thanks. I'm so excited to be here.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Well, I am obsessed with your research around executive functioning skills and the ways readers' executive functioning skills impact their engagement and motivation. And I loved your first edition of the book on this topic, and I'm so excited to read the new one that I know is out this month. For listeners who haven't yet read your work around this particular topic, can you give us a brief definition and maybe some examples of what you mean when you say executive functioning skills?
Kelly Cartwright:
Absolutely. I'm so excited to get to talk with you today about these important skills because I think we don't know about them, but we expect students to have them. And so in a nutshell, executive function skills, and people call them executive control skills or simply executive skills for short.
They're mental skills that help us manage complex tasks so that we can achieve goals. And there are three core or basic executive skills that are thought to be sort of like the little Legos, the building blocks for more complex self-regulatory skills like planning and monitoring and strategy use, which I know are central to your work, having had a sneak peek at your new book that's on its way out any day now. But those three core executive skills are called working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibition or inhibitory control. Some people call it self-control. And these are important for just about everything that we do. Even consider shopping at the supermarket, you need to hold things in mind while you're making your way through the store. And we usually use a concrete tool, like a list to help us with that. And in fact, we often use concrete tools to support our executive skills.
But as you make your way through the supermarket, got the stuff in mind that you want, and then you're flexibly shifting your attention between the shelves and your list, and then you're inhibiting your impulses to buy Oreos on the end cap and something of that nature.
So all those things, the working memory, holding stuff in your head, the flexible shifting and the stopping and thinking and trying to resist distractions, those are executive skills and they're also super important for reading and beginning and struggling readers need to be able to, say, hold strings of sounds in mind as they're using their phonics knowledge to decode print and come up with pronounceable known words. I'm likewise, more advanced readers with strong decoding processes still have to recruit their working memory to hold meaning in mind as we make our way through a text and we update that meaning as we encounter new information, sometimes we have to revise what we thought and continue on. And we do these things as expert readers. We do these things really flexibly,
And we've got to inhibit attention to things that don't help us make meaning from text, whether it's a distracting peer next to us or an irrelevant word meaning or connection to text. But importantly, one of the, I know I talk for a long time about executive skills because I get excited about them, but I think for us as educators, what's really important about these skills is that they are at the heart of self-regulation. And that has been a primary goal for us as educators for decades. We want to create independent self-regulated learners and developmentally from I'm, I'm a psychologist by trade, a developmental psychologist. I study how we grow and change, and I use my psychology knowledge to study reading. So developmentally as we grow, those executive skills appear before strategy use and they provide the cognitive foundation for higher level self-regulation processes. So you can think of it this way, students who are better at managing their time on tasks, monitoring, understanding, who approach reading strategically, those are the students with the stronger executive skills. But because they're invisible, we don't always realize they're there.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I wonder if people are wondering, as I did, the directionality involved with executive skills and comprehension. Does it seem like from the research that kids just naturally have these skills and then therefore they're set up to be stronger readers? Or that being a stronger reader helps you to have better skills, executive skills? What's the relationship there between the two?
Kelly Cartwright:
That is a really, really great question. And I, looking at the research, there's more evidence, not that the evidence is not there, and this is a relatively new research area, so we have to keep in mind that science is not something that's settled. It's something that continuously evolves and we get more findings. So to date, there's more findings to indicate that executive skills undergird strong reading skills, both word reading and reading comprehension. But recently, some folks have gotten interested in this exact question and have looked at whether there's a reciprocal relation there. Carol Connor and her colleagues, for example, recently had a 2021 piece that showed that there are reciprocal effects of those self-regulatory executive function skills and reading comprehension between first and second grade. So the ones who had better reading comprehension in first grade, that reading comprehension contributed to their later self-regulatory skills and vice versa. So it creates sort of a cycle, and it makes sense to me because it, and I think as educators, when you think about what's happening in a classroom or even with us as we are reading books, we are practicing holding things in our working memory, we're flexibly shifting our attention, attention among many print features and many processes we're inhibiting attention to many relevant things. And just like with any skill, practice strengthens executive skills. So I find these new findings fascinating. There's a lot more that we need to know about how this plays out in a classroom context, but there are so many ways we could go with this. I mean, children who come in with low executive skills than are set up to not read as well, but then if they're not reading as well, their executive skills don't grow as much as they should. And it becomes a vicious cycle instead of a constructive cycle. And we would rather it be a constructive cycle.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Let's shift a little bit now to talk about goal setting and having kids focus on goals, whether they should be in charge of deciding on those goals, what it looks like to work toward goals over time in reading as it relates to executive skills, which is something I know you write a lot about.
