Welcome back!
It’s been a little while since I’ve written here, and I’ve been building a few things in the meantime. One is In Practice, my second newsletter for shorter stories, templates, and examples from literacy classrooms.
Next week, I’ll share a piece there on chess, reading comprehension, and the importance of the “standard of coherence.” If you’re not already subscribed, you can join here: https://www.lukemorinliteracy.com/in-practice-signup
But this week, I’m trying something new.
I launched a YouTube channel.
Why YouTube? Mostly, it comes down to one obvious fact: teaching is a live act. It’s extraordinarily hard to capture the nuance of a lesson without actually showing what happens once the text is open, the document camera is on, and students have pencils in their hands.
Also? Video is fun. And I’ve learned quickly that it can make certain parts of the work visible in ways writing simply can’t.
The first video is a full close-reading model built around the opening paragraphs of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. The full video is embedded above, but you can also find it here:
My hope is that the channel becomes a place for concrete examples of literacy teaching in all of its messiness and nuance.
When I think about the practices that can genuinely change a student’s trajectory as a reader, I want more of them in front of more teachers—not only the schools and districts I’m lucky enough to support directly.
So, here’s a quick tour of the first video. Thanks for tuning in!
—Luke
The messiness of explicit instruction
I open with a question that has been on my mind for a long time: how do we take the ideas behind explicit instruction—which are fairly easy to picture in a discipline like math—and apply them to the much messier work of reading comprehension?
Every text makes its own particular demands on a reader, which makes simple procedures or silver-bullet approaches rarely sufficient. What an experienced reader needs to notice, infer, or clarify changes from text to text and even from one paragraph to the next.
The moment my thinking changed
Next, I share a classroom moment from early in my career when I realized that the way I was teaching reading wasn’t actually helping enough students make sense of difficult text.
I was teaching concepts and standards. I was asking questions. But I was spending far less time showing students how an experienced reader actually works through the text itself.
One lesson changed that for me.
Read 1: Establish the meaning
Then we get into the lesson itself.
Despite all the framing, most of the video takes place under the document camera. Once we get into the lesson, much of it is unscripted: I’m just working through the text, worksheet, and annotations much as I would in an actual classroom.
The first read is intentionally simple: hear the full passage with fluency and prosody, and stop only to clarify a handful of words students will need later.
The vocabulary work here is brief and contextual. We’re not doing an extended word study; we’re defining words quickly enough that students can understand the passage as we go.
Here, the lawn is “painfully cut to the quick.” It’s worth stopping because it’s such an odd, specific description. Grass doesn’t literally have a “quick” in the way a fingernail or animal’s nail does, nor can it feel pain. The phrase is metaphorical, and it helps characterize both the setting and, eventually, the people who live there.
Because “quick” is such an unusual image, I pair the definition with a picture without over-explaining what the phrase might suggest about the house. That analysis comes later.
Read 2: Pattern Spotting
On the second read, we record a purpose for our reading: How does Babbitt personify the road?
Then I model the first annotations that move beyond vocabulary, identifying language connected to the road’s personality and movement.
But there’s a moment in this segment that I think packs an outsized punch. It comes when we stop and connect the pronoun it back to its referent: the road.
That move is almost completely unrelated to the final objective—the lesson eventually asks students to analyze a shift in tone—and completely central to understanding the passage. The word it appears repeatedly in the opening paragraph. If a student loses track of what it refers to, almost everything that follows becomes harder to understand.
These tiny acts of comprehension are exactly the kinds of things that become nearly invisible to experienced readers. But for novice readers, calling attention to them can be the difference between following the passage and getting completely lost in it.
Read 3: Move into analysis
Once students have traced the basic movement of the road and noticed the patterns in Babbitt’s language, we move into the heavier analytical work.
The third read focuses on tone and intentionality: why these particular words, and what effect do they create?
One of the most important moments hinges on something extremely small.
A single word: but.
That transition marks the turn. The road has been wandering, swaying, and ambling through the natural setting; after but, its movement changes sharply.
From there, students begin putting language to the contrast they’ve been noticing across the lesson. The relaxed, wandering road of the opening becomes increasingly tense and constrained as it approaches the house and the “world of people.”
By the time students are asked to write about this, most of the intellectual groundwork has already been laid.
So what made it a close read?
Near the end, I step back from the document camera and recap the larger structure.
Importantly, it wasn’t a close read simply because we read the passage three times.
Each read had a different job, and each depended on the understanding built in the one before it: establish meaning, then notice the patterns in Babbitt’s language, then analyze what those patterns reveal, and finally put that interpretation into writing.
That sequence gets at one of the tensions I care about most in literacy instruction: how heavy teacher guidance can ultimately serve the cause of independence rather than compete with it.
Resources
Everything I use in the video is available below:
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the work I care about more visible—not only the ideas behind strong literacy instruction, but what those ideas actually look like once the lesson begins.
This video is my first full attempt to capture that work from beginning to end.
If you watch it, I’d love to hear what lands, what raises questions, and what you’d like to see modeled next.
And if this format proves useful, be sure to subscribe to the channel. There’s certainly more to come.
