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.