Top 10 Things I Learned in "Teaching Reading in Content Field"

10. Blogging is easier to do than I ever knew (especially on Google Blogspot)! And so addicting! It was like opening a present whenever I would check to see if any comments were added to my blog and there was one!




9.  Literacy has been redefined to include language, writing, social constructs and cultural conventions, as well as psychological dimensions and a person's way of being in the world, including nationality, sex, and class, which Dr. James Gee calls Discourse. There is a whole new field of study now called Literary Studies.. "mushfake" is a cool word to describe faking it within a Discourse you don't have mastery in.




8. Discourses, with a Capital D, are multiple (reading for science, reading for language arts, being a student in school, being a student on a soccer field, etc., etc.)and people will learn many over their lifetime.  Discourses are multi-faceted and people need to learn them through an apprenticeship program with chances to practice in order to become a master and literate in any Discourse.

Image via Wikipedia

7.  The Web can be seen as a continuum, like a library of data which is controlled by one central creator on one end, and a polar opposite where information is decentralized, collaborative, and connected to many other sites of information. This end can be edited by any viewer and then corrected or changed by any other. (and a responsive school of fish can be correlated to an emergent knowledge system!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_pN88xJotM   (at time 4:43)

Image by kharied (vacation!!) via Flickr

6.  While blogging is fun, it is harder for me to discuss in online audio chat forums without video. I am just too visual, and not seeing people's faces while talking is not a part of my Discourse on school discussions. I need to work on that. I would start thinking about what was written on my computer screen while I was talking and lose my train of thought! And my train of thought jumps the track easily enough as it is!

5.  Teaching reading literacy requires more than just instruction in decoding words and testing on finding facts within a text. Students need modeling on the actual mental tools that master readers use to navigate difficult texts, textual cues that indicate important information is going to be coming in the text, metacognition, and much more. After learning this methods, they need time to
practice the skills within actual content based writings.

Image via Wikipedia

4. Teaching as a Master reader requires thinking about the mental tools one uses to navigate a particular Discourse. This is harder than it sounds!

Image by davesaunt via Flickr

3.  We can think of text as simply marks on a page that do not convey anything until a reader's mind brings all their background, emotions, images, to the words and this transaction between the readers' mind at a particular time and the marks happens in the act of reading. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?








2.  The best atmosphere for literacy to occur is one that is collaborative between student (apprentice) and teacher (master), safe for students to share any problems that they have with text, and personal. Students are given ample time to think about their mental processes and thinking (metacognition), practice modeled behaviors and skills, think critically about new information, and be exposed to many different types of text and approach them from stances both aesthetic and efferent.







1.  Literacy is an ongoing process throughout our lifetimes and no one is literate in everything. Literacy requires more than just an ability to read words, we have to be able to make connections with previous knowledge and and be able to use the information in new and creative ways.

Reading the Art of Navajo Weaving

So while this post is not based on my Reading for Understanding Book it does relate to Gee's Theory of Literacy(s). I took a seminar class in Farmington in June that was all about Navajo weaving. We visit Trading Posts and visited weaver's homes to see them at work on their looms and with their spindles. We got to experience sheep shearing, dyeing, carding and then we attended the Crownpoint Rug Auction. The weavers have formed their own association to market their rugs directly.  The weaving is taught to both males and females through scaffolding. When asked how they learned to spin or card, most weavers responded that they just learned from their grandmother or parent, starting when they were young with a small loom to work on.  Here are some pictures I took.  The weavers are amazing!

A few more ideas for apprenticeship

I have not broken down my text into large enough chunks to finish the blog with the end of the book unless I go past our due date! So I thought I would try to add in a few more techniques and try to reach some sort of ending point.

There are 2 more cognitive tools to place into your student's mental toolbelt. Last blog covered questioning and summarizing, and now I'll briefly mention predicting and clarifying.

Predicting
Master readers gave the students some guidelines for predicting (pg. 91) which was a list of signal structures and phrases that usually predict a specific type of clarification by the author later in the text. For example, a colon(:) will usually be followed by a list; Therefore-usually followed by results or conclusions; Similarly, In the same way, Just like, Just as, Likewise, In comparison, Also- usually followed by a comparison of how things are the same.
Students were asked to try to predict the types of information that the author would be presenting more than just what information they might learn. One reason to do this is so the reader learns not just predicting but how to handle incorrect predictions and not get locked into their incorrect schema.

