Creating Lifelong Learners

In order to further fine-tune students’ reading comprehension, it may be helpful to do an error analysis…looking at where students are making errors and the nature of those errors.  Error analysis can be done by analyzing student test answers on standardized tests (boring—but sometimes necessary) or through listening to student conversations in literature circles.

In my experience, I see frequent errors of both higher and lower level thinking.

Higher Level Thinking

Inference

Students are programmed to look for the “right answer” in the text.  This works often but it doesn’t work when the author gives us clues and doesn’t tell us directly.  It also doesn’t work when there is subtext.  A character might say, “I’m have a great day.” But the character is really having a lousy day.  Students can’t always take a character at their word.

Lack of Vocabulary Strategies

After students have taken a test, I always go over the test.  Rather than giving students definitions of words, we talk about how you could kinda-sorta figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words when you’re left out there on your own and in the middle of taking a test.

For example, if you didn’t know what paralyzed meant, you’d be given a clue from a following paragraph which talks about the guy being in a wheelchair.  If you didn’t know what granite was, you could kinda figure it was some kind of rock because the passage said the mountain was made of granite.  Students need a set of vocabulary strategies at their disposal.

Errors of reasoning

Here’s a fantastic list of 15 Reasoning Errors by Mark Pennington.  Mark lists things like omission errors, when students leave out words when they’re reading that change the entire meaning.

Low Level Thinking

These do not require great thinking and yet about half of the errors I see are due to these problems.

Pronoun confusion

Students get questions wrong simply because they don’t know who “he” or “she” refers to.  In addition to summarizing, when you’re doing guided reading, it’s a good idea to stop now and then and ask who is “he” or who are “they”?  Make sure students are able to identify the person the pronoun refers to.

Contractions/Abbreviations

Even fluent readers I work with get confused between Mr. and Mrs.  It makes a big difference in who we’re reading about.  Students read don’t as do or skip the word entirely and it changes the meaning of the sentence.

Are there any other comprehension errors you see your students making?

Using literature circles is another way to increase student comprehension.  Even teachers of prescribed reading series should incorporate additional authentic literature in their teaching.  This literature may be related to curricular units and must be high interest and at an appropriate reading level of students.

I adapted my reading comprehension posters into Literature Circle Table Tents (print and fold each in half after laminating) which I use to assign each student a job.

The jobs are:  The Predictor, Maker of Connections, Great Summarizer, Curious Clarifier, Word Wizard, and the Very Good Visualizer.  Of course, when reading in the real world each person must do each of the jobs.  However, in literature circles each person specializes on a particular job each day (we switch jobs daily).  This gives students additional practice using the strategies and ensures that they know what each of the strategies is.  Each card includes a definition.

For additional information on literature circles, I recommend the following:

In the Middle by Nancy Atwell
This is more about Reader’s Workshop than about literature circles but it does give you fantastic ideas about how to develop reading comprehension and interest in literature.  I highly recommend it.

Litcircles.org gives some additional information about how to set up literature circles.

Somehow the Literature Circle name intimidates some teachers.  I like to think of them as Oprah’s Book Club for kids.  It’s really just about enjoying literature with peers while the teacher helps facilitate some discussion surrounding the book.

Have any literature circle tips to share?

Update:  Adding Edutopia Article on Literature Circle Discussions

Thanks to web site visitors, Luz Arriaga and Dora Antillon, my Reading Comprehension Posters and Bookmarks arenow also available in Spanish.

Reading Comprehension Posters (English)
Reading Comprehension Poster (Spanish)

Reading Comprehension Bookmark (English)
Reading Comprehension Bookmark (Spanish)

Larger versions of the Reading Comprehension Bookmarks (not yet translated) are also available here.

Our district requires us to administer comprehension assessments at six weeks intervals to all grades K-5.  Here are my ideas on what to do to improve students’ performance on these assessments.

Students will need both Test Taking Strategies as well as Real World Comprehension Skills.

