The days of handing students a book and imposing quiet reading time are long gone. Now more than ever, teachers are looking for ways to ensure students stay engaged along the way. How do you integrate questions throughout a lesson without feeling like you’re constantly interrupting the flow?
Amber Shivers, a former special education teacher, has spent two decades watching schools replay the same failed strategy—with the success rate of finding working dry-erase markers in April.. As our Instructional Manager at Subject, she’s read every flavor of “individualized learning plan,” most of which feel like bureaucratic Mad Libs.
As Amber recalls:
“The papers say, ‘this is who this student is, and they fit in this box.’
That’s sometimes true, but often not.”
The fix isn’t more paperwork. She says it’s noticing how kids actually learn. If a student’s eyes glaze over during silent reading, don’t take it personally. It’s time to give them a new challenge.
The Curriculum Catch-22
Here’s the catch-22 that keeps curriculum specialists awake at 2 AM: Do you water down content for struggling students and watch them fall further behind, or stick to grade-level material?
Students with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, and other learning differences get extra support, but it’s not as differentiated and supportive as it can be. Standard options are often lacking, and students without IEPs or extra support are left to fend for themselves. A fire drill happening at a convenient time has better odds of working.
It’s time to change that.
Why “Chunking” Actually Works
Amber’s special education background became her superpower—like having that teacher sixth sense for when a lesson is about to go sideways. When you work with kids whose brains process information differently, assuming anything will work the traditional way is like expecting a Chromebook battery to last through an entire school day.
She saw the most success with “chunking”: students can handle grade-level content when it’s served in manageable portions with built-in comprehension checks.
“What we’ve done is we have taken that information and put it into small amounts, that are hitting the standards,” she explains. “Students build layer upon layer of information to reach a critical thinking task.”
No matter their learning style, chunking helps students who struggle with feeling overwhelmed and encourages them to ask questions along the way. Whether they’re talking to you or fellow classmates about the reading chunks, there’s a higher level of engagement. Plus, it’s harder to get AI to summarize three sentences instead of three pages. May as well do it yourself, right?
Think Netflix figuring out people wanted episode options instead of just three-hour movies. Same content, better pacing. Students still hit the same standards.
They just get there without the cognitive equivalent of trying to binge-watch an entire series during your planning period.
How to Chunk Content in Four Steps
Amber’s approach breaks down into four steps you can implement between now and whenever you finally get those dry-erase markers you ordered in August:
Step 1: Chunk Everything Into Micro-Doses
Break reading into 2-3 sentence chunks, then check for understanding after each bite.
“I’m a big proponent of asking questions along the way, rather than reading something and asking at the end,” she adds.
This prevents what we politely call “cognitive overload” and what students experience as their brain doing that spinning wheel thing your laptop does before it crashes.
Step 2: Go Full Multimedia Buffet
Whatever format you’re using (text, audio, or visual): consider the format to present chunks to students.
For long pages of text, try cutting it up into different sections. Then students can go deep on these specific sections and analyze them.
Audio and visual clips are simple to edit into short clips and include questions along the way. .
Embrace the fact that students can be readers, watchers, or listeners. Let students customize their learning like they’re building the perfect classroom snack. “Most of us listen to audiobooks,” Amber points out. “Are they watching it on the screen at the same time? Yeah, that’s what we want.”
Stop treating accommodations like educational scarlet letters. Adults use audiobooks and voice-to-text without apology notes to administrators.
Step 3: Let Students Show What They Know Their Way
Some kids think out loud like they’re narrating their own nature documentary. Others need to pace around your classroom. If a student really needs quiet time to finish the reading, help them find a quiet space. Even though it would be great for each student to sit in their assigned seat and not move for 50 minutes, we know kids don’t work that way in reality. Stop forcing everyone through the same narrow funnel like we’re still using those ancient bubble sheets.
“Some students just need to talk that out with someone, and then capture that in voice-to-text.”
A chaotic classroom is an engaged classroom.
Step 4: Give Feedback and Demonstrate Progress
After each chunk and check for understanding, make sure to give feedback to your students. If there is room for improvement, make sure to note the positives alongside that. Chunking is as much about building confidence as it is about learning the concepts.
As students make their way through these chunks, they may not immediately notice how far they’ve come. Especially for students who struggle with sustained attention – they may have self-categorized as “bad at school.” When you’ve made your way through several chunks, shout out the wins. Show your students how far they’ve come and celebrate the wins together.
One Year, Three Grade Levels
The numbers don’t lie, unlike that “revolutionary” curriculum your district bought last year.
In Amber’s research project with 30 students, teaching with bite-sized chunks delivered results that would make any instructional coach do a happy dance:
- 3 students tested completely out of special education
- Every student improved reading comprehension by at least one grade level
- Multiple students jumped 3 grade levels in one year
- A student with severe dyslexia learned to read aloud and answer questions
- A student with autism aced chemistry questions
“I have watched a student that has severe dyslexia be able to read out loud. And answer a question. Whereas if I let her go with a traditional text and just have the questions at the end, well, number one, she probably wouldn’t read the whole thing.”
These are concrete academic gains that happen when you stop fighting how brains actually work.
Every Kid Wins With Chunking
Strategies for students with learning differences end up helping everybody. Chunking mirrors how modern brains consume information in our TikTok-trained, Instagram-visual world.
“Chunking benefits students regardless of what background or special need they may have,” Amber adds, “because it follows what our society is currently doing.”
Advanced students blast through chunks like they’re speed-running your lesson while also diving deeper. Struggling students get scaffolding they need to succeed. The method raises the floor without lowering the ceiling—something most edtech “innovations” promise about as convincingly as your district promising this year’s “PD” will actually be useful.
Instead of total staff retraining, this just requires rethinking how you structure lessons you’re already teaching.
- Start with one assignment.
- Break it into digestible pieces like you’re meal-prepping content.
- Add guiding questions along the way.
Watch what happens when learning becomes accessible instead of feeling like trying to grade essays during lunch duty while the copier is broken and someone’s using your planning period for an “emergency” meeting.