Episode 284 Transcript

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 284

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 284 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll be talking about how and why we can bring whole books back to our classrooms.

I was fortunate to grow up in a house full of books. From birth, my parents read to me and my siblings, read on their own, and even did the most cringe things to encourage reading, like the day when I was fourteen — fourteen — and they announced in front of my friend Adam, whose primary hobby was making fun of me, that we were going to start doing FAMILY READING NIGHT once a week.

Adam NEVER let me live that one down.

My point is, I didn’t really need school to support my love of reading. But growing up in the 70s and 80s, I did get that support. There were lots of library visits and SSR periods and book reports and so on. I don’t think we were assigned a ton of whole books, but we were definitely reading real writing, written by people who had stories to tell and things to say.

Years later, as a middle school ELA teacher, I got to share that experience with my students. I have especially fond memories of our school book room, where we stored class sets of novels. I can still picture them: Tuck Everlasting, Holes, Freak the Mighty, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and of course, The Outsiders. About 150 copies of each, stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, waiting for us to choose them. It was a delicious feeling, moving them into crates, bringing them into my classroom, then signing out one copy per student, knowing we’d be going on a little journey together.

We would always do the first chapter together in class. I would read most of it myself, out loud, stopping to think aloud, get their reactions, maybe jot a few names down on the board to make sure we were all clear about who was talking and what was going on. I might have them read a little more silently, then touch base again as a group. I knew it took a while to get really sunk into a book, to have it grab you, so I never wanted to leave it to chance that they’d be able to do this on their own, at home. We had to get anchored together.

Those are good memories. Not all of my students did the reading like they were supposed to, and not everyone liked every book. There were days when kids were bored or hadn’t read or pretended to read. But we were sharing something: a piece of art, someone’s vision brought to life, a complete experience carefully crafted and shaped, then laid out on paper, wrapped in a cover, and packaged so you could literally carry it around in your backpack. With every book, we got to have conversations about people and life and why people do the things they do. Apart from the academic value, It felt like we were doing something real, participating in a long, long tradition of people capturing their thoughts and experiences and passing them down through the years.

The first time I encountered the idea of “passages” was around 2010, when I was supervising preservice teachers at the university level. I was helping one of my student teachers create an assessment aligned with our required ELA standards, and she told me she had to use the assessment issued by the school where she was placed. The assessment was all multiple-choice and it was all based on short reading passages. After going back and forth with her for a while, it finally dawned on me that her students weren’t reading actual books. They weren’t even reading complete stories or articles. Just “passages.”

At the time, I thought this was an isolated situation. I didn’t realize it was a sign of where reading instruction was headed.

In the years since, I’ve heard more and more about classrooms where students spend most of their reading time working with short texts and excerpts, while whole books have become an occasional extra, if they’re included at all. And although I understand the value of teaching students specific reading skills and strategies, I have to wonder what gets lost when we spend so little time actually reading books.

That’s what we’re exploring in this episode with literacy expert Jennifer Serravallo, who is returning to the podcast for the fourth time. We’ll look at how whole books lost their place in many classrooms, why reading them matters, and how teachers can make room for them again, even within a packed curriculum.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Highfive for sponsoring this episode. If you’re like a lot of school leaders, you know the frustration of the revolving office door. Kids go straight from a warning to a write-up, and the consequences don’t change their behavior. Right now, lots of schools track behaviors on paper, spreadsheets, or systems that don’t talk to each other. Highfive was built to solve this exact problem. Created by Nathan Maynard, the author of Hacking School Discipline, Highfive is a behavior management platform built on a simple idea: Every discipline issue is a chance to teach. Instead of just tracking punishments, Highfive equips your staff to recognize the skills students have and teach the skills they’re missing. It turns behavioral challenges into learning opportunities, and gets teachers and MTSS leaders on the same page. Ready to reimagine what discipline looks like in your building? Head over to highfive.school/cult. You’ll get a quick walkthrough of the dashboard so you can see how it works. That’s highfive.school/cult.

