Sticking to the Deep Dive: One Teacher’s Approach to Language Instruction

This Month’s Focus 

The Humanities team at Great Minds® stays updated on the current scientific research on literacy. We bring research to life in our curricula and make research accessible to educators in our blog posts. In this month’s post, Tanniece Chinn shares the importance of teaching the Deep Dive—even if it means being creative about when to teach it.

A Lesson in Unintended Consequences

Deep Dives constitute a small but powerful component of a Wit & Wisdom® lesson. They provide students with 15 minutes of explicit instruction in language structures and vocabulary, both of which make up strands of Language Comprehension in Scarborough’s Reading Rope. The Language Comprehension strand weaves together with Word Recognition to help students become skilled readers.

In year 1 of Wit & Wisdom implementation, I thought, “I need more time to teach the actual lesson, so we will just cut the Deep Dive.” This decision led to several unintended consequences:

• Students lacked knowledge of text-critical vocabulary.
• Students missed important morphology lessons that would have helped them examine words.
• Students were denied critical instruction in parts of speech, capitalization, and punctuation.
• Students lost opportunities to improve their writing.

Wit & Wisdom texts and tasks require these skills and knowledge. By year 2, I fully understood that cutting Deep Dives meant removing opportunities for my students to learn new vocabulary and language structures.

I needed to get creative to ensure I always taught Deep Dives, so I decided to try teaching the Deep Dives at the start of our instructional day.

Benefits of the Deep Dive

• Deep Dives increase access to complex texts. They provide vocabulary and language instruction in the context of module texts. Students build their knowledge of vocabulary and language to deepen their understanding of module texts and to access future texts.
• Deep Dives build curriculum connections. The language structures and vocabulary that students learn in a Deep Dive often relate to parts of their day outside the Wit & Wisdom lesson. In particular, the connection between Fundations® and Wit & Wisdom Deep Dive skills can be powerful for students.
• Deep Dives build confidence. Deep Dives are short and focused and engage with less text than other parts of the lesson. The confidence students build in a Deep Dive leads to increased motivation to attempt more challenging tasks throughout the day.
• Deep Dives provide structure and predictability. Students know that we will engage in this focused learning daily. Doing so at the start of the day helps students transition into learning.
• Deep Dives set a tone for collaboration. Because Deep Dives almost always include partner work and collaboration, they set a positive tone for learning each day.

A Day in the Life of Grade 2

The first lesson in Grade 2, Module 3: Civil Rights Heroes offers one particularly powerful example of the Deep Dive’s benefits. This lesson introduces students to the prefix in-. During the Deep Dive, we broke down the word injustice and applied an understanding of the prefix in- to other words, such as incorrect, incomplete, and inactive.

After completing the Deep Dive, we transitioned to our Fundations lesson in which my students continued learning about prefixes. Students excitedly participated in the Fundations lesson by using what they had just learned in the Deep Dive.

The excitement carried through the core Wit & Wisdom lesson. During the Welcome, we read our Essential Question for Module 3: “How can people respond to injustice?” As soon as the question appeared on the board, students started shouting, “There’s in-! In- means ‘not’!” I marveled at the connections they made in the opening task.

Students later used injustice in a sentence about a module text. They really started to demonstrate their emerging understanding of the word’s meaning. This understanding framed our discussions throughout the module regarding the injustices people faced before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Summary

Simply put, Deep Dives are our friends. Scarborough’s Reading Rope shows that, to become better readers, students need the grammar and vocabulary support embedded in Deep Dives. The multi-year process of implementing Wit & Wisdom requires some trial and error to find what works best to successfully teach all lesson parts in the allotted time.

More Deep Dive Guidance from the Great Minds Humanities Team

Based on our experience, we know that Wit & Wisdom teachers often wonder how to effectively teach all parts of the lesson when time is limited. Tanniece shared one way that she found success with Deep Dive instruction, and here we will offer additional suggestions.

Consider the instructional block’s length to determine how Deep Dives can best be included in your daily routines.

• If the block is 90 minutes or more, keep the Deep Dive within the time allotted for Wit & Wisdom instruction. (Read more on how to maximize pacing.)
• If the block is less than 90 minutes, determine when and how Deep Dives can regularly take place by exploring these questions:
  • Are there flexible points in the instructional day for teaching Deep Dives?
  • Is there an opportunity to teach multiple Deep Dives one or two days a week?
  • How can I adjust pacing to include Deep Dives in the allotted time?

As you plan to teach Deep Dives, use these guiding questions to help make instructional decisions:

• Why is the instruction in this Deep Dive critical for students?
• How will the learning in this Deep Dive be assessed? When will the assessment take place in the Focusing Question Arc or module?

We would love to hear about the knowledge parties your students have every day in Wit & Wisdom! Connect with us in our Facebook groups for each grade band (K-2, 3-5, and 6-8) or on Twitter @WitWisdomELA.