Kelly Cartwright:
When we think about goal setting, it's really a component of making a plan to understand a text. And we know from the research that a good comprehender is one who approaches a text with a purpose, with a plan for understanding that text, and they know what things they need to do to be able to reach that goal. And all of that is managed by those executive function skills. You can't hold a goal in mind without working memory. You can't stay focused on that goal without inhibiting attention to other things. You can't flexibly check to make sure you're making progress if you don't have that mental flexibility, those kinds of executive skills underlie planning.
In terms of being engaged, you talked about engaged readers and reading engagement, engaged readers are planful because they do read for particular purposes. In some ways, I think making a plan and setting a goal or a reflection of being an engaged reader, a disengaged reader, doing it for a purpose necessarily. And in addition, I think planning and goal setting helps readers to maintain engagement because if you know why you're doing something, you continue to persist toward that goal.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Many are familiar with the importance of decoding and language comprehension and reading because of the often cited Simple View and Scarborough's Rope, however you discuss in your book in the opening chapter that there are students whose reading difficulties can't be explained by either. In other words, they decode well, and if the text was read aloud to them, they'd understand it. But you talk about what might explain their difficulties as being, again, back to executive skills. Can you talk a little bit about the research around this particular subset of children with reading difficulties?
Kelly Cartwright:
I think what the Simple View doesn't highlight as clearly for practitioners is that effective reading involves more than just being able to decode and being able to comprehend the language that we've decoded. These independent processes are vital, but even if you can do them when they're assessed independently, that doesn't mean that a child can coordinate them and can integrate them skillfully while engaged in a text. I may be able to decode well all by itself, and I may be able to comprehend if somebody's reading to me, but if you're asking me to put them all together—sort of like juggling—that's more difficult. And I often like to go back as a very concrete example to that childhood game we used to play where we would try to pat our head and rub our stomach at the same time, and I can pat my head all day doing very well. If I'm doing only that. And the same thing with rubbing my stomach, I can do that by itself just fine. But when I, I put them together, or when I try to do both of these independent things at the same time, it requires this weird third coordination ability that is not just a matter of adding these two skills together.
And what we have seen in decades of research is that students with this profile, the ones who've got great decoding skills, but poor, comparably, poor, surprisingly poor reading comprehension, these kids have deficits in executive skills. They may also this over, they overlap with kids with developmental language disorder. They may have language processing difficulties but there are kids who do process language well and still have those executive executive function difficulties. They consistently emerge with problems in planning, problems in working memory, problems in inhibition, problems in cognitive flexibility.
But I just want to make sure that your listeners realize as well that executive skill difficulties are also evident in students with dyslexia or with word reading difficulties. And we see, I'm going to do a little neuroscience commercial here and just add this bit in. Research, and neuroscience tells us that our reading network in the brain, that we as educators get to help build—such a cool job—that reading network helps us to link up print with the phonological information and the meaningful information. So we have these three hubs: print, meaning, sounds. I'm very, I'm oversimplifying for the sake of this example. And we have to have strong links between all of these for reading to proceed smoothly. And what we know is, or what we're beginning to uncover is that the brain's executive skill networks actually help to facilitate the important links between these hubs and the reading network. But students with reading difficulties, whether it's word reading difficulties like in dyslexia or whether it's those word callers with specific comprehension difficulties, even though they've got great decoding, they have weaker links between the hubs in the reading network and weaker executive skills.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah. Well, I think it's a great segue into the paper you released in 2021 with Nell Duke, where you talk about the Active View of Reading as a framework to help us to see what some of these connecting processes, or you call them bridging processes, look like, and the role of some of the executive skills sort of woven into and kind of laid on top of some of the stuff that we're thinking about with the simple viewer with the rope. For those not familiar, I'll put a link in the show notes to the diagram so you can see it. But if you're just listening and walking your dog or something right now, you can picture a circle on the far left titled Active Self-Regulation. In the center, a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles representing word recognition and language comprehension, and an overlapping area between the two called bridging processes. And then the arrows between the circles indicate the relationship between each of these categories of processes. So I'd love to talk about a couple of these in a little bit more detail. Let's start with active self-regulation, and what's in that circle. What is it, why is it critical to include in a reader model?