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Now here’s my conversation with Jen Serravallo about bringing whole books back to the classroom.

GONZALEZ: Hey, Jen. 

SERRAVALLO: Hi. 

GONZALEZ: Hi. Welcome back. 

SERRAVALLO: Thank you. So glad to be with you again. 

GONZALEZ: You’ve been on several times already, and so probably anybody coming to this listening already knows who you are. But we also have lots of new teachers in the audience too. So give us just a little bit of background on what you do in the world of education and literacy. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. I love what I do, because it’s different every day. I do a balance of writing books for teachers. I’ve got more than two dozen books at this point. Probably best known for my reading and writing strategies books. I also have books on methods of instruction, like how to do good small group instruction, whole class lessons, and I really work a lot in the explicit research-based responsive instruction space in literacy and a little bit in the content areas. I also support a team of literacy specialists. We work in schools throughout the U.S., in Latin America, in Europe. I did a little podcasting. I sort of gave up on it, but I might resurrect it. That podcast is called “To the Classroom.” It’s a lot of work, this podcasting, right? And then sometimes I’m at state conferences, national conferences, doing keynote speeches and things like that. And then I like to get into classrooms and work with teachers whenever possible too. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. And really, when I think of who is a literacy expert in 2026, your name is the first one that comes up. 

SERRAVALLO: Oh, thank you. 

GONZALEZ: There are lots and lots. 

SERRAVALLO: Thank you. 

GONZALEZ: But you’ve just always been a really good clear voice, and I think the thing I’ve always appreciated about you is that every time you’ve come on, you’ve never wanted to stand on one strong side or another thing. “This is the way it has to be done.” It’s always been something very balanced and nuanced, which we don’t hear enough of in conversations about literacy. 

SERRAVALLO: Thank you. I really appreciate that. 

GONZALEZ: So what we’re going to be talking about today is, and this is precipitated by a new project that you have about teaching whole books in the classroom. And we’re going to get to some more details later on about the resource that you have coming out. But we were talking before we started recording about where we are right now in literacy instruction, and how we sort of lost the teaching of whole books in the classroom. So why don’t we start by just kind of telling us a little bit about how we got where we are right now where teachers are rarely teaching whole books anymore. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. I think the “how we got here” maybe has to do with a few different things. One is a lot of core program adoptions that were brought about through the science of reading and related legislation. Core programs. Being on an approved list at the state level. And many of these core programs rely on short excerpts, short stories, articles. And why are they doing that? I’m not 100 percent sure. My gut says it might be for copyright permission reasons. It’s a lot easier to get permission from — some core programs use short texts that are created for that program, like Amplify is an example of that. It’s probably easier to get a short excerpt of a chapter book than to try to purchase the actual book and send that out with the kit. I’m assuming that’s part of it, just a business decision. And also, short texts are really useful for a lot of reasons. They help kids to connect across texts. You can build text sets to develop concept knowledge. You can get through a lot of different texts together in a short period of time. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: So there’s benefit to short texts. But yeah, where have the whole books gone? And because these programs are so full, it can become really hard to find time for it. I’ve even seen — I’ve been in schools where they’ve adopted this new core program and they used to have a classroom library filled with books that kids could select from, and they put them in the closet. They’ve put them away. “We don’t have time for that anymore.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: And libraries have become technology centers rather than even kids checking out books there too. 

GONZALEZ: Right. Well, and I’m remembering, part of the project that you’re working on is a grades 1-6 project, and I’m coming from a middle and high school background, but I can remember when I was teaching in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, we would have a book closet where we would have class sets. 

SERRAVALLO: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: And you would talk to the other teachers and say, “I’m going to be taking ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ for awhile,” and that was how we would run our teaching. And now, I have three kids who have graduated from high school in the last four years, and they’re telling me that they have not read a book at all in their whole time in high school. 

