Scaffolding complex texts, with Mitchell Brookins, Ph.D.

[00:00:00] Mitchell Brookins: We don’t have to let the gist be the aim. The gist is the part of that journey. It’s how we consolidate. But how are we getting kids to ask the next question, the “So what.”

[00:00:15] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify Today I’m excited to share a special edition of the show. Dr. Mitchell Brookins, one of our regular and favorite guests, has authored a new book, Scaffolding Complex Texts: How to Plan and Teach for Deeper Comprehension in Grades 5 Through 8.

[00:00:37] Of course, we had to bring him onto the show to talk all about it, and we wanted to slot it in just after our recent Tier 1 conversation with Dr. Sarah Brown because this book is really about what can we do for all kids to help all kids access complex texts.

[00:00:55] In this episode, we’ll discuss strategies for helping all students become close readers, for unlocking conversations about deeper concepts, and so much more. Dr. Brookins is a 20-year literacy practitioner with teaching roots in Chicago and leadership roots in New Orleans. Now it’s time to dive into his new book, Scaffolding Complex Texts.

[00:01:20] Well, I am so excited, Dr. Mitchell Brookins, to have you back on Science of Reading: The Podcast. Yay. I would love it if you could give our listeners just a little introduction to yourself before we jump into our topic for the day.

[00:01:35] Mitchell Brookins: For those of you who are new, you should know that I have my teacherhood roots in Chicago, third, fifth, sixth, first grade, RTI, but then I have my leader roots in New Orleans with three different charter school districts where I was an administrator really trying to support evidence-based practice to take root.

[00:01:57] And in the past, I would say since COVID, around 2020, the pandemic happened, and in that time period I said I wanted to just get into scale. And so I put myself out there. I went to book studies. I got into Science of Reading Facebook groups and really just engaged and got all in.

[00:02:21] And so I’m here today just to tell my literacy learning journey.

[00:02:25] Susan Lambert: I love that. And before we started the recording we were talking about how you ended up as a guest the first time, which we’ll link listeners in the show notes if they haven’t listened to that one. But it was because of, you were getting engaged in all the places, and I saw you popping up in all social media, and I have to say that you were giving people the best advice. I really appreciate your work of diving in and digging into the weeds of really supporting educators to support students. So thank you very much for that work.

[00:02:57] Mitchell Brookins: Thank you.

[00:02:58] Susan Lambert: Well, we are smack dab in the middle of a season on Multi-Tiered System of Supports. We just had an episode with Dr. Sarah Brown talking about the importance of Tier 1 or that universal instruction, how that sets the foundation for everything. And you just released a book called Scaffolding Complex Texts: How to Plan and Teach for Deeper Comprehension. Congratulations.

[00:03:28] Mitchell Brookins: Thank you.

[00:03:28] Susan Lambert: Yay. And I thought what a great opportunity to bring you on, first of all, to talk about where this book came from and what listeners can get from this book and why they should go buy the book. But also bridging to our comprehension season that we did last time with reminding listeners that all good things start in Tier 1 instruction, and there’s a lot of ways that we can support our students there.

[00:03:56] So that was a big, long intro. Before we dive into the meat of this, and just again, this is specifically focused on grades five through eight, which is also amazing. Can you just tell us a little bit about how this book came to be and why it was important for you to get this out into the world?

[00:04:19] Mitchell Brookins: It started in my classroom. It started in my classroom where I fell in love with complexity. I’ll never forget the first time that we had the chief director of literacy came into my classroom, and she looked around my room, saw all of this writing, and she said, “You’re a writing teacher.”

[00:04:42] And she doesn’t know what she did to me as a third-grade teacher. I was a first-year teacher, and I said, “Oh, if she thinks I’m a writing teacher, then I’m a writing teacher.” And so I became obsessed with you’ve got to teach kids how to write better, you’ve got to push them to think, because I always believed, and I learned, and especially in my studenthood, I learned that the more you learn how to write those literary essays, it gets you to college. It gets you there.

[00:05:10] And so I share that because that’s the beginning of my story in my own classroom. But what really happened was when I became a leader as well, and it started in core instruction, where I began to see that teachers were using HQIM. I began to see that there was a gap between what students could do with a text by themselves. Many of our students in our school were not able to access those texts by themselves.

