A Period in the Life of a HS interventionist: FASE Reading, Retrieval Practice, and Gist Statements

This is the fifth piece in our series "What does the science of reading look like in high/middle school?"

After reading The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, I wanted to try FASE reading because I was intrigued by the opportunity to work on expressive reading with my students and offer immediate feedback other than during our daily repeated reading and oral fluency routine. In the clip, I introduce FASE reading to my 9th-11th grade intervention students. Then, we start reading chapter 11 of A Long Way Gone.

As you watch, notice how I’m able to provide instant feedback to students on prosody, decoding multisyllabic words, and offer error corrections like skipping or inserting the wrong word. You’ll also see how high engagement is because students never know when they might be called on. Bonus: they all want to be called on to read! This activity alone is a stark improvement from the typical popcorn reading often witnessed in classrooms, but when you pair it with retrieval practice for comprehension, it’s magic!

After reading, students close their books and complete a two minute brain dump where they record everything they remember from that section of reading. This retrieval practice is inspired by another book I recently read, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. Check out the worksheet I designed for this part of the routine!

From there, they do a turn and talk with their table partner, during which they share what they wrote with each other.

This is our only second time doing this activity, so I take student input and create a model brain dump under the document camera. While we do this, I encourage students to use “Thieves and Robbers” to steal an idea and add it to their sheet.

This modeling process gives students the opportunity to ask clarifying questions organically and notice and correct any misunderstandings they had about the text. I use this time as an informal check for understanding. Unprompted, students start making predictions about what will happen next as we read on in the chapter.

Lastly, we move onto GIST statements, where students summarize their brain dumps in 10 words or less. This time, students work in pairs since this routine is still new, but eventually they will do these steps independently, while covering a larger chunk of the text. We end class by sharing and comparing GIST statements.

I share this routine because it’s transferable. It can work with any age group. It can work in any intervention setting or at the Tier 1 level. It can work with any content.

But most important of all, I share this routine because it works! It maximizes student attention to and engagement with a challenging, grade-level text. It allows my intervention students to access and analyze a great work of complex literature. And students are bought in because they see it working. For those students who have always complained, “As soon as I finish reading I can’t remember what happened,” this routine is THE antidote.