SERRAVALLO: Oh my gosh. That gives me chills, right? 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SERRAVALLO: How are we saying that this is college, career, or even life ready, if we’re not actually reading books? And I don’t know if you saw it, Jenn, but there’s an article recently about Harvard eliminating whole books from literature classes. That’s not good. Professors saying the kids can’t read whole books, so we’re just going to make texts shorter. The SAT. My daughter just took the SAT and the ACT. The SAT has these short, one-paragraph passages with a question that follows rather than longer. It’s astounding to me. 

GONZALEZ: It is. And one of the things I was sharing with you earlier was that I remember when, because I feel like some of this seemed to happen right around the same time as the introduction of the common core. And I remember when I first saw the common core English language arts standards, I thought, good, this is good. We’re measuring students’ ability to do all these things as opposed to, “What did a certain character do in Chapter 2?” Because that used to always bother me when I would see tests and my colleagues sort of measuring students’ recall of things that happened in books, and not deeper understanding of things that were going on in the text. I would think, you can take any book and teach all of these things. That’s great. But then it also seemed like we just completely abandoned books altogether. Went too far in the direction of not having any books at all. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. I do think it’s true that the practice of working through a book as a class and having it be just about the details of the book, and did you get it right or wrong? That’s not very transferable. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: That’s not going to help translate to other texts or other experiences. But I think there’s a way to be planning your lessons that acknowledges what’s in the text. Right? There are facts of the text. But also, you’re teaching strategies of how to handle the challenges that are going to transfer across texts. For example, teaching kids about how to recognize foreshadowing or teaching kids how to think about how characters are complex because they’re different in different scenes, and then you put those different characteristics from different scenes together and come up with a bigger idea about them. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: Those are things you can do really in any book. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SERRAVALLO: And you’re still talking about the details of that specific text. So it’s a both-and thing. Like, so many things. It’s both-and. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

SERRAVALLO: I care about what’s in the text. There’s accuracy that matters. And we can be teaching skills and strategies that are transferable. Vocabulary that they’re going to see again and again. Build their knowledge in a way that’s going to be helpful to them in other literacy experiences. It’s really all of those things. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. And the other piece that I think is really worth mentioning too is that if kids never read whole books, they never become readers. They never learn to love reading as a thing on its own as opposed to just something you do in short segments in school. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah, and one of the researchers I think is so important to think about here is Dr. Maryanne Wolf. I don’t know if you’ve ever had her on your podcast, but I’ve talked to her a little bit on, actually I talked to her on “To the Classroom” and did another interview with her on another podcast. I love her book “Reader Come Home” where she talks about what’s lost when we’re reading all these short digital passages, and we’re not in what she calls the deep reading state anymore. It’s an opportunity to build empathy, take different perspectives on, do deeper inferential on, critical work. If you’re not immersed, that immersion of book feeling, you can’t replicate it with just a series of short texts, even if you’re reading the same number of pages over time. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. That’s basically why we’re here today is to sort of advocate for not swinging all the way back to only teaching whole books in succession but building in ways to add back in more whole book reading. And in your series that you — this is a series of resources for grades 1-6 called “Whole Book Comprehension.” This is meant to be a support for teachers who have bought into the idea that yes, we should be getting whole books back in, but how do I even do it? 

