Goal:
To Improve Teacher Confidence when
Teaching Reading Comprehension
2012
What are some of the things
we know about teaching
comprehension?
http://wallwisher.com/wall/stcomprehension
St Thomas’s School Goal:
To improve comprehension of students.
In order to achieve this goal, teachers need to feel confident with teaching
comprehension in their classrooms.
Our aim is that teachers will feel more confident about:
-the theory behind the teaching of comprehension
-the range of strategies they should be teaching
-how to explicitly teach comprehension strategies in their classrooms
-teaching comprehension in a differentiated classroom
WHAT HAVE WE DONE SO FAR?
Teaching staff have taken part in the following PD:
• The 6 Step Teaching Process (QAR Now)
• First Steps Reading and Writing
and CARS & STARS is available as a resource
In 2012 St Thomas’s is taking part in an Australian Government Quality Teaching
Project (AGQTP) and the focus of the project is comprehension
• Alison Davis Workshop (21st May 2012)
The 6 Step Teaching Process
(Gradual release of responsibility model
Pearson and Gallagher 1983)
1
•Explicit
•Explanation
•Goal
Setting
2
Modelled
Lessons
3
Shared
Lessons
4
Guided
Lessons
5
Independent
Work
All of the steps of the process should be evident in planning for teaching
of comprehension strategies.
6
Reflection
Australian Government Quality Teaching Project
Survey of St Thomas’s Staff March 2012 - Results:
With your current class, how easy do you find planning for the teaching of
comprehension strategies using the 6 step teaching process?
Very easy
47.1%
(8)
Easy with support
35.3%
(6)
Difficult but having some success 17.6%
(3)
Very difficult
0.0%
(0)
Difficult and unmanageable
0.0%
(0)
2. With your current class, how easy do you find the teaching of
comprehension strategies in a differentiated classroom?
Very easy
11.8%
(2)
Easy with support
47.1%
(8)
Difficult but having some success 29.4%
(5)
Very difficult
11.8%
(2)
Difficult and unmanageable
0.0%
(0)
EXPLICIT TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR READING COMPREHENSION
WORKSHOP BY DR ALISON DAVIS
Dr Alison Davis is the director of Vision Education, a team providing regional PLD in
literacy for schools in Auckland and Waikato.
She has a PHD from Auckland University and a 1st class Masters degree in
Educational Leadership and Administration.
Her specialist areas are literacy, assessment and schooling improvement.
She has led the PEN schooling improvement project in Huntly/Ngaruawahia and the
Papakura Achievement Initiative in Papakura.
Alison has been on the writing team for Effective Literacy Practice years 1-4
and years 5-8, the newly published oral language handbooks and the
revised literacy progressions.
Alison has also written her own texts – Teaching Reading Comprehension 2007 and
Building Comprehension Strategies 2010. She is working on her next book,
Strategies for Comprehension: Informational text, due to be published in 2012.
KEY POINTS FROM THE WORKSHOP
*Metacognitive approach
Metacognition (Thinking about our thinking)
*Learning must be active - purposeful. Students must engage.
How do we get students to engage?
Students understand ‘why’ they are learning this and therefore are happy to engage
in the learning.(Mark Davidson mentioned that this is also crucial for behaviour
management.)
*Teachers need to assist students to ‘make links’ between what they already know
and new knowledge.
*Goal Setting – students need to have some individual goals to focus their learning
and to make learning active and purposeful. (This is also the first step towards
planning for differentiation in a classroom.)
METACOGNITION
Students need to know what reading is, they need to know (be
able to explain and demonstrate) the skills and strategies
“skilled” readers use.
They need to be able to self-monitor and reflect on their
choice of strategies while reading. They need to know when
they are reading with skill and when they are not.
Metacognition is important for students of all ages e.g. A prep
student might explain that he knew the word ‘cat’ because it
started with ‘c’ and he also saw a cat in the picture. He should
also explain that he knows to use letter clues and picture clues
to help work out words when he is reading.
LEARNING must be ACTIVE
For active learning to occur, students must have ‘cognitive capacity’ –
space in the brain for the ‘new stuff’. New space in the brain is created
when ‘stuff’ that was once ‘new’ becomes ‘automatic’.
