It has been about five years since Kim Yaris and I shared "The Prompting Funnel" in Who's Doing the Work? How to Say Less So Readers Can Do More. The premise of the prompting funnel is that, in the moment of supporting a student at the point of difficulty, our biggest work is actually to not do their work for them!

​Questions and prompts from the top of the prompting funnel require students to do more of the work, while those at the bottom provide heavier scaffolding. Rather than supporting heavily from the moment a student encounters something tricky, we can save the questions from the bottom of the prompting funnel until students have had time to wrestle with the challenge a bit. The original prompting funnel is below.
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Predictably, my thinking has evolved and my vision for the prompting funnel has expanded since its inception. More specifically, all of the research that Kari Yates and I did as we were writing our new book, Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading Into the Balanced Literacy Classroom, made it clear that the last stage of the prompting funnel needed refining.

More specifically, the prompts at the bottom of the prompting funnel need to be considered based on the particular problem a student is trying to solve. For example, if a child is trying to figure out a word, prompting them to look at the print and say the sounds--and then check with the context--is the "best practice." On the other hand, if a student is trying to figure out the meaning of a word, asking them to check the context is an important bottom-of-the-prompting-funnel cue. Basically, prompts and cues from the bottom of the prompting funnel may vary based on the challenge, whether with the print or with the meaning.

This expanded version of the prompting funnel is below. You can download a bookmark of this updated prompting funnel, here. 

I offer a full explanation of these revisions to the prompting funnel in the new version of the Who's Doing the Work? ​Online Class. I would love to have you join me for a deeper dive into this versatile and practical tool. The idea behind the prompting funnel can change the way you scaffold students when they encounter the tricky things that are within their grasp and offer them the biggest opportunities for growth.

​Implementation
Once you have a plan, you face the challenge of implementation. Of course, your schedule will vary from day-to-day. Now really concentrate on working within the timeframes. Use an egg timer and stop when you had planned to. This is really challenging, but if you do it a few times you will begin to really think about instructional time. If you know that you can’t run over the allotted time for guided reading, you will find ways to stay on schedule. Also, planning to stop, even if you aren’t finished, means that read aloud, independent reading, etc. don’t get neglected. 

Of course, this is not meant to be a militaristic implementation. I am not suggesting you teach robotically or become a rigidly driven by the clock. I am suggesting, however, that if you want to fit everything in, you will have to do a bit less of some things and a bit more of others.

These kinds of changes in practice requires a shift from the frustrating mental model of fitting everything in every day. You can begin developing a new, kinder mental model with a few pads of sticky notes and an egg timer.

Adapted from a blog post originally written by Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris.

Like many of us, I have been eager to move past 2020 without really looking back. I usually enjoy beginning each New Year by reflecting on the past year's learning and shaping plans for the next. However, the idea of lingering in the residue of 2020 has been unappealing at best, horrifying at worst. Who really wants to reflect on one of the hardest year's ever?

To complicate the reflective work even more, I tend to judge myself for not having enough pain this year to even really give myself permission to grieve or process it. Certainly, many people have had it much worse than I have. I continue to live a life with much privilege. We do not have hunger or housing insecurity. While 2020 has been challenging professionally, I have managed to keep my work afloat enough to support us. And most significantly, I have not lost a loved one to COVID (or anything else) this year. So what do I really have to lament from 2020?

My sweet friend, Krystle Cobran, author of The Brave Educator, once told me, "We have a tendency to compare pain." She went on to say that using someone else's pain to delegitimize our own only delays our healing. So I try to give myself permission to process my experiences, even when some part of my brain tells me that they aren't serious enough to warrant attention because someone else's pain is more. 

I have learned the truth, however, that I can't be of service to anyone if I haven't tended my own inner garden in ways that are loving. This means acknowledging my hurts and grieving my losses, even if they seem smaller than someone else's. So when another friend, Lizzie Merritt, mentioned that she had just finished her "annual year in review" process, I thought, "Wait a minute! Perhaps, this year needs to be looked at even more closely than usual, rather than boxed up and stored in the recesses of my psychological closet."

Lizzie was kind enough to share with me a reflective tool she created for learning from a previous year and planning for a new one. What I love about Lizzie's work is that she seems to really find a balance between action and reflection, between listening to ourselves and engaging our power to move past our limitations. For example, Lizzie's book about willpower begins with recommendations about learning to meditate.

Lizzie was kind enough to let me share her year-in-review tool.