SERRAVALLO: Yes, exactly. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. So before we get into a little bit of the how-to, how if I’m listening and I’m thinking, yes, I would love to but I can’t imagine how to fit that in, anything else you want to say here about why, about why teachers should be considering this in their instruction, particularly at the elementary level, but we’ll touch on later secondary. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. I think that work that I just talked about with Maryanne Wolf is very compelling. I think we definitely need to foreground empathy, perspective taking, deeper critical, analytical thinking, especially in the age of AI when so much of the thinking is done for kids. It’s really critical that we have kids grapple with ideas and get into that deep reading state. I think it’s important from an executive function skill perspective. I think about the work of Dr. Kelly Cartwright who’s one of the co-authors of “The Active View of Reading,” and she talks about these skills like being able to sustain attention, handle multiple things at the same time, synthesize things together. Something that happens in whole books is you have to get information early on and sometimes hold onto it, and then it comes up later, and you got to bring it back in. And she talks about how executive skills could really only be practiced in the context of what it is you’re trying to get better at. So executive skills in science is different than executive skills in reading. So we’ve got to practice it, we’ve got to teach it. We’ve got to give kids opportunity. I think about the work of Dr. Peter Afflerbach who’s got a book called “Teaching Readers (Not Reading),” which explores engagement, motivation, self-efficacy. This is another thing I’m hearing a lot from teachers. Kids seem kind of checked out. They’re not as engaged. They’re having a hard time with stamina. They’re used to the quick rewards of a digital platform. I’m getting all the likes or the gamification of education that’s so common. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: We’ve got to, again, help kids develop this sense of yes, I’m a reader. I can do this, and I want to. I’m engaged and I’m motivated. And I think books offer us a great opportunity to do that. And then I think if you’re thinking from a strictly, “I want my kids to get better on measures of comprehension,” “I want them to be better readers.” I came across this study by a researcher named Westbrook, and he and his colleagues, this was done in England, where there was a heavily short text or short text-heavy curriculum being used. And they decided to pause that curriculum for six weeks and read novels at a brisk pace across those six weeks with scaffolding and support. The same kinds that’s in whole book comprehension, so helping them with vocab, background knowledge, skills and strategies. And they found that in six weeks, kids made 34 to 64 weeks of growth, and improved their self efficacy. That’s astounding. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: Six weeks? If I can find six weeks and get that kind of bang for my buck, why wouldn’t I do it, right? 

GONZALEZ: Yes. It reminds me of when I read Donalyn Miller’s stuff years and years ago about just getting kids to start reading more, just for pleasure. Suddenly all the test prep we’re doing is pointless. We don’t need it, because if they’re just reading regularly, a lot of that stuff just kind of organically starts happening. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. Donalyn’s work is so important, and I think about Penny Kittle too and the high school. What they have done to help teachers see the benefit and the power of voluminous whole book reading. Those kids are reading dozens of books across the year, independently. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: That, I hope, is a complement to all of this as well. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Hey, this is Jenn — I’m jumping in here for a second to tell you about something I’m really proud of: My new online course, Mastering the Lesson Plan. It has taken me over three years to build this course, and I truly believe it’s something every teacher should have.

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GONZALEZ: Okay, and so a lot of teachers are currently in systems where they have been given a program that they need to stick with that does not involve whole book reading. So if they hear this and they’re thinking, yes, sounds good, but how do I even do that? So maybe let’s start with those folks. How do they start to do this? 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. Just from my experiences on social media, talking to teachers about this, posting articles, engaging with them in conversation, the teachers don’t really need convincing. I feel like the teachers are like, yes, we need to be reading books. Books are good. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: I think sometimes it’s the administrators who have bought these core programs and are telling teachers to follow them as written, they might need a little convincing. So maybe share some of those studies and researchers I just mentioned. And then we need to get into the how, right? So we know that these core programs are over-stuffed. They have more in them than you could ever hope to do. You have to cut back a little bit somewhere to get a little bit of time, and I think just the logistics of it, to me what I would do is I might pause in between modules. So you teach the module as written or with a little bit of editing. Some things that might feel redundant or maybe your kids have shown you they can master certain skills or some of the short passages feel like they’re repeating the same kind of skills and you can let that go. And if you can find a week, again, the Westbrook study was novels at a brisk pace. We’re not dragging a novel out for six, seven, eight weeks. Maybe find a week in between each module and teach a book with the students at that point. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: Maybe it’s coming into content studies. Maybe you’re thinking about whole informational texts. And maybe there’s a whole book that is aligned really nicely to the content studies, and you’re going to study that book together, alongside whatever hands-on experiments or field trips or whatever it is you’re doing for content studies. It doesn’t also have to be all whole class. Think about small group time. If there’s a time when kids are working independently, in centers, book clubs, small groups. Maybe you have a small group routine where you have 30 minutes a day where everyone’s either working independently or in a small group with you. That could be something kids could work on. You could introduce some of the vocabulary, teacher strategy to support them with the reading of that chapter. Then they read it, and maybe get together in a book club and discuss it. Remember Junior Great Books? Let’s bring some of that back. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: The conversations that could happen around books. Other schools, my sister’s school, she said, this is so sad, but also maybe practically helpful, she said the only time her kids read a book is at the end of the day during the WIN block. So the kids move around to different groupings, and it’s the “what I need block for enrichment and intervention.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: And that’s the time of day when kids are reading a whole book because their core program that they use is all short excerpts as well. I think it could be a great summer school thing. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: Like summer school book clubs. I think once we are convinced it has to happen, then we look at our schedule carefully and say, where are we slotting this in? Is it a time of day that’s consistent? Is it a routine like in between the units or modules that’s consistent? Obviously in conversation with admin. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Oh, right. I’ve got two questions that are hanging at the top of my head as I’m listening to you. So one of them is just a simple logistical question, which is part of these studies, because I know that you’ve got a lot of strategies in terms of background knowledge, front-loading vocabulary, and so on. But also when you describe all these different ways that we could be building in, like doing a novel over a week, for example, are you talking about a lot of silent reading in class also? Or are we just sending the books home and saying, read it. 

