On the Podcast: The Reading Strategies Book 2.0, Aligning Literacy Strategies with Student Skill Progression

How can educators move beyond one-size-fits-all literacy instruction and make every strategy truly count? 

In this 2023 episode, Jennifer Serravallo explores how The Reading Strategies Book 2.0 is organized to support skill progression and responsive teaching. Learn how the book’s “if-then” paths help teachers quickly identify the right strategies based on individual student needs—whether in small groups, whole-class lessons, or intervention settings.

Whether you're helping students build fluency, strengthen comprehension, or move toward independence, this conversation highlights how 2.0 empowers educators to teach with clarity and purpose.

Jennifer Serravallo:

So in the first edition, the organizing principle within each chapter was that it went from strategies you can use with more simplistic texts to strategies you can use with more complex texts. And I found that there were many cases where teachers were presented with maybe 15 options from a chapter. All of these could work with a child who's reading typical third grade level texts, for example, and it didn't really help people to find exactly what they needed based on a child's skills.

So the skill progressions are really an attempt to organize the strategies by giving teachers a clear if-then situation. So I'm setting them up to say, if the student fits this particular profile, then these are the three, four, five strategies that might be helpful for them right now.

So let me give you an example. If I'm looking at the fluency chapter, and I have on the if side of the skill progression, if a child is reading word by word and needs to try to read in longer phrases, then here are three strategies you might teach.

Or if a child is reading in phrases and is ready to start thinking about attending to the ending punctuation and changing their voice to match the punctuation, then these are some of the strategies that you might teach.

So what I hope it does is it helps teachers to look at assessments or just observe their students or talk to their students and have a really easy way to find out what strategies are going to be the most helpful.

I think a lot of people use this book to help them with small group instruction or targeted responsive instruction in lots of ways.

And there's another reason that I think these skill progressions are helpful, which is when you're trying to align strategies to standards. So standards are essentially one big progression. If you look at, let's just say the Common Core Standards, and you look at Standard 2 and you look at Standard 2 from kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, if you look across all the grade levels for the same standard, what you're seeing is one big progression of a skill, of one particular skill over time.

And so by organizing the strategies according to skill progressions, it allows you to align standards really easily to pick up the language exactly from the standard and say, "Oh, this is the thing I'm trying to teach all my fourth graders to be able to do."

So I think that for teachers that are using the book to help them with whole class instruction, whether that's weaving strategies into read-aloud or teaching whole class lessons or borrowing strategies to help with literacy skills during content area like science and social studies, these skill progressions will help them find standard alignment, but it also will help them to respond immediately to whatever they see on their students' need, whether it's in small group or one-on-one instruction.

Jaclyn Karabinas:

So would you say this book can be used as curriculum?

Jennifer:

Well, no. The book itself is not a curriculum, and that's really important. It's a complement to really any curriculum. It works in any kind of classroom, regardless of what curriculum you use, regardless of what approach you use to literacy instruction. But as it stands, it's not curriculum.

What you could do is you could supplement your curriculum. So you could say, I'm working with whatever curriculum I'm working with, and the curriculum is asking kids to identify the main idea or write a good summary of this article. But as I look at the curriculum, that's not really teaching them how to do it. Well, you can dip into The Reading Strategies Book and get strategies for how to figure out main idea, how to figure out key details. And those two pieces together help you write a good summary.

Or maybe you've got students who are exceeding expectations or above grade level and your curriculum is teaching to grade level expectations. Maybe you're going to dip into the strategies book to say, hmm, I wonder what comes next and maybe I can start teaching my child about satire or allegory or one of the higher level strategies that's new in the book?

So it is not curriculum. You could use it to supplement curriculum, you could probably create a curriculum from it. But a curriculum needs to have a really clearly defined set of objectives, knowledge building. Scope and sequence, which is more than what this book is.

