Part 2: More Ways to Address Teaching Reading Comprehension!

As promised, we are continuing our blog conversation on strategies to support reading comprehension instruction.  Previously we have talked big picture research and introduced one strategy, Monitoring.  Today we will proceed with our discussion with a few more instructional innovations, Metacognition and Graphic Organizers!

• Monitoring
• Metacognition
• Graphic Organizers
• Question-Answer-Relationship
• Generating Questions
• Classroom Discussion
• Annotating Text

Metacognition

Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Teachers can help students understand how to use metacognition by talking about what good readers during reading. Research notes that effective readers use at least two metacognitive strategies when reading all types of text. 

·     Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. 

·     During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. 

·     After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.

Metacognition strategies that have proven to be effective for reading comprehension are:

·     Ask and answer where the challenges occur in the text.

·     Ask and answer the specific difficulty in what the text says.

·     Restate a difficult piece of text in their own words.

·     Look back through the text to find content that supports overall comprehension.

·     Look forward in the text to identify text that might help them solve their problem. 

·     Reciprocal Teaching: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting.

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.  Graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand both informational and literature text.

Graphic organizers can:

• Help students focus on text structure 
• Provide students with tools they can use to examine and show relationships in a text
• Help students prepare well-organized narrative, informational/explanatory, or argumentative writing. 

A common misuse of graphic organizers is that they become the end product- that because one completes an organizer, they then comprehend the text.  Research is very clear that the graphic organizer is the means to the end, not the end itself.  Teachers can help students use the completed organizer to then complete a more challenging task that forces the learner to use the organizer to demonstrate understanding. 

Graphic Organizer strategies that have proven to be effective for reading comprehension are:

·     Compare and Contrast

·     Storyboard

·     Chain of Events

·     Sequencing

·     Story Structure

·     Cause and Effect

·     Problem and Solution

·     Text to Self

·     Character Map

·     Close Reading

·     Word/Concept Map

·     Cornell Notes

·     Progress Map

 Want to learn more?  Reach out to us to talk Reading Comprehension!  We love it! Stay tuned for more information and great ideas in the week ahead! 

Addressing Challenges with Teaching Reading Comprehension

This time of year when we are all analyzing summative achievement data, it brings attention to the ongoing challenges our students have with Reading Comprehension. We have been working with a variety of school districts to address these challenges and to help teachers become innovative in reading instruction. It's not just enough to read and ask a few comprehension questions.  To truly comprehend at an analytical level, we need to be intentional and strategic. 

Over the next week, we will be posting about some research-based Reading Comprehension strategies that have proven to work with all types of learners! Here is our first take!

Comprehension strategies are conscious plans — sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of a text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. 

Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit comprehension instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. 

The steps of explicit comprehension instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling, guided practice, and application.

·      Direct explanation: The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.

·      Modeling:  The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.

·      Guided practice:  The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.

·      Application:  The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.

Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Cooperative learning instruction has been used successfully to teach comprehension strategies. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups. Teachers also provide modeling of the comprehension strategies.

While there are a plethora of names and strategies associated with reading comprehension, research for the last fifty years can be synthesized into the following strategies:

• Monitoring
• Metacognition
• Graphic Organizers
• Question-Answer-Relationship
• Generating Questions
• Classroom Discussion
• Annotating Text

Today we will discuss the first strategy, Monitoring.  Stay tuned for more information and great ideas in the week ahead! 

Monitoring

Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that teaching monitoring skills can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.

Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:

• Be aware of what they do understand
• Identify what they do not understand
• Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension

Monitoring strategies that have proven to be effective for reading comprehension are:

·     Story Maps: A story map is a strategy that uses a visual organizer created by the reader during the reading to help students learn the elements of literature. By identifying the characters, plot, setting, problem and solution, students read carefully to learn the details. There are many different types of story map visual organizers. The most basic focus on the beginning, middle, and end of the story. More advanced organizers focus more on plot or character traits.

·     Concept Maps: A visual organizer that can enrich students' understanding of informational text. Using this type of organizer, students think about the information in several ways. Most concept map organizers engage students in answering questions such as, “who, what, when, where, why, how, examples, etc.”.

·     Verbal Summarizing: Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. While we often ask students to write a summary, we often do not take enough time to provide opportunities for students to verbally summarize what they have understood during and after the reading. Teaching students to verbally summarize improves their memory for what was read. Summarization strategies can be used in every content area.

