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.
You are right Mathew. I am going to print out this story and pin it to the wall by my desk as a reference. Thanks.
Thanks, Leila! Good luck.
I believe it is also important that our students be reading at an instructional level not at the frustration level. Otherwise, the content will not be comprehended no matter what strategy they may try apply. Much of the Open Court Reading is not at grade level. Specifically, 4th grade “Mystery to Medicine” unit. If the Flesch-Kincade syllable test or Fry Chart were applied I imagine that it would not qualify as 4th grade reading.
@Felyce,
Agreed that we want to read age appropriate material. However, since the anthology is read whole glass and would classify as guided reading, you can have students reading material that is higher than a fourth grade level because of the support of the teacher. I know that no matter what level our students are reading in elementary, our middle school teachers still feel that we haven’t prepared them enough.
In regards to strategy use…strategies can be applied to any text no matter how difficult. In fact, the more difficult, the more important the strategies. We’ve read textbooks in high school or college that made little sense (for me it was trigonometry and physics). It was not so much about the text not being on grade level, it was more important to have the background knowledge and experiences to fill in the for the unfamiliar vocabulary…that’s where the teacher comes in.
I completely agree with the need for being explicit.
I think we can hold ourselves accountable for explicit lessons by following the Mini Lesson Format:
Connection: We’ve been learning about (Plug in the reading strategy). Today I’m going to teach you how (plug in the move you want to show children of how to do this strategy)
Teaching: Model/Think Aloud for students how to do this reading strategy
Active Engagement: Allow children an opportunity to practice this strategy with a partner under your guidance.
Link: Send the children off to their reading task and invite them to use the reading strategy you have introduced that day.
I think your article made some good points: first, needing to begin the lesson by setting the objective with students, and then explaining the steps so the students can be cognitive about their learning. Second, providing the schema that students need such as a sentence frame like “I predict ________ because _________” and making certain that they explicitly state the strategy. As Angela pointed to in her comment and what I think we might want to consider in teaching strategy instruction in Open Court, or any reading program, is that there is a hierarchy in how the strategies are taught — modeling, prompting, and facilitating. Let me use predicting as an example. At first the teacher has more ownership of the strategy use– thinking aloud for students and using the important vocabulary such as “This is a good place to stop and make a prediction.” Students at this point are listening to the teacher’s model. The next step would be for the teacher to say “This is a good place to make a prediction. Would anyone like to make one?” Teacher here is still keeping students within the recommended strategy in the T.E. but is asking for a student model. The next step is prompting. This is where the teacher would stop in the text and say “Can anyone think of a strategy we can use here?” and would prompt them to examine the text. If a student uses an appropriate strategy that supports the discussion about the text, the teacher listens and invites others to share another strategy if there is specific information he/she wants students to understand. This is the prompting. The last step, once students have most ownership of strategy use, is to allow students to sit in a circle and read AND discuss the text using strategies and handing off to one another. Teacher is facilitator and moves the conversation, asking questions aloud and modeling, “I wonder if…” or other think alouds. For students that have difficulty using the strategies, pre-reading part of the selection the day before and modeling strategy use allows them to have an understanding so they can contribute to the discussion of strategy use.
@Kiki,
Yes, you are talking about “gradual release.” Unfortunately, many teachers do not get beyond modeling. Or they simply ask questions related to predicted instead of explicitly asking students to predict. I think it makes a difference if we can get students to say the name of the strategy they’re using in terms of them taking ownership of it. There are many fifth graders in Open Court classrooms who cannot tell you a definition for the strategies even though they’ve been using them since kindergarten.
I think that’s because we’re not explicit enough.