I found the reflective the process challenging. I was surprised by how tender I was and how much my weary inner self wanted to avoid the work of self-reflection. I worked through the process in four different sittings, which helped. Because my work has demanded so much focus this year, I didn't pick work as a category. Basically, I never need nudging to work more. Instead, I chose: Health and Fitness; Home/Physical Environment; and Fun and Leisure. All of these areas need some serious attention from me. In fact, when I got to "Fun and Leisure," I was stumped (Does working on a "fun" writing project count?).

Here's some of what I learned from the whole reflective process:

• 2020 was one of the biggest years of learning I have ever experienced, personally and professionally. 
• It is worth really knowing what our inner self needs and fighting for that; the compromises we make really do hold us back.
• We are not responsible for anyone else's happiness. Seriously.
• The more we can nurture our most authentic self, the better able we are to take care of the people we love. The more we hide or neglect our authentic self, the more we tend to self-sabotage and the less able we are to take care of others.
• Clearing out things (people, experiences, belongings) that are not working for us or bringing us joy can make space for "things" that are new to us and better for us, which inevitably makes us happier.
• I am stronger than I thought.

So, while I have no interest in a repeat of 2020, now that it is almost behind me, I am grateful for what it is taught me. 

May 2021 bring everyone at least some small dose of "normal." May we be kind to ourselves as we process 2020's difficulties, and may or biggest growth work of this year the stay with us, propelling us to be our most powerful selves.

In part one of this series, I introduced the following model as a representation of how proficient readers are able to make full use of both the print information and the meaning information in a text. 
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I also described two variations on reading process, which illustrate the ways students may be better at using one or the other source of information.
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We can actively teach children not to comprehend (not meaning to of course), which is actually different than not teaching them to comprehend. The latter, not teaching children to comprehend, is an act of omission wherein we offer little or no comprehension instruction at all. The former--teaching children not to comprehend--is the subject of this blog. It involves actively putting students into reading situations where they can't or are not likely to attend to the meaning of the text. 

For example, many beginning reading texts offer children very little to think about. If we give them these texts to cut their reading teeth on, we literally ask them to practice reading the words without thinking deeply about what the text means. Because the text limits their opportunities to comprehend, our text selection preferences reading without thinking. The solution is not shifting from predictable to decodable texts, or vice versa, because "bad texts" are common in both text formulas. For example, a decodable text that would teach a child not to comprehend would be one that makes little to no sense--"The fat rat sat on the bat on the mat." A predictable text that teaches children not to think deeply about what they read would be a text that simply reads like a list-- "I go to school. I go to the store. I go to the library." 

To avoid teaching children not to comprehend deeply, select texts that give students something to think about. This is a challenge with beginning reading texts! In my experience, only about 25% of beginning reading texts--whether "decodable" or "predictable"--offer opportunities to think deeply across the text.
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Similarly, we actively teach children not to use the print when we give them texts that don't provide opportunities to practice using the sound-symbol relationships they know or are learning. For example, children learning consonant sound-spellings and the "short" A sound-spelling, should have opportunities to apply this new learning with CVC words in the context of reading. If we are careful with out text selection, this can happen whether the text is officially labeled "predictable" or "decodable." 

We also teach children not to attend to the print on the page, when we prompt them to use context to figure out a word first, rather than using context to cross check after using the print information. While context may help them "read" a particular word in a particular text, it does much less to teach them how print works or to enable them to read that word the next time they encounter it. The ultimate print goal, even beyond figuring out the word in front of them, is that they have full access to all the information in the alphabetic code and that they actually learn the new words they encounter. 
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Through our text selection and our prompting we can unintentionally teach readers away from using print or meaning. If this happens enough, children can habituate not using all the information a text offers them, which of course, sets up an unsustainable reading process for them and requires an intervention to interrupt. 

For more on how to teach children to both comprehend deeply while also utilizing all the print system offers them, look for Shifting the Balance, which I wrote with Kari Yates. Shifting the Balance also includes guidance on considering both predictability and decodability when selecting texts for beginning readers. Shifting the Balance will be available in February, but you can preview it now on the Stenhouse website.

As educators, our ultimate goal, of course, is for readers to be equally proficient in navigating the print and in comprehending what they read. In fact, the more we understand about how individual children are doing these two things, the better we can teach them. So the reading process of a proficient reader can be generally represented like this:

I first represented the print/meaning duality with with this two-circle Venn Diagram when I was a regional language arts consultant in 1999, because I wanted all of the work I did with teachers anchored in understandings of children's reading processes. Literally every workshop I've ever taught across two decades, has been held up by this mental model. 