[00:05:38] And so I found and saw my teachers, they were actually struggling, because it was, “No, this is hard.” And this is not a belief system. This wasn’t that my teachers didn’t believe that children deserve to have equitable instruction or whatever we want to call that now. It was really because they could not lift the words off the page.

[00:06:00] And so I said, “Okay. What are things and scaffolds that we can put in place so that as we’re using the HQIM, it’s going to work?”

[00:06:11] Susan, I think you remember the story. I went to the National Reading Panel Report one Friday night. I’m at the University of New Orleans. I’m in a PhD program. I went to that chapter on fluency. And I came back Monday morning and said, “Hey, you all, I have an idea. Let’s add fluency drills to our HQIM implementation.”

[00:06:33] And I’ll never forget walking out of that classroom, and the kids said, “Oh, I like that.” And I said, “Oh, so if they like it and they like reading aloud, we just turned it around and made it work and made it fun.”

[00:06:47] That was my opening to this book to say, “Oh, as I learned these scaffolds over the years, how do I put that in a book so that people can know the lessons I’ve learned?” So this book is actually my literacy lessons.

[00:07:04] Susan Lambert: And your motivation was “We’re not going to bring the text down to their level. What we’re going to do is scaffold our instruction to ensure that they can engage with these texts.”

[00:07:15] Why was that so important to you?

[00:07:20] Mitchell Brookins: Maybe this sounds weird, but there was no other way. I don’t understand. I am not going to set up my instructional aim to set children up to be less than. I’m not going to make the aim below grade level. I just did not believe that as a teacher, I’m setting the instructional aim.

[00:07:42] No, that’s just not who I am. You have to know that about me, that complexity is worth it. I’m all about sophistication. I’m all about deeper-level thinking. And so, no, dropping the rigor was not an option.

[00:07:57] Susan Lambert: I love how you said that. And maybe the title of the book should be I Fell in Love with Complexity. I think that’s what you said to begin with this, because said no one ever.

[00:08:09] Mitchell Brookins: But I do. I am, I guess I am a literacy nerd. I love language. I love nerding out. “Oh, that word choice, why did you do that? And why did you arrange it that way? And oh, wow, you made me think. And oh, that’s a reference to another text.” That really feeds me.

[00:08:27] I love text internalization, so I think people will see that. That’s a belief of mine.

[00:08:32] Susan Lambert: And that is also contagious. That’s the word I’m looking for. When you love something like that, it’s contagious, both as an instructor with the students, but also for you in the role you are in as a leader influencing what happens in the classroom.

[00:08:49] This is all about comprehension, so I’m going to ask you the hard question: What misconceptions, beliefs, mindsets about comprehension do you take head-on in this book?

[00:09:04] Mitchell Brookins: Oh, you started with a big one.

[00:09:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I did.

[00:09:10] Mitchell Brookins: That  deeper level thinking is something you do after.

[00:09:18] I believe that deeper level thinking, the deeper idea is actually the aim. When it comes to comprehension, comprehension to me is not the who, what, when, where. It’s not the gist. It’s insight. I think that’s where I sit with that.

[00:09:38] When I think about insight, when I think about outcomes, and when I think about what we believe comprehension is, we also have another misconception, and that is children just arrive at the insight on their own.

[00:09:57] It’s funny. When you look at the research of Kintsch and Rawson’s work in 2005, they talk about how the novice comprehender is satisfied with a reasonably accurate text base. They’re satisfied with that.

[00:10:14] Susan Lambert: Reasonably accurate. Satisfaction and reasonable accuracy, right?

[00:10:18] Mitchell Brookins: As long as it’s that, they’re cool. They’ll get it, and I think we see that in classrooms where our kids are like, “Yeah, I will tell you. I’ll retell. I’ll paraphrase. I’m good with that.”

[00:10:27] And so the misconception that I’m really calling out is that we don’t have to let the gist be the aim. The gist is the part of that journey. It’s how we consolidate. But how are we getting kids to ask the next question, like the “So what.” And the “So what” isn’t just reserved for the children who are advanced thinkers.

[00:10:51] That’s the other misconception I want to put out there, too. Sometimes the difference between students’ responses is just their knowledge. It’s not their intellect. It’s not their aptitude. It’s not that there’s some one person is smarter or not, that honestly, the difference is what knowledge did you activate, and could you integrate it?

[00:11:13] I’ve seen oftentimes where, I don’t know if you all have seen it, where you ask a student a question, you get the retell answer, and you ask them that next question. You start probing, and then what do you get? You get all the brilliance. You get all, oh, you do have it in you. I just need to tease it out.

