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.

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.