Author: CCIRAblog

By Hannah Schneewind and Dr. Jennifer Scoggin

Recently, we sat next to a kindergartener as she read a book about all the animals that a boy sees in a pond. At the beginning of the book, she giggled and whispered,  “I hope he finds an alligator.”  After reading each page, she said, “And next, he will find an alligator.”

Alas, the boy never did find an alligator. Disappointed, but undeterred, this kindergarten reader announced, “I’m going to write my own book called Alligator Man.”  She jumped up, grabbed some writing paper and got to work. In her finished book, the last page reads, “Then he sees an alligator. AAAAAA!!!” 

We all dream of and cherish these moments when everything a student is learning comes together so beautifully and with this level of independence. These moments are within every students’ reach. How can we intentionally prepare to make these moments a regular occurrence for all students?

Teaching reading and readers is a constant juggling act. The research on the positive impact of instruction in the areas of fluency, decoding, phonemic awareness, vocabulary and comprehension is well established (Young, Paige & Rasinski, 2022) . As former first grade teachers, we know this from experience. 

The research on the positive impact of agency, motivation, engagement and metacognition on reading success is equally well established (Afflerbach, 2021, Fisher et al, 2017, Guthrie et al, 1996). However, this second set of foundational skills does not garner an equal amount of attention in curriculum or in the national conversation around best practices. Again, as former first grade teachers, we know this from experience too. We remember well students who could proficiently decode multisyllabic words, and yet did not regularly show high levels of engagement in the classroom reading community. For these students, turning toward these more affective foundational skills was the key to unlocking their potential.

Can you picture students in your classroom who possess strong cognitive skills, yet might lack the confidence or motivation to put them into action?

We invite you to embrace a broad view of foundational skills that encompasses both the cognitive (phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency) and affective (agency, motivation, engagement and metacognition) aspects of long term reading success. Below we offer a quick definition of each affective foundational skill mentioned here.

Affective  Foundational Skills At A Glance

Skills	What it is	Why it matters
Agency	A student’s ability to take strategic self-directed action in pursuit of self-established goals.	Students with a strong sense of agency are more likely to take ownership of their own learning.   Agentive readers comprehend texts more deeply and are more likely to be engaged, independent, and confident.
Motivation	A student’s drive to read, including their purpose for reading.	Students are more likely to choose to read, have a variety of reasons for reading, and persevere through challenges. Motivated readers are more engaged.
Engagement	A student’s ability to immerse themselves in reading, including their level of cognitive effort, behavior and interest.	Students are more likely to reap the full emotional and academic benefits of reading, enjoy reading more and read with greater frequency. Engaged students are more motivated.
Metacognition	A student’s awareness of the cognitive skills readers use and their ability to put these skills into action.	Students who are metacognitive will stop reading when meaning breaks down, can flexibly  use a variety of strategies, and are aware of their own strengths and next steps.

Having this broad understanding of what is “foundational” frees us to include both the teaching of reading and the teaching of readers. Of course, we need to support children as they begin to decode words, determine the main idea or discuss character traits; however, we also need to teach students to find books that they love, to be able to read for extended periods of time, to know when they no longer understand what is happening in a book and to decide which strategy to use to rediscover the plot. These two sets of skills go hand in hand.

One way to get started thinking about how cognitive and affective foundational skills work together is to turn to the concept of student reading identity. Prioritize getting to know students in this more holistic way by conducting a Discovery Conference.  You can do this while you give other 1:1 assessments or anytime you are with an individual student while reading.  For more on this, please see our earlier CCIRA blog post,   Reflection and Discovery: The Power of Reading Identity in Independent Reading.

Now let’s consider how we might respond to this new broad understanding of students’ strengths and opportunities for growth. There are already a wealth of resources and instructional moves upon which you can rely to respond to students’ specific needs in the cognitive foundational skills.  We find there are fewer such resources that explore concrete ways for teachers to respond to students’ affective needs. Here we offer moves that work to highlight and strengthen the affective foundational skills of your readers. 

The good news is that you do not need to purchase any new materials or make more time in your day. Instead, you can be intentional about your language. All approaches to reading instruction include feedback. Regardless of your schools’ approach to reading instruction, we decide what to say to students and how to receive and act on the feedback they provide us. Explore the following tips about ways to intentionally teach affective foundational skills, considering which might be most impactful in your classroom:

• Notice and clearly name agency, motivation, engagement and metacognition as strengths. Strengths based feedback is a powerful teaching tool that calls students’ attention to the work they are already doing, validating it as worthy of attention and working to build confidence. Highlight affective skills alongside cognitive skills to bring students’ attention to the wide range of their abilities.  Here are some examples of what that feedback might sound like:
  • “I noticed that you read for all of reading time today. That is important because reading a lot and for a long time is how we grow as readers. You are the kind of reader who is really motivated to keep reading, even when there are a lot of distractions.”
  • “You read and reread that book so many times because you love it so much, and you recommended it to other readers in the class. Every time you reread a book, you learn something new. You are a very engaged reader.”
  • “You thought a lot about what strategy you could use to figure out that really long word. You knew that you could try different strategies when one did not work. Trying different strategies is something that you can always do when you read.”
• Use prompts that encourage student agency. 

