Comprehension Strategy Instruction:

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Comprehension Strategy Instruction

• The Critical Role of the School Library Media
  Specialist

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Comprehension Strategy Instruction
Teachers must explicitly teach the language of
thought. -Ellin Keene, Residency, LES, 9/06
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The School Librarians Role in Promoting Reading
Comprehension

• Working with teachers
• Collaborate to define what it means to comprehend
  deeply.

• Working with children
• Ensure that children are comprehending what they
  read and study.

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When students understand, they

•  
• comprehend a wide variety of texts
• reflect on ideas
•  struggle for insight
•  extend existing knowledge stores
• reapply knowledge in new contexts and
• generate new knowledge
•  

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When students understand, they

• create models to help them understand
• manipulate thoughts to understand more
  completely
• consider multiple perspectives
• understand ways in which memory, knowledge,
  emotions, values and thinking change
• engage in rigorous discourse about ideas
• remember what they read and learn
• Keene, 2003  

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The School Librarians Role in Promoting Reading
Comprehension

• Teachers
• Work with teachers to understand what is
  essential to childrens literacy learning
  encourage focus on what matters most.

• Children
• Help children focus on a few concepts of great
  import for a long period of time in a variety of
  text.

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Whats Essential?

•  
• Cognitive Strategies are the moves a reader and
  writer makes in his mind in order to read, write,
  speak, and listen.
• Cognitive Strategies include fully understanding
  the grapho-phonetic system, instantaneous visual
  word recognition, understanding of grammar and
  syntax, vocabulary, using background knowledge
  and interacting with other readers in order to
  understand more deeply.
•  
•  

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Whats Essential?

• Teachers explicitly teach the cognitive
  strategies most commonly used by proficient
  readers, writers, speakers and listeners.
• Instruction in Cognitive Strategies is focused,
  in-depth, intensive, long term, and repeated
  throughout a childs school life in progressively
  more difficult situations.
• Cognitive strategies vary only slightly for of
  different age groups.

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The School Librarians Role in Promoting Reading
Comprehension

• Teachers
• Work closely with teachers who are conducting
  comprehension strategy study in their classrooms.

• Children
• Work with children to ensure they use
  comprehension strategies in what they read.

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Comprehension Strategies

• Monitoring for Meaning
• Using Schema (background knowledge)
• Determining Importance
• Creating Mental and Emotional Images
• Inferring
• Asking Questions
• Synthesizing

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The School Librarians Role in Promoting Reading
Comprehension

• Teachers
• Help teachers to see how comprehension strategies
  apply to research projects.

• Children
• Encourage children to use comprehension
  strategies as they explore topics of passionate
  interest.

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Comprehension and Research

• Researchers
• Researchers ask questions to narrow a search and
  find a topic
• Researchers ask questions to clarify meaning and
  purpose
• Researchers ask themselves
• What are the most effective resources and how
  will I access them?
• Do I have enough information?
• Have I used a variety of sources?
• What more do I need?
• Does it make sense?
• Have I told enough?
• It is interesting and original thinking and does
  my writing have voice?

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The School Librarians Role in Promoting Reading
Comprehension

• Teachers
• Assist teachers in identifying text and
  multi-media sources that are particularly
  conducive to the comprehension strategy they are
  studying.

• Children
• Assist children in selecting texts that will
  challenge them to comprehend deeply and consider
  important issues.

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The School Librarians Role in Promoting Reading
Comprehension

• Teachers
• Work with teachers to build a collection that
  matches students needs and interests in
  comprehension.

• Children
• Introduce children to a wide range of genres,
  media and texts help them understand the
  distinctions between genres.

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A Variety of Genres

• Mystery
• Journalism Opinion/Editorial
• Tests
• Expository text (narrative or didactic)
• Picture Book
• Photo essay
• Promotional Materials and Advertising
• Fantasy

• Biography
• Historical fiction
• Textbooks/Reference Text
• Persuasion
• Realistic fiction
• Poetry
• Memoir/Autobiography
• Science fiction

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A Variety of Text Levels

• Work in instructional level text for
• Practice in decoding
• Practice word recognition
• Practice oral reading fluency
• Practice in word work such as recognizing
  prefixes and suffixes, word analysis
•  

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A Variety of Text Levels

• Work in challenging text (that may have been read
  to children) for
• Application of comprehension strategies
• Book Club discussion
• Reading with a partner
• Reading to learn new content (especially when
  there are charts, graphs, pictures available)

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Reading Comprehension is Thinking thinking is
hard Its supposed to be hard.
Modeling What Good Readers Do
http//link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid45
52198001?bclid4475696001bctid1859672351
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Analysis is really hard!

