In this episode of The Teaching Show, high school reading teacher and Goyen Fellow Faith Howard, NBCT shares how she uses FASE reading with whole novels in her reading lab class for high schoolers who need extra reading support.
To maintain comprehension, she uses a three-part strategy:
Brain dump—everything you remember from the past few pages
Turn & talk—share with a partner
Gist statement—10 words summarizing the section
More Links:
Literacy Lab with Faith on Facebook
Literacy Lab with Faith on Substack
Literacy Lab with Faith on Twitter/X
A Period in the Life of a HS interventionist: FASE Reading, Retrieval Practice, and Gist Statements, in Science of Reading Classroom on Substack
FASE Reading & Vocabulary in the Science Classroom with Marcie Samayoa
Full Transcript:
Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Faith Howard. Faith, welcome.
Faith Howard (00:16):
Hi Justin. Thanks for having me.
Justin Baeder (00:18):
Well, thanks for being here. And tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into the strategy you have for turn and talk gist statements and brain dumps for reading comprehension.
Faith Howard (00:28):
Sure. My name’s Faith Howard. I am a sixth through 12 literacy specialist and former high school English teacher and I also teach seventh grade English language arts. I am in Pinedale, Wyoming, and a current Goan fellow as well as a board member for the Reading League, Wyoming.
Justin Baeder (00:45):
Wonderful. So you work directly with students in your own classroom, is that right?
Faith Howard (00:49):
I’ve created a really unique model which has caught some attention called Literacy Lab. Essentially these classes are their own freestanding elective courses that are offered for middle and high school students who are below grade level readers.
And it’s an innovative approach where we’re using science of reading those key components, but in a teen friendly way with novel studies and they experience immense growth.
And I think part of that is just due to the science of reading approach and then the ability to have them in protected time in a legitimate class, which a lot of schools really struggle to find that time to work with kids.
So yeah, it’s been a journey. It’s been my passion project since I stepped into this role four years ago and really excited and happy to share about Literacy Lab more with anybody that’s curious of what reading interventions can look like in secondary.
Justin Baeder (01:42):
Absolutely, absolutely. So is this a class students take in addition to a regular ELA class?
Faith Howard (01:47):
Yes. Yes they do. And they qualify based on universal screeners and then diagnostics. So we have kind of a whole process. So it’s an elective that’s sometimes not optional.
Justin Baeder (01:59):
I’m excited to talk about the strategies you use in that class, but I just wanted to point out there the immense power of that extra time because often we look for things that will work in zero time for students who are behind.
And I think often when we do have students who need extra support, that support takes time. So I think it’s a very smart foundational piece that you’ve actually built in that time. So these students are essentially getting twice as much ELA time as everybody else. Right?
Faith Howard (02:24):
Yeah, and I think there’s been a lot of talk kind of on the social media sites and through some of the big wigs in the literacy world lately about two things like distraction and how a lot of young people now just don’t have the time or the focus.
And so building in that time for a lot of these kids who have potentially have habitual absences and we literally have to make up for lost time. And then the other side of it is reading whole books and you have a lot of these, you’re competing with their core content and even in secondary English classes now, it’s really hard to protect time to read whole books, and that’s not happening across our country in a lot of classrooms.
And so having a class like this in addition for some of my students, it’s the first book they’ve ever actually read cover to cover because they found ways of sneaking and not really reading throughout their educational career.
Justin Baeder (03:15):
So they’re reading whole books in this lab class and we’re going to talk about a strategy that you use to support them and to guide them along in that. But I think what you said there is really important that often students may look like they’re reading but often are just not reading whole books.
And one of the, as a sidebar, one thing that I came across recently that was pretty surprising was that independent reading often just is not a good strategy for struggling readers because they don’t do it. They might sit there quietly, but they’re not necessarily reading.
So what we’re talking about today is a somewhat social practice, it’s something you’re doing as a class. Take us into that process of reading novels and then you have a particular tool that you sent me that we’ll share with people for a brain dump turn and talk and just statement. So let’s get into that.
Faith Howard (04:00):
Yeah, so I think when you’re reading a novel with struggling readers or really anybody adolescent readers as a class, the temptation is either to only play audiobook and assume that they’re not going to be willing to read, or the assumption is I’ll read aloud to them as a teacher or I’ll assign independent reading, but how do I hold them accountable and know that they’re actually reading it?