Kelly Cartwright:
Skilled readers are active: they manage reading, they're reading in goal-directed ways. And active self-regulation involves a number of things that help readers to manage reading tasks on their own. Keeping in mind that our eventual goal as reading educators is to develop those active independent readers. We're starting by showing them we're working alongside them, but we're gradually releasing them to do things on their own. And first, they need to want to do them and persist and stick with the tasks. And that captures motivation and engagement, whether you're working on decoding, whether you're working on language comprehension or pulling it all together, they've got to want to do it and stick with it. They also need those core mental self-regulatory skills that support and enable reading. That working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control those executive functions. But they also need that how-to knowledge the procedural and strategic knowledge to make reading happen, whether it's decoding and word recognition strategies, knowing that sometimes I need to flex the pronunciation of a vowel because in an open syllable or a closed syllable vowels do different things, or whether I'm needing to implement a comprehension strategy that's strategic knowledge that I need to be implementing as a reader to make reading happen. And together, those active self-regulatory processes, the motivation, engagement, executive skills, strategic knowledge and processes, they undergird and drive word reading, language comprehension, and they help readers to coordinate these processes in the service of reading comprehension.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So if I'm understanding correctly, you're saying undergird and the way that the arrows are flowing, that's on the far left and it's flowing left to right. If you don't have those things in place, the other things are going to be hard, right?
Kelly Cartwright:
Yes. Yes. If you pull out that working memory ability or you pull out that inhibitory controllability, if a child doesn't have that, then their word reading is going to suffer their comprehension. Their language comprehension ability will suffer. And without those executive skills and those self-regulatory skills, without motivation, the other things aren't going to happen as well as they could.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah, that makes sense. So if you think about the middle portion of the visual. That's got word recognition, which includes things like phonological awareness, phonics knowledge, decoding skills, automatic word recognition, and we've got the language comprehension, cultural knowledge, genre knowledge, verbal reasoning. And then you've got this overlapping section in the middle that you're calling bridging processes. How should we think about these bridging processes?
Kelly Cartwright:
I, I'm so glad you asked this because, and I've said this before today, that word reading and language comprehension don't operate independently.
The overlap between them, what researchers call that shared variance, is actually bigger than the independent contributions of decoding and language comprehension alone. So in other words, the overlap or the interaction between these skills is a really important part of reading comprehension too. And it reflects a reader's ability to coordinate them to do them at the same time and the influence of each one on the other.
So I like to take reading fluency as an example, because if you're a fluent reader,it's reading that sounds like talking. It's meaningful, it's expressive, and it requires active coordination of those word recognition processes and word recognition, accuracy, that word reading side of the simple model. And it also requires management of meaning in order to produce expressive reading that preserves meaning preserves phrase boundaries and puts all the emphasis in the right place. And fluent readers are great, accurate decoders who do attend to all these meaningful pieces all at the same time. So fluency isn't just word reading and it's not just language comprehension.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I love that example of fluency because in some models it seems as though fluency is regarded as a byproduct of these things, rather than having a really active connection between the two which just makes much more sense to me. Within the language comprehension circle, you've added something that is a little bit novel maybe to some, and it's called theory of mind. And I think this is such an important skill to be thinking about, especially as we're supporting kids with understanding stories, fictional texts, narrative texts being able to understand characters and infer about those characters. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is and why it's an important skill in your mind?
Kelly Cartwright:
Absolutely. So it's a strange term theory of mind. What does that even mean? It's a child or a reader's theory about what's going on in people's minds. So that's sort of how to think about it. Another way to think about it is social understanding, and it's the developing understanding of our own and other people's minds. Kids have to learn that minds contain invisible things like thoughts and feelings and intentions and motivations, beliefs, desires, and all of those invisible things cause us to act in particular ways. Theory of mind is essential for making the kinds of social inferences that good readers make on narrative texts,
You're making inferences about why people do what they do. But Jerome Bruner is a researcher whose work focused on many, many other things, these two levels of understanding that he talked about that we need to have for narrative texts.So he talked about the level of action or the landscape of action he called it, and the landscape of consciousness. So the landscape of action is what characters are doing. I can watch Piggy and Gerald doing things all day and describe it to you, but that's only focusing on the action. And when Gerald is embarrassed, because he doesn't want to tell the snake that he can't play ball because the snake doesn't have arms. If you're familiar with this story, I don't understand why. If I don't think about that landscape of consciousness, what's going on inside Gerald's head, I have no idea why he's blushing and he's sweating and so uncomfortable. I don't recognize that even in this very simple text, I don't recognize and comprehend what's going on unless I can enter into and read the mind. I'm putting that in air quotes, read the mind of that character.