​Of course, not all children are equally proficient in both print and meaning, and variations on the Venn diagram can illustrate some of the differences. For example, children who are skilled in decoding but don't comprehend well, are represented with the same two circles, but the meaning circle is smaller. This reduction indicates that the stronger proficiency is in the area of decoding/word recognition, like this:
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Children with "small meaning circles" have difficulty with language comprehension. Their spoken vocabulary, general knowledge, and/or facility with language structure are typically limited, which places a ceiling on their reading comprehension. Children who's reading looks like this may rely on context to figure out words with little or no attention to the letters on the page.

Similarly, children who are not skilled with reading the words (vs. understanding the words), are represented with the opposite pair of asymmetrical circles: 

Children with "small print circles" have limited orthographic knowledge. They don't fully understand how our alphabetic code works. Consequently, if tricky words are not sufficiently supported by context (which happens increasingly as text gets more difficulty) they get really stuck.

You can read about this simplified model in Preventing Misguided Reading (Burkins and Croft, 2010), Reading Wellness (Burkins and Yaris 2014), and Who's Doing the Work? (Burkins and Yaris, 2016). ​

There are a number of factors that contribute to children reading in ways that favor meaning or favor print, paying insufficient attention to the other source of information. The most troublesome cause, however, is us, their teachers. If our instruction is biased towards print or meaning, then it is possible for children to learn to rely on that source of information and neglect the other. This is, or course, unintentional. 

In the next post in this two-part series, I will describe one of the ways we can inadvertently teach children not to use the print or not ​to comprehend.
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​I write this post amid construction noises. Repairs are being made after an undetected, leaky pipe wreaked havoc on our floors and cabinets. When we learned of the hidden flood, the contractors mopped and dried and disassembled, leaving us without a kitchen or any common living area. And then they quit.

That was almost three months ago.

Due to an odd assortment of COVID19 related delays, the work of putting everything back together has just begun today. Living in the back of the house for months--eating mostly take-out on our bedroom floor--has added a layer of stress to a time that was not short on stressors.

And before it is all over with, we will have to move all the way out of the house, storing our books and dishes and chairs and toys while we live in an Air BNB for an undetermined amount of time.

For the most part, I've stayed positive and focused on what I can "control." But I am weary of the chaos and hungry for the normalcy of my home during a time when so much else can't be normal.

On Sunday evening two sweet friends came over to sit six feet apart around a campfire and visit. I bent their ears about feeling simultaneously frustrated by the prospect of moving out and relieved that repairs would begin. On hearing of our impending move, Valerie said someting like, "I once had an aunt who felt stuck in her life. So she took everything out of her house onto the lawn and put it all back in a better way."

And the frightened, overwhelmed, tender part of me grabbed onto that story like a scuba diver following a rising line of bubbles to the surface for air just in time! I was buoyed by the very idea of it. The visual image of Valerie's aunt rallying her husband to help her drag everything onto the lawn to redesign her living space from the bottom up. The metaphor of getting unstuck by looking at all the pieces of your life and reimagining or tossing them. There is such hope in the desperation of reaching that point, of shaking things up and reinventing our spaces, even our lives.

So it seems that my New Year will be heralded with a rich opportunity to reorder, repair, and reclaim. It is a Marie Kondo experience on steroids, and intense physical and emotional taking stock had not even been in my universe of perspectives. Just as Valerie's story changed the way I felt about our move, stories give us an opportunity to open our hearts and see a way forward. When our imagination is against a wall, stories let us get a leg-up from someone else's. 
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Sometimes, when we are trying to solve a problem we place limitations on ourselves because of tradition. We don't "think outside of the box" because we have come to consider the box as somehow integral to the process. It helps to sometimes bring to the foreground and scrutinize the barriers that we place on ourselves. So, what is limiting our thinking about guided reading, the trickiest instructional context to shift to digital platforms?

While read aloud, shared reading, and even independent reading and conferences seem to translate to virtual spaces with less disruption to the model, guided reading remains the more challenging instructional context to teach over a computer.

In addition to the intrinsic challenge of teaching across cyberspace, the fact that probably no one else has your school district's exact model makes it harder to crowdsource the problems. I am endlessly amazed by all the different ways districts give shape to teaching in 2020 (and soon 2021).

