Supporting Students to Read with Deep Understanding

Anna Safi UTC

Module 3

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Where does this module fit?

UTC Module Percent of Final Grade

Lesley Course

M1:Language Development in Young Children

20% EEDUC 6102 Language and Literacy, Development and Diversity

M2:Emergent and Early Reading

40%

M3:Supporting Students to Read with Deep Understanding

40%

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Module Description

• Reading is an active process of constructing meaning from text. It requires the integration of a complex set of non-linear processes and is influenced by developmental, cognitive, social, and cultural factors.

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Module Description• Residents will understand the research and use

multiple ways and strategies to teach reading.

• Residents will use a wide array of assessment tools selected for their usefulness in improving instruction and monitoring progress.

• Residents will use data to plan lessons, systematically mark growth, and differentiate instruction for student success.

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Essential Questions

• What skills and strategies are used by proficient readers to construct and monitor meaning from texts?

• What is the role of talk and written response in constructing meaning?

• What classroom practices foster engagement in reading, verbal and written response?

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Module Goals1. Residents will foster habits that enable readers to make purposeful

choices about texts and celebrate the joys of reading. 2. Residents will know, use, and teach comprehension strategies used by

good readers. 3. Residents will understand the importance of fluent reading for

constructing meaning from text and know how to assess and teach for fluency.

4. Residents will understand the importance of vocabulary and background

knowledge for constructing meaning from text and know an array of strategies for vocabulary instruction.

5. Residents will nurture reader response experiences to examine diverse

responses to texts and develop skills to think critically about texts.

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Module Outcomes1. Monitor students’ choices during independent reading.

2. Assist students in choosing text they will enjoy at their independent reading level.

3. Understand and analyze their own reading behaviors, skills and strategies.

4. Determine students’ reading comprehension strengths and difficulties (especially background knowledge assumed in text) by administering 1:1 assessments and think-aloud protocols, analyzing student talk in book discussions and students writing in response to texts.

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Module Outcomes5. Select appropriate materials to use and determine a comprehension

strategy to teach. Explicitly teach and scaffold how skilled readers actively process text while using this strategy (e.g., visualization) and engage students in applying active strategies: self-monitoring, making inferences, generating questions, visualizing, synthesizing and drawing on relevant background knowledge before, during and after reading.

6. Monitor student progress to determine whether or not students are applying comprehension strategies.

7. Use formative pre- and post tests to assess the degree to which students have developed breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge.

8. Provide multiple opportunities for reader response to explore various perspectives about texts and diverse issues conveyed in texts (e.g., through reader response journal entries, book club discussions, debates).

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Key Assignment• Plan and teach a series of three comprehension lessons with a single

group of students (small or whole group) focusing on one text.

– First lesson, identify and justify the targeted comprehension habit or strategy of this lesson. What data was used to determine the focus? How did the elements that can influence comprehension identified by the RAND Reading Study Group inform your decisions? Videotape the lesson. Analyze the degree to which contributions to the conversation during and after the book reading indicate students’ application of the target habit or strategy. Support your analysis with evidence from the video.

– Create and teach a second lesson that builds on the first lesson in a logical sequence. Provide a rationale for creating this lesson.

– For the third lesson, design a writing prompt that encourages students to analyze, evaluate or synthesize ideas in the text they are reading.

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Session 1

•How do Proficient Readers Construct Meaning?

What do good readers do?

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• When students use prior knowledge to find meaning when reading, they rely on a number of tactics available to them.

• Essentially three sources of information are used: semantic, graphophonic, and syntactic.

• Proficient readers employ all three information systems in a balanced way to construct meaning.

Assignment for Session 1

• Read chapters 1 & 2 from Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension for understanding and engagement. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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• What kinds of questions are we asking students to demonstrate their understanding of the text?

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• Instruction in America’s elementary reading classes has been based on this theory: a series of comprehension questions – coming from the basal reader or the teacher – were posed, and the goal was to see if children could answer them (caught them) in the way the teacher believed they should… For decades many educators believed that teaching reading meant dealing with the visible or audible, rather than metacognitive, manifestations of reading. If children completed drill sheets and workbook pages and sat in their ability groups to discuss the story, the spiral curriculum built into the basal series would ensure that students could comprehend complex text. But we never really considered what they might have been thinking about while they were reading.

Mosaic of Thought, Ellin Keene UTC Washington DC 14

• Comprehension is the process we engage in as readers to make sense of, to figure out, to understand what’s going on in the text we’re reading.

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Comprehension Work

• What is it readers really do to make sense of text?

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Moby Dick

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Comprehension is the making of meaning.

• It is monitoring for understanding.

• It is enhancing understanding.

• It is acquiring and actively using knowledge.

• It is developing insight. UTC Washington DC 18

“The process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work.”

Walt Whitman

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The Inner Conversation

• What if all the talking we did in our heads as we make sense of text became apparent, concrete, and real to our students?

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Proficient Readers

• Search for connections between prior knowledge and new information.

• Predict outcomes.• Ask questions of themselves, the authors they encounter, the

text they read.• Draw inferences during and after they read.• Distinguish important from less important ideas.• Visualize characters, places, relationships.• Synthesize information within text, across text, and across

reading experiences• Monitor their understanding and repair, as necessary.

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Multiple Strategy Instruction

“…the instruction of more than one strategy in a natural context leads to the acquisition and use of reading comprehension strategies and transfers to standardized comprehension tests. Multiple strategy instruction facilitates comprehension as evidenced by performance on tasks that involve memory, summarizing and identification of main ideas.”

Trabasso and Bouchard, 2002

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What if all classrooms promoted Active Literacy?

What would it look like?

What are teachers What are students doing? doing?

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Assignment for Session 2

1. Read chapters 3 & 4 from Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension for understanding and engagement.

2. Read Cambourne, B. (2001). Conditions of literacy learning. The Reading Teacher, 54, 784-786.

3. Take the Metacomprehension Strategy Index from Fisher & Frey (2009). Background Knowledge: The missing piece of the comprehension puzzle.

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• Refs Isabel Beck – Vocabulary

• Keene Mosaic of Reading