We also include stories in every chapter, incorporate snippets of relevant research, and turn quickly to practical application. For example, we show you a simple way to hold your students accountable for independent reading in ways that won’t tax your energy. We show you high-value writing activities that help students unpack the wide variety of sentences they encounter in texts. Our primary audience, as always, is you, the teacher, who works so hard to ensure every student is learning to read well and with confidence. We show you how to help each student thrive as a reader. We argue for the value of curiosity and how to notice what your students need so they can build and sustain the genuine pleasure that bubbles up when one’s curiosity is sparked through reading. And we show you what it can look like when a classroom—or a whole school— celebrates words, texts, and learning. Doing all those things fuels students’ reading growth until comprehension becomes every student’s superpower, rather than their problem. We’ve been worrying—a lot—that essential aspects of reading other than foundational skills are being neglected in conversations around the science of reading. So, with this book, we reenter the conversation and broaden it. We lay out, in the same friendly manner of our first book, what else is crucial: comprehension. Our Core Beliefs Over the years, we’ve made mistakes that have informed our core beliefs. Those in turn have shaped our teaching of children, our teaching of teachers, and, now, this book. We assure you, our own journey to solid outcomes for our students was uneven and downright rocky at times. “Know better, do better” applies to us as much as it does to any other practitioner. The parents of our students helped us toward success by forcing us to justify our decisions when they didn’t understand them, especially when our school got the lowest reading scores in the city. We’ve learned—painfully—that failure is opportunity if we take the chance to do things differently.
Doing all those things fuels students’ reading growth until comprehension becomes every student’s superpower, rather than their problem.
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KNOW BETTER, DO BETTER: COMPREHENSION
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