Test Taking Strategies

1. Review the assessment.
   This need not be done in one sitting.
   However, students should have an opportunity to see where their mistakes were.
2. Teach students to read question first.
   It’s very difficult to keep all the text in one’s head while you attempt to answer questions about it.  It is often easier to read the question first and then read to find an answer.
3. Teach students to eliminate “silly” or obviously wrong answers.
   Multiple choice tests will include two answer choices that are totally wrong, sometimes even ridiculous.  The sooner students learn to game the tests, the better they’ll do.
4. Teach a QAR (Question-Answer Relationship) Strategy
   Some answers are “right there” whereas other answers require the reader to “think and search” or use only their own head.  (worksheet available here)

Real World Comprehension

1. Explicitly Teach Reading Strategies
   Many teachers use the language of the reading strategies (predicting, making connections, summarizing, etc.) but how many students can explain what each of the strategies are or why you would use a particular strategy?  Recommit to teaching the strategies, not just as incidental to reading but as the objective of lessons.  (for help with reading strategies, including printable posters, see here)
2. Promote Student Discussion
   Through handing-off (student-led discussions) or some other means, allow students to discuss literature on their own terms with the teacher acting as the facilitator.
3. Allow Practice with “Real” Books
   Your basal reader is not enough.  Students will be bored with reading and not develop their strategy use unless they have opportunities to read additional high interest literature in addition to anthology stories.  Whole class readings, small group literature circles, or independent reading workshop, can give students that practice.

How do you improve comprehension?

Thank you to those of you who attended my workshop, “RTI:  A Complete Apple Workflow” at the CUE conference this weekend.   I spoke about using Apple Software to address your Response to Intervention program.  This post contains the links, resources, and ideas that I shared.  Rather than simply posting the keynote file (which is much easier) I prefer to recap and flush out some of the ideas so that it’s beneficial even to those who weren’t there.

What is RTI?

As I define it, rather than simply teaching everyone the same thing and assuming that if someone doesn’t “get it” that there’s something wrong with them, RTI assumes that there will be students who do not master a concept after whole group instruction and will need additional time and intensity (interventions) to master concepts.  This, of course, is very similar to the idea of Independent Work Time.

Alice Mercer, in her CUE presentation, also addressed RTI and went into additional detail in defining it.

Part One:  Dealing with Data

It’s very important to collect and analyze data in order to target interventions to specific student need.  ”Fluency” is to vague to be an intervention.  Focusing on short vowels, long vowels, or digraphs is a better intervention because it targets a specific student need.  Using Apple’s iWork (Pages and Numbers) or even Microsoft Word’s (Office and Excel) can help you to organize data by creating a spreadsheet, graphing data, and using the word processor’s mail merge functions to create parent reports about student data.  I much prefer iWork to Office because of its ease of use and the ability to create better looking documents.

Here’s additional information on graphing in Numbers and how to use the mail merge function.  I taught both these things in the workshop.

Part Two:  Prescriptions for Success ways of using Apple technology to address student needs

Fluency

• Use Garageband to record students doing Reader’s Theater and then add photos via iMovie or Final Cut Pro

Find free Reader’s Theater scripts here

See two of my projects done this way…The City Mouse and the Country Mouse and Tales from the Yard

• Use iPods with Voice Recorders to have students record their voices or have students record their voices directly into Garageband.

Find a voice recorder

Find out more about these techniques through Escondido Unified’s iRead Project

Comprehension

• iMovie projects which focus on unit themes and non-linguistic representations (as per Marzano’s Classroom Instruction That Works)

See our example for the Look Again Camouflage Unit

Read about how vocabulary is scaffolded for such projects

Behavior

While behavior tracking software is popular among schools with large behavior problems.  I saw office referrals eliminated in my classroom simply through working on these movie projects.  I gave the example of Joseph, a student who I knew would not be quiet if I was to call “Quiet on the Set.”  Instead of playing through that scenario and getting annoyed at Joseph ruining other students’ projects, I decided to make Joseph the engineer.  He called out “Quiet on the Set!” and he pushed the red Garageband button.  The rest of the class was dead quiet and Joseph experienced being a successful and productive member of our class rather than being the one who wrecked everything.  This is a behavioral intervention…intervening to improve student behavior rather than punishing students for bad behavior.

Evidence

Here are two slides that show some evidence that these techniques are producing gains although I am the first to admit that we need to continue collecting data on the subject.

In my classroom, I saw an 18% increase in the number of students reading at benchmark 12 weeks after working on the Reader’s Theater script, The City Mouse and the Country Mouse:

In Escondido Unified, they saw average gains of about 40 words per minute after six weeks of reading with iPods whereas normal gains are about 10 words per minute:

Bonus

Here are some incidental things I mentioned in my presentation.

