Mosaic of Thought, by Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmermann, became a runaway best-seller as the first book to explicitly describe the use and benefits of strategy-based comprehension instruction. To recognize the 20th anniversary of the book, Tom Newkirk, who served as editor, recently sat down with Ellin Keene to revisit how Mosaic of Thought came to be and the impact it had on education.



See below for a full transcript of our conversation.

Tom Newkirk:    I want to go back to pre-mosaic, the conversation we had in the car after a workshop I did in Denver. My memory of it, and I'd like to get your memory of it, is that you're being the gracious host and asking me what I could do next, and then I asked you the best question I've ever asked, "What are you doing?" Could you take it from there because then you …

Ellin Keene:    I do remember, absolutely.

Tom Newkirk:    You remember that?

Ellin Keene:    I remember absolutely because it had not occurred to me that the work we were doing might be interesting or relevant to anyone else, and it had never occurred to me that I might be an author. I love to write. I knew that I like to write, but I never thought, particularly at that stage in my career, that I would write a book. I actually remember it so well that I can tell you exactly the street, the intersection, exactly where we were when you asked that question. You then said, "Have you ever thought about writing a book?" and I nearly drove off the road and into the culvert. We have culverts in the West. I mean I was flabbergasted. While I was still being flabbergasted, you said, "I think this comprehension strategy work is interesting enough that a lot of people would benefit from hearing more about it," something like that.

Tom Newkirk:    Nobody was writing about comprehension then.

Ellin Keene:    No, Delores Durkin had done the seminal study in 1978 or '79. Everyone in the research community had read that then. Basically it showed that less than 10% of our time in classrooms went to comprehension instruction, but even that time was really mostly asking kids comprehension questions, which is assessment not comprehension instruction. There was an understanding in the research community for the need to teach comprehension. It was believed at that time that you learned to read K-2, and then you read to learn thereafter, which is just patently not the case. Primary comprehension, in particular, was very, very underdeveloped, and actually intermediate. The notion that you could teach someone to understand better was very, very foreign to most people.

Tom Newkirk:    There's this good research basis. Look at Pearson and Dole. I mean it was…

Ellin Keene:    Solid.

Tom Newkirk:    Solid as a rock.

Ellin Keene:    Yes, and Jan Dole had been my undergraduate professor, so I had read it in my own classroom, and then in other classrooms started to experiment with it. Researchers don't prescribe how to use something.