SERRAVALLO: That’s an important question. So I think the answer depends on — I’m advocating for some whole book reading at grade level. So what we have to think about is how far are your kids from currently being able to handle grade level texts independently? If you work at a school where they can handle grade level texts independently, your support as the teacher could be a little bit light. You can introduce a couple of vocabulary words, maybe have a little background knowledge conversation, maybe introduce a strategy and say, “Off you go. You read this on your own during independent work time.” Or you’re reading it for homework and we’re going to come in and discuss it. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SERRAVALLO: That’s the kind of reading by yourself, or maybe they’re partnered up. We know reading with a partner, that could be another option. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SERRAVALLO: But if they need a little more support than that, then maybe you’re reading with the kids. Maybe it looks like shared reading or you’re displaying the text and kids are practicing reading chorally or echo reading for some or all of the text. Maybe you’re doing close reading where you’re looking at a text together and supporting kids with the careful re-reading necessary. Or maybe if you need to give even more support, you’re reading to the kids and you’re doing some read-aloud of this text. So we’re all still maybe holding a copy of it, having conversations about it, practicing writing about reading, but I’m reading it to you. And I think also just because you choose one way for Chapter 1 doesn’t mean you have to choose the same way for Chapter 2. For example, you might start off a 10 chapter novel reading aloud the first three chapters, then once you’re sure kids have a good handle on the setting, the characters, you’ve got a good sense, maybe the next chapter you’re like, okay, let’s do the first page together as close reading, and then let’s try, you read the rest with a partner for the rest of that chapter. So you can kind of alternate the amount of support and scaffolding you’re giving based on what it is that the students need. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. That’s all really helpful, and I like that there’s sort of a menu of options, and it’s going to really depend on what your kids are showing you. And I would also imagine you could be doing different things for different students even in your room. 

SERRAVALLO: Oh yeah. 

GONZALEZ: If you’ve got a few kids who are just, like, “Can I just put on noise-blocking headphones and just read by myself?” You could just let them go. 