[00:11:30] And so what I’m pushing on everyone here is “Tease it out.” That’s actually a part of comprehension instruction. We’re so busy checking for understanding that we’re not helping them to construct it.

[00:11:44] Susan Lambert: That’s such a good distinction. It’s similar to the distinction we’ve made before about comprehension as process versus comprehension as product.

[00:11:53] Mitchell Brookins: Yes.

[00:11:53] Susan Lambert: It’s ongoing. It’s ongoing, and there are things as an instructor, like you said, or even if you and I were talking about a text, you may ask me a question about a text that I could never conceive of, and it makes me think in a different way, makes me think differently about that text that I’m reading.

[00:12:12] Mitchell Brookins: And I… you said something, too, that made me think. Active process. Everyone knows about surface, cold, text-based, and situational model, but do we also understand that the situational model, you all, is in your mind?

[00:12:29] And the only way for a situational model to be built is what you built during reading. You have to take that agency. You have to do the work. The teacher, teachers, you can’t get in the kid’s mind. Just like orthographic mapping, that’s cognitive. And so you can’t leave the reader out of the conversation.

[00:12:47] And so I’m calling out, why don’t we create multiple practice opportunities for students to sense-make? Take them through the process. Don’t allow it to act like you just come at these deeper ideas by just sitting in the conversation. No, it comes through the pressing and the probing from the facilitator.

[00:13:07] Susan Lambert: So when we think about that then, helping students comprehend deeply or comprehend complex texts, what do we need as educators to understand differently about how students comprehend those texts?

[00:13:24] Mitchell Brookins: The book highlights access to complex texts, because there are instructional approaches that we know from the evidence base, from vocabulary to syntax, to how writing and all of that. I call it the combo effect.

[00:13:41] Your scaffolds have to have that combo effect. There’s going to be some discussion, there’s going to be some writing, there’s going to be some thinking, there’s going to be some reading. And when you put those pieces together, that’s the scaffold.

[00:13:52] I think that’s one piece. But then I think there’s another piece that I’ve recently really been reflecting on a lot, and that is actually the mental model building.

[00:14:07] Because once I give you access to the text through pre-teaching the vocabulary, I still have to have an instructional routine or an approach to get you to think from that idea to the next idea. I still have to move you.

[00:14:22] When you conjure up that memory of, hey, I’m reading this text about, let’s say, “Charlotte’s Web,” and you’re thinking about the pig and the spider, you’re also conjuring up that memory of friendship.

[00:14:37] When I think about Langston Hughes’ “Thank You, Ma’am,” yes, I’m thinking about the figure, but I’m also thinking about compassion. And once I get to those key ideas, I need my teacher to help me say, “So what is compassion? What does it mean? What do you know about it? What are the examples and the non-examples?”

[00:15:01] Saying, “Guess what, Mitchell, I’m going to hold those ideas for you.” I’m going to hold it. I’m going to take you back to the text and say, “So what’s going on in the text?”

[00:15:12] “Well, the character’s doing this.”

[00:15:14] “Now, do you remember when you said that compassion meant this? How can you use your knowledge of compassion to help you understand why this character is doing X, Y, and Z?”

[00:15:27] Susan Lambert: That’s a great example.

[00:15:29] Mitchell Brookins: We’ve got to activate, but we’ve got to hold it and bring it back to their remembrance at the just-right moment and say, “Okay, now use it. Now work that, work your knowledge and work that text. What are you seeing now?”

[00:15:40] “I’m now seeing that she did this because she saw herself in him. She saw her past in him.”

[00:15:45] And if you know “Thank You, Ma’am,” you know that. But the child can’t do that by themselves because, well, it’s a lot to hold.

[00:15:53] And then guess what? One day you’re going to create that disposition of what we call a close reader is, and that child will begin to say, “Oh, let me stop. Let me activate what makes sense. Let me make sense of that.”

[00:16:08] I shared all that because I think we keep forgetting that they have to do the mental work, too. And we’ve got to help guide them in that.

[00:16:17] Susan Lambert: Talk to me a little bit about some of the chapters that you have in the book that you really address these areas for scaffolding that will help students access or comprehend these complex texts.

[00:16:28] So I know you have a chapter on vocabulary, right?

