Are We Checking for Understanding … or Constructing It?
Dr. Mitchell Brookins is a nationally recognized educational consultant with over 20 years of experience across K–12 education as a teacher, instructional coach, school administrator, district leader, and literacy thought leader. As a school administrator, he led instructional improvement efforts that produced measurable gains, including raising DIBELS proficiency from 43% to 72%, increasing LEAP state assessment performance by 16 percentage points, and improving school letter grades from “D” to “C” within one year at both ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy and Dwight D. Eisenhower Academy.
Dr. Brookins has contributed to national literacy conversations through conference presentations and media, including Amplify’s Science of Reading podcast and Beyond My Years (2026), Keys to Literacy, The Reading League Conference, and the Black Men in Education Convening. His work has more recently been featured at state and regional convenings, including Read Ohio (2025), the Mississippi Winter Literacy Conference (2025), the Michigan Reading Association’s 70th Annual Conference (2026), and the PaTTAN Literacy Symposium (2026). He also leads a citywide literacy fellowship in partnership with New Schools for New Orleans, supporting 25 literacy leaders across the city.
As Managing Director at Leading Educators, he supports system-level change in Jackson Public Schools, Baltimore City Schools, San Mateo-Foster City School District, Dubuque and Omaha Public Schools.
He holds a B.A. in Elementary Education, an M.A. in Teacher Leadership, and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration.
You can feel it in the room.
The teacher asks a question.
A student answers.
The teacher confirms it.
The class moves on.
Then another question. Another answer.
The pace is fast, but the thinking does not deepen.
In a recent analysis of classroom instruction in schools using high-quality instructional materials, 67% of lessons produced surface-level understanding of text, not deeper comprehension (Reynolds et al., 2025).
So, this is not just a curriculum issue.
It is an instructional one.
In many classrooms, discussion has become a cycle of checking:
Did you get it?
But that is not how understanding gets built.
When it comes to complex text instruction, the work is different.
It assumes, and plans for, the fact that students will not get it yet.
Complex text instruction intentionally targets the moments worth wrestling with. The sentence. The idea. The language students are most likely to miss.
It focuses on where the text becomes more demanding. Where syntax stretches one’s stamina. Where meaning is not immediately clear.
Because that is where the thinking happens.
That is where the beauty of language resides.
So the question becomes:
How do we help students work through a text, rather than simply check if they understand it?
What I’m Learning About How Understanding Gets Built
If we want students to build understanding, then we must be clear about what the work actually demands.
At its core, comprehension is not about answering questions. It is about building a mental model of meaning, a lasting memory of the text (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). This is not a one-time act. It is a dynamic, recursive process of building and revising meaning. Readers continuously extract, activate, and integrate as they read (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978).
To support that recursive process, Sedita (2026) and Amendum and Conradi Smith (2025) highlight the need for intentional scaffolds that help students examine challenging text closely, directing their attention to language, structure, and meaning as it unfolds. Without that level of support, the mental model may not fully come together.
Deeper understanding is strengthened when reading, writing, and oral language work together (Kim, 2020). Oral language, that extended back-and-forth talk, helps students clarify and refine their thinking (Goldenberg, 1992; Cabell & Zucker, 2024). Zwiers’ work on academic conversations pushes this further, showing discussion is not just about participation, but about building, challenging, and refining ideas. Writing then sharpens how students organize and express that thinking.
But even that is not the full story. Alfred Tatum’s Multidimensional Reading Model reminds us that meaningful exchanges with text also build students’ intellectual capacity, shape their academic identity, and contribute to their overall well-being (Tatum, 2021).
Together, this creates a combo effect, where each part reinforces and deepens understanding. Here’s what that means for practice:
- Challenging text is at the center of instruction: Are students actually working through something complex, or just completing tasks around a text?
- The text is examined closely: Are students attending to how the text works, or just moving through it?
- Student thinking is probed: What happens after a student answers? Do we move on, or do we push the thinking further?
- Ideas are pressed for clarity: Are students expected to be right, or to be clear, precise, and grounded in the text?
Students do not understand a text because they were told it. They understand it because they worked through it.
If you’ve been struggling with these questions, join me in the upcoming EDVIEW360 webinar here. This webinar explores what it means to help students wrestle, examine, probe, and press.
References
Amendum, S. J., & Conradi Smith, K. (2025). What is text complexity and how does it affect literacy learning? In S. B. Neuman & M. R. Kuhn (Eds.), Handbook on the science of literacy in grades 3–8. Guilford Press.
Cabell, S. Q., & Zucker, T. A. (2024). Strive-for-five conversations: A framework that gets kids talking to accelerate their language comprehension and literacy. Scholastic Inc.
Goldenberg, C. (1992). Instructional conversations: Promoting comprehension through discussion. The Reading Teacher, 46(4), 316–326.
Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture. Anchor Books.
Kim, Y.-S. G. (2020). Interactive dynamic literacy model: An integrative theoretical framework for reading-writing relations. In R. Alves, T. Limpo, & M. Joshi (Eds.), Reading-writing connections: Towards integrative literacy science (pp. 11–34). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38811-9_2
Kintsch, W., & van Dijk, T. A. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85(5), 363–394. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.85.5.363
Reynolds, D., Rutherford-Quach, S., Cassidy, L., Jennerjohn, A., & Woodworth, K. (2025). Beyond the surface: Leveraging high-quality instructional materials for robust reading comprehension [Learning brief]. SRI.
Sedita, J. (2026). The essentials of adolescent literacy: Integrating evidence-based reading and writing instruction in grades 5–12. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.