Chapter 6 is the first within the section of Strategies That Work entitled “Strategy
Lessons”. The lessons in Chapter 6 are
on monitoring comprehension. The
importance of monitoring comprehension has been discussed in the previous five
chapters, so it is natural that the strategy lessons would begin with
this. Students won’t know that they need
a comprehension strategy, after all, unless they realize when they are not
understanding the text as well as they should.
The five strategies introduced in this chapter all deal with building
metacognition during reading.
Following the Inner Conversation
This strategy is all about “leaving tracks of thinking” (p.
78). The authors suggest that teachers first
model recording thoughts on sticky notes during reading. These thoughts can be connections, questions
or reactions to the text. Next is guided
practice, students read with a partner and stop to discuss their thoughts with
the person next to them. Students then
record their thoughts on sticky notes, and at the end of class they share some
of their thoughts with the group. I do
this sort of thing frequently with students, but I find the actual sticky-note
part challenging to implement at the high school level. With 25 students in a class that is expected
to be actively engaged from bell to bell, it is difficult to check that every
student has utilized the stick notes effectively and get them out of the way in
time for the next group to come in (all of our books are class sets, so post it
notes cannot be left in the books). I
prefer to implement this strategy through margin notes when texts can be
written on, or by having students keep notes on a “side journal,” a page in
their notebooks that they keep open next to their textbooks.
Noticing When We Stray from the Inner Conversation
Let students know that everyone’s attention drifts off
sometimes when they are reading, and everyone encounters texts that they find
challenging. The authors suggest
bringing in an example of a text that I find challenging to demonstrate a text
that I might have trouble with and the strategies that I might implement in
order to remedy the problem. Then guide
students through the creation of an Anchor Chart on monitoring
comprehension. The chart could look like
this:
Why Meaning Breaks Down
|
What to Do About It
|
Fatigue
Not enough background knowledge
Don’t like the book
|
Reread to Construct Meaning
Put the book down when too tired to read
Focus and read words more carefully than usual
Choose another book
|
(Harvey and Goudvis, p. 80)
Knowing When you Know and Knowing When You Don’t Know
This strategy basically is to label text that is confusing,
with a code such as “huh?”, then code text with a light bulb symbol if the
confusion is cleared up. It is simply an
explicit way to demonstrate that students should be monitoring their
comprehension and clearing up confusion as they read.
Noticing and Exploring Thinking
Unlike most reading strategies in this book, this one asks
that students DO NOT write anything down or say anything while they read. After reading, have students jot down their
thoughts and reactions to the text.
Afterwards they get with a partner to share their thoughts and
reactions, and some pairs can share their thoughts with the rest of the
class. The purpose is to simply remind
students to focus on their reading as they read, not just on the setting, plot,
characters, etc.
Read, Write, and Talk
When introducing this strategy, emphasize the importance of
merging your thinking with the text by stopping, thinking, and reacting. This can be modeled first to give a clear
demonstration of the thinking process that occurs during reading. Then, stop periodically during guided reading
and ask students to write down and then discuss their thinking. After reading ask students to flip over their
papers and answer three questions on the back:
1.
What is one thing you learned that you think is
important to remember?
2.
How did talking to your partner help you
understand what you read?
3.
What are any lingering questions you still have?
Encourage students to implement the strategy on their own by
reading on their own, then stopping to discuss thoughts with someone else who
has read the same article.
Implementation in my Classroom
Everything I have read in chapters 1-6 have made me think
more about being explicit about the purpose of the reading strategies that we
use in class. I need to let students
know that these strategies are being used to help them better understand the
text, and that they should be used even when they are not “assigned”. Before beginning a lesson from Edge (our school’s required reading
textbook) that incorporates the use of double-entry journals, I shared a personal
story with students. I told them that
the reading strategies that we use in class are not just for high school
students struggling to pass the FCAT, but that they can be beneficial to anyone
and that anyone can be a struggling reader.
I then showed them the following excerpt from a textbook I had to read
during my master’s program:
I said that it was then that I knew what it was like to be a
struggling reader. My professor had
required that we submit a double-entry journal for each chapter. I had thought it was just a way for her to
confirm that we had completed the required readings, but I truly benefitted
from the journals because they helped me stay focused on the text and to
monitor my own comprehension.
We saw an example of a double-entry journal in the textbook
and I had students fold their papers in half to make one on their own. We read the first two pages of the story out
loud, and then I modeled how to complete the first entry in the double-entry
journal. I asked students to copy a
significant quote on the right, then to write their reaction to the quote, why
they thought it was significant, or a clarification of what it meant on the
left. After modeling the first one, all
I did the rest of the time was stop and ask them to record something in their
double-entry journals. Afterwards, I had
them write a reflection of how the strategy helped their comprehension and
asked them to pair and share with classmates.
Even though this is not an exact reproduction of one of the
five strategies described in Chapter 6, it incorporated many of the suggestions
from everything I have read so far in chapters 1-6. I have used double-entry journals before, but
I had never taken the time to explain their purpose (monitoring comprehension)
or shared how they have helped me when I struggled with comprehension. I had also never shared a text that I had
struggled with before. Following Harvey
and Goudvis’s advice that “readers get better at reading and thinking by doing
the reading and thinking” (p. 44) I also adjusted my tendency to do too much of
the thinking for my students. In the
past I have guided students through every double-entry journal entry rather
than asking them to come up with their own thoughts and ideas. I had also never bothered to have students
reflect on how the strategy helped them to comprehend. I am very happy that I made these
adjustments, because my students reacted very positively to the lesson. I even had a student that very day tell my
assistant principal that I am the “best reading teacher he has ever had”. I guess it is working…
Here is the presentation I created to implement this lesson in class:
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