There are students who can read words fluently but still can’t tell you what they just read. As a teacher educator and former elementary teacher, I’ve seen both firsthand and other teachers’ confusion about these “strong readers” who suddenly hit a wall when comprehension is required. Dr. Kelly Cartwright’s keynote presentation at a recent literacy summit I attended helped name and explain this common struggle and reminded me just how critical it is that we teach thinking alongside reading.
Dr. Cartwright is also the author of Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators, a teacher-friendly resource that explains key executive skills, such as planning, organization, cognitive flexibility, and impulse control, and how they support reading comprehension. The book includes detailed, classroom-based examples that illustrate how strong readers use these skills and offers practical strategies for supporting students who may struggle in these areas.
The Problem: When Word Reading Isn’t Enough
Many of our students, particularly those with specific reading comprehension difficulties (RCD), can decode with ease but struggle to understand, analyze, or remember what they read. Dr. Cartwright explained that 20–30% of struggling readers fall into this category. These students often go unnoticed in early grades because they can “sound fluent” while reading. However, sounding fluent isn’t the same as thinking fluently.
English Learners (ELs) often fit this profile, not because they have reading disabilities, but because their second-language processing is still developing. When we overlook this distinction, we risk misidentifying students, or worse, ignoring what they do need: structured, explicit support for building meaning, not just decoding words.
What’s Really Going On? The Role of Executive Skills
Executive skills (also called executive functions) are the mental skills we use to plan, organize, regulate emotions, remember what we hear or read, and shift focus when needed. In reading, these skills are what help students:
- Set a purpose for reading
- Recognize text structure (narrative, informational, etc.)
- Make sense of unfamiliar words or ambiguous language (e.g., figurative language)
- Keep track of story elements or information
- Shift their thinking when new information challenges earlier ideas
Dr. Cartwright highlighted how students with comprehension difficulties often have weak executive skills. The reading brain network relies on connections between print, sound, and meaning, but without strong executive skills, those connections don’t fully form.
What Teachers Can Do: Make Thinking Visible
In my dissertation (Woods, 2020), I explored how teachers’ think-alouds help make invisible cognitive processes visible to students. When we verbalize our thinking (how we plan, organize ideas, ask questions, and monitor for understanding) we model the strategic behavior that many students with reading comprehension difficulties (RCD) or executive function weaknesses haven’t developed yet. This process directly supports the development of metacognitive awareness, helping students learn to think about their own thinking while reading.
In a later article (Sharpe, 2022), I expanded this work by examining how think-aloud instruction can be implemented through a culturally responsive lens, emphasizing the importance of honoring students’ diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds while modeling reading strategies that promote deep comprehension and critical thinking.
Try this:
Instead of asking, “What happened in the story?” say:
“Let me show you how I figure out what’s important in a story. First, I ask myself what the character wants and what’s getting in the way. Watch how I figure that out…”
Practical Tools to Support Comprehension
Here are a few ways to support students who decode well but don’t comprehend deeply:
1. Planning & Purpose
- Set goals before reading: “Today, we’re reading to find out why the main character changes.”
- Use graphic organizers that include purpose-setting and after-reading reflections.
2. Organization & Structure
- Teach text structures directly (narrative, compare/contrast, cause/effect).
- Use story maps and paragraph frames.
- Highlight transitions and signal words to show how ideas connect.
3. Cognitive Flexibility
- Practice using words with multiple meanings (e.g., “sum” in math vs. “some” in reading).
- Read books with wordplay, like Amelia Bedelia or riddles.
- Use think-alouds to model shifting between different interpretations (like the book Wonder).
4. Inhibition & Ambiguity
- Teach students to slow down, reread, and use questioning when things don’t make sense.
- Use examples of ambiguous sentences (“Let’s eat, Grandma” vs. “Let’s eat Grandma”) to build awareness.
5. Working Memory
- Explicitly teach students how to track pronouns (e.g., “he,” “they”) back to their referents.
- Use sentence unpacking and chunking strategies.
6. Social Understanding
- Read books like Elephant and Piggie and discuss how the characters feel and why.
- Map stories from multiple perspectives to build theory of mind.
Why This Matters for Equity
Reading opens doors to opportunity. However, when we define “good reading” solely as sounding fluent, we overlook students who struggle to access meaning, even if they appear to be strong readers. This is especially critical for:
- Multilingual learners navigating meaning in a second language
- Neurodivergent students with executive functioning challenges
- Black and Brown students who are often misidentified or under-identified due to biased screening or insufficient instructional support
Equitable reading instruction means teaching all children to make sense of what they read, not just decode it. It means supporting the mental skills that make comprehension possible, and never assuming students “should already know how.”
Final Takeaway: Comprehension is More Than a Skill – It’s a Process
Reading is thinking. When we center the thinking work behind reading (planning, monitoring, organizing, shifting, and understanding others), we help all students, especially those often left behind, become lifelong readers and thinkers.
Let’s move beyond surface-level literacy and build instruction that teaches the brain how to make meaning, because solid literacy is a key to equity.
Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Executive skills and reading comprehension: A guide for educators (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Sharpe, S. W. (2022). Think‑aloud reading instruction through a culturally responsive teaching lens. Literacy Matters: The Journal of the Palmetto State Literacy Association, 22, 32–37.
Woods, S. (2020). Making teacher thinking transparent: An examination of teacher think-aloud instruction (Publication No. 28288644) [Doctoral dissertation, Auburn University].
Literacy for Justice 
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