The types of questions we use when engaging students as readers can encourage increased agency and emphasize your belief in their ability to work through obstacles independently.  When working alongside readers, encourage them to tackle obstacles by relying upon their own strengths. When students encounter challenges, rely on agentive prompts such as:

•  “What can you do?” 
• “How did that go?” 
• “What else can you try?” 
• “Did that work?”
• “How do you know?” 

• Use prompts that highlight students’ metacognitive knowledge and use.  We tend to focus on outcomes: was a student able to successfully sound out a word or not? Instead, highlight a student’s process, which increases and allows you insight into their metacognitive ability. Rely on feedback and prompts such as:
  • Naming the strategy you observed the student using: “I saw that you read the word once, and then you reread the word to make sure that it made sense.”
  • Ask students to reflect on their own process: “What did you do when you (name the obstacle)?”

• Provide students choice whenever possible. Choice invites increased engagement and provides students with the opportunity to act agentively, making meaningful decisions about their own learning. Teach into these types of meaningful choices by naming why they are important to readers. For example, you might highlight that choosing a purpose, or why we read, is important to how we stay engaged in and make meaning from text. Consider integrating these high impact choices when possible:
  • Choice of text, genre and/or author
  • Choice of purpose for reading
  • Choice of where to read
  • Choice of with whom to read

There is no magical, best way to teach reading and readers. The effective teaching of reading relies upon expert teachers making in-the-moment decisions to meet the needs of their students. The following formula works to guide those decisions:

Cognitive Foundational Skills + Affective Foundational Skills= 

Lasting Academic Success

We started this post by sharing a story of a kindergartener’s enthusiastic response to reading. While it may seem the result of a magical day when everything just clicked, in reality, this moment was a result of the careful creation of a classroom in which students’ cognitive and affective skills are intentionally and consistently nurtured.

Educators live in the world of “and.”  We are teachers of reading and we are teachers of readers.  We are experts in cognitive foundational skills that unlock texts and we are attune to the affective foundational skills that nurture confidence and purpose. When we embrace a broad view of these essential foundational skills, we open the door for all students to be capable and confident readers.

Citations:

Afflerbach, Peter (2021). Teaching readers (Not reading): Moving beyond skills and strategies to reader-focused instruction. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Fisher, F., Frey, N., Quaglia, R., Smith, D., & Lande, L.L. (2017). Engagement bydesign: Creating learning environments where students thrive. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Guthrie, J.T., Meter, V., McCann, A.D., Wigfield, A., Bennett, L., Poundstone, C.C., Rice, M.E., Faisbisch, F.M., Hunt, B., & Mitchell, A.M. (1996). Growth of literacy engagement:Changes in motivations and strategies during concept oriented reading instruction.  Reading Research Quarterly, (31)3, p-306-332.

Young, C., Paige, D., & Rasinski, T.V. (2022). Artfully teaching the science of reading,1st edition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hannah Schneewind partners with teachers to design literacy opportunities that center students.  She  began her career as a teacher in Brooklyn, NY; she then worked as a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Hannah is the co-author of Trusting Readers: Powerful Practices for Independent Reading (Heinemann). 

Dr. Jennifer Scoggin collaborates with teachers to create engaging literacy opportunities for children in elementary classrooms.  Jen began her career teaching first and second grades in Harlem, NY.  She holds a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Teachers College, Columbia University and has previously published two books about literacy instruction and classroom life.. Jen is the co-author of Trusting Readers: Powerful Practices for Independent Reading (Heinemann) and is the co-founder of Trusting Readers LLC.

Jen and Hannah are currently collaborating on a new book focused on reading identity to be published by Stenhouse in 2026.

by Travis Leech and Whitney La Rocca

The Potential of Read-Alouds

A well-chosen read-aloud can be the lifeblood of a language arts classroom. Teachers can do some heavy lifting in an efficient time frame to ground students in content and prime the pump for instruction. Read-alouds could be reading the entire book to your class. But it doesn’t have to be. We can also read a chapter, a section, or even a page aloud. The important thing is that we use the text as a connection point to both listening comprehension skills and language comprehension as we model how the text is supposed to sound when read aloud. Molly Ness explains this beautifully in her book, Read Alouds for All Learners (Solution Tree, 2023):

“Before students are fluent, independent readers, listening to an expert reader is the most efficient way to build the knowledge and vocabulary that are crucial to reading comprehension. It’s been found that children’s listening comprehension exceeds their reading comprehension through about age 13 on average. That means they can take in more sophisticated concepts and vocabulary through listening than through their own reading.”

We feel that it’s important to interact with the text, modeling the thinking that we do as readers during reading and invite our students to do some thinking with it as well. It’s not enough to just simply read it aloud.

With this being said, we’ve also found potential in using this experience as a jumping off point into other literacy instruction. We’d love to share with you some of the golden nuggets we’ve unearthed, so that you can put them into practice in your own classrooms. We’re going to discuss how we would extract all the amazing potential from a read-aloud we’ve recently done for the book Bugged: How Insects Changed History, by Sarah Albee, a book that highlights important historical connections between insects and humans, both good and bad.