And if they do read it as a teacher, and I think anyone who’s taught students and asked them to read would admit that often you’ll get students and especially those who have working memory issues or those struggling readers who will say, I just read those five pages or those two pages and I have no idea what I just read. I don’t remember any of it.
That’s really unfortunate, and it feels like a huge lost opportunity and a waste of time.
(04:46):
So they have to be taught and kind of coached through how to do that better so that they can actually retrieve that information and remember what they’ve read because there is no point in reading.
I was just listening to a podcast with Doug Lemov this morning and he talked about the purpose of reading is to remember what you read and then to gain empathy from it. And you can’t do that if you don’t recall anything that you’ve read.
And it’s really frustrating for my students who basically admit that their whole life it’s been this like, okay, I read whatever’s been assigned and then I don’t remember it. So for me, a huge goal was like we’ve got to have a concerted effort toward remembering what we read, so that retrieval practice, but at the same time, reading is, it should be social, right?
And it should be this group effort and I think a community practice.
(05:32):
And so the FASE reading really helps with that. So I’ll talk about that. But also working on their fluency, how we read aloud is often how we read in our heads. And if it’s broken and choppy and they’re not honoring punctuation and using voice inflection, then that’s a part of why they’re not understanding what they’ve read.
And so by focusing on all of these pieces, it creates this really cohesive process that hopefully what we’re doing is training students’ brains to do this organically while they are reading on their own. And so I’ve kind of been testing that theory in my classroom.
So the approach, because I know that’s kind of what you’re wanting me to talk about, is a marriage of three different things that I have been reading about and learning about lately that I decided to incorporate into one reading strategy. So the first step of it is doing FASE reading, which Doug Lemov talks about in his new book, Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.
(06:26):
So FASE reading is fluent, accountable, social and expressive. And so the idea is that you start modeling as a teacher and you’re reading as we move through a novel, we’re going to mix up our format and style of reading, but with my students, then we open our books.
We’re in chapter 12, and I’m going to start by modeling some reading and I’m going to also content and background knowledge and vocabulary is really important.
So I want to make sure that I capture that, that that’s all a precursor to this because we’re not just reading for comprehension as this nebulous idea. It’s reading for a specific focus and purpose as well.
And so there’s always an application piece that they’re doing in writing a discussion afterwards as well. But anyways, so I start with modeling and I’m reading fluently out loud with them. We talk about prosody often in my classroom.
(07:18):
And so we’re talking about our voice, not just pausing it commas, but actually making a scoop so that you go up, down, up again, all of those kinds of ticky tacky things that really increase your comprehension. And so I model that for a while and then I start cold calling.
And in my classes we have about eight to 12 students. These are smaller class sizes for a reason, and it really holds them accountable. They don’t know when they’re going to be called on. And this idea of no one is off the hook, but it’s a safe space.
We build that community to where it’s okay to read aloud and it’s okay to make mistakes. I even make mistakes in front of them then, but the key is that I correct them, I notice it.
And so as they’re reading, it provides this beautiful opportunity. And they might read for a paragraph, they might read for three paragraphs.
(08:01):
They might read for just one or two sentences. They might even get cut off midway through a sentence because what I’m asking the other students to do is to follow along and pay attention.
And as soon as I call on the next students to pick up, they’re picking up where the other student left off. But that beautiful opportunity is coaching them in the moment in their fluency.
And so I have a couple of videos I’ve recorded that we’ll share, but where a student is really struggling to decode a multi-syllabic word and I’m able to not just tell them how to say the word, but actually coach them through the syllabication process that we also work on and that I teach in that class so that they are successfully working through that difficult word.
Everything from that to—in another video, I have a student who typically reads in a monotone higher register and their voice never drops at the period.
(08:50):
So that impacts comprehension because they’re not able to recognize that that’s the end of an idea in the beginning of the next idea. So coaching them through that where I might pause them, redirect that and say, I want you to reread that again, but listen to what my voice does.
And I model that sentence and then have them reread the sentence with their voice going down before they keep going. And so they feel that feedback, but also success in the moment after we read a designated amount of text and I build up to longer chunks of text. So it’s important to know we started by just doing one page at a time, then two pages, then maybe a little bit more.
So the next step is a brain dump. And so I set a timer for two minutes and on there and I created a worksheet.