I also want to say that this book is not a replacement for phonics curriculum. So there is this chapter in here about word level reading strategies. This cannot be all you teach kids to help them to read the words on the page. They need a phonics curriculum. These strategies are meant to be used alongside to help kids transfer phonics knowledge to connect to text reading.

Jaclyn:

I imagine that teachers will be really excited and look through, want to try all of the strategies right away.

Jennifer:

It's really important that you don't skip the Getting Started chapter. It's called Getting Started because I really do want you to get started there.

And it's also really important that you don't skip those little beginnings to every chapter. There's yes, 300 and I don't remember, two, three, four, there's 300-plus strategies in here, and it can be enticing to just jump right in and flip through and find. But really, the power in the book, I think, is in the way that you're matching the strategies you select to your students.

So the Getting Started chapter gives you really important research foundations. What is strategy instruction? Why is it important? What's the research base for strategies? It gives you an overview of the book, how to navigate it, how to find the strategies quickly that you most need, how we think about giving feedback to kids, which aligns to the prompts, how we think about providing kids with visual scaffolds, which aligns to the charts that are in the book.

So the Getting Started chapter really is a very, very streamlined, tight 30 pages that you will not want to skip because it gives you a really important overview. And as I said, it's a completely rewritten 30 pages from the first edition.

And then those beginnings of every chapter help you know how do I figure out what my student needs? How do I use these skill progressions? What assessments am I collecting? What am I looking for? So they really are, I promise you, I wrote them as tightly as I could because I know people want to jump into the strategies, but they are really important.

Jaclyn:

We know that assessment is a critical part of teaching, whether you are determining where to begin with a student or looking for evidence that they have progressed. Now schools use a wide variety of assessments. So can you share any ideas or strategies for assessing where students are currently at with skill progressions?

Jennifer:

One thing you might do is to look at the assessments you already give and try to identify what skills those assessments are giving you information about. And then every strategy in the book, on each strategy page in the corner, it says which skills that particular strategy helps you with.

I should back up and say, when I talk about a strategy, I'm talking about a step-by-step how-to. And when I'm talking about a skill, I'm talking about a proficiency.

So for example, if I talk about inferring as being a skill, a strategy needs to be a step-by-step way that helps you to get to inferring. So really the how to, like a little recipe. So it might be, for example, if I'm trying to help a child infer about a character, I could say, "Notice a place where the character talks or acts. Think about people in your life who talk or act like that," and then say, "What ideas does that give me about the character?" And now they're able to come up with their own words to describe the character. It's an inference.

But if a child is not yet able to do the inferring, that the strategy offers them the support. So oftentimes what happens is no matter what test you're giving your kids, whatever standardized assessment you're giving them, you might get a printout that says they need help with inferring. They need help with retelling. They need help with visualizing. They need help understanding the vocabulary words. And so you can go to the book and find strategies that align to those different skills because the skill is named on every single page.

Another way that you could think about it is that you might also be looking at, I don't know how often people are giving some of these standardized assessments, maybe like quarterly, but every day kids are changing in some way. Every day they're showing you new things they're able to do, new misunderstandings that you want to correct and support.

And so, one of the things I do in the book is I offer support with kind of really low stakes, formative classroom-based assessments, observational assessments, like watching your students while they're reading and noticing who looks distracted or who's asking to get up and move out of the room. Or little samples of student writing about their reading that they might've jotted in a Post-it note or in a notebook. Or little bits of student dialogue from a conversation they're having in a literature circle or a conversation they're having with you about their book. And I give teachers really quick and easy ways to evaluate that sample of student work and align it to the skill progression. And that's right there in the books, too.

So I think it's a combination of both using standardized assessment data or whatever kind of assessments you're mandated to give, identifying those skills and matching them up, along with your own observations and your own informal formative assessments that you might do in the classroom.

Edie:

Thanks for tuning in today. You can learn more about Jennifer Serravallo and the Reading Strategies Book 2.0 at blog.heinemann.com. That's also where you'll find a full transcript and sign up for our newsletter while you're there.