Clarifying
Students were asked to make a chart while reading that was labeled with 4 headings. As they read, the students used the steps for clarifying mentioned in earlier blogs and noted the text they had problems with, what confused them about that text, what strategy they used, and how it clarified the issue. The next day the students shared their lists with each other. To repeat, those strategies were as follows:

1.ignore and read on to see if you understand enough to keep reading
2. keep reading to see if meaning gets clearer
3. reread section right before what was unclear
4. reread what was unclear
5. connect what you are reading to things you already know
6. get outside help

(Schoenbach,pg.93)

When students began to read independently with these strategies, they also were told about chunking. Many students were not aware that they could stop reading at any point even without commas, and periods. Once they were aware of the idea, they could organize the text into digestible bits depending on the difficulty.

For building context, text and disciplinary knowledge, the master readers began early in the semester to discuss why students needed some prior knowledge to make sense of texts. Schema was the term used to this body of mental associations the student has in their head. Teachers used the classic Abbott and Costello routine to help students visualize this concept.



They also did exercises with humorous/ambiguous headlines: "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim", Eye Drops Off Shelf". They discussed wrong meanings that could be assumed if one did not have the schema to interpret headlines.

I would recommend this book to all teachers who are interested in embedding literacy in their subject matter, as it has many helpful tools.

Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal Teaching is a process that was first developed for small- group work in remedial classrooms. It has been adapted for whole-class and peer-led group work in larger classrooms. It helps students monitor their comprehension and involves the same apprenticeship model as the Strategic Learning Initiative. Internalizing of the 4 key elements of comprehension-questioning, clarifying summarizing and predicting is the aim.
Questioning
One exercise, called ReQuest, has the apprentice reader ask questions about the text they are reading, imagining they are a teacher. What would they want their students to learn from the text? One student is chosen to ask their question to the class, and choose the correct answer from those given from the rest of the class. The person with the best answer asks the next question. For complete participation, no one can answer more than once until all have answered at least once. This exercise usually would entail a class discussion about which answer is the best or correct answer.

Master readers (teachers) discuss 4 types of questions with the students.
1. Right there questions- answer is right there in text, reader just needs to copy it down
2. Pulling it together questions- the answer is in the texts, but in different areas and the reader needs to pull it together from different locations in the text
3. Author and me questions- Answers are not in the text. Reader must combine his own knowledge and use information in text to find answer. For example, the text may say that someone took shower, worried they might miss the bus for school. The question "what time of day was it?" requires the reader to know that school starts in the morning and combine their knowledge with information from the text to find answer.
4. On my own questions- Answer not in text, reader may use text to inform their answer but it comes from their own knowledge. For example, "Should parents wake their children up for school?"

The first two questions are categorized as "in the text questions" with a right answer. The last two questions are "in my mind" questions and may have more than one right answer.
Now the activity for the class is "Question Around" and the class does the previous activity but labels the questions according to the 4 labels above.

Summarizing
Most students have experience with summarizing but do not have explicit knowledge on ways to determine what is important enough to include in the summary. To help make this visible to the students, teachers developed a list of what makes a good summary. The students agreed that a good summary should be shorter than the text, contain important information but leave out details and examples.
Signal words that would give the students structure to what they were looking for were detailed. Word such as first, then, finally helped the students mentally organize the text. Peer review of the summaries gave the students a safe way to learn what others felt were important ideas and which ideas they may have included that weren't deemed necessary by their classmate. Discussion and referral back to the text would then ensue.

Acquiring Cognitive Tools

The authors of "Reading for Understanding" reinforce the idea that reading is problem solving. They suggest that for students to increase their comprehension they need to have a wide variety of tools and specific strategies for solving any confusions and problems that come up when they read. These tools need to vary so that when different types of text are encountered they can pick and choose strategies to help them glean meaning from the subject. If students are not able to successfully read for comprehension from academic texts they will eventually give up.