[00:16:30] Mitchell Brookins: Yes.

[00:16:31] Susan Lambert: Yes. Of course.

[00:16:33] Mitchell Brookins: Vocabulary, I’m going to say it is different. It’s not just about pre-teaching vocabulary. It’s about using that word’s meaning to help you go back and close read.

[00:16:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:16:43] Mitchell Brookins: I’m really excited about that because that’s a flip. I’m also excited, if you know me, you know I love syntax.

[00:16:49] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I know you do.

[00:16:51] Mitchell Brookins: I love a long sentence and breaking it apart. And in the book you’ll see just it’s not about grammar labels to me. It’s about meaningful units of ideas. And so when you read a sentence, can you help students see that, “Oh. Oh, this sentence has two ideas,” and that’s where it is.

[00:17:12] And so we’re looking at those meaningful phrases to say, “Well, what idea is surfacing there?” So syntax is more than just a label. It’s a function. And we use that to help us build that mental model, put that effort in there.

[00:17:27] And I hope that people also get excited about the stories. I don’t think this work is just about the scaffolds. It’s about the meaning behind those stories. And so I hope that when you all are reading the different chapters, it takes you back to classroom moments.

[00:17:46] It takes you back to your time when you were working with complex text and you got lost in a book. And so I hope you all experience that. So yeah, I just think it’s the scaffolds for access, the stories that make it stick, and then I hope you all definitely see the thinking of how you turn that scaffold from an idea to a lasting memory in that reader’s mind.

[00:18:13] Susan Lambert: You contend here that things that are actually happening in the classroom now need to change.

[00:18:23] So you’ve talked a little bit about helping students tease it out, or we need to do some different things in the classroom. Can you help us understand what you believe needs to change in the classroom?

[00:18:35] Mitchell Brookins: Let’s talk about what matters. Let’s talk about concepts. One of the things, even in my current work, when I get an opportunity to walk through classrooms, and I see a lot of classrooms, one thing that I’m seeing is that we’re using HQIM, but the conversation is still surface level.

[00:18:55] We’ve got the text. We’ve got the TDQs. We’ve got the exit tickets. We have the module task and all of those things, but yet the conversation is still on the who, what, when, where. Just retell all the facts that you remember.

[00:19:12] And if I had a wish, I wish that we could go back to having conversations about concepts. If you were that English teacher and you got excited about teaching that motif for the day, and you just wanted the kids to get that enduring understanding, I want to hear more of that. Because I believe that it’s the conversations about concepts, the life idea plus the text idea comes together, and we get a deeper idea.

[00:19:43] I would love to hear more conversations about that. I would love to see writing as a moment of reflection. Writing has turned into an assignment.

[00:19:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yes.

[00:19:56] Mitchell Brookins: It’s the weekly constructive response. And I know that all that is important, so don’t hate and get mad at me, people. I’m not saying those things are not important.

[00:20:05] But what I’m saying is what happened to writing when you need to take a Post-it Note out and think for a second, or I’m going to do a quick write because I need to get this idea out, or I’m going to annotate my book, but not those annotations that don’t lead to anything, and the whole page is marked up, but sometimes the plus or minus sign that says, “Oh, that’s a negative effect.”

[00:20:29] Those kinds of things I would look for in classrooms.

[00:20:33] Susan Lambert: This makes me think about bringing concepts to life. You were talking about that when you were talking about vocabulary.

[00:20:40] So you can see vocabulary as a list of words that you help students understand the meaning, or you could go the next step and help students understand that, yes, this word has a meaning, but it’s also connected to the content or the concept that you’re actually reading, and taking that next step deeper.

[00:20:59] Is that what you’re talking about?

[00:21:01] Mitchell Brookins: That is exactly, that’s exactly what it is. It’s to say, let’s use that word knowledge of resilience and go back into that passage. Go back into that VIP. I call it the VIP, the very important part.

[00:21:17] Susan Lambert: Oh, I love that.

[00:21:18] Mitchell Brookins: Go back to that VIP and keep that word’s meaning in your mind. Okay, resilience means “Keep going.” It means “I’m going to have a hard time.” It means “I’m going to have to overcome.” And go back and see how the author illustrates that, because it teaches them that this didn’t happen by happenstance. The writer was intentional.

[00:21:43] But what you called out, which is perfect, which is very different, I’m calling out my little nugget, and I’m just going to say it, I call these the anchor words, because I say an anchor word is a text-critical word. It is that one word that captured that VIP’s essence.

