Teaching Middle School ELA
Welcome to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, where we are dedicated to helping English Language Arts teachers create dynamic and engaging lessons for their students, while also managing the day-to-day responsibilities that come with being a Middle School ELA teacher.
As educators ourselves, we understand the challenges of finding a work-life balance that allows us to pursue our passion for teaching while also enjoying our personal lives. That's why each Tuesday, hosts Caitlin Mitchell and Jessica Cannata share practical and innovative solutions for managing your workload and staying inspired in your teaching practice.
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If you teach reading and writing to middle schoolers and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in ELA education, then this is the podcast for you! Tune in every week and let us help you make a difference in the lives of your students and in your own teaching career.
Teaching Middle School ELA
Episode 300: Navigating the Science of Reading Part 1: Background Knowledge
On this episode of The Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast, Jessica and Megan kick off a series to help you navigate important concepts in reading comprehension. You'll learn a little about the Science of Reading and how Dr. Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope can help you understand the skills necessary for reading comprehension. Your hosts will guide you through the importance of Background Knowledge as the first skill in Language Comprehension and share strategies to incorporate it effectively into your teaching.
After listening, you'll be able to implement a fun jigsaw activity using infographics. This engaging activity helps students build background by reading and summarizing different texts related to a story's context, then creating a collaborative infographic to visually represent their learning. Tune in for these valuable insights and practical tips to strengthen your students' reading skills and make your instruction more impactful!
Hey there, teachers. We are kicking off a new series with an in-depth look at the science of reading. We're also focusing on the reading rope model. These are two key concepts that can really transform your reading instruction. Now, in this episode, we break down what the science of reading really means and we introduce you to Dr Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope. This is a visual model that highlights the essential skills that are needed for reading. So, in this episode, join us as we explore the first foundational skill, which is background knowledge, and we'll discuss why it's crucial for comprehension. You're going to get practical tips on planning activities to build background knowledge and an engaging jigsaw activity that uses infographics to make this process a whole heck of a lot easier for you and more impactful for your students. All right, let's dive into this episode filled with actionable strategies to strengthen your students' reading skills. Hi there, ela teachers. Caitlin here.
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Speaker 1:Our mission here is simple to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher Digital Planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs, and we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description and in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I'm Jessica and I'm here with Megan and we are kicking off a new series on the podcast that we're actually really, really excited about. So for the next eight episodes, we are going to be talking all about the science of reading and before we dive into that, I really want to acknowledge Pat on our EB team. She's our curriculum writer and she's the one who did all the research for these episodes and she read articles, listened to podcasts and what she came up with for our notes is just so helpful. I feel like I don't know if you felt that reading it, megan, but like seeing the ideas she shared.
Speaker 3:I'm like this is practical and it doesn't seem so daunting Very much and, like you say, just the way she kind of spread these episodes out and the information out, I think it's going to be super digestible and also very actionable for teachers.
Speaker 2:For sure, and I feel like that brings us to the point that, no matter where you teach at this point, chances are pretty good that you've been asked to incorporate the science of reading into your planning and your instruction. And we get so many messages about this from our EB teachers. They're saying, like help, I don't get this, I need to navigate all this stuff, I don't know what to do. It's overwhelming. And that's why we created this series to really walk you through the eight foundational components of reading. And as you start to listen, you may recognize these as the sections of the reading rope. So that's actually where we're going to start. We're going to go over what the science of reading is and how the reading rope fits in. So, basically, the science of reading is not a program and it's not a system. Instead, it's a whole field of research and it's about how people learn to read. And I feel like just even knowing that was eye-opening to me, because when I first, way back when, heard about the science of reading, my initial reaction was like oh God, now what for teachers? Right? What do we have to do now? This is like the next trend. But knowing that that's not what this is. Rather it's just research and likely you're already doing a lot of this in your classroom. It makes it so much more manageable. So the research looks at how our brains process information and what methods work best for teaching people how to read. This research can help teachers use proven techniques to teach reading effectively to all students.
Speaker 2:And that brings us to the reading rope, which was developed by Dr Hollis Scarborough in the 1990s, and it's a really visual model that shows the different skills needed for reading.
