As we come to the end of our focus on Reading, I'll draw your attention to three overview formats for the reading process:
The Active Reading Model
Reciprocal Teaching and Guided Reading
The Directed Listening and Thinking Activity Model
As we've seen, the reading process requires much more than simply reading.
Our top performing students already use the strategies outlined in the "Reading For The Rest of Us" series. Overtly teaching these strategies and monitoring the development of these skills in our lower - achieving students is a pathway to truly begin to close the gap in student achievement.
Before we jump into Reading for the Rest of Us Part 4 of 4: Reading for Understanding, here are some other readings based on this week's theme that you might find interesting:
What Is Deeper Understanding?
An interesting blog post on what deeper understanding means in the context of a classroom and if schools can truly provide an environment to enable it.
Deeper Understanding Through Questioning
A short article on different types of questions that can be asked to get students thinking.
Can We Assess Deeper Understanding? Are we?
An article from Edutopia looking at American standardised testing and performance tests.
A Strategy for Fostering Deeper Understanding.
A research paper investigating the impact of Reciprocal Teaching in higher education settings.
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Reading for the Rest of Us Part 4 of 4: Reading for Understanding
The vocab is now familiar. The purpose has been set. The text has been skimmed and predictions made. Prior knowledge has been accessed and the links between what is already known and what is about to be read have been fully explored.
Now we're ready to read.
According to -Effective Literacy in Years 9 to 13: A Guide for Teachers- from which most of the information for this series is derived,
"students need to monitor their learning and have a repertoire of strategies to use when they get stuck."
Students should be asking themselves as they read:
- Am I using the most helpful strategies?
- How well am I understanding the text?
- What information do I need to remember?
- How do I visualise this information?
- How does this fit into what I already know?
Moving students to this level of independence involves teacher modelling of strategies, peer exploration and feedback with activities to engage with texts:
Remember that will ALL reading - students must be clear on their PURPOSE for reading the text.
Stage one: Shared Reading: the teacher reads the text to the students and "thinks aloud" about the literacy strategies to adopt and how meaning is being construction.
Stage two: Guided Reading: the teacher works with small group of students (or this can be done with a whole class) with the students read silently through short sections of texts and then discuss meanings and strategies before moving on to the next section
For more, very in-depth info on Guided Reading: http://www.readingtogether.net.nz/Portals/0/Other/GuidedReading2002.pdf
Teaching about Making Inferences during the Shared and Guided Reading stages is essential. Here are a few recommended sites for ways to model and teach this essential comprehension skill:
Comprehension Skills Inference Strategies
Why Inference?
Activities to help students interact independently or cooperatively with the text:
- Identifying Main Ideas: teacher hands out a sentence for each paragraph that summaries the main idea. Students must match the sentences with the appropriate paragraph, discussing what evidence there is to support their selection. Following this activity, students could be given a similar text and asked to write their own summarizing sentences.
- Combining sentences: students are given half sentences from the text. Students match up these up to make complete sentences and then place them in order. Students must discuss the reasoning behind their choices and use evidence from the writing.
- Coding (either with written initals such as "MI" for main idea "DL" for detail "NR" for not relevant or a highlighter colour code): Student mark up a photocopied text with codes to categorise each sentence as a key idea, detail, example, or whatever codes seem relevant to the context you are using.
- Three Level Guides: Explained nicely here for those that missed our PD session.
- Questioning:
