Across the United States, many educators will face what often feels like an insurmountable predicament. The goal is to provide students with complex, grade-level academic challenges designed to achieve a rigorous set of standards. The problem is comparable to a 20-foot brick wall in front of us and our students, and we have 120 days to get them all to the top. It is often assumed that the students come from previous grades with the set of skills needed to scale the wall on their own. After all, they should have practiced climbing this wall for several years. However, for many students, there is a glaring problem: each year, the wall gets taller. Literacy demands become greater. The thinking becomes deeper. Despite our good intentions and efforts, what we are doing is not working.
So how do we get over the wall? It is time to slow down, take stock of the tools at our disposal, and get to work building the scaffolding students need to accelerate their literacy learning.
During the 2023-2024 school year, we saw growth in reading and writing mastery with our students in every class period in our co-taught Language Arts 9 class; every period grew by at least a grade level according to our periodic benchmark assessment system. We were especially successful with our multilingual students, who make up anywhere from 25-75% of the make-up of our co-taught classes. While the results we saw last year are worth celebrating, we want to make it clear that we collaborated a lot, and it did not happen overnight. After participating in work with our district around assessing the standards, we decided to break things down foundationally and build mastery in approachable and meaningful chunks with smaller texts. A motivating factor for this is our learning around Cognitive Load Theory. Essentially, when “the total cognitive load on students is too high, learning is hard or impossible” (Kelleher). After mastering skills, we were able to build up our students’ reading stamina and reintroduce longer, still meaningful texts.
To begin laying the foundation for this work, we relied on pre-assessments in reading and writing at the start of the year. We took into account our students’ understanding of the standards we were to assess that trimester, planned around their skills, discussed how to elevate their ability, and determined where they needed to be. Teachers are good at figuring out that many of their students are not reading and writing at grade level, but often, we are not equipped with the tools or time to scaffold instruction for our students in a way that still supports grade-level learning.
Slowing down in a classroom does not mean lowering the standards or simplifying the curriculum. The content is still rigorous. Challenge and support go hand in hand. In their article titled “4 Myths of Rigor,” Williamson and Blackburn point out, “As teachers design lessons moving students toward more challenging work, they must provide scaffolding to support them as they learn” (3). Rigor does not mean piling up more work for students to do. An assessment is still rigorous if we meet students where they are and lift them to the demands of the grade-level standards by providing careful scaffolding. When we talk specifically about reading, “reading quickly isn’t the same as reading deeply” (Miller). Slowing down in a classroom leads to more learning gains, improved critical thinking, increased vocabulary skills, and a deeper understanding of a text. This could be done through scaffolding, modeling, think-aloud, and purposeful group work. As defined by the Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation, “Scaffolding is an instructional practice where a teacher gradually removes guidance and support as students learn and become more competent. Support can be for content, processes, and learning strategies” (“Scaffolding Content”). Scaffolding can help teachers assess students to determine their prior knowledge and skills and build a curriculum that helps them make connections and progress in their learning. It also helps teachers to understand what individual support students need, for how long, and when to gradually release them to more independent work.
Collaborate with Other Teachers Early and Often
Collaboration between teachers is an important part of instruction, as it allows for additional opportunities to exchange ideas, learn from each other’s areas of expertise, and co-plan and co-present lessons. Collaboration among teachers can lead to the creation of more meaningful and complex instructional tasks for students with different learning needs. Furthermore, cross-curricular collaboration can lead to more creative ways of curriculum planning and, ultimately, student success. Collaboration with specialists and academic coaches can also be impactful to student learning. It allows different areas of expertise to come together at the classroom level to determine what is truly needed to achieve mastery. This can lead to more ways of assessing students and collecting data that can help us find more information about students’ baseline skills and scaffold instruction that helps them learn and make connections to their existing knowledge.
Explicit Instruction
Literacy instruction should be explicit and purposeful, and “Most learners benefit from organized, deliberate, and explicit instruction in the critical elements of reading” (Vaughn). Explicit instruction involves think-aloud, modeling, guided practice, providing students with timely feedback, and various practice opportunities. “This explicitness includes modeling new skills, giving students ample practice with feedback, and providing structured opportunities for review and practice” (Vaughn). In other words, our students who need to develop their literacy skills call for routines that involve step-by-step instruction with lots of repetition, practice, and support.
Chunk Reading
When instructing on a skill, we recommend using a shorter text and increasing length and depth once students have demonstrated mastery of the short text. Teaching reading through careful scaffolding is crucial for students’ success. Many students are struggling with reading, but even students who can read at grade level can still benefit from the gradual scaffolding of grade-level texts.