• Analysis requires students to
• Apply critical reading and thinking strategies.
• Determine importance of information and its
  relevance to essential question.
• Separate information and ideas into component
  parts.
• Make inferences, identify trends, interpret data.
• Exercise flexibility in information seeking and
  collaboration with peers.

The Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE) points
to 8.7 million secondary school studentsthat is
one in fourwho are unable to comprehend the
material in their textbooks.
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Analyzing Data

• Analyzing Data and Conclusions

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But asking questions is easy

• Good readers ask questions before, during, and
  after reading. They ask
• Essential Questions
• Elaborating Questions
• Clarification Questions
• Hypothetical Questions
• Strategic Questions
• Probing Questions
• Unanswerable Questions
• Provocative Questions
• Creating Questions During Reading

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Scaffolding Analysis

• Interactive Guide for Students
• Online Research Models
• Hands on Habitats
• Comparing Economic Development of African Nations
• Information Seeking Process Model

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Synthesis

• Synthesizing involves fusing, reordering,
  recalling, and retelling to create new meaning or
  understanding.
• It begins when the student draws conclusions to
  create new meaning based on sound reasoning and
  authenticity of information. 
• It ends when students apply new understanding to
  solve a task, write an essay, create an original
  idea, see a new perspective, or form a new line
  of thinking to achieve insight.

Synthesis is the ultimate goal of learning, for
it is through synthesis that new knowledge is
created.
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Catalysts for Synthesis

• Juxtapositions of genres, images, data, texts,
  and disciplines
• Thought-provoking quotes, images, or data
• Essential Questions
• Real-world Problems
• Authentic Assessments
• Multiple Knowledge Sources

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Scaffolding Synthesis

• Online Research Model
• Explore World Hunger
• Interactive Guide for Students
• Information Seeking Process Model

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Assessment

• Assessment is often seen as external to
  instruction, but it is an essential part of
  teaching and learning. Assessment that provides
  regular feedback about student learning has
  benefits for students and teachers when it is
  used to shape future instruction.
• It can enhance motivation as well as achievement
  among students. Teachers who receive daily or
  weekly information about student development can
  intervene effectively.
• (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004).

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Pre-Assessment
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Pre-Assessment
Rating Scale 0 Not attempted/absent 1
Incomplete/unsatisfactory 2 Satisfactory 3
Extensive insightful
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Formative

• TRAILS
• The Reading Lady

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Summative

• RubiStar ... Create your own assessments in
  minutes.
• BCPS - created assessments...for elementary and
  secondary featuring oral, written, visual, and
  community service products - Word format for easy
  customization.
• Authentic Assessment Tools ... how-to hypertext
  on creating authentic tasks, rubrics and
  standards for measuring and improving student
  learning.

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Questions Answers
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Beyond Sticky Notes

• Beyond Sticky Notes, and would look at ways to
  use Web 2.0 tools and authentic real world
  experiences, like book clubs and web-conferences,
  to enhance both the delivery of comprehension
  strategy instruction and transcend time and space
  barriers to create a true community of readers.
  It will also address how to
• encourage interpersonal connections in addition
  to text-text, text-world, and text-self
  connections.
• encourage students to ask meaningful questions of
  each other, not just of themselves or the author,
  regarding interpretations of texts further, ask
  students to back up their responses with relevant
  prior knowledge or excerpts from texts.
• encourage authentic conversations regarding
  texts, spotlighting strategy use as it occurs
  within those conversations.
• continue modeling a variety of strategies for
  making sense of texts.
• provide a wide variety of text genres and topics
  that may encourage students to employ the growing
  number of comprehension strategies they have at
  their disposal.
• recognize the variety of socially and culturally
  embedded strategies students may use in their
  day-to-day lives, and bridge these understandings
  to reading school texts.

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Summary

• Teaching every child who enters our doors how to
  tackle books dotted with multisyllabic workds
  and navigate through trellised sentences the
  climb across many lines of text not only ensures
  that we stay in business, but more important,
  ensures that every child has equitable access to
  the wealth of knowledge housed within our walls.