(Done on autopilot – we can do it without thinking.)LEARNER DRIVER EXAMPLE
‘New stuff’ needs to be just out of range of what students already know. This
allows students to ‘make links’ and ‘build on what they already know’.
• Students need lots of opportunities to practise ‘new stuff’ so that it becomes
‘automatic’. Once skills are taught they need to be maintained
– similar to mathematics.
Activating Prior Knowledge is the key to students being able to make links to what
they know.
For Metacognition to occur, strategies must be explicitly taught and explained, in
language students will understand. Teachers need to model the use of strategies in
Context, using the “Think Aloud” teaching strategy, so students see how a successful
reader thinks.
The aim, is for students to be able to explain and demonstrate a strategy using their
own language, and to discuss why they would choose a strategy/strategies for a specific
purpose.
When teaching new strategies, teachers must introduce the strategy and
explain what it is and how and why it is used. Class goal setting should be part of
this explanation and the goal should be displayed for the students and referred
to often as the lessons progress.
Reflection at the end of the process is also vital. Reflection could involve
students making a class chart to explain their understanding of a strategy
at a point in time. These charts should be displayed and added to as understanding of
the strategy develops.
Students could also make short video presentations to explain and demonstrate the
use of a strategy in context.
Alison Davis has examples of goals written in ‘Student Friendly Language’ for
all suggested strategies in her book “Building Comprehension Strategies”.
Here is an example of a class goal for learning about the strategy of ‘retelling’.
Key learning goal: We are learning to retell what we have read.
Retell is the strategy by which we tell about what we have
read AFTER we have read it.
Retell helps us to become skilled readers because we learn:
• that if we cannot retell we need to read the text again
• how to check if we understand what we have read
• how to better understand the words and ideas the author
has written
Once the strategy has been explicitly explained in language students will understand,
the teacher must then model the strategy in context.
THINK ALOUD
This helps students to see and understand how a successful reader might successfully
use a comprehension strategy. TEACHERS IN LOWER SCHOOL MIGHT HAVE A “THINK
ALOUD” HAT THEY WEAR. ONCE STUDENTS ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE THINK ALOUD
PROCESS, THEY MIGHT BE INVITED TO WEAR THE HAT AND SHARE THEIR THOUGHTS
WHILE READING. PUPPETS MAY ALSO BE USEFUL DURING THIS PROCESS.
TEACHERS NEED TO READ THE TEXT PRIOR TO THE LESSON AND MAY NEED TO
MAKE NOTES. STICKY NOTES CAN BE LEFT INSIDE A TEXT FOR NEXT TIME.
REFLECTING – Class chart created by teacher and students
Retelling
Retelling is when I talk aloud about what I have read.
Retelling happens AFTER I have read.
When I retell, I need to include some detail (information)
to make my retell clear for the listener.
I need to think about the order of the story when I retell –
(beginning, middle and end) I might use these words (At the
beginning, next, then, later, after that…)
I need to make sure that I include all of the most important
parts of the text when I retell.
Reflecting: Develop a chart/ wall display or flip chart on IWB.
Teacher and students or groups of students work together to develop a wall display
about what they know. The chart can be added to as understanding is developed.
HERE IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE:
INFERENCE – What do we know about this strategy?
What I think – I wasn’t told this but I really, really think this is so.
A calculated guess.
??
Drawing together different ideas in the story.
Getting inside the author’s head.
Reading between the lines.
Thinking about the bits the author did not tell me.
What is reading?
Some ideas from kids taken from Sheena Cameron Reading Workshop:
Reading is when you read a book and
understand it and it paints a picture
in your mind.
Reading is learning and
travelling to the
author’s imagination.
Reading is a way of finding
out more information about
a topic.
Reading is understanding
words and knowing what
they mean.
Reading is a subject
that helps you in the
future. It helps you
understand. It’s
better than sitting
on the coach (sic)
watching
a box.
What is a strategy?
A strategy is a plan to help you achieve something. So a
reading strategy helps you achieve understanding when
you are reading. Another word for understanding is
comprehension.
WHAT ARE THE STRATEGIES?