[00:22:01] Susan Lambert: Oh, beautiful.

[00:22:02] Mitchell Brookins: It’s a Tier 2 or Tier 3 word. It’s got to be multisyllabic, all of those things, and it’s like, “Oh, the reason why we can go back and look for evidence is because this word captures the essence of the VIP.”

[00:22:17] And so you do that process, and so in the book you’ll learn, you all, that when you choose the right text-critical word, you align it to the core concept of the text, you choose the VIP that illustrates that core concept, we can now go back and examine language.

[00:22:36] Susan Lambert: And we can help students… What I love about that is we can help students understand that, “Hey, in your mind, you have to hold the meaning of this word, while at the same time, you’re using that to look back on the text to find whether it’s evidence, examples, or whatever.”

[00:22:54] And that’s a fairly complex process for a young student. It’s hard enough for an adult, but for a young student that’s just learning how to engage deeper with text, that’s complicated.

[00:23:06] Mitchell Brookins: Yes. And it’s, but it’s beautiful when you see it, because when you see the video, it took me back to a moment where people say it’s always so hard, and in one of the videos, it’s in the, going to be on the companion guide, you get to see children who we just talked about the word. We just talked about its meaning, and they hold the meaning in their minds, and you see them going back and annotating the text, and then putting that answer on the Post-It.

[00:23:35] But it’s because, when you think about cognitive load theory, I focus your attention on the key word, and we hold that one thing as we close read.

[00:23:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It’s a little bit mind-blowing, actually. But we’re talking too about kids in fifth through eighth grade. So you specifically focused on this grade level, which I think is really, really cool because they’re also the kids that need probably a little more motivation to get into the text, if you will, because many times they’ve been non-successful because maybe they’re not the greatest decoders and never learned how to read.

[00:24:17] But the way that you talk about text makes me think that this age range would also then understand that text isn’t just lifting the words off the page, like you said at the beginning of this episode, right?

[00:24:30] Mitchell Brookins: Yes. They see it as, “Oh, you chose a topic that it’s meaningful to me.” Or like, “Oh, I want to learn about… Yeah, I want to learn about the Anti-Federalists and Federalists and what was that fight about?” Because people still fighting today about it. And we can make those connections.

[00:24:48] They, for some reason, I don’t know why we don’t think that middle school students want to talk about the hard stuff. They want to talk about the stuff that you all go behind the scenes and say, “We’re going to talk about as adults.” They want to have that conversation in class, and why can’t we? I’d have rather them have that conversation with an educated adult who’s going to have the emotional intelligence to move the room to help them make a better understanding.

[00:25:17] Susan Lambert: So this is also, this also means that the high-quality instructional materials you’re using has these high-quality complex texts in order to engage students in deeper comprehension, so that should be an assumption of an HQIM.

[00:25:34] Mitchell Brookins: It is. And if anyone has seen me, you know I love a good complex text. It’s all about the just-right text that… I like to choose text, you all, that gets us talking, gives us something to talk about.

[00:25:51] Susan Lambert: Now let’s talk about making this kind of instruction consistent.

[00:25:56] So this can feel great for that teacher who’s as passionate as you about language, who really wants to get beyond surface level text. But what can we do to ensure that this kind of instruction is consistent across classrooms or across schools or across districts or states, right?

[00:26:17] Mitchell Brookins: Yeah. I actually think we’ve got to re-norm or reset what we understand about how you come to understanding.

[00:26:27] Remember we talked about that checking versus constructing. I do think that there’s a need to understand, “Well, how do you construct understanding? How do we use these scaffolds around fluency when you need it? When you see children are going to get this dense passage, will you do the fluency drill there? If when, do you understand that like from an instructional science standpoint, that when the syntax gets heavy, now it’s time for the sentence dive.”

[00:26:54] So I think that’s, we’ve got to elevate that these scaffolds are instructional responses.

[00:27:01] Susan Lambert: I love that.

[00:27:02] Mitchell Brookins: They’re a response, and they’re to be used at the most challenging moment. ‘Cause I think what happens in an HQI implementation, teachers are all over the place, have to know everything about the text. They’re trying to figure all the things out, and they don’t really have a mental model of where they want to go with that day’s lesson with the text.

[00:27:22] And so I think that’s my second point, that we’ve got to also elevate, and I know people are going to not want to hear it.