Beyond the Read-Aloud: Grammar Instruction

Now that the text is familiar to students, we can leverage our time and instruction by using the text to teach craft moves through a grammar and conventions lens. For example, we may share this sentence with our students as an entry point into teaching how writers provide additional information with use of parentheses: 

At some point in its life cycle, an insect has three parts to its body (head, thorax, abdomen) and six jointed legs. 

Using the invitation process from our Patterns of Power series, we begin by asking our students what they notice about the author’s choices in this sentence. Through conversations with partners and then the whole group, students share their thoughts. They may discuss the punctuation such as the commas, or they may share the information the author is providing. No matter what they notice, we honor and name it, discussing why Albee chose to do what she did. There is a strong possibility that the writers will, in fact, notice the parentheses, especially since it’s not something they see in every sentence, therefore sticking out even more for them. We discuss the purpose of the parentheses, why Albee chose to use them and analyze information inside of them. Through this discourse, we discover that one way writers can add additional information is through the use of parentheses. 

We may share or create a focus phrase together that can be posted in our classroom and orally repeated often to act as an anchor for our students as they add this move to their toolboxes: “I use parentheses to add information efficiently.”

To deepen the awareness and understanding of this craft move, we can then find or create another example where parentheses are used in the same way and invite our students to compare and contrast this new example with the sentence from our mentor, Sarah Albee. 

After this discussion, we give our students a chance to write their own through imitation, beginning with the class writing one together and then writers composing one independently. They may or may not choose to begin their sentence with the opener, At some point…

Below are two examples students wrote independently.

At some point in my day, I have to do chores (clean my room, make my bed, take out the trash) before I get screen time. 

My dogs (Millie, Kimber, Ginger) love to go on walks.

We take a moment to share and celebrate their imitations as this makes them feel confident enough to continue to use this move as needed in other writing they do throughout their day and year. For example, one class was writing research reports, and this child chose to add additional information for their reader about gorillas:

Because we started with a text that was familiar to students, our writers are now able to read text as writers and use some of the moves they discover in their own writing. 

Beyond the Read-Aloud: Revision Instruction

Another element of writing instruction we can extract from this text post-read aloud is bolstering revision skills through sentence combining. Using a process from our series Patterns of Revision, here is an overview of a revision lesson connected to this text.

First, we would extract a short chunk of text from the read-aloud, preferably one that includes complex ideas mashed up together (like a compound sentence, a list of ideas, appositives renaming a noun, or compound subjects or predicates). Here’s one sentence with potential from Bugged: 

Eight-legged spiders, ticks, and mites are not insects.

We like this sentence because there are multiple ideas being organized together into one sentence. Our work behind the scenes would then be to pull apart these ideas into separate, stand alone sentences:

Eight-legged spiders are not insects.

Ticks are not insects.

Mites are not insects.

After we’ve selected a sentence and separated out the ideas into their own stand alone sentences, we can bring these sentences back to our students to facilitate discussion about combining these ideas together. This is how the process would break down, using the acronym DRAFT:

1. We’d display the sentences for students and read them aloud.
2. We would discuss any repeated information students see being presented to decide what we could DELETE, allowing us to combine what is left.
3. Students would prompt us to do work in the moment to combine the ideas:

Eight-legged spiders are not insects.

Ticks are not insects.

Mites are not insects.

4. To combine what is left, we would consider how we could REARRANGE the words left over, what other words and punctuation we might ADD, and if we could do anything to FORM new verbs. Students TALK it out as they create a newly combined sentence.
5. Students might suggest something close to the author’s original when combining the ideas together. After we complete the sentence-combining work collaboratively as a class, we compare our work to the author’s original, reflect on any similarities or difference between our combination and the author’s, and discuss how this exercise could help us in our own writing.
6. We might then go back into a draft of writing we’ve previously created and try looking for ways we could combine our sentences or ideas in a similar way we did so with Sarah Albee’s work.

Concluding Thoughts

Studying grammar and supporting revision are two of the many lenses we could use to revisit part of the text we used for our whole-class read-aloud. We could follow a similar process of illuminating things like figurative language or text structure in a similar manner: by revisiting a manageable chunk of text, displaying that text for students, and asking them to discuss what they notice the author doing in this portion of the text.

We believe it is through this small shift in instruction, offering space for students to observe and discuss what they notice the author does in their work, that we are building students’ cognitive structures for learning. This shift will support them in strengthening this line of inquisitive thinking and observation in their future work as readers and writers in our classroom…and beyond it!

Whitney La Rocca has been a teacher, a literacy coach, and a consultant, working with children and teachers across grade levels, schools, and districts. With a deep knowledge of content, standards, and best practices, Whitney enjoys delivering professional development and coaching teachers to support children as they develop their identities in the world of literacy.

Travis Leech is a middle school instructional coach in Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, TX. He has thirteen years of experience in education, including teaching middle school English Language Arts and as a gifted and talented specialist. He has presented about engaging literacy practices and technology integration at the district, regional, and state levels.