(09:34):
I started doing it with mini whiteboards, and that works great too. I still mix it up and do that, but I wanted somewhere to have it captured in note taking forms so that they could refer back to it at the end of the chapter for some of our writing tasks. And so the brained up is essentially that it is, okay, close your book. This is really important so that they’re not overly relying on a text. Close your book and I want you to think back and write down anything you can remember about what you’ve just read. And so
I model that under the document camera initially and then have them compare their brain dump to mine to see how much am I remembering? Am I actually writing for the entire two minutes? And so for some of them it really pushes them and I explicitly show them that it doesn’t have to be complete sentences, it’s keywords and phrases even that are just anything in your brain.
(10:23):
And so it offloads that working memory before we go on to reading the next section of text. And I watched a really amazing webinar by Brett Benson about that exact practice.
He talks a lot about the science of learning and retrieval practice, and then recently read the book, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Patrice Bain and Pooja Agarwal.
And they, both of them kind of talk about this idea of brain dumps being low stakes. It’s not for a grade, it’s not a quiz, but it’s like holding students accountable and really tapping into their memory while also then it’s written down so then they can free up that working memory space for continuing to read on. And what I hope is that over time students learn to be good note takers. They could easily do this while they’re reading stop intermittently to check in on their own monitoring of their comprehension, which is what good readers do.
(11:15):
That’s what we do while we’re reading. So after the two minute brain dump, then they do a turn and talk. I think verbal expression and the ability to compare notes with a partner is really important. They’re actually providing a verbal summary of the text then, and there’s a lot of value in that, and it kind of is a checks and balances.
So often I build in engagement, have them move around the room, find a partner from a different table to share, and then they do, there’s little games you can build in thieves and robbers where they have to steal one idea that they didn’t have in their brain dump from a partner.
So they do that, they add that to their brain dump. And then as I was creating this process, the last step that I thought about, I had been doing a lot of Matt Burns and Lindsay Cheney’s approach, which is partner reading paragraph shrinking.
(12:00):
And that’s a wonderful strategy to have students reading in pairs fluently and then stopping along the way to do some annotating and summarizing of the main idea.
And I thought, how could we do that as well? Because objective summaries summarizing the text, not just verbally, but then in writing tends to be a real struggle point for a lot of my adolescent readers that I have in Lit Lab specifically.
They’ll either write me, I ask them to tell me the main idea of that section of text, and they’ll write me massive chunks of text. They’re writing basically, they’re just paraphrasing the entire passage.
They can’t disseminate what’s important and not important. They can’t put it all together. And so they only focus on one detail that they remember from the text, and it’s like that’s not actually the main idea.
So the really cool part becomes with partner reading paragraph shrinking, one of the approaches is when they’re writing the main idea for that little section of text that they’re doing it in 10 words or less.
(12:55):
And so you’re capping it and really having them focus on what they highlighted in the partner reading paragraph shrinking. It’s like who or what is the paragraph or section of text about what are the most important pieces of information we learned about the who or what they’re doing that essentially, so the last step, I actually have 10. I made it this way so that it held them to that 10 words or less.
So they have 10 blanks for words with a period at the end, after the turn and talk they have to work. We start off where I model it, then we do it in small groups, and then we come back together to share out and compare notes.
And then eventually they do it independently and they summarize the gist. So the gist is like, what’s the point? What was the point of that small section of text?
(13:34):
And the awesome part is that they use their brain dump notes to look back and say, okay, how could I summarize that in 10 words or less? And what’s been really interesting in working with my students is that from that I’ve been able to coach them and give them feedback even on sentence construction at the syntactical sentence level of, well, how would you want to start that sentence?
It doesn’t always have to be subject verb, and we have to be really thoughtful about where we add those conjunctions. And so yeah, it’s been a journey and I sort of tested it out and put all of these pieces together and I’ve had so much success with my students and it’s clicking for them, and they’re saying for the first time, I actually remember what I read, but then I wanted to test it and say like, is there data that supports this in my classroom?
(14:18):
Kind of action research model. And so I had given them a traditional reading comprehension quiz earlier in our novel, and the average scores were about a five out of 10, just multiple choice basic comprehension questions after we had read a chapter of the book.
Then we did this process and we practiced it for a few weeks. And then I had them do that process in pairs and independently, so releasing them to more of it less led by me. And then I gave them a similar reading quiz over that chapter, and the average scores were a seven out of 10. And I had many students that were an eight or nine out of 10 who before had gotten a five out 10.