[00:27:29] Susan Lambert: Grumble. It’s okay. They can grumble.

[00:27:31] Mitchell Brookins: Text planning. Text internalization.

[00:27:35] You have to spend time with that text. You need to know where are the VIPs. You need to know where the dense sentence is, though, or let’s call it the beautiful sentence, ’cause the writer spent a lot of time on that one sentence.

[00:27:47] If you’re like me, there are sentences in here that I spent about two hours trying to craft, you all. Don’t just run over the sentence. But I’m just sharing that, teachers, you have to spend time with that text. And I’m telling you, if you spend time with the text, you’ll be able to work that text. You’ll understand that lesson. It’ll make sense. But you’ve got to have a mental model of the text.

[00:28:10] Susan Lambert: Oh, it’s such a good point. And I’m going to backtrack a couple of places because I think what you said might be, teachers might, educators might think, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense.”

[00:28:22] So the most dense places in the text is the best place for fluency practice for students. So take them to the hard spots and scaffold them in the hard spots.

[00:28:37] And I think sometimes as an educator, we may think, “Oh, that’s too hard for Mitchell. I’m just going to tell him that, and then I’ll have him do that practice in the places that are a little bit easy for him so he can feel confident about what he’s doing.”

[00:28:55] You’re actually talking about flipping that the other way. Put that kid in the hard stuff and help the kid do it.

[00:29:03] Mitchell Brookins: When you give them more, they do more. So why am I, why would I… I just said this last week, and it’s in my book, you all. There is no point in using sophisticated scaffolds for shallow thinking.

[00:29:19] Susan Lambert: Such a good quote. Oh my gosh.

[00:29:21] Mitchell Brookins: There is no point.

[00:29:23] So I’m going to, I’m going to put all of my energy in the easiest part of the text? For real?

[00:29:31] Let’s not be afraid of complexity. Lean into it. It’s okay. It’ll work out. It’s going to be messy, but it’s worth it. So yes, I believe in going to the most challenging VIP.

[00:29:43] You’ll see that in the book, you all. It’s not about every spot. It’s not everything, and this is not a move to do for everything.

[00:29:50] Most challenging VIP, break it down, figure out if they need a fluency scaffold, a vocabulary scaffold, a syntax scaffold, and help them construct the meaning. And yeah, you did say, “If Johnny can’t do it, I’m going to give it to him.”

[00:30:07] You all, when you give it to them, they’re not going to make a situational model. It’s their job. It’s in their mind. So step back and just create the conditions.

[00:30:22] Susan Lambert: And I love that. Again, not to take it back to grades five through eight, but kids in grades five through eight have come in with experience and knowledge and things that we often don’t know how to allow them to access or, do I want to say, give them credit for.

[00:30:41] Helping them engage with that helps to then activate all those things they already know and make it come alive and real for them within the context of a text.

[00:30:52] Mitchell Brookins: They’ll stay engaged because you’re working their brain, y’all. Like, “It’s cognitive engagement.”

[00:31:00] When you ask me, “So Mitchell, what do you think about that?” I’m now retrieving my memories of what I know about that. So you already are starting to make me work, and you’re now making my brain say, “Okay, there’s something I got to categorize. There’s something I got to organize. I got to make a connection.” So the brain is activated now.

[00:31:22] And I think that’s the thing, and the reason why I keep saying that checking thing, you all, the checking should come out of the understanding. You’re checking too soon. You’re checking too soon. You just got the conversation started and you’re asking the deep question. Let the brain marinate, let it come to its understanding, and now check. “And so what did the author believe is the big idea?”

[00:31:50] That’s a question I ask towards the end. That’s not the entry, especially when I know I’m choosing the hardest part of the text that has the most complex ideas that I just figured out last night.

[00:32:05] Susan Lambert: Or you didn’t figure out until after you had the discussion with your classroom, and they helped you figure it out.

[00:32:11] Mitchell Brookins: Correct. And guess what? And don’t be afraid of those moments either, teachers. Those are the best moments when you construct meaning with your students.

[00:32:20] Susan Lambert: I will never forget my favorite third-grade student, Jacob. Jacob could always figure it out before me, and he always taught me something whenever we approached a new text. It was amazing.

[00:32:33] Mitchell Brookins: But that’s because you also have to have this other disposition in comprehension instruction. And if you allow me to share this one.