And the research shows that elementary students typically only focus on the landscape of action, what the characters are doing without an understanding, or at least without attention to the characters', invisible, mental, emotional, and motivational states that make them do what they do. And that's really what's important for making those social inferences that we need to make for comprehension. And because they're invisible, kids just don't notice them unless we explicitly teach them.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah, I think it's just so important to call that out because I think when a lot of people read the research around the importance of knowledge building and the role that knowledge plays in helping kids to comprehend, they're thinking like science topics, which are also of course important, but not always are we thinking about the social and emotional knowledge that you need to really be able to understand, put yourself in the shoes of the character, like you said, understand their feelings, motivations, why they do what they do, what they're hoping for, all of those things. So I think it's just really helpful to call that out and make sure teachers are paying attention to that.
Kelly Cartwright:
Absolutely. And that just in terms of a very simple knowledge, some of the very early things kids learn are words for these things. If kids come to a text without labels for these emotional states, they don't have that conceptual knowledge. And so just teaching that vocabulary is important. We name frustration, we name embarrassment, we name these things. If they don't have that basic knowledge in their vocabulary, they won't be able to make those inferences either because they don't even have a name for it.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I'd love to hear from you about any sort of practical classroom practices or structures that you've seen that help support kids' executive skills and help some of these bridging processes that you're talking about. What can teachers do in the classroom?
Kelly Cartwright:
So executive skills, we know just like going to the gym, executive skills can be strengthened, but as educators, we need to be mindful that they need to be strengthened in task-specific ways. So having students practice general working memory tasks is not going to support their reading. Putting them on an iPad with a working memory game, it's not going to support their reading as much as scaffolding reading specific tasks that have working memory demands. So students with weak executive skills often need concrete scaffolds, like the list I talked about earlier, that help them to see and visualize and become aware of the thinking necessary to make comprehension happen.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Super helpful. So being mindful that these skills even exist, making really concrete, practical visual, in some cases, scaffolds for kids and explicitly teaching into it and then giving them guided practice with it so they're not just off you go, or not just vague reminders of what to do, but really concrete and specific. I think that's really helpful advice. Dr. Cartwright, thank you so much for joining me today. I've learned so much from our conversation, and I can't wait to get your new edition of the Executive Functioning Skills and Comprehension book. Thank you.
I now welcome my colleagues, Darren Victory and Lanie Powell for a conversation about practical takeaways for the classroom. Darren, Lainie, welcome. What are some of your first thoughts and questions?
Darren Victory:
Hello. Thanks for having me.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Hello. Wasn't that a great conversation?
Darren Victory:
Oh my God. Oh my gosh.
Lanie Powell:
My head's swimming.
Darren Victory:
Swimming. I know, I know. So good.
Lanie Powell:
I'm thinking as I was listening to her, the just critical importance of knowing your kids and meeting with kids one on one. Mm-hmm. Really conferring and especially if you serve readers who struggle to really prioritize that conferring work in your classroom to give them the feedback and the strategies that they need in order to hopefully, eventually orchestrate all of these really sophisticated processes at the same time,
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
What struck, one of the things that struck me was just her advice around intentionality, around teaching these skills specifically, and making sure that we're deliberately identifying that there are students in our class who may need support with these skills.
You have at least a couple in your classroom that really need explicit direct instruction to support executive skills. And like you say, with conferring for guided practice or small groups for guided practice and accountability, checking in with them and seeing how they're going and ongoing feedback to support them. So I thought that message came through really loud and clear.
Darren Victory:
I love her emphasis on how these skills, this learning doesn't happen in isolation and the overlap, the reciprocity that we see between the different areas of reading comprehension. And I, to me, an implication as a teacher when we're thinking about goal setting, planning, organization, cognitive flexibility, working memory, all of that, coupled with foundational skills, comprehension strategies, to me the implication is slow down. We get into this frenetic pace of covering standards, covering the curriculum and I think there's a lot of benefit to just slowing down to thinking about how does this knowledge around executive skills impact number one, how and what I assess, what I'm looking for when I'm conferring, when I'm doing small group, when I'm looking at patterns across my classroom. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I just want to go back to something you just said was standards, covering the standards, because I'm just coming off of doing standards alignments to my strategies book and every single chapter. No problem. Standard alignment. Guess which chapter is not explicitly mentioned in standards?