And so I mean small level research there, but there is incremental growth in showing that they’re retaining more information of what they read through practices like this,
Justin Baeder (15:07):
You’re modeling and teaching them how to be good readers and getting them through a book that they would not otherwise probably get through.
Faith Howard (15:16):
And they really love the book. I mean, I’m really thoughtful on the books, but they’re really on which books we read and why we read them. I have students who didn’t meet the exit criteria and are in my class again this year who are high schoolers, and some of them talk about the books we read last year and they’re like, “That’s the best book I’ve ever read. I missed that book. Can we read that book again?”
Those kinds of questions. And for a struggling adolescent reader to say that I think is pretty remarkable.
Justin Baeder (15:42):
And just for context here, to kind of recap some of the situation. So these are students who are below grade level, maybe struggle with working memory often have not read many books at all as far as age appropriate, full length novels.
Are they reading on grade level novels that you’re choosing for them? These are not at their independent reading level,
Faith Howard (16:02):
Right? Leveled text, leveled lives, right? That idea. So these are grade level complex texts, if not higher. We read the other We Moore by Wes Moore for my high school lit lab. Right now we’re reading a Long Way Gone by Ishmael Bay last year. We read Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson.
So we do a lot of narrative nonfiction because I can pull in informational texts often through our fluency to build background knowledge because as we know, knowledge building, background building is a huge part of their comprehension as well. But these texts are meaningful, they’re impactful, they have a lot of dialogue about the human experience.
They can develop empathy. And often for small town Wyoming kids, it can educate them about a part of our world that they don’t have a lot of exposure to otherwise. So it hits a lot of pieces that make them really powerful.
And yes, the whole point of this is it has to be grade level complex texts. That’s what they’re going to be facing anywhere else. They go in their day. And so you don’t do them any favors by let’s read a upper elementary level book.
And quite frankly, they laugh that off. I mean, they don’t want that. I think that’s dishonoring to them because what they ultimately want is success in content that is appropriate to their age and grade level.
Justin Baeder (17:20):
And one more clarification. They are reading the entire book aloud as a class, is that right?
Faith Howard (17:25):
Yeah. I mean, obviously we mix up the formatting of the reading, and so some chapters or portions of text they’re reading independently and then other parts we’re reading as a whole class.
Sometimes we do listen to the audio. So I think it’s all about mixing that up. And sometimes they’re reading in small groups, groups of two to three, and then other times we’re doing whole class with these approaches. But yeah, cover to cover, we don’t cut out sections at all.
Justin Baeder (17:48):
I love how this just addresses so many of the challenges that teachers feel about their students who are below grade level that maybe the fluent reading is difficult and FASE reading addresses that so well and give students that opportunity to practice prosody and to hear fluent reading modeled and to get a chance to read but not have the whole class be kind of dragged down by a monotone.
You’re addressing so many of the reasons that often the kids who come to you just have not read, they just have not read books and you’re giving them that opportunity.
So thank you so much for sharing these strategies and we will link to the videos that you mentioned and to the template that you provided. Anything else you want us to know about this approach?
Faith Howard (18:28):
Not really this approach, but I would just say that if paired with this approach, you can do daily oral reading fluency in addition to this. This doesn’t have to be the end all be all for their fluency work.
And then strategies like explicit vocabulary and morphology work where you’re front loading key vocabulary terms that are going to be coming out of that text that they’re reading.
And then a strategy for decoding multi-syllabic words, which Melissa and Laurie on their podcast, they have some really great stuff about that specifically and that approach and strategy for teaching students.
So I leveraged that approach while we’re doing the FASE reading. So I think if you can piece all of those together and add them in, layer it that that’s really where the magic happens because you’re essentially hitting at all of the parts of the science of reading that many of these struggling adolescent readers have gaps in virtually all of them. So yeah,
Justin Baeder (19:23):
If people want to see some of your videos or find your Substack, where’s the best place for them to go online?
Faith Howard (19:27):
Yeah, I’ll keep it really simple. Literacy Lab with Faith, I have a teacher Facebook page, a Twitter account, and then a Substack all under that same handle.
Justin Baeder (19:36):
Great. We’ll link them in the show notes. Faith Howard, thank you so much for joining me on the teaching show. It’s been a pleasure.
Faith Howard (19:41):
Thank you, Justin. Pleasure is all mine.