·     Think-Alouds: Think-alouds have been described as "eavesdropping on someone's thinking." With this strategy, teachers verbalize aloud while reading a selection orally. Their verbalizations include describing things they're doing as they read to monitor their comprehension. The purpose of the think-aloud strategy is to model for students how skilled readers construct meaning from a text. Students implement think-alouds after the teacher has effectively modeled them.

How Can You Boost Your Educator Credibility?

As we begin this new school year, I am reminded of the importance of what our students think of us as educators. It is not a new realization that teacher credibility has a significant impact on student learning and success.  In John Hattie's research, teacher credibility has a strong effect size of .90 which is far above the average effect size of .40.  Teacher credibility is students' belief that they can learn from a particular teacher because this adult is believable, convincing, and capable of persuading students that they can be successful.

In a recent article in Educational Leadership, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey discuss that teacher credibility has four components: trust, competence, dynamism, and immediacy.

TRUST
Students need to know that their teachers care about them as individuals and that they have their best interest at heart.
How to build TRUST:

• Keep your promises.
• Tell them the truth about their performance.
• Don't spend too much time finding what is wrong.
• Focus on strengths.
• Take a close look at negative feelings you have about students.

COMPETENCE

Students need to know that their teachers know their content and how to best teach it. They expect expertise in terms of delivery and accuracy of content. 

How to build COMPETENCE:

• Know the content and don't be afraid to ask for help. 
• Deliver content cohesively and coherently.
• Be mindful of your non-verbal communication- does it show competence? 

DYNAMISM

Students need to know that teachers have enthusiasm for the content and for their students'. Lessons need to capture student interest and the delivery must show it. 

How to build DYNAMISM:

• Find the passion you once had for the content.
• Consider the relevance of your lesson for students. 
• Seek feedback from other educators on your delivery of content. 

IMMEDIACY

Students need to know that their teacher is accessible and relatable. The classroom should be a place where all can learn from one another. There should not be a "line" or a "wall" between teacher and learners.

How to build IMMEDIACY:

• Get to know your students- names and interests.
• Attend student events outside the classroom.
• Teach with a sense of urgency so that students know their time is not being wasted. 

What can you do today to boost your educator credibility? 

Reflecting on Benjamin Bloom and Mastery Learning

For many reasons, Benjamin Bloom keeps popping into my head and into my conversations with educators.   We regularly discuss the difference between Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. We use Bloom’s for lesson and environmental development and we use Webb’s for an assessment of the learning. All this reflection and discourse around learning has made me go back into the archives of my brain and revisit Bloom’s ideas on Mastery Learning.

The features that characterize Ben Bloom’s scholarship are several. First of all, he was interested in understanding the ways in which cognition functions and, more important, how high-level forms of thinking can be promoted. Secondly, he had an abiding faith in the power of the environment to influence the performance of individuals. He certainly was not a genetically oriented determinist. His convictions about environmental influences led, ultimately, to the impact that his work had in establishing the Head Start Program in the United States. He was invited to testify to the Congress of the United States about the importance of the first four years of the child’s life as the critical time to promote cognitive development. His testimony had an impact that has lasted decades. Thirdly, Bloom believed that not only was the environment important but also that it was possible to arrange systematically the ways in which learning could be promoted. It was these foundations of his scholarship that gave birth to the oddly controversial idea of Mastery Learning.

Mastery Learning, rooted initially in the work of John Carroll, is a good example of Bloom’s effort and his abiding faith in the power of rationally defined goals to promote the attainment of those goals through instruction.  For at least a century, the way to approach the measurement and description of students’ academic achievement had been to expect a normal distribution and then to compare students’ performance.  The assumption was that there would always be a normal distribution among students and that this distribution and the students’ location within it should determine their rewards— rewards distributed in the form of grades.  Some students perform and get A’s and B’s, most get C’s, and some get D’s and F’s.  That is the way it was- a normal distribution. A fixed mindset.

Bloom looked at the matter differently. Under the influence of Ralph Tyler, he recognized that what was important in education was not that students should be compared, but that they should be helped to achieve the goals of the standards they were studying.  Goal attainment rather than student comparison was what was important. The process of teaching needed to be geared towards the design of tasks that would progressively and ultimately lead to the realization of the objectives that defined the objectives in the standards. Mastery learning is a tribute to such a conception. In current educational circles, he would be identified with a growth mindset.