SERRAVALLO: Absolutely. I think you could also even say, I’m going to teach this strategy, maybe this strategy about how to handle flashbacks to everybody, because I know for the whole class, this is new. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: And then I’m going to get the kids started reading, and I’m going to split the class into small groups, and I’m going to pull this group over because they need help with character analysis. And this group, they’re my multi-lingual learners. I’m going to give them extra vocabulary support. This group, it doesn’t even have to be that the whole class is doing the same thing. Absolutely, that level of differentiation’s possible and really helpful too. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. I kind of feel like with all of this, you’ve sort of answered my second question, but I do want to bring it up too because I’m thinking that for a teacher who’s teaching right now, you have admin that you need to convince. In terms of they’ve got the programming, and they’ve got test scores that they’re worried about, but then I also think you have this generation of kids who are not used to reading whole books either, or mostly. Not all of them, but mostly. And I’m thinking of one kid I know specifically in my personal life who I’m thinking what would even be my approach to convincing him that this is something you could actually enjoy doing. This is somebody who’s very into hands-on stuff and video games and not sitting with a book. So how do you bridge that gap with the kids and getting them excited or maybe just willing? 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience yourself, but I have. I have periods where I’m not really reading a novel because I’m so immersed in a writing project. Everything I’m reading is research, and I’m spending all my time writing, and I’m not reading like that. And then after I turn this project in to the publisher, I was like, okay, I have a week at the beach. I’m going to read again. That week was so challenging. I’ve got to tell you. I did a lot of re-reading. I did a lot of no, Jen, stop thinking about that. Focus. Get back in. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: It was a muscle that had atrophied, and I had to regrow it. 

GONZALEZ: I have had that, yes. Especially if I’m reading on a — I have this Nigerian writer that I love reading, but I’m constantly going to Google Maps and looking up Street View of certain places. Like, I want to keep looking up things that she’s writing about. And it’s just like, no, just read the book. It’s okay. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. That experience is, it’s hard to sustain that stamina again. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. It is. And Dr. Wolf talks about this, this neural plasticity, this ability to regrow our brains in this way that we can train ourselves back to it, but it takes some work, and it takes some practice. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: So I think about students who are like, eh, that’s not for me. Reading is boring. I don’t want to do that. And I think part of what’s so hard is that that first week when you’re getting back into a book, the muscles that you need to practice using to be able to do it with success, and I think that can be where to teacher comes into play and provides the support necessary, whether that’s vocabulary support, background knowledge support. Building community in the class around conversations about the book, helping them through writing about reading, and you have to give that guidance, I think, for kids who are not regular book readers so that eventually they feel like, I’ve got this. I can do it. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SERRAVALLO: And that’s, again, backed up with that study I talked about earlier from Westbrook. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: The kids didn’t believe they could do it, probably didn’t want to, doesn’t say that in the study, but by the time they got to the end, they’re like, yeah, I can see myself reading another book. I feel like I’m a reader of books now. I can do this. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. I love that you told that story about yourself. I mean, Jen Serravallo having trouble getting through a book is really validating to everybody. And that’s absolutely been my experience. I can’t hold attention that well anymore. So I would even think that with an older kid to explain that mechanism to them, that everybody can really struggle if they’re not used to it. 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. And these screens. The phones and the swiping and the scrolling. Dr. Wolf calls it dopamine lollipops that we’re constantly getting — bing, bing, bing, bing, bing — rewarded, rewarded, rewarded. And a book? Reading is not like that. You get rewards, but it’s a different kind of reward, and it requires sustained reading over time, and it’s a different kind of experience. So they need practice and, I think, guidance with the teaching. 

GONZALEZ: So you have got a kit, actually a whole kit for grades 1-6. There’s separate ones for every grade level to help teachers with this process. So tell us about what’s in this kit, and then once you’re finished telling me about it, we’re going to ask you to give us a peek into one of the lessons that’s in there. So what is this kit? What’s it called? And how can people find it? And what’s in it? 