Lanie Powell:
Engagement,
Darren Victory:
Engagement.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Engagement.
Darren Victory:
Yeah.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
It's all this, it's, it's not in the standards that you should be teaching kids to be goal directed, that they should have purposes for reading, that they should be able to read independently for a long stretch of time, which, hello, if they're not doing that,
Lanie Powell:
Which Kelly's Active View of Reading so nicely illustrates.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
That's right.
Lanie Powell:
That nothing happens without that. Yes. But even to Darren, I'm thinking about that word assessment you used earlier. I don't know that teachers have access to, you know, can quantify things like working memory, but that has to be specifically tested for. I don't know that, how do you access to that kind of data?
Darren Victory:
Well, I know, unless you get, I guess when I say assessment, I mean more of a formative in the moment.
Lanie Powell:
If you have a group of readers for whom your tried and true strategies are not working, you're not seeing growth and you have to roll up your shirtsleeves and say, I'm going to do something different. There you go. Yeah. I'm thinking about the very end of your interview with her where she talked about those concrete scaffolds and making things visual where we have to be really intentional and just maybe assume that maybe there's some sort of executive function issue at play, and how can I help this reader pay attention, attend to the things that I need him or her to attend, to hold on to information longer. So the phrase that Kelly used that I wrote down, or Dr. Cartwright, we're not on a first name basis, was to offer those external supports until they become internal. And I love that because I think that's something that teachers would gravitate towards and are so good at is how do we create some visuals around engagement and self-regulation for readers for whom traditional teaching is just not working.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah. I mean, I did think that the idea of having individualized visual scaffolds for kids, the way we have classroom anchor charts, but having for each student, mm-hmm. Reminders. Whether it's a list or a graphic representation of what they're thinking or a reminder of what their goal is that they're focusing on or sticky notes inside of their books to stop and jot and think as they go that connect back to their goal. Those very concrete tangible things I think are super, super helpful. And I'd love to go back to something you were saying earlier about how do we even know that a student might need support with working memory if we don't have a specific diagnostic assessment for it? And I think back to kids, I've taught that I suspect this was what was going on. And what I noticed was they're kids that read a page and you could talk about the page, no problem. And you say, read the rest of the chapter, and you come back and they have a hard time remembering what they had read first, or I bet they're even kids outside --so that grocery store example was so helpful outside of reading -- you tell them three things to do and they do the last one, but they forget the first two kinds of they remember very short term fine, but longer term, harder.
You're going to stop and chunk that much text, write a word, sketch a picture or something. And if it's on an article or a short story that you've printed, they could just do it right there in the margin. If it's in a book that belongs in your classroom library, maybe they're doing it on a sticky note. And then those notes and sketches or keywords become scaffolds to help them then go back at the end of the chapter to retell the whole thing. And then hopefully she's saying, it fades away now I'm going to try to read two pages and sketch and then the three pages in sketch, and then get work up. Just like you're practicing and building those muscles, you're working up to longer chunks of information to help that working memory.
Darren Victory:
I think that one of the things that strikes me about Dr. Cartwright's work around executive skills, the Active View of Reading, is that it's very reader-centered and brings the reader back into the foreground where I'm really considering what is this reader bringing with them? Does that make sense?
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah.
Lanie Powell:
Absolutely. Yeah. It's more positive, very positive and affirming a lot the tidbits and the practical applications of her research.
Darren Victory:
This undergirding she talked about of skills like active self-regulation, motivation, reader engagement, those are all things that have to do a lot with who the reader is and what they're bringing with them and who are they are right now.
Lanie Powell:
And I love that she, because I think a lot of teachers may hear that and think, well, how do I fix that? How do I fix an unmotivated reader? How do I fix a disengaged reader? And one of the last things that Dr. Cartwright said was, executive functions skills can be strengthened with task specific reading exercises. And I loved that she ended with that message of hope that no, this is something we can do. And that idea you talked about earlier, Jen, of taking these larger tasks and chunking them out, I think serves that purpose.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
And I think how do we make sure we have an eye on that and that we maybe slow down and pause and focus deliberately on it when we know it's not in the standards, yet it undergirds everything. When we know that it may not be in core curriculum that is standards aligned. Because if it's not in the standards, it's not going to be in the core curriculum. And yet if you don't have it, you're not going to get to all the other stuff. So I think it oh, it's such an important message, such an important area of research. I know it's still new, and I appreciate her caveat that it's not settled science, it's always developing.