The variable that needed to be addressed, as Bloom saw it, was TIME. It made no pedagogical sense to expect all students to take the same amount of time to achieve the same objectives. There were individual differences among students, and the important thing was to accommodate those differences via instructional differentiation and the environment in order to promote learning rather than to hold time constant and to expect some students to fail. Education was not a race. In addition, students were allowed, indeed encouraged, to help one other. Feedback and correction were immediate.  Opportunities for reasoning and critique were essential.  What Bloom was doing was applying in a very rational way the basic assumptions embraced by those who believe the educational process should be geared towards the realization of educational objectives. He believed that such an approach to curriculum, instruction, and assessment would enable virtually all youngsters to achieve success in school. The problem lay in curriculum design and in the forms of teaching that was appropriate to promoting the realization of the goals.

The educational world lost Benjamin Bloom almost 20 years ago, but his research, efforts, and legacy live on in head, hearts, and hands of many.  Cheers, Ben.  Thanks for the vision.

How Are You Conferencing?

How are you conferencing?

It’s that time of the year again and teachers are prepping the walls and scheduling their dreaded fall conferences.  It’s not that we don’t like to meet with parents/ families, but it takes time away from our teaching and most conferences consist of teachers constantly talking about what their students are doing or not doing.  And in reality, shouldn't parents/ families already know that?

In many schools, educators are transforming teacher-led parent-teacher conferences in favor of a Student-Led Conferences (SLCs) formats that engage students in the process. These conferences can provide powerful opportunities for students to advocate for their own learning. What better way to monitor progress than to have the student take ownership and be self-reflective?

Though the format may vary, these conferences differ from traditional conferences in that they place students at the helm of teacher-supported discussions with parents about student progress and learning. SLCs also often present opportunities for students to prepare, reflect on, and discuss evidence of their learning and growth by way of student portfolios and analysis of student work and assessments.

Schools that implement student-led conferences report that they encourage students to take responsibility and ownership for their learning by involving them in the goal-setting and assessment process.  They also boast that SLCs engage families in richer, more transparent conversations about student progress.

To learn more about how SLCs can transform conferencing at your site, contact info@LeverageLearningGroup.com .  If you want to read more about the benefits of SLCs, here are a few links to get you started.

A Guide To Implementing Student-Led Conferences at the Secondary Level

A Step-by-Step Plan for Student-Led Conferences at the Elementary Level

Have you been implementing SLCs at your site?  Love to hear your stories too!

Supporting Classroom Discourse with Non-verbal Communication Norms

With so many classrooms making distinguished efforts to incorporate collaborative conversations and discourse, this excerpt from Ellie Cowen and Megan Nee’s article, 6 Hand Signals That Bring Learning to Life, really gives teachers an easy guide to support non-verbal and verbal communication in the classroom.

One of the greatest challenges in teaching a classroom of diverse learners is determining what students are thinking and how they are feeling about the concepts being introduced or processed. Many of the thoughts that pass through students' minds would be of great value for their teachers to know, but opportunities to hear them can feel few and far between.

In many classrooms, students use non-verbals to communicate certain thoughts when teachers introduce hand signals for bathroom breaks, "quiet" signals, and silent cheers. But teachers can look to non-verbals for more than classroom management. During discourse, visible and nonintrusive signals provide instant feedback for peers and valuable insight for teachers about students' moment-to-moment reasoning and comprehension of the content being discussed. They are a great starting point to collaborative classroom discourse! 

Here are six handy hand signals try in your classroom.  Call them whatever you want, but here are some visuals and the descriptions below. 

"I agree!"

The "I agree" symbol, the pinky and thumb extended like “hang loose”, derived from the ASL sign with the same meaning, is popular in American classrooms as an outlet for enthusiastic agreement. When a student hears a strategy or solution path that matches his thinking, he makes the "me, too" sign, acknowledging his classmate's reasoning, expressing that he had a similar idea, and communicating his understanding of what has been shared.

"I disagree."

When students disagree with a statement that they've just heard or need to hear more so that they can follow the speaker's reasoning, they hold up a single index finger to express that they have a "point of interest."

"I have something to add."

The "build upon" signal consists of placing one fist on top of the other to represent the idea of "building." Students use this to express that they have something to say that will add to a classmate's idea.

"I can paraphrase or restate."

Students make air quotes to express that they can paraphrase or restate in another way what they've just heard.

"Complete the thought."

This signal, made by touching the fingertips of both hands together in an "A" shape can be used by teachers or students to remind a speaker that she needs to include a unit or a label, be more precise, or to use a complete sentence to express her thinking.

"I have a conjecture."

After being introduced to conjectures, an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of the information known, a students can show the "conjecture" signal: they place a fist, which represents an imaginary light bulb, on top of their heads to indicate that they have a conjecture to share.

Adapted from Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/hand-signals-bring-learning-to-life-ellie-cowen