In this blog, Hacks for Virtual Guided Reading, I explored some intuitive suggestions for navigating guided reading in virtual spaces, including a suggestion for how to listen to individual students read during virtual guided reading. I recently worked with a school where a teacher was really problem-solving how do just this thing, but she needed a different solution than the one I offered in the previous blog.

Her students all had access to district-provided laptops, so that eliminated one barrier that is present for some. In my conversation with the teacher, I realized that we were assuming some pre-virtual conditions that didn't necessarily have to apply. We found that adjusting away from those limitations helped us meet the goal of listening to students read instructional level texts, even though they weren't face to face.

Here were some of our assumptions:

• Running records need to happen synchronously.
• Guided reading sessions are a continuous time block.
• Listening to individual children read during guided reading must happen while the other children remain in the group and read silently.
• If children see the guided reading text before the lesson, it will be spoiled.
• Running records during guided reading should be "cold reads."

As it turns out, none of these assumptions is requisite to guided reading instruction. Questioning all of the aforementioned beliefs, we developed a plan.

On Fridays, she is going to give her guided reading groups their texts via links placed on the school's virtual platform. Over the weekend, students will record themselves reading using either video, or simply audio. Students will send their teacher their recordings by Monday.

During the week, she will listen to a few student recordings each day, as she had done when guided reading was face-to-face, and take running records.  If a student is having difficulty, she will check in with that student via whatever tool seems appropriate. When the group gets together to talk about the book, they can engage in some choral reading of the text and have conversations about it.

Again, there are things about this variation on the guided reading model that don't work as well as face-to-face guided reading. You may or may not find out how a child navigates a first-read in a text, although you may be able to specify that you want a first read in the directions. Either way, there are worse problems than a child practicing a text to sound good when they read it to you. If children see their recordings as something to practice and perfect, what we lose in cold-read data we gain in repeated readings practice and reading growth. 

There remains a driving need to work with small groups in virtual spaces. While none of the creative solutions out there seem to be perfect, many of us are finding that a pandemic is a great time to embrace approximations and explore not being a perfectionist.

If you explore this model or some aspect of it, I would love to hear about what you figure out. You can always reach me at [email protected], or you can leave a comment on this post.

​Who's Doing the Work? (Burkins & Yaris, 2016) explores the ways we support students in problem-solving, especially if they are grappling with something that is really requiring them to think deeply and work hard. Right now, when so much about our instruction is different than usual, asking good questions is a reliable and familiar friend.

Of course, we all know that asking higher-order questions can help children learn more. But, while asking "good" questions remains important in mask-to-mask and digital spaces, it's what we do after we ask the question that matters next.

I recently encountered, however, a bit of research on math instruction that is making me think about the limits of these "good" questions.

In a study that compared the way math teachers ask questions during math instruction, researchers found that only 1 in 5 questions required children to make deep connections across the content. This does not seem like big news; we are all aware of the need to ask more questions that push children to take the content they are learning to levels of analysis and connection. We also appreciate the important role that procedural questions ("low level") play when learning new information or processes. Certainly, it would be silly to try and make every question higher- order.

What is most fascinating about the study mentioned in Range, however, is that in many cases, when better questions were asked, children still didn't get the opportunity to think deeply about the content. Rather than actually getting to do the work, they were given a series of "hints." So even though the work began with an invitation into deep thinking, their thinking was actually hampered during the process of answering the question.

While 1/5 of questions in the study were high-level questions, requiring students to deeply process the content, students received hint after hint in the form of a low-level question. So, low-level, hint-giving questions, eliminated the value of the original, good question.

Historically, in developing better questions for reading instruction, we put a lot of energy into thinking about levels of inquiry and Blooms Taxonomy. We craft the questions thoughtfully, but  the moments after the initial question matter just as much as the question. In fact, with hint-giving through a series of low-level questions, a question such as, How do authors show the ways characters change over time? becomes no more thought-provoking or learning-inducing than a question like, Who is the main character? 

Fortunately, there is a magic bullet for letting our better questions do the work we intend for them to do. The simple practice for making the most of our good questions it to, quite simply, wait.

​Wait time is the critical complement to a good question, and it is proving even more tricky in virtual instruction. A few seconds can feel like forever when you are up close on a camera screen. Instructional time is somehow different in this new time-space-continuum. But just because it feels like forever, doesn't mean it actually is forever. In virtual instruction especially, and in light of the negative effects of "hint" giving to move things along, just giving students time to think remains essential.

Now more than ever, the way we support students in answering questions is just as important as the question itself. 