[00:32:41] Susan Lambert: Please.

[00:32:42] Mitchell Brookins: You’ve got to become an expert listener, because you’ve got to remember, and I’ll just say for myself, when I talk about comprehension, you all, I am saying I believe that it is my duty as the facilitator of this learning that I’m going to guide and probe, ’cause I know you’ve got to build this. That’s my role.

[00:33:07] But I still have to ensure that that child has that space, and I think that is the piece that we are missing in instruction, that we don’t realize that that’s our role.

[00:33:24] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that’s making me think. Can we segue a little bit?

[00:33:29] Mitchell Brookins: Yeah.

[00:33:31] Susan Lambert: I want to talk about some potential unintended consequences of these books’ ideas or how some of the ideas might be implemented. How are you thinking about that?

[00:33:47] Mitchell Brookins: #CognitiveFlexibility.

[00:33:51] I always worry when we read books and we become very rigid. “Well, if so-and-so said it was this way, it’s got to be this way,” and there’s no flexibility.

[00:34:04] You’ll read the chapter and say, “Well, that’s the way to do summarization, and Mitchell said that’s the only way to do syntax.”

[00:34:14] No, I’m not saying that. I hope that you all will realize you’re going to see I built some combinations. I’m combining the repertoire, and so I hope… That’s an unintended consequence, that people just think I’m just saying, “This is what it is.”

[00:34:29] Susan Lambert: Yeah. This is the only way.

[00:34:32] Mitchell Brookins: I want people to hit me up and say, “Hey, Mitchell, I tried it, but you know what? I added this.”

[00:34:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And you’d love to hear that stuff, wouldn’t you?

[00:34:40] Mitchell Brookins: I would. That’s the point. I want you to take this book and see that, “Oh, he put those combinations together to deal with that challenge. So the real lesson is, as a teacher, let me look at my VIP for today. What’s the big idea for today? What are we talking about today? Not the text, but the concept, what’s challenging. I’m meeting that. I’m meeting my students in that moment.”

[00:35:08] And so I think it’s that type of planning, that I definitely hope that people take away from it and they just build from there.

[00:35:17] Susan Lambert: What are you most excited about for teachers to, or educators to gain from this book?

[00:35:24] Which, by the way, we’re recording this before the book has become available, and I got to do a preview copy of it. It’s fabulous. But what are you most excited about?

[00:35:34] Mitchell Brookins: You know what I keep seeing in my mind? I keep… I can’t wait till the day, I want to do like a VIP text challenge. I want teachers to send me different texts, and we’re going to talk about those texts, because I want to show that we can do this, and that it’s not as hard as everyone makes it out to be. But it’s worth it.

[00:35:58] So yeah, I’m excited about people using the book, hitting me up on Facebook, on Instagram, and saying what they’re doing with students. And there’s a little treat that I would say, chapter… my chapter on summarization.

[00:36:16] Susan Lambert: Okay. Are you going to share what the treat is, or is this like a big old secret?

[00:36:20] Mitchell Brookins: I mean, you see it all the time in all of my writing. I just said it on here, and you hear about what I call the hashtag, and knowing that the hashtag is the moment that you allow the brain to create an association with that text.

[00:36:42] Because when we step back and say, “In one word, what does this VIP represent? Will you say ‘joy’? Will you say ‘coming of age’? Will you say ‘friendship’? Will your hashtag say ‘power’? Would your hashtag say ‘she did it’?” it’s that hashtag that I’m excited about people seeing, and seeing if they will realize it is the moment of cognitive engagement. Sense-making. Mental model.

[00:37:18] Susan Lambert: Love it. Love it. And listeners, by the time you’re hearing this, the book is available. The link is in the show notes. All you have to do is click, if you haven’t already pre-ordered it, and I bet a lot of people have, but it is available now.

[00:37:32] Let’s talk a little bit in closing about how writing this book impacted you, because I’m sure by the end of the process… I’ve never written a book, but I’m sure that if I did, the process of writing that must have changed you. You’ve become at least reflective about all the things you’ve done in the past and how everything is coming together. So talk a little bit about that impact.

[00:38:02] Mitchell Brookins: I… You know what’s interesting. Susan, I had so many memories about childhood. I found myself in different chapters going to like different parts of my life and reliving these moments and understanding what they were and how things fit together.

