Reading Comprehension

Hi teachers-

All of you do a fabulous job with your efforts to understand and employ the strategies associated with reading comprehension. No doubt it's one of the hardest things to teach well, or teach at all. When I started teaching, I soon realized that the literature I had learned in college would quickly take a backseat to what I was really there to do-- teach students how to read complex materials.

This article sums up reading comprehension strategies for expository texts pretty succinctly. Naturally, the topic is more complicated than 5 steps can summarize, but given its nebulous nature, I think this is a good, cogent summary of what's involved.

Enjoy!
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A Five-Part Strategy for Good Comprehension

            “Do you have students whose minds go blank when you ask, ‘What was this article about?’,” ask New Zealand professors Susan Dymock and Tom Nicholson in this article in The Reading Teacher. “Do you have students who write screeds of notes about an article but cannot boil it down to four or five main points?” Their answer is the “High 5” strategy to help students boost comprehension of expository texts:

            • Activating background knowledge – Good readers ask what they already know about the text and fill in gaps through discussion or Internet searches.

            • Questioning – Good readers generate their own questions about the text at three levels: information that is right there in the text; think and search questions about the author’s intent, and beyond the text questions about what’s not said that needs more thought or research.

            • Analyzing text structure – Good readers look at subheads and key words to see what kind of text they are reading, for example, a list, a web, a matrix, a step-by-step description of events, a cause-and-effect sequence, or a problem-solution sequence.

            • Creating mental images – Good readers create and often sketch an image of the structure of the text; it’s as if they could see the ribs and bones of the content they are reading.

            • Summarizing – Good readers pull together the big ideas, the key skill being to discard unimportant and redundant information and zero in on what’s most important.

“‘High 5!’ Strategies to Enhance Comprehension of Expository Text” by Susan Dymock and Tom Nicholson in The Reading Teacher, November 2010 (Vol. 64, #3, p. 166-178), no e-link available; the authors are sdymock@waikato.ac.nz and t.nicholson@massey.ac.nz.

Teacher Teamwork

This article from the DuFours says a lot that I agree with regarding teacher teamwork and collaboration.  I wanted to send it forward in advance of the data collecting we'll be doing and will continue to do for our benchmarks, starting with this month's persuasive essay grading. 

If you don't know, the DuFours are two of education's most trenchant writers on the subject of teachers collaborating to review data, examine their practice, and share in the pursuit of ways to improve everyone's teaching.  That's why I was very excited to see the bullet points (highlighted)-- that's exactly what we're doing when we participate in the benchmark grading! 

It's good to know we're on the right track.  I'm excited to see how the first round of grading goes!

2. Richard and Rebecca DuFour on the Elements of Teacher Teamwork

            “One of the more pointless debates going on in many school districts is who will decide how teams will use their collaborative time,” say consultant/authors Richard and Rebecca DuFour in this Solution Tree advertisement in Education Week. “Both sides should be able to agree that if teachers do not use the collaboration time for the purpose intended (that is, if they don’t co-labor on the right work), there will be no gains in student achievement.” What is “the right work”? For the DuFours’ list of 18 critical issues for grade-level and subject teams, see:

http://www.allthingsplc.info/pdf/tools/CriticalIssuesForTeamConsideration.pdf

            The big idea here is that when educators work collaboratively rather than in isolation, students learn more. Key elements of collaboration are:

-    Committing to implementing a guaranteed and viable curriculum;

-    Using interim assessments that provide ongoing evidence of each student’s learning;

-    Collectively analyzing that evidence and using it to inform and improve practice;

-    Putting in place a systematic intervention process that provides struggling students with additional time and support.

It’s also important, say the DuFours, for teacher teams to be as self-directed as possible, so that if the principal leaves, the work will continue. Team leaders and administrators should agree on the work to be done, a timeline, and what the team will present as evidence of completion. As long as things are running smoothly, administrators should meet with teams only once a quarter to review progress, analyze evidence of student learning on interim assessments, and offer specific support. But if there are signs of dysfunction on a team, administrators should attend meetings to get things back on track. The key principle here is reciprocal accountability – the team is accountable for doing its work and administrators are accountable for providing what’s needed to support success.

“Who Decides Who Decides” by Richard DuFour and Rebecca DuFour in Education Week, Nov. 3, 2010 (Vol. 29, #10, p. 14), no e-link available

What To Look For

Lately, I've heard a lot in the news about what bad teahcers do in classrooms, and how detrimental they can be to a student's education.  Unfortunately, there isn't nearly as much discussion as to what good teachers do, and how valuable they are to the education of those same students.  Lots of research agrees on one thing-- a good teacher makes the most difference in whether a student is successful or not-- more than SES, more than attendance, more than behavior, more than parental involvement, more than any other factor. 

I think that a good teacher asks his or her self these questions before each and every lesson:

- What do I expect students to know and be able to do as a result of your lesson?
- How do I “hook” the students in at the beginning?
- How do I make sure students are engaged throughout the lesson?
- How do I know students are understanding the lesson?

For me, being a good teacher amounts to three things:  Clarity, Continuity, and Concurrency.  Let me explain what I mean by these three:

Clarity is about one question:  Is the teacher clear about exactly what his students should do?  If a teacher doesn’t know why he’s doing an activity, you can bet that the kids won’t, either.  If there’s no objective in mind, whatever learning occurs will be accidental, haphazard, unpredictable.  Classrooms without clear expectations for behavior, attitude, and achievement will have kids mired in mediocrity, at best. 

Continuity is about putting it all together– one of the most important things a teacher does is make coherence out of complicated, difficult subject matter.  A teacher showing continuity begins class with an opening deisgned to pique interest not only for that day’s lesson, but as part of a think-back to the day before.  At the end of a class, she does the opposite– make sure students understand all that was done that day, and link it to what’s coming the next day.  And most importantly, she doesn’t move on if her students didn’t get it!  A teacher with engaged students will also be consistent in policies– if you’re wishy-washy from one day to the next about how things go down in your classroom, guessing your mood will be distracting.  Good teachers are also continuous learners– you can’t be finished learning when you’re done your master’s or a workshop or a seminar.

Concurrency is maybe the hardest-to-pin-down of the three because it describes something that’s tricky to articulate: “With-it-ness.”  We all know people who are “out of it” and people who are really “with it.”  That’s not unique to teaching.  But there’s more to concurrency than just being “with it.”  Concurrency is about being in the moment, whether we’re talking about in the classroom moment, with our students, engaged in them as we want them to be engaged with us… it’s also about being in the moment with the world, and being aware of what’s going on out there– the issues and problems students in your community have, the digital tools they constantly use as fluently as we drive our cars, the unique structure of their social lives and how different it is than that of kids just 10 years ago– and certainly how different it is than most of their teachers’ K-12 years.  Being concurrent means being in touch– in touch with the individuals, the human beings in front of us, the community in which they live, and the world in which they’re situated.  Concurrency gives you credibility– everyone, especially kids, knows who’s with it and who’s out of it.

I hope this gives you a sense of what I consider to be good teaching.  Please add your own observations.  Comment, or write a new post yourself!  See me for help with this, if necessary.

-Marc