A Plea for Literacy 'Best Practice' Instruction
Straight from my graduate level text book.
I heard a rumor. It’s that District 65 literacy scores may have gone down this winter. Although this rumor is not confirmed, we’ll partake in a thought exercise and pretend that it is confirmed. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the case. I’m not sure how many times I can say this, but here I go again. I don’t think our curriculums are aligned to best practice models, especially at the middle school level.
In order for us to shift and utilize best practice models, D65 does not need to purchase a new canned curriculum. Just give the educators a little flexibility, let us use our existing resources, our hard-earned professionalism, and watch the children flourish.
Right now, I’m getting my masters degree in literacy. Please bear with me as I directly quote from my textbook:
We know that “a reader’s prior knowledge of a topic leads to increased reading fluency, the ability to make higher-level inferences, and increases the likelihood of employing effective reading strategies at points of difficulty” (Stahl, et al 205).
In short, all children (young and old) need to activate their background knowledge on any topic in order to fully comprehend literature. And so, WHILE children are becoming phonemically aware and then practicing their decoding skills (all based on the Science of Reading), they must SIMULTANEOUSLY be exposed to many texts — partially through read-alouds from their teachers — that are interconnected and rich.
One way to activate background knowledge for students is through something called conceptual text sets. Here is how we can include these text sets in the classroom.
“ELA teachers might choose books that belong to a particular genre, address an essential question, or are literary stories that work in tandem with the grade-level social studies unit” (Stahl, et al 205). FULL STOP.
We. Used. To. Do. This.
We. Don’t. Anymore. Because. We. Were. Told. By. Our. Literacy. Department. To. Stop. This. Best. Practice. Model. In. Favor. Of. A. Scripted. Curriculum. That. Does. Not. Utilize. Conceptual. Text. Sets.
When I first started teaching sixth grade in the district, many moons ago, we taught a memoir unit in which we gave the kids a long list of grade and age appropriate memoir titles, all at different reading levels and lexiles. Students could choose what book(s) they wanted to read. We monitored their reading through in-class check-ins, reading responses (written and verbal), and sanctioned, sacred reading time. These memoirs were an example of a genre-based text set. Then, as a class and in small groups, we practiced literacy skills using a variety of different excerpts, short stories, and poems (also memoirs). All were interconnected and rich. This purposefully and effectively built children’s background knowledge.
“Conceptual text sets are used ‘to build substantive understanding of a set of concepts through repetition, elaboration, and examples provided across texts’ (Cervetti et al., 2016, p. 764). Cervetti and colleagues (2016) determined that students who read text sets of six books over 3 days demonstrated stronger retellings, greater conceptual knowledge, and more target vocabulary knowledge than a control group that read unrelated texts” (Stahl, et al 205).
So there. There is the research. Kids need to be exposed to interconnected texts. I, and so many other teachers, know that this layering is VITAL for building reader’s background knowledge. At the middle school level, this is blatantly not built into our curriculum. So, if teachers are building text sets, they are doing that themselves, incognito. In silos. Often with the help of their librarians and teammates.
I want to shift this. I want to build interconnected, conceptual text sets that support rich, deep units OUT IN THE OPEN. WITH YOUR SUPPORT.
Below, I’ve attached some prior newsletters for your perusal.
I’m a teacher, but I’m also a D65 parent. If this issue is of any importance to you, subscribe to this newsletter. Join me in asking for a little more educator autonomy, so that we can make choices to support the kids sitting in front of us every day.
Works Cited
Stahl, Katherine A. Dougherty, et al. Assessment for Reading Instruction. The Guilford Press, 2026.