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Strategies, strategies, strategies. I'm going to go ahead and make the over generalization that all teachers have heard this word.
Reading strategies have been at the forefront since the National Reading Panel (2000) came out with a report outlining the most important aspects of literacy.
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Among "The Big 5 Ideas" of literacy components that should be explicitly taught is comprehension. Born out of this report, was the idea of 6 reading strategies, famously outlined in the book, Strategies that Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding by Stephanie Harvey, Anne Goudvis, and Donald Graves. Predicting, visualizing, connecting, questioning, clarifying and synthesizing (evaluating) became the big buzz words at this time.
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The issues that arose from these reading strategies was the way in which they were taught: statically. As Dr. Sunday Cummins argues (at around 42:30 in the video):
I was teaching 3rd grade, and what came out? Strategies that Work, remember? Mosiac of Thought. We were all so excited because David Pearson had done this research and he knew which 7 comprehension strategies to teach, right? And so what do we do? September you teach making connections, October you teach asking questions...chapter by chapter, month by month, and in December we visualize and January you make inferences. I am so darn tired after ISAT, I didn't get to the chapter on synthesis. Oh well, maybe next year...so what happened was our kids were making connections, they were asking questions...our kids were learning about strategies and using them in isolation.
Here lies the problem:
And really, when you want kids to read a text and get deeper meaning, you want them to synthesize. And making connections is in service of synthesis. Asking questions is in service of synthesis. Visualizing is in service of synthesis.
So what do the experts suggest can aid comprehension? Digging deeper into domain specific vocabulary. Or in other words...technical vocabulary.
And here we make a full circle to disciplinary literacy.
Understanding more about the world and using that domain specific vocabulary helps the reader understand the context in which the text is set.
Daniel Willingham claims:
Use reading materials that teach something about the world!!! Don't neglect other subjects!
These current assertions support the idea of preparing our younger students for a disciplinary literacy approach in which students actively learn how to read a specific discipline's text. The full circle of these instructional "strategies" will only help with a student's comprehension of all texts.
For more information about how to use domain specific vocabulary into your instruction, please see Jennifer Jones's presentation, Word Up!, on vocabulary instruction in the 21st century classroom.
Hey Jen! You had some great additions to your blog to help me understand exactly what you were talking about. My favorite (and the one I had the most "take-away" from) was Word Up! Vocabulary Instruction in the 21st Century Classroom from Jennifer Jones. Especially on slide 11-children decode words fluently and still have comprehension problems-I have high readers but they are unable to comprehend anything of what they are reading (and openly admit it). My goal is only to work on comprehension since they are at such high reading levels. Meaghan mentioned making it very specific for teaching the comprehension strategies by making sure she removes those supports so they are not dependent on her for remembering the strategies. I wonder can you tell me more about how that is possible with the curriculum restraints/demands and multi-levels of your students (which I think every grade level experiences)?
ReplyDeleteJen, the images and the videos embedded in your post allowed me to really connect with what you were saying. One thing that stuck out to me was how you mentioned that these strategies we teach are often taught in isolation even though they are comprehension skills that build upon each other and are not usually used in isolation. These strategies and skills really do not exist without each other. I like how you made the point that vocabulary is something that is necessary again not in isolation but in really everything the students read. After reading Christina’s comment, my question was somewhat similar, how do you ensure that your students are not isolating these strategies and seeing the connection between all of them?
ReplyDeleteWow! What an awesome blog! I really liked all of the extra content that you shared. Jennifer Jones's presentation, Word Up! was very interesting. Not only did it help me to think through our blog from last week, but also helped me to think deeper about the importance of vocabulary, which we have been focusing on this week.There were a few things that stuck out to me as I viewed the slides. The slide that stated the following: "We use words to think, the more words we know, the finer our understanding is about the world." really proves just how important having a large vocabulary is. When I saw the Tiers of Vocabulary slide, it made me think back to last year when my school used a form to share essential vocabulary for each grade level every week. The classroom teachers chose select Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary that they felt all students needed to know across all disciplines. The support staff were then able to focus in on these words while we were teaching. This is something that we have not done this year, however, I think it would be a good idea to encourage my teachers to start doing it again. How do you make sure that you are including these different Tiered words in your classroom?
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