There’s a moment I love during reading instruction when students begin talking about a text, and you can almost hear their understanding taking shape. One student notices an important detail. Another makes a connection. Someone goes back to the book to check an idea. And sometimes a student starts to explain something, stops, and realizes they need to rethink it. That is comprehension in action.

Understanding a text is so much more than answering questions after reading. It develops as students read closely, build knowledge, learn new words, connect ideas, talk about their thinking, and return to the text when they need to figure something out. As texts become more complex, students need thoughtful teaching that helps them do more of this work for themselves.

So the question becomes: How can we help students think more deeply about what they read without doing the thinking for them?

Start by Setting Students Up for Success

Before students begin reading, think about what they may need to understand the text. Do they have enough background knowledge to get started? Are there a few important words or concepts that may be unfamiliar? Is there something about the text that would be helpful to preview?

We don’t need to explain everything before students read. In fact, we want to leave plenty for them to discover. But a little thoughtful preparation can help students enter a text ready to make meaning.

Take Nature’s Perfect Partners, an informational text about the fascinating relationships animals and plants form to survive. Students encounter giraffes and oxpeckers, pistol shrimp and goby fish, ants and aphids, plants and their pollinators, and many other examples. As they read, students begin to develop an understanding of symbiosis and the different ways partners provide food, shelter, camouflage, or protection. 

Before reading, I might briefly introduce the big idea and a few words students need to know to understand the text. I don’t want unfamiliar vocabulary to get in the way of understanding, but I also don’t want to do all of the work for them. The goal is to give students just enough to get started.

Give Students Something to Think About as They Read

A clear purpose can help students know where to focus their attention. In Nature’s Perfect Partners, for example, we might ask students to notice how the different partners help one another. As students read about the sloth and algae, they learn that algae get shelter and water by living in the sloth’s fur while the sloth gains camouflage and a possible source of food.

Later, students encounter the pistol shrimp and goby fish. The shrimp builds and maintains a burrow but has poor eyesight. The goby fish watches for predators and warns the shrimp of danger—and in return gets a safe home.

With a purpose in mind, students begin to notice a larger idea that stretches across the text.

Make Your Thinking Visible

Sometimes we ask students to do something—identify important information, retell, compare, infer—without showing them enough of the thinking that goes into doing it. A quick teacher demonstration can make an enormous difference. If I want students to identify key information, I show them how I decide which words or details seem most important. If I want them to notice cause and effect, I model how I connect one event or condition to another. Then I turn the work over to students and listen carefully as they try it themselves.

In the Literacy Footprints lesson for Nature’s Perfect Partners, students identify key words that help them remember and retell important information. As they read, the teacher confers with individuals, helping students identify important words when needed. Students then use their key words to retell portions of the text.

This is where conferring becomes so valuable. Sitting beside a student and listening gives us a window into what that reader is doing. We can notice what the student understands, where their thinking has gone off track, and what small prompt or bit of teaching might help. We teach, and we listen. What we hear helps us decide what to do next.

Give Students a Reason to Reread

I’m a big believer in rereading, but there should be a reason to go back. A second reading gives us an opportunity to ask students to look at a familiar text through a slightly different lens. Because they already know something about the content, they can return to the text to notice relationships, make connections, and think more deeply about the ideas.

That’s exactly what happens with Nature’s Perfect Partners. After students have read for important information and retelling, they return to the text to think more closely about relationships. This time, they generate questions around ideas such as cause and effect and compare and contrast.

Consider the sloth. Students have already learned about its partnership with algae. On a rereading, they might consider a question such as: What causes sloths to have so little energy? To answer, students have to connect ideas within the text: Sloths eat mostly leaves. Those leaves take a long time to digest and provide little energy, so the sloths are slow moving as a result.

As students continue rereading, they can compare different partnerships and consider what each partner gains. Eventually, all those individual examples contribute to a much bigger understanding: These relationships help living things survive. The book returns to that larger idea at the end, explaining how partnerships can help creatures stay healthy, grow, and survive. The text stays the same, but the thinking gets deeper.

Listen to Students Talk

I don’t think of discussion as something that happens after comprehension. Talking about a text can help students develop their understanding of it.

Ask students to explain an idea to a partner. Let them ask and answer one another’s questions. Have them compare two relationships from the text. Ask them to return to a page to explain what made them think something, and then listen.

A student’s response tells us so much more than whether an answer is right or wrong. We hear which details the student noticed. We hear connections being made. We may hear a misunderstanding that we can address immediately, and sometimes we hear a student change an idea after listening to someone else.

Those conversations are part of the comprehension work.

Build a Bridge from Reading to Writing

Once students have read and talked about a text, writing gives them another opportunity to make sense of their thinking. The Literacy Footprints lesson for Nature’s Perfect Partners does this in a very purposeful way.

Students first gather key words as they read and use those words to retell and discuss. When they return to the text, they generate and answer questions about the relationships they read about. Then they carry that thinking into writing, where students are asked to describe an example of mutualism and explain how each partner benefits from the relationship.

I especially like giving students time to talk before they write. Ask them to tell a partner what they plan to say. Encourage them to return to the book if they need an important detail. Listen for whether they can explain the relationship in their own words. Then have them write.

The writing grows directly from the reading and thinking students have already done. Read it. Talk about it. Write about it. Each experience gives students another opportunity to organize and deepen their understanding.

Keep Bringing Students Back to the Text

Some of our best comprehension teaching happens when we keep bringing students back to the book. Simple prompts can open the door to some very rich conversations.

• What did you notice?
• What makes you think that?
• Where did you find that information?
• How does this connect to something you read earlier?
• Did anything change your thinking?
• How would you explain that in your own words?
  

We don’t always know exactly where those conversations will lead. That’s part of what makes listening to students so important. Their responses help us decide when to prompt, when to teach, when to send them back to the text—and when to simply let them keep thinking.

What Do We Want Students to Take With Them?

When students close a book, I want them to leave with something they didn’t have before—a new idea, a new word, a new connection, or maybe even a new question. That’s why our comprehension teaching can’t end with Did you understand the text?

We have to give students opportunities to show us what they understand: to talk, reread, question, connect, and write. Most importantly, we need to listen. Because when we listen closely to students as they make sense of a text, we learn a great deal about what they understand and what they need from us next.