​Note: If you are in search of the free ebooks for guided reading,
​go to the "Free Books" tab, above.

There are a number of challenges that make teaching guided reading tricky in virtual spaces. From access to books, to watching body language, sound issues, there are definitely some hurdles to get over. As we prepare to go back-to-school, one virtual guided reading challenge is prominent: figuring out how to listen in as individual students read without falling into a round-robin routine.

There is a solution that seems pretty simple. In fact, I think it is so simple that it has been hidden in plain sight.

When we are face-to-face during guided reading and listening to individual readers, we want to hear ONLY the reader that is getting our attention, while we conduct a running record or engage in a conversation. Additionally, we don't want the readers who are NOT receiving our attention at that moment to listen in on our exchange with the student in our focus--for their sakes and for the sake of the student who is reading with us. 

To limit what we hear from the other students we can, of course, mute their microphones. To limit what they hear, we can simply ask them to turn their volume all the way down! This seemingly obvious solution allows us to stay in the group, rather than send students off into breakout rooms, which is clunky. Staying in the group by having the student you are listening to turn up the volume (while the others turn their volume down) allows you to keep that small-group feel to your virtual guided reading lessons.

By staying in the group together, you can still watch the other students to see that they are engaged with the text. A little motion on the screen, should get the attention of everyone again. You can use a chat box, or even something as simple as a sign with a student's name on it, to let the group know who needs to turn their volume back up so you can read with the next student.

As for access to books, there seem to be a few options.

1. If possible, it would be great if students had hard copies of the book you are exploring with them. If they are at school every few days, or you are sending material to homes periodically via bus routes or otherwise, then you can send home the guided reading books they need. I imagine that this is the trickiest option to pull off.
2. If children have access to the same book digitally, then everyone can see it on their screens during the lesson. A parent or someone will probably have to support children, as they may need to have two windows open at once or navigate being able to see you on their screen at the same time that they see the text. It may work to email parents a link to a book so that they can open it up on a second device (I know this option will not be available for all students). If you want to send parents the link and the code for the free guided reading books on this site, feel free to do so! 
3. While it is less than ideal, you can display a book on your screen page-by-page. Everyone can read silently or with volume down, except for the student on whom you are focused. Of course, not everyone will read at the same rate, but they can read a page more than once and study the illustrations, until the student reading with you is ready to turn the page. This isn't a perfect solution, of course, but we are living in an age of compromise.

In the end, shared reading and one-on-one conferring are likely to do more of the heavy-lifting in virtual literacy instruction. However, it is worth trying to figure out how to maintain some small group work for those students who really need it to succeed. Asking the other children to turn down their volume while you work with one child may be one way to make small group instruction work in virtual spaces.

A couple of years ago, Kim Yaris and I wrote a collection of guided reading books to go with the Who's Doing the Work? K-2 Lesson Sets (Stenhouse, 2018). Carnegie Learning has graciously agreed to let me share the fiction titles from this collection with you, here on this site.

There are 15 titles ranging from Level A to Level J. I have built flipbooks with each title, and embedded them here on the site. The text below, one of my favorite in the collection, is an example of the set-up for each book, and will show you how the flipbooks in the collection work. Missing Socks, like all the books in the collection, includes illustrations designed to engage students and deepen the story.
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Here are some highlights from the collection:
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Mindfulness:
​There are three titles in the collection that relate to mindfulness. Happy (Level C) is about a little girl who is exploring different kinds of happiness, such as the calm happiness of a breeze vs. the palpable happiness of a surprise birthday party. Hurry Up, Slow Down (Level D) is about a little girl who is walking to school with her father and is caught up in the simple beauty around her. Finally, Everyday Beautiful (Level H) is about two boys who have been asked to find something beautiful. One boy overlooks the natural beauty around him while another shows him how simple things can be beautiful.

Shadows:
There are five titles in the collection that use science related to light and shadows to tell a story. They range in levels from C-J. We wrote these to align with science standards. If you teach light and shadows, you may find these texts a nice way to integrate your science content into your reading instruction.

The books are all in flipbook format and are free to use and share with children, but they require a password to access them. To get the password, complete the form below. When you hit submit, a password will pop up on the screen. Use that password in step 2 (below) to access the books.

If you already have the Who's Doing the Work? K-2 Lesson Sets, these digital versions of some of the books should be helpful. Although you don't need the lessons to use the books, if you are interested in the lessons that go with the books, they are available from Stenhouse Publishers.

If you have questions or feedback, please write to me at [email protected].