Today I had one of those 'aha' moments, not in my classroom but at a training focused on blending National Urban Alliance (NUA) strategies, like thinking maps, and balanced literacy. A coach involved in the training demoed a series of lessons on priming students for comprehension strategies with text. She prefaced the demo by sharing that when she taught Stephanie Harvey's Comprehension Toolkit lessons, her students never had the comments that Stephanie's students did or went away with the same level of understanding. In retrospect, she realized that when introducing students to a comprehension strategy with the Comprehension Toolkit, she was requiring students to learn a new strategy, a new text, a new subject and a challenging