FIRST STEPS READING RESOURCE BOOK p.113 - 114
First Steps Reading Resource Book
Chapter 4: Teaching Comprehension and Word Identification Strategies
What are the strategies? p. 114
*Predicting
*Self-questioning
*Re-reading
*Connecting
*Skimming
*Reading On
*Comparing
*Scanning
*Adjusting Reading Rate
*Inferring
*Determining Importance
*Sounding Out
*Synthesising
*Summarising & Paraphrasing
*Chunking
*Creating Images
*Using Analogy
*Consulting a Reference
First Steps also talks about the importance of developing fluency (Chapter 1, p. 30)
CARS and STARS strategies
Finding the Main Idea
Recalling Facts and Details
Understanding Sequence
Recognising Cause and Effect
Comparing and Contrasting
Making Predictions
Finding Word Meaning in Context
Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences
Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion
Identifying Author’s Purpose
Interpreting Figurative Language
Summarising
Strategies suggested by Alison Davis in her book
“Building Comprehension Strategies”
Making connections to prior knowledge
Prediction and re-prediction
Visualisation
Asking and Answering Questions
Inference
Retell and Paraphrasing
Summarisation
Sheena Cameron
List of strategies:
Activating Prior Knowledge Questioning
Visualising
Inferring
Self Monitoring
Making connections
Synthesising
Predicting
Summarising
GOAL SETTING:
In order for students of all ages to be engaged and to improve, they need to
have achievable goals. Students must be aware of these goals. (Not just parents
and teachers.) School officers should be aware of the goals of students they are
working with.
• Use assessment from Terms 1 and 2 (running records and comprehension
tests) to identify comprehension goals. Some goals may become class goals as many
students in the group may need to work on developing the same skills.
• Start simply – one or two goals for each student.
• Group students with similar goals. (This is the first step towards differentiation in the
classroom.)
• Plan guided lessons to target the goals of groups of students. Think about how
school officers and/or parent helpers can also help to support these goals.
• Provide explicit feedback to let students know how they are progressing and how
they can improve.
• Include time for student reflection of how they are going towards meeting
their goals.
• Class Goal Setting Sheet
• Individual Student Goal Setting Sheet
Class Goal Setting
Class:
Teacher:
Comprehension Skills
Term 3, 2012
Read on to work
out words
Include some detail Tell the difference
in retell
between fact and
opinion
Use letter clues to
match words and
pictures
-
-
-
Improve fluency
Develop a bank of
sight words
-
-
-
STUDENT GOAL SETTING
READING COMPREHENSION
NAME:
CLASS:
DATE:
To be a better reader I need to work on the following goals:
How am I going?
How am I going?
Our aim is that teachers will feel more confident about:
-the theory behind the teaching of comprehension
-the range of strategies they should be teaching
-how to explicitly teach comprehension strategies in
their classrooms
-teaching comprehension in a differentiated classroom
Use the “Traffic Light” strategy to reflect on the session:
What will you stop doing in your classroom?
What will you continue to do in your classroom?
What will you start to do in your classroom?
REFLECTION
SUMMARY of KEY IDEAS:
• Gradual release of responsibility model – Modelled Guided Independent
• Explicit explanation of strategies in language that students can understand.
Working towards students being able to ‘explain’ and ‘demonstrate’ their
choices of strategies in different situations, and reasons for these choices. (Example
of Learning Goal written in student friendly language.)
• Goal setting – students need to know the purpose of what they are doing and
should be setting goals to work towards (Modelled by the teacher. Start off with
whole class goals and move towards students having one or two individual goals.)
• Reflection – students should be frequently reflecting on how well they are doing
in relation to class and personal goals. (This is a vital part of having students who
are ‘engaged’ and ‘active learners’.)
Class charts should be created by teachers and students as new information
about strategies is discovered. (See example of class chart.)
• Feedback provided by the teacher must be explicit and provide students with
information about how they are going in relation to their goals
e.g. “One thing I noticed you doing today during guided reading was…”
“Today I noticed you learned to…when you read …”
• The ‘think aloud’ teaching strategy is a vital part of allowing students to understand
the thinking process of a ‘skilled’ reader (the teacher). Could have a “think aloud”
hat in lower school for teacher and students to wear.