HandBrake for ripping movies from commercial DVDs  you own for storing on iPod.

PWN Youtube and other ways of downloading Youtube movies.

BXMXM7FY39V3

Green is good.  Red is bad.

Here’s what they taught me in “coaching college” about how to read data.

Reading vertically indicates the teacher’s problem.  Reading horizontally indicates a student’s problem.

So, Harpo needs some additional help in all language arts areas.  However, in the vocabulary category, it appears that the teacher needs to examine his/her own instruction as its not succeeding for most of the students.  There’s all kinds of reasons why the teacher could say the students aren’t succeeding and there is validity to all of them…no help at home, trouble learning the language, poorly designed tests, a bad day in class.  This class in particular I hear is a bunch of class clowns.  However, the fact remains that the teacher’s vocabulary instruction with this group of students is not working and if he/she wants better results he/she must try something different.

Here are some resources to help elementary school parents support their children in learning to read at home.  Please feel free to use if this is of use to you:

Links for Parents
(for any reading series)

Links for Parents Using Open Court Reading
page 1 |  page 2

Last year, I posted a redesign of the comprehension strategies we use with our reading series. I’ve tweaked the posters a bit and am now re-posting them.

For the uninitiated, the explicit teaching of reading strategies is supported by current research on reading comprehension instruction.  (See Put Reading First for more information).

A few versions of these posters have been circulated in my district.  What I tried to do was to replace meaningless clip-art with visuals that better support the actual strategy as per design ideas widely circulated amongst bloggers.

As I’ve been using the strategy posters in the classroom, I’ve decided to change them again to make them a little bit easier to read and  more user friendly.  If you have any feedback on them please let me know.

Comprehension Strategy Posters

Comprehension Strategy Wall Chart

Comprehension Strategy Bookmark (pictured, above left)

Comprehension Strategy Cheat Sheet

Comprehension Strategy Powerpoint

Update:  I’ve already made some subtle changes to the cards in terms of readabilty and consistency.  The above links lead to the revised cards.  Thanks for the feedback already received and keep it coming.

As I’ve posted before, decoding isn’t everything.  Students also need strategies to know how to comprehend and make sense of text.  This is sometimes hard for teachers to believe because as adults, we’ve already internalized reading comprehension strategies like clarifying and predicting.  I vaguely remember being taught about inferencing in school, I think most of my reading comprehension strategy instruction happened at home where my mom was constantly reading, modeling what good readers do, and reading stories to me while she instructed.  Unfortunately, many of my students do not have that support at home.  As children, they will not automatically figure out how to comprehend difficult text even once they begin decoding.

So how do you explicitly teach a strategy?  I’ve known a lot of teachers who think they’re explicitly teaching a strategy just because they talk about  but their students still aren’t comprehending.  I want to suggest that if you are explicitly teaching something you need to make it clear to students that you want them to learn what you are teaching.  When you are teaching a story from a basal reader, naturally you are teaching them the content of the story and students generally understand that they’re supposed to be learning that content.  However, there’s another objective for teaching that story and it’s to teach students to use the comprehension strategy.

So, at the beginning of the lesson you can tell students today we’re learning about (insert content of story here) and we’re learning how to (insert today’s reading strategies here).

During the lesson, if we want students to use the reading strategies, we can give them linguistic patterns to help them (for example, I predict ___________ because (the text or illustrations) show/say).

After the lesson, we review…how did making predictions help us to understand today’s story.

To me, that is being explicit…making it abundantly clear what you want students to learn, giving them the tools to internalize that learning, and then reviewing what they’ve learned.

The librarian at one of my schools this year is published illustrator, Diane Greenseid, who has a great web site herself.  She also recommended the following sites that were new to me:

Just One More Book
Audio interviews with authors and illustrators compiled.  You’ll find almost any author on this site.

Guys Read, a site created by Stinky Cheese Man author,  Jon Scieszka.
Trying to motivate boys to read, this site makes suggestions for books that appeal to boys and even adult males.

Planet Esme, from author Esmé Codell
Engaging format to expose you to Esmé’s books

Mrs. P, in a hilarious format, Mrs. P. shares stories with you
thanks to Angele Maiers for the link

For additional storytelling resources see:

Literacy Blogs

Sharing Stories Links

Reader’s Theater