The mental toolbelt for comprehension has four elements:
questioning
predicting
summarizing
clarifying

The goal is for students to independently use these tools to gain meaning from any texts. This requires practice. So the students first were introduced to using the tools with fairly straightforward and easily read texts. Individual and group work was repeatedly done. One way to do this was to have students explain to the class what they did to summarize, how they knew they needed to clarify something. By sharing, the students came to understand the strategies that worked for them and also opened up the idea that other students in class could be a resource.
Power and gatekeeping texts were explained and specific instances were explored such as SAT's, .

Teachers used The Think-Aloud Process to model problem solving. The master reader reads a text they have never seen before. Out loud they use Predicting, Picturing, Making Connections, Identifying a problem, Using Fix-ups. Some questions would be:

I predict...
In the next part I think...
I think this is....
I picture...
I can see...
This is like....
This reminds me of...
I get confused when...
I'm not sure of...
I didn't expect...
I think I need to ( reread or take some other action to help comprehension)
Maybe I'll need to ( read on, or persevere in some other way)


After the teacher models this a few times, the students begin to make check lists as they observe the teacher demonstrate. Whenever they hear one of the techniques used, they make a tally mark, and then the class goes over the checklists. Next the students read in pairs, using think-alouds to share their process. Then students read independently and use checklist on their own reading. They share their self- assessments. Tally sheets are saved in reading logs throughout the year, so that students can look back and review their growth. At the end of the year, students can share reflections on how the think-alouds affected their reading.

The goal of repeatedly doing read-alouds is to make the dialogue second nature and eventually be used unconsciously. According to Gee, at this point they would have mastered this secondary Discourse. They have a cognitive toolbelt for attaining meaning from the text.

Personal Dimension of Motivation

For students to become independent readers, they need to find their own authentic reasons for reading beyond simply finishing an assignment for school. The majority of students in the 9th grade pilot readership class reported not reading for pleasure which changed over the school year to a majority who did like to read. So what were some ways this came about?

Students were asked to report on why an author or character would answer the question "why read?". They also asked family members or community members why they read. The teachers tried to show how reading is not just something one does in school. They also reinforced that reading is a process, not just learned once early in childhood.

SSR -Sustained Silent Reading was a big part of the class. They gave the students a list of methods for picking out a book they might like, because many had stopped reading for pleasure when they hit middle school and started having to read for information and not just for aesthetic reasons. Many had no strategies for picking out books, which makes sense because as elementary readers, the books they were choosing from had more visuals to scan and use to help them choose books. I really liked the explicit instructions given, so I'll share.

Ways to pick out a book

Read the back to see if it is interesting
Find a subject you like to read
Ask a friend.
Look for another book by an author you like
Skim the book- read a few pages
Find a book that relates to you
(pg. 64)

If a student didn't like the book, they were to use "the 10-page chance". Read for 10 pages, if you like it then keep reading. If you don't like it, get another book. If you aren't sure, read another 10 pages. In SSR, reading for pleasure required new rules. It was okay to put a book down.

For SSR to work, class rules need to be set down. Students need to read either their book from home or, if forgotten, a book from the class library. A good library with many genres and options needs to be available. Students should write in logs every day about their reading. But this writing should focus on how they read and how they felt about what they were reading not the content of the books. Some great prompts for the log can be written inside the front cover, to be accessed by the students each time they logged. Here is a sample of some of them:

Sentence Starters(pg. 68):

While I was reading.....

I got confused by....
I was distracted by....
I started to think about....
The time went quickly because....
I figured out that....

Give the students a regular time to share about the book with the class, using the 10-page chance criteria.

To build concentration, SSR starts around 10 minutes and builds up to 20 or more minutes. Strategies to build stamina included an exercise relating the mind to a TV with many channels. The students need to ask themselves if they are on the friend channel, dressing channel or school channel. Students can write down what they think they will be distracted by and then a plan to deal with these distractions.

Set a goal for how many books must be read during SSR for the year, broken down by grading period. Students will write a letter to the teacher at then end of each book telling about the story and about how they as a reader experienced the book. Did they like it? Are your skills changing since the beginning of the year? If so, is anything surprising you?

Independence Day!

I was just thinking about Independence Day and it occurred to me that the goal of the Schoenbach etal. model is to give their students the strategies, motivation and cognitive skills to become independent readers. When that happens, they are no longer dependent on other people's interpretations of information,but are free to make their own informed opinions based on the knowledge they glean from their reading. What a powerful gift!

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

Thought this was a fun video!