[00:38:21] Those were moments that made me step back and say, “Oh. It makes sense now. It makes sense now.” And so I am now finding myself in a place of saying, if you allow me to share this, I just found out one of the most important people in my life passed away two days ago.

[00:38:46] Susan Lambert: Oh, I’m so sorry.

[00:38:49] Mitchell Brookins: My pastor passed away two days ago. He never got to see me speak. But when you say what has transformed me, this book has instilled in me that there is something greater that I have to do, and there’s a message that I have to send. And it’s making me realize that…

[00:39:21] People would tell me all the time, “You know what, Mitchell? Is your father a pastor? Are you a… Where… Did you study religion?” ‘Cause they said, “You have this preachy tone to you.” And you’re asking the question, and you’re saying, “Mitchell, what’s the connection here?”

[00:39:45] I’ll never forget when I was asked, “Mitchell, you sound like you’re a literacy evangelist.” And you asked what’s transforming for me. I think I’m embracing that now. I’m embracing that. I’m okay with being the person who’s going to spread the good news that evidence-based instruction works.

[00:40:08] And so I am so moved and so humbled and so honored that everyone who read this book, I hope that you all will digest it. I hope that it would empower you. I hope it would instill in you the academic joy that I know that we all so dearly want. And I hope that it actually reinvests teachers back in the field again.

[00:40:36] So yes, I’ve been transformed. I’m now accepting the fact that that is my role. I want to accept the role of being that literacy evangelist.

[00:40:44] Susan Lambert: I love that. I love it. We’re so glad that you have, because I think that both your first episode, every time I’ve seen you speak, all of the advice you give to teachers, and sometimes it’s challenging them.

[00:41:03] You challenge them, and I see in some of these Facebook comments that you make, you’re really challenging their thinking, but in a way that is, “I believe that you can change your practice so that we can instill this literacy success and excitement in our students to help them embrace this.” Because what is more important than creating literate individuals.

[00:41:36] Mitchell Brookins: And that teachers can do this. Teachers are my heart. You all, this book, I wrote it for you. I wish someone would’ve sat me down 20 years ago and said, “This is what to do, and this is how to do it.” I was having to figure it out, and so this is my contribution to the field.

[00:41:54] So yeah, hope you enjoy it. I hope you tell me it’s an experience, that you’ll move.

[00:41:59] Susan Lambert: I’m sure they will. And it sounds to me like you have visions for maybe book number two in terms of a new playbook or something like that.

[00:42:10] I’m just putting it out there in the world that once it gets out there for teachers, to really help teachers in grades five through eight, and I would imagine there’s going to be some other grade levels that read it too, because I thought it was just amazing, once they take a different view of text, once they think it through, once they create these VIPs and build these scaffolding strategies, I think you’re going to get a lot of responses in terms of how it engaged students differently in the comprehension process.

[00:42:42] Mitchell Brookins: That’s what I can’t wait for, the shifting the conversation from active participation to cognitive engagement.

[00:42:52] Susan Lambert: Oh, I love that. That sounds like a whole other topic of conversation. And as always, when I talk with you, I think about things a little bit differently, so I appreciate that.

[00:43:03] I also appreciate you coming on to join us to talk about ways that we can support core instruction for deeper comprehension, and again, thanks for putting that book out into the world. I can’t wait for our listeners to read it.

[00:43:18] Mitchell Brookins: Thank you.

[00:43:22] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Mitchell Brookins. His new book is available now. Visit the show notes for a link to Scaffolding Complex Texts: How to Plan and Teach for Deeper Comprehension in Grades 5 Through 8.

[00:43:35] Dr. Brookins is the founder of Brookins Consulting, and currently serves as the managing director of the Science of Reading Network at Leading Educators, where he supports district and state literacy work.

[00:43:47] Check out the show notes for links to Dr. Brookins’ past podcast appearances. And for anyone interested in adolescent literacy, we did a whole miniseries this past summer. Look back in our podcast feed for those four episodes.

[00:44:03] Next time, we are jumping fully back into our MTSS season. This time, we’re doing a deep dive into screening with Dr. Carrie Thomas Beck. We’ll explore what goes into effective screening and what it looks like to use screening data well.

[00:44:18] Carrie Thomas Beck: We’ve talked a lot about using universal screeners to identify risk factors so we can intervene early. But that other important question that universal screening data answers is what is the health of our system?

[00:44:33] Susan Lambert: That’s next time. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I’m Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.