Transcript Iowa Core Literacy Standard IA.1

How Do We Focus Our Instruction
on Comprehension Strategies to
Help Our Students Become
Proficient Readers?
(Iowa Core Literacy Standard IA.1)
Carol Duehr
June 2012
Reading Standards for Literature
Reading Standards for Informational
Text
IA.1 Employ the full range of research-based
comprehension strategies, including making
connections, determining importance,
questioning, visualizing, making inferences,
summarizing, and monitoring for
comprehension.
Research-based
• Qualities of Best Practice in Teaching Reading from Best
Practice, 4th ed., Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde. (2013)
 Reading means getting meaning from print—The essence of
reading is a transaction between the words of an author and the mind of a
reader, during which meaning is constructed. This means that the main goal
of reading instruction must be comprehension.
 Reading is thinking--Reading is a meaning-making process: an active,
constructive, creative, higher-order thinking activity that involves distinctive
cognitive strategies before, during, and after reading. Students need to learn
how skillful, experienced readers actually manage these processes.
 Teachers should model reading--. . . They must show their students
how they think while they read. Using a powerful teaching strategy called
“think-alouds,” teachers can read aloud unfamiliar selections in front of their
students, stopping frequently to “open up their heads” and vocalize their
internal thought processes.
Why These Strategies?
. . . Mainstream researchers agree that all skillful readers:
• Visualize (make mental pictures or sensory images)
• Connect (link to their own experiences, to events in the world, to
other readings)
• Question (actively wonder, surface uncertainties, interrogate the
text and the author)
• Infer (predict, hypothesize, interpret, draw conclusions)
• Evaluate (determine importance, make judgments, weigh values)
• Analyze (notice text structures, author’s craft, purpose, theme,
point of view)
• Recall (retell, summarize, remember information)
• Monitor (actively keep track of their thinking, adjust strategies to
text at hand)
• Best Practice, 4th ed. By Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde. (2013)
How should Teachers Teach Strategies
to their Students?
• Explicit instruction
 Showing our thinking and modeling the mental
processes we go through when reading
 Demonstrate what thoughtful readers do
 Make our thinking visible
• Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
 Teacher Modeling—I do, You watch
 Guided Practice—I do, You help
 Collaborative Practice—I help, You do
 Independent Practice—I watch, You do
Monitoring Comprehension
• Proficient readers. . .
Have an inner conversation about what they
are reading
Have metacognitive knowledge—an
awareness and understanding of how one
thinks
Know how to use strategies during reading
Match strategies to their purpose
Monitoring Comprehension
• Struggling Readers. . .
Need explicit instruction demonstrating
metacognition—thinking about what they are
thinking while reading
Need NOT ONLY a clear understanding of
comprehension strategies BUT ALSO an
awareness of when and how to use them
• Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
Making Connections
 A bridge from the new to the known---Activating and
connecting to background knowledge—schema theory
 Connecting to personal experience facilitates
understanding
 Text-to-Self: connections that readers make between
the text and their past experiences or background
knowledge
 Text-to-World: connections that readers make between
the text and the bigger issues, events, or concerns of
society and the world at large
 Text-to-Text: connections that readers make between
the text they are reading and another text
Determining Importance
• Nonfiction—focus on important information and merge it
with what we already know to deepen our understanding-Text features that signal importance
• Fiction—focus on character’s actions, motives, problems &
personality
• Poetry—figurative language, metaphors, & imagery require us
to dig deeper
• Importance is determined by our purpose
 Remember important information
 Learn new information and build background knowledge
 Distinguish what’s important from what’s interesting
 Discover a theme, opinion, or perspective
 Answer a specific question
 Determine if the author’s message is to inform, persuade, or
entertain
Questioning
• Readers ask questions to
Construct meaning
Enhance understanding
Find answers
Solve problems
Find specific information
Clarify confusion
Visualizing
 Allows readers to create mental images from
words in the text
 Infer but with mental images
 Involves all of your senses
 Enhances meaning with mental imagery
 Links past experiences to the words and ideas in
the story
 Strengthens a reader’s relationship to the text
 Stimulates imaginative thinking
 Heightens engagement with text
Making Inferences
• Occurs when text clues merge with the reader’s prior
knowledge and questions to point to a conclusion
about an underlying theme or idea in a text
• When readers infer, they
 Draw conclusions based on clues in the text
 Make predictions before and during reading
 Surface underlying themes
 Use implicit information from the text to create
meaning during and after reading
 Use the pictures to help gain meaning
Summarizing
Pull out the most important information and
put it into our own words to remember it
Retelling the information and paraphrasing it
Need to sift and sort through large amounts of
information to extract essential ideas
Resource
• Strategies That Work: teaching
comprehension for understanding and
engagement, 2nd ed. Stephanie Harvey and
Anne Goudvis, 2007.