The science of reading offered a necessary and overdue corrective on the practices that teach students to read. But as we make strides there, we face a new question: What’s next?

Once our students cross the decoding threshold and read with relative fluency, the next project of K-12 is strengthening comprehension—that complex tangle of knowledge, dispositions, and skills that, if we get it right, serve our kids for life.  And if research tells us that complex, on-grade texts are a key engine of reading growth, we need practical, manageable ways to give students access.

Simply put: the science of reading has to go beyond helping students learn to read. We need them to understand what they read, too.

A Call for Change

It’s time to stop organizing instruction around the same six or seven standards test-makers use to tag questions. In their place, we can turn to a better authority: the texts themselves. Every text is complex in its own way, which means every text demands different knowledge and strategies. 

Our kids don’t struggle in the abstract. They struggle with specific, precise complexities in the real world.  Not “main idea” but understanding how a counterargument undercuts a speech. Not “figurative language” but recognizing how a specific metaphor operates in the context of a specific poem.

To help students make sense of it all, we need systems that keep us attuned to what makes each text unique.

We call this text-led analysis: the practice of using the text itself to drive how we diagnose comprehension and plan instruction. It hinges on this principle: Each text whispers how to teach it. And when students struggle, each text can also help reveal why.

A Classroom that Beat the Odds

To find a way forward, let’s learn from the classroom of Lis Bluford. Lis was one of the most successful teachers at the Uncommon Roxbury Prep schools in Boston. She ran a joyful room: her kids eagerly shared writing goals, got into comfortable spaces to read and enjoy poetry, and discussed all manner of books and articles. Typical English teacher stuff, right?

But Lis’s room wasn’t standard by any means. In Massachusetts, classes receive a measure called “student growth percentile”—a metric of how much students have grown in a year—and Lis’s 5th graders earned top numbers across the entire state. 

How did she do it?

Lis spent careful, regular time thinking about the texts her students were reading and the errors they made with them. Once she spotted a trend, she’d give students extra practice with that specific type of text. 

Did students struggle with feature journalism? Or an unreliable narrator? Or dense sentences?  The answers matter.

The work of Lis and teachers like her responds to a growing and long overdue realization in literacy instruction. As our students develop, we can spend a bit less time on isolated comprehension strategies and more time on the unique demands of the specific, complex texts our kids read.

Students First, Teaching Second, Everything Grounded in Text

What might it look like to shift our approach? Imagine the following:

It’s time for Ms. Austen to analyze her class’s work.  But instead of picking up their papers, she does something else.  She picks up the text she had them read.  Ms. Austen reads the text and tries the prompts she’s assigned herself, jotting an exemplar response and pausing to consider what aspects of the text made it tricky to write.

Then, she moves to student work.  When arguments are weak, she considers what about the text might have tripped them up.  If evidence or analysis are lacking, she considers how the text might be linked to the gap she sees. And if she has student annotations, she uses them to help her pinpoint where comprehension may have fallen apart.

Many of us were taught that analyzing student work begins with the standards. For Ms. Austen, it begins with the text itself. She doesn’t ask, “What standard did students miss?” She asks, “What about este text made comprehension difficult?”  

How does she do it?  A few basic steps:

• Know your text. Get to know the complexity by drafting your own exemplar response.
• Know your students. Read students’ work with that complexity in mind.  Where did understanding break down?

First, Ms. Austen gets to know her text. Texts are like fingerprints: each one unique in its own way.  Generating an exemplar response forces Ms. Austen to grapple with the specific demands that make este text difficult.  Not in the abstract: right here, right now.

Then, when it’s time to look at student work, Ms. Austen uses students’ writing and annotation to reveal their thinking.  For example, she might have her class use an annotation scheme like this one that helps her get a sense of what students were thinking as they read.

Sometimes the barrier lives inside the text itself. Sometimes it lives in the knowledge readers bring—or don’t bring—to it. Sometimes it’s both. Text-led analysis helps teachers distinguish between the two, asking where these specific students struggled with este specific text.

From there, planning an instructional response becomes both practical and powerful:

Ms. Austen is ready to plan her lesson. Instead of a broad lesson on “characterization” or “theme,” she has a much clearer picture of how her students struggled.  They didn’t realize the narrator wasn’t fully reliable, and mistook their commentary for the unbiased truth. Here’s a topic the class can sink their teeth into.

Ms. Austen begins class with a short activity to activate knowledge on different types of narration.  Class hasn’t discussed it in a bit, and it’s possible students forgot or are shaky with the concept.  Then, she sends students right back to the text, now with a narrower focus: Review pages 23-24. What do we make of Jay’s account of the festival? 

Notice how much sharper instruction becomes when it responds to the interaction between students and their texts. Ms. Austen isn’t teaching a broad standard or engaging in tiny practices. If the text caused the stumble, the text can help students stand back up.   

By activating or building knowledge, then sending her students back to the text, Ms. Austen has done something noteworthy. She hasn’t presented her readers with a new text; she’s returned to her text with new readers. That shift makes all the difference.

In a nutshell, that’s text-led analysis: know your texts, know your students, plan and act. Ground every choice you make in the complexity of the text itself.

Go Back to go Forward

After a generation of isolating reading standards, we think this alternative respects both our students and what we have learned about how students make meaning from texts.

Once our students are reading at or near grade level, educators are left with the task of helping them make meaning from the rich texts they’ll encounter in school and life. That’s the whole game. For us, the goal of a K-12 education isn’t just to teach kids how to read, but also why they should want to do so in the first place.  

The next chapter of literacy instruction won’t be organized around broad reading skills. It’ll be about the thing those standards were supposed to help us assess: comprehension of rich, worthy texts and the critical thinking that comes with it.  We can’t think of a better place to take our learnings from the science of reading, or to take our kids.

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“Does this approach resonate?  Uncommon is proud to announce that Steve Chiger has written a book  Team Up with the Text, which profiles much of the work Uncommon has been doing on text-led analysis for the past decade.