SERRAVALLO: Yeah. So it’s called “Whole Book Comprehension.” And like you said, for grades 1-6, six different kits, each one has four fiction and four nonfiction whole books included in the box. And those are award-winning titles, beloved authors, interesting topics, from science and social studies, with a real range of representation, text types, and so on. And I picked these titles purposefully, but I also set it up in a way to help teachers use any book that they loved to do the same kind of work. So I’m glad that you asked about how to plan a lesson or what a lesson looks like, because we’ll get into that a little bit so people can try that out right away. Every book is broken up into 30- to 45-minute lessons. Sometimes it’s a chapter per lesson, sometimes two chapters per lesson, depending on the length of each chapter. I’ve done the work to select the Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary words. And every lesson also includes four recommended strategies that align to “The Reading Strategies Book 2.0,” which is also included in the kit. So there’s a teacher’s guide, which half of it’s a professional book that kind of talks about the research and theory and how to understand text complexity and thinking about what is comprehension and how do we assess and how do we teach it. And then the rest of the book, the teacher’s guide is really lesson by lesson by lesson by lesson breaking up these eight titles bit by bit so it’s ready to use right away in the classroom. 

GONZALEZ: Nice. And so a teacher could take this basically and just say, I’m going to have the kit. I’m probably going to only teach two of these books throughout the year. 

SERRAVALLO: Sure, yeah. 

GONZALEZ: But I’ve got it as a resource. And then I thought it was very interesting that it was sort of tied to specific titles in each kit. Could a teacher use what’s in the kit to then also teach other books? 

SERRAVALLO: Yes, absolutely. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: Another part of it is there’s downloadable planning forms, student response forms for writing about reading, and then rubrics to evaluate their comprehension. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

SERRAVALLO: And the ones that go with the book have student exemplars from the books that are included, but I also included generalized rubrics that you can use with any book and generalized lesson planning forms that you can use with any book. So I have this Five Steps for Lesson Planning after you’ve figured out what the section of text is that you’re going to read. You’re first going to think, what’s the background knowledge support that kids need. I think you want to leave it alone if there’s support in the text itself to learn the content. But if not, maybe you want to have a discussion, show some photographs, like you were saying, go to Google Maps and learn about the place, before you begin the reading. Step 2 is to think about vocabulary and figurative language, and for the books in the kit, I’ve picked out the words and recommended which of those ones I’ve chosen are most important. What you would do for any book is just go through, read for Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary. I recommend picking words that are either really critical to understanding that book or are words that are just good to know, because they’re going to show up again and again. Those are the most high leverage, so that’s Step 2. Step 3 you’re going to be thinking about strategies, because we don’t want to just teach the book. We want to teach transferable how-tos, like thinking about how do I look at a text and figure out its structure and use that to help me determine the main idea? How do I use context clues to figure out what a word means? So these how-tos become transferable and portable across other texts and experiences. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

SERRAVALLO: That’s the second one, and prompts to help them with that. Then I want to think about writing about reading. This doesn’t have to happen in every lesson, but I think it should happen somewhat frequently, that kids are pausing, they’re jotting their thinking, and teachers are teaching them how to be clearer or complete in their writing about these different skills. And then the fifth one is conversation. Do we want to do a book club, a whole class conversation, quick turn and talk? We want kids talking, because I really think we’ve done so much work around reading curriculum, probably because there’s reading tests, but literacy skills are reading, writing, speaking, and listening. So I wanted to include all of these in the lesson planning format as well. 

GONZALEZ: Fantastic. Okay, so if listeners want to learn more, where can they find more information about the series or just find more from you online? 

SERRAVALLO: Yes. My website is jenniferserravallo.com. There’s a lot there. My podcast is there. You can learn about my literacy specialist team and the support we can offer in your school. I’ve got articles and blogs and other things linked there. I’ve got a little store filled with freebies, all that’s there. I’m probably most active on Instagram, @jenniferserravallo. Facebook, The Reading and Writing Strategies Community. I did a little bit of TikTok experimentation, so those are out there. I don’t know if I want to keep going with that. The resources published by Heinemann, so you can find out more about whole book comprehension on heinemann.com. 

GONZALEZ: Awesome. Thank you again. You’ve got so much knowledge to share, and I’m just really, I’m excited to have you on again. So thank you. 

SERRAVALLO: Thank you. I’m excited anytime I get to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me. 

To read a full transcript of this interview and find links to Jen’s new Whole Book Comprehension kits, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 284. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.