Transcript P.O.S.S.E. - Reading...YES!

P.O.S.S.E.
5 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE READING
COMPREHENSION
Comprehension in Context
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Reading Comprehension is one of the most fundamental skills for academic
success. Without it students will have difficulty in:
* Following Directions
* Test Taking
* Completing homework assignments
* Keeping on task in classroom activities.
WHY IS IT A PROBLEM?
-Many teachers do not feel it is their responsibility to teach reading
comprehension strategies, they feel it should fall solely to the Language
Arts/English teacher
-Students are not provided adequate training in reading skills and strategies
What is P.O.S.S.E.?
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POSSE is a reading comprehension strategy designed
to model habits of strong readers to students and teach
them how to utilize these strategies
Developed by Carol Englert and Troy Mariage in 1991
Most effective when taught at an early age, though can
be introduced at any grade level
Most useful in English or Social Studies classes, though
can be used in all contents
Provides opportunities to implement other organizing
tools such as note cards or graphic organizers
What it Stands For
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P- Predict Ideas
O- Organize the Ideas (can use note-taking or graphic organizers)
S- Search for the Structure
S- Summarize the Ideas
E- Evaluate your Understanding
-POSSE provides steps for before, during and
after reading
It’s all about “P”
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Studies conducted with POSSE by Nicole Pesa
and Sarah Somers with 7th and 8th Grade
Classrooms drew the following conclusions:
-Students
actively use most of the steps of POSSE, except for the “Predict”
step.
-Possible Reasons: Students do not remember to use the P step without a
teachers prompting or they do not have enough time to utilize all the steps.
In this case, the study found the Predict step was most likely to be skipped.
-This is the step that must be emphasized most to students for this reason
More P’s, Please
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Students tend to automatically utilize the final
four steps of POSSE, but not the first.
This causes problems with Socratic Questions
after reading (questions that require background
knowledge in order to make real-world
connections)
Provide practice with Prediction processes
wherever possible
How do you teach it?
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RECIRPOCAL TEACHING- can be used to teach
students how to comprehend material by providing
teacher and peer models of thinking behavior and
allowing them to practice with their peers.
Steps: Teacher should lead this dialogue first, demonstrating how the
strategies can be used in reading.
Gradually, students should be given more and more responsibility to
maintain the discussion
Eventually, the students should be leading the discussion and the teacher
serving as a facilitator.
The most important part of the instruction is the teacher’s releasing
control of the discussion to the students
Does it Work?
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Pesa and Somers (2007) conducted research at a
Chicago Middle School with 2 Separate Classes
with several reading strategies. What they
found:
*Students do not properly implement all steps of the
POSSE reading strategy without prompting. This lead to only
21% of the students being able to properly identify the main
ideas of the passages they were provided to read. Because they
do not take the time to familiarize themselves with the text
before reading or organize information they have difficulty
determining what information is most important.
Study, Continued
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The Study taught several strategies over a 16 week period to two classrooms,
including predicting, questioning, visualizing and evaluating
Through this, students developed higher critical thinking skills about texts,
demonstrated the ability to both formulate and answer Socratic questions
Advanced students demonstrated a firmer grasp on structure than other
students in the study
By the end of the program, the two classrooms both overall demonstrated
increases in their responses to questions concerning self-monitoring, (3.2 and
5 % increases respectively), visualizing (4.9, 4.0 %) and making connections
(3.8 and 4.4%)
Without the cooperation of content area teachers, students will most likely
not transfer strategies to areas outside of the Language Arts classroom.
Content area teachers responsibility to align methods of instruction with
reading strategies taught in the English classroom.
Tying it all Together
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POSSE should be taught to students at the
beginning of the school year, and practiced
continuously throughout the year
Will greatly help students in areas such as
standardized testing
Tovani (2004) “With explicit instruction that
demonstrates what good readers do, struggling
readers can be taught HOW to comprehend the
text.”