Speaker 2:So I want you to picture the rope having two main parts, and one part is language comprehension, and that includes background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge, and then the other part is word recognition, and that includes phonological awareness, decoding and sight recognition, and basically these two main parts are used together and they lead to overall reading comprehension. So if you're having like a hard time visualizing that, we recommend you actually do just like a quick internet search of reading rope and you'll see a really cool visual of how all the sections work together. And you'll see that as students learn to read, these skills come together like the strands of a rope, making their reading stronger and more fluent. And so what this podcast series is going to do is go over in detail these different skills, starting with building background knowledge. So we'll share some tips. We'll share some activities for each skill to really help your students improve their reading.
Speaker 3:Yes, and we should also add that we will be tackling each skill I kind of mentioned this earlier in its own episode, and that's just going to make it easier for you all to digest and take in the information. But these skills, these eight skills, actually do work together as people read. So you're going to see some overlap in the skills, and that's a really good thing. The activities that we will share in this series are based on the principles supported by Dr Scarborough's findings and the research conducted by the National Reading Panel, and the National Reading Panel still, to this day, remains a really relevant source of reading research. Okay, so now that we know kind of background science of reading and the background of the reading rope, let's talk about today's topic, which is background knowledge, and that's really the first skill under language comprehension. So why is background knowledge so important for reading and what should teachers take into consideration before they actually create an activity that helps build background knowledge? Take into consideration before they actually create an activity that helps build background knowledge? So background knowledge is crucial for reading because it helps students make sense of what they are reading. When readers have a good understanding of the topic, they can just better comprehend and connect with the text itself. And so background knowledge really provides this framework that allows students to infer meaning, understand vocabulary and context and then relate new information to what they just already know. And so without solid background knowledge, students may actually struggle to understand the content they're reading, even if they can read the words. And so just imagine that you're a teacher and you're creating a novel unit.
Speaker 3:Here are a few things you could think about to know what kind of background knowledge your students are going to need to really understand and appreciate the book you're teaching. So the first thing is time period. When does the novel take place? What important historical events or social norms from this period should students really know to understand the context of the story? Second thing to think about is setting. Where does the novel take place? What geographical or environmental or societal information about this specific location will help students visualize and relate to the setting itself?
Speaker 3:Third thing is culture. Are there cultural values or customs or traditions in the novel that differ from those that your students have experienced? And then, what cultural knowledge will help students appreciate and understand the characters and their actions and their perspectives? And then, finally, think about themes and ideas of the novel. What are the major themes or major topics explored in the book that might be new or unfamiliar to your students, and then what foundational knowledge or concepts will help them grasp these ideas more deeply.
Speaker 3:So, after you've planned and thought through the background knowledge that your students are going to need, a great place to start with is with some journaling or just some discussion on students' own experiences, and that can just really help them build bridges between their personal lives and the text you're reading. So, for example, if a holiday is important in your story, you can ask students which holidays they celebrate at home and how they celebrate them, and that's just going to kind of activate their thinking, activate their learning for what they're going to read in the text. But beyond that, then this can feel overwhelming because there is a lot to think about. So Jessica is going to give everyone an idea for an engaging activity to help your students build a lot of helpful background knowledge.
Speaker 2:Thanks, megan, and just as you were speaking, it made me reflect back on my early years in the classroom and I did not do this and I like look back at novels that I read with my students and what comes to mind is like but not buddy or Esperanza rising. And I just jumped into the novel and I'm like gosh. I like what I wouldn a teacher at my old school yesterday who's using EB material.
Speaker 3:She's going to teach Amigo Brothers and she was chatting about a personal experience she had with a boxer because of a family connection and I was like how cool to share that with your students. And we literally had this conversation about activating background knowledge. So I think for teachers, don't be afraid to use your own personal experiences too.
Speaker 2:I love that Well, and students love that right, like that's the stuff they remember. Yes, yes, okay. So for that activity that you can take back to your classroom to help activate that background knowledge. Well, if you're part of the EB community, you know we love infographics and infographics are basically really just visual representations of information or data which make information easy to understand at a glance. So these can include pictures, facts, statistics, et cetera. So if you want to see an example of this and you're an EB teacher, if you go to your perspectives in texts resource, you can see a really good example. Otherwise, you know, just do a quick Google search and you'll find a bunch of different infographics.