Darren Victory:
I am not the reader I was pre-pandemic a different...One of your strategies, Jen, from The Reading Strategies Book, I can't remember what it's called, but it's kind of making a goal for yourself. So chunking.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Are you using that yourself as a reader?
Darren Victory:
I use that on a daily basis. I'm like, okay, I'm going to read this many pages. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
But there's a perfect example. You're recognizing you want to be a reader. You want to read, and you're recognizing what's standing in your way right now of being a reader is executive skills. And you're like, I'm going to practice it. I'm going to have a specific way of how to practice it, and I'm going to hold myself accountable for it.
I think it's really an important message for teachers to hear that all readers maybe need this at some point or another, and that it's worth the time to take the time to get this right for their kids.
Lanie Powell:
And the other thing that really struck me that I felt like would be harder, the harder task here is how do we help readers and help teachers, help readers integrate all of this at once? I think teachers, myself we're really good at parsing out some of the things you see in that Active View of Reading. I've pulled it up phonological awareness, alphabetic principle the things that are language structure, text structure, all of that. But being really intentional about connecting those parts of the day for kids. Showing them, and in forcing ourselves to be intentional in connecting the content of those across the day
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I totally agree. So there's times for explicit focused instruction on one particular skill because of the research around cognitive load, which we didn't talk about today, but you don't want to overburden the reader with so much to think about all at once that they're having a hard time doing this one new skill. At the same time, you need orchestration practice and integration practice, or else these things become siloed in the reader's mind and don't actually get applied when they're in a real reading situation. So what are the times of day or the types of lesson structures that you feel like are the best way to set kids up to see, to experience, to practice this orchestration?
Darren Victory:
Yeah, read aloud. I was going to say interactive read aloud
Lanie Powell:
Having a really instructional, intentional read aloud I think is critical. And even too, at the beginning of a whole class lesson, some teachers call it the mini lesson, those tight, explicit whole class moments, we offer a connection of some sort in the beginning, doing that in other parts of your day too. Connecting it.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Remember how over here? Yeah,
Lanie Powell:
Yeah. Look, we're going to remember when we did this before lunch. This is how it connects to vocabulary. This is how it connects to your independent reading, or even in your conferring in your small groups, offering those connections to kids so that they see how the puzzle fits together.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I think shared reading too, right? We've got an enlarged text on an easel, and you're having kids orchestrate, decoding, and fluency, and comprehension on the run, and you're there to support them.
Interactive writing, I know we're talking about reading, but writing and reading are reciprocal processes. There again, you're orchestrating: I have to hear the sounds and I have to put the space between my words and I have to think about what I'm trying to say, what my message is, and I have to go back and I have to read and think about process. There's a lot of structures I think that teachers are already comfortable with that if you think about it through this lens of how and when am I helping kids orchestrate or pull things together? And just being really intentional, but making sure that you're doing that regularly. I think it could be really helpful.
Lanie Powell:
And even in those moments of shared reading, read aloud, interactive writing is another one. I think whatever we can do to slow down, be metacognitive and make that thinking visible, like name it for kids.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Absolutely. That's a great place to stop for today.
Lainie and Darren, thank you so much for joining me. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.
Darren Victory:
Thank you so much.
Lanie Powell:
Thanks, Jen.
About this episode’s guest:
Kelly Cartwright is a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and teacher preparation at Christopher Newport University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in cognitive development, language, and literacy processes and instruction. She mentors and advises undergraduate students in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and teacher preparation; and graduate student pre-service educators. Kelly has provided professional development for teachers across the US and throughout Virginia. Her research focuses on the nature of skilled reading comprehension and the factors that underlie comprehension difficulties from preschool through adulthood in order to find appropriate interventions to serve those who struggle to understand text. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of Research in Reading, Contemporary Educational Psychology, the Journal of Literacy Research, the Journal of Child Language, Early Education and Development, and the Journal of Educational Psychology. Her most recent book, Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension, was published with Guilford in 2015.