An example that has worked with our students was modeling and explaining the theory behind using these strategies. We use a document camera to model the process on pencil and paper which leads them to make meaningful brain connections between text and thinking. Teachers can demonstrate the following when modeling:
- how to underline important facts in the text,
- how to choose what to underline, and
- how to take this information and convert it into a summary.
This strategy can be time-consuming, but it helps make complex texts more comprehensible. Practicing it helps students become more comfortable reading difficult texts and grow into more independent readers.
Chunk Writing
Acknowledging that reading and writing are closely correlated, the same chunking strategies can be applied to writing. When approaching writing instruction, one of the ways to promote student success is to build a solid foundation. Learning how to write can be compared to building a building. If our students do not have a good foundation, the rest of the building will inevitably collapse. Breaking writing into smaller, more manageable chunks helps our students to build this base. Oftentimes, we assume that our students know how to write a solid paragraph by the time they get to middle and high school. So, we ask them to write a five-paragraph essay. It can be a daunting task that overwhelms our students’ limited cognitive loads, especially for students who lack a solid foundation. It is important to slow down and break tasks into smaller steps, including modeling, thinking aloud, and utilizing graphic organizers. The gradual release model is a simple yet powerful way of accomplishing our scaffolding goals. Just like with reading, chunking does not mean simplifying the task. It means scaffolding it so that students learn throughout the process toward the mastery of grade-level standards.
A simple paragraph writing graphic organizer used across the curriculum to organize paragraphs is a valuable tool. Below is an example of a step-by-step graphic organizer for paragraph writing using “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. It allows students to make connections between the topic and concluding sentences, as well as the importance of including concrete details to support both.
Write to Argue Paragraph
Topic sentence (attention grabber/thesis statement): Make an argument for who is the best hunter.
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Detail #1 (First argument)
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Detail #2 (Second argument)
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Detail #3 (Third argument)
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Conclusion (Summarize why either is the best hunter)
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Teach the Strategies and Share Them across the Grade Level
Graphic organizers are crucial for organizing learning and teaching. However, each class often uses unique graphic organizers, making students spend time learning every one of them. Collaboration across the disciplines helps to streamline this process and choose common graphic organizers to use across curriculum areas. Using common graphic organizers in multiple content area classes creates greater opportunities for continued learning with familiar methodology. For example, using a KWL (Know, Want to know, and Learned) graphic organizer in language arts class for pre-reading can be modified and adapted to science to build students’ background knowledge before a unit with a Notice and Wonder graphic organizer. The K (what students know?) corresponds to Notice (what students notice in science introduction videos). The W (what students want to learn?) corresponds to Wonder (what students are still wondering about).
Additionally, cause-and-effect graphic organizers can be adapted to be used in science and social studies classrooms leading to students’ making meaningful connections between literacy and other content areas.
In conclusion, do not be afraid to slow down. Our students report that they feel more equipped to master standards when we slow down and work toward mastery with smaller tasks before we jump to larger ones. Instead of assigning an essay for the “write to argue” standard, we recommend starting with a thesis, and possibly sentence frames for those who need them. Spend the time needed to build the foundational skills. Once they master each piece, move to a claim-support paragraph. Then a three-paragraph essay can come next. After that, try out a traditional five-paragraph essay. Does taking the time needed for explicit instruction take longer? Absolutely. Will your students feel more confident writing an essay to demonstrate mastery of the write-to-argue standard after the necessary time has been given to each component? We argue yes. As teachers, we are the steps, ladders, and ropes to climb the wall of literacy learning. With a bit of time and scaffolding, we can get every student over that wall.
Works Cited
Kelleher, Ian. “How to Reduce the Cognitive Load on Students during Lessons.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 16 September 2022, www.edutopia.org/article/how-reduce-cognitive-load-students-during-lessons. Accessed 27 January 2025.
Miller, Kelley. “Slowing Down the Reading Process to Build Students’ Comprehension Skills.” Edutopia, 2024, https://www.edutopia.org/article/boosting-students-reading-comprehension-slowing-down/. Accessed 26 January 2025.
“Scaffolding Content – Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation.” University at Buffalo, http://www.buffalo.edu/catt/teach/develop/build/scaffolding.html. Accessed 28 January 2025.
Vaughn, Sharon, and Jack Fletcher. “Explicit Instruction as the Essential Tool for Executing the Science of Reading.” The Reading League journal vol. 2,2 (2021): 4-11.
Williamson, Ronald, and Barbara R. Blackburn. “4 Myths about Rigor in the Classroom”, 2010, static.pdesas.org/content/documents/m1-slide_21_4_myths_of_rigor.pdf. Accessed Jan. 27 2025.
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MEJ 