Speaker 2:Now, before I get to the actual infographic part of the activity, this is what you're going to do with your students. You're going to start with a really simple jigsaw activity. So let's say you have that novel unit you're about to teach. What you'll do before you start reading it is gather three or four texts that share information. You want students to learn to build background for that particular unit. So let's use this example If you're teaching the Watsons, go to Birmingham. You could have a text about the civil rights movement, a text about Birmingham, alabama, a text about the music of the 1960s, maybe even some audio right of music how cool would that be? A text about the great migration, literally anything that relates to this novel. So you gather those texts, those resources and then, if you want to differentiate, that you can make some of those texts at a higher level for your students, or maybe at a lower reading level. You can use AI like ChatGPT to just make it a bit easier or add some hints in the margin. You know whatever you want to do, but of course, if you use ChatGPT, like just fact, check it right, we want to make sure that it's accurate before we give it to our students. So then next you'll put your students in groups of three to four and assign each student one of those texts to read, and after they read, then each student needs to summarize the text verbally to the rest of their group.
Speaker 2:After that happens, they're going to create an infographic together. So you'll want to show them some examples of infographics like the ones you find online, and I think that's just so helpful, because then you're, you know, setting the bar higher for your students. They know the expectations, and then here's where you can offer honestly, like as much support or as little support as you think your students need. So at the very least, you'll probably need to tell them what to include in their infographic. Like, maybe you want them to include a short timeline of the civil rights movement or three important facts about the Great Migration, or a glossary of words that will be helpful before reading that novel. Okay, you could also map out the locations of each part of the infographic for students. You know how some students they just need that structure. Right, you can give them some sentence starters if you really want to guide them along. So hopefully you're seeing how, like you give them the text Now they're communicating with each other, like that's so fun already and now they're creating a really cool visual.
Speaker 3:I love it. I love it, and if you want to challenge the students with this activity, you could even have them look up more information on their own using links that you provide too. So there's gosh so many ways of scaffolding and making kind of extending this activity too. And then finally, at the end of this, you want to have students share their own work. That's such an important reflection piece, I think, and you could use a document camera to do this, or do like a gallery walk where you posted everybody's final kind of projects and then everybody's walking around and viewing them and then talk about what students included in their infographics and why. So this is a great activity for helping students not only acquire background knowledge but then mentally organize it and remember it, for that text they're going to be reading Absolutely, and I think this is a great activity.
Speaker 2:But just know, like this isn't obviously like the only one. You could just as easily show an appropriate YouTube video to your students. It can be a simple two-minute thing or, you know, tell a story to your point earlier, megan, and this just made me think as well for fictional novels. I think there's tons of opportunities for this as well, not necessarily a historical fiction novel, but what came to mind is the Westing Game, and I remember when I first read that with my students. Everyone knows I love that book. But when I first read it again, I just like started the novel with them and we'd read along and then over the years I was like, hmm, there are probably some things that would be helpful for my students to know before we read it. So maybe by year five maybe I would start to show them. Do you know the Abbott and Costello routine of like who's on first?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's so funny and I realized it's referenced in the novel.
Speaker 2:But I realized, gosh, if they could watch that before we start reading, you know four minutes on YouTube they would so much better understand, like the nuances of the story. And then when we get to that scene, they're like oh my gosh, we remember it and it's like we didn't have to stop, take a big break. They had that background knowledge. So I just think, like anything we can do to like spend a few minutes before we read a big text is going to be so beneficial.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I'm even thinking, as you say that um off backgrounds on authors. You know, like Alan Poe, like so many of our resources, start with background on his life and it just helps you understand, like why his writing was sort of morbid. I mean it was his life experience. So it's just so important in understanding text.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's such a good point you bring up and that just made me think again of Edgar Allen Pope. We have that two truths and a lie. That's a great way to build knowledge, right. Just do some quick research, come up with two truths and a lie, see if your students can guess what is the lie of the author of any text. So hopefully you're seeing like there's a bunch of different ways you can help your students build background knowledge. But we hope you give this infographic one to try. And then, of course, we hope you join us in our next episode of this series where we're going to talk all about vocabulary. I know that's like a hot topic with teachers, like we all have to teach it and it's like what's the right way to do it. It's going to be good.
Speaker 1:It is.