I created this slideshow to accompany my presentation on reading comprehension at Notre Dame AmeriCorp's Mid-Year Conference. Lots of tips for metacognition, activators, and summarizers. Based on the book by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann.
2. For your classroom:
experiment with starting your
class with a greeting or full-
scale morning meeting.
Resources: Responsive
Classroom series Morning
Meeting books
4. by Robert Inchausti
1. Morning-Meeting-style greeting
2. Overview
3. Activator
4. Comprehension strategies
5. Teaching and modeling
6. Other tools
7. Q & A
from Spitwad Sutras:
Classroom Teaching as Sublime Vocation
5. An initial word sort can be revisited &
revised throughout the unit.
For your classroom: can be used to
get a feeling for student
understanding before teaching a unit.
Resources: http://tinyurl.com/word-
sort-lesson-ideas
6. For your classroom: give
students time to synthesize
new ideas and improve their
oral language skills.
7. ◦ Time to read
◦ Time to talk
◦ Instruction in strategies
Metacognition: thinking about thinking
Teachers modeling how we read
Showing students how they’ve grown
Students need:
9. - Using and creating schema
- Determining important information
- Using sensory and emotional images
- Synthesizing
Printable resources available from:
Anchorage School District and Troup
County School System
10. The umbrella under which the other
comprehension strategies fall
Keep track of your understanding as you read
Know what your purpose is as you read
Know how to solve problems and change your
thinking when meaning breaks down
Good readers carry on an inner conversation
with themselves when they read.
11. Before, during, and after reading:
◦ Clarify meaning
◦ Speculate about the text yet to be read
◦ Determine author’s intent, style, content, or format
◦ Locate a specific answer
Proficient readers understand that many of
the most exciting questions are left to the
reader’s interpretation.
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Asking)
12. Right There Questions:
Think and Search Questions:
Author and You:
On My Own:
Right There Questions: “What color was the dog?”
Think and Search Questions: “What was the same
about every dog in the story?”
Author and You: “How did the boy probably feel when
he found the dog?”
On My Own: “What would you do if you found the dog?”
Question-Answer Relationship (QAR):
Categorizing Post-Reading Questions
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Asking)
13. If new learning is like a crystal, the schema is the
chandelier on which it can hang and make sense.
Successful readers need to access their schema.
◦ Teachers can help activate “mental files” before, during, and
after reading.
◦ Kathy Schrock’s Guide is full of activators and summarizers.
Proficient readers make different kinds of connections:
◦ Text-text
◦ Text-self
◦ Text-worldview
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Connections)
14. “You expect me to remember all of that?!”
◦ Which ideas are the important ones to remember?
Highlighting is easy. Determining what to
highlight is hard.
Nonfiction:
◦ Fonts, signal words, illustrations, graphics, text
organizers, and text structures
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Trackingimportantideas)
15. Inferences are used to:
◦ determine meanings of unknown words
◦ reason about the theme of a text
◦ make predictions about text that can be confirmed
or contradicted as they read on
Inferences depend on:
◦ the schema in the reader’s mind
◦ close attention to textual clues
◦ rereading
◦ conversations with others
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Inferring)
16. Visualizing brings joy to reading!
We create pictures in our minds that
belong to us and no one else.
Visualizing is a process of creating
meaning.
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Visualizing)
17. As we read, we create a blueprint for what we’re
reading and continually revise the plan as we
recall or encounter new information.
“I have been there, this is what I remember, and
this is what I believe about what I know.”
Synthesis takes place during and after reading.
A
C
T
I
V
E
(Eureka!)
18. - Using and creating schema
- Determining important information
- Using sensory and emotional images
- Synthesizing
Printable resources available from:
Anchorage School District and Troup
County School System
19. Number your paper 1-5. Write
3 ideas. Talk with at least two
more students to get 2 new
ideas and share two of your
own.
For your classroom: good for
summarizing concepts or
uncovering possibilities.
20. Model how you use the strategies in texts that
you genuinely love and/or grapple with.
Provide opportunities for guided and
independent practice.
Find time to confer with students individually and
track their progress.
Gradually release responsibility (*.doc file - preview)
for using strategies to the student, moving them
toward independent reading and thinking.
21. - Using and creating schema
- Determining important information
- Using sensory and emotional images
- Synthesizing
22. 30-60 sec for A to talk; 30-60
sec for B to talk.
For your classroom: good for
summarizing between topics.
Resources: www.online-
stopwatch.com
23. Rubrics work on many levels at once:
◦ Help with grading: clear and consistent standards
◦ Help kids stay on-task and accountable: “How are
you doing on each section of your rubric?”
◦ Act as a teaching tool: “This is what ‘excellent’ work
looks like, as compared to ‘good’ work.”
Rubrics for comprehension skills – can be used
as conference forms
24. Mini-Lesson: 15-20 minutes
Read & Confer: 15-20 minutes
Share: 5 minutes
Mini-Lesson Lesson Plans (Troup County
School System page)
25. 5 min: Settling in, teacher reads along with students
35 min: All students reading, teacher roves, one-on-
one conferences, observational notes, monitoring notes,
oral reading records. Teacher can systematically meet
with between 3 and 5 students each day in 7-10 minute
meetings.
5 min: Meeting together – students or teacher sharing,
reflections about strategy use during reading, book
talks or recommendations, self-evaluations, changing
books, record keeping
Source: Caught in the Spell of Writing and Reading
26. Learn reading and writing in an authentic
environment of practice & peer collaboration
See Nancie Atwell, In the Middle:
New Understandings about
Writing, Reading, and Learning
27. Fluency: sample rubric
Vocabulary Development:
vocab squares examples 1 & 2
Oral Language: Think-Pair-Share, Quick
Share, other activators & summarizers from
Kathy Schrock
Phonics Instruction: activity on next slide
28. 1) Timed quick-write.
2) Split into groups of 4-8
students. Compile lists.
3) Face off with a student
from another team and
knock out duplicates.
For your classroom: good for
activating prior knowledge
Editor's Notes
Share your name and the title of a book you enjoy.
Think-Pair-Share encourages students to think about something, and then articulate their thoughts.
It promotes understanding through active reasoning and explanation.
Because students are listening to and sharing ideas, think-pair-share encourages students to understand multiple perspectives.
It’s a great practice tool for introverts especially, or students who lack confidence in the classroom.
One of the most useful things I did this year in setting up my math classroom was to post the eight processes for math thinking at the front of the room, right below the whiteboard.
When I stop the class to ask my students to slow down and think about their thinking, I have these posters to point to to show them why. It helps them see purpose in what can otherwise be a very abstract exercise.
There are posters provided on the website on the previous slide, but you can make your own, too. There’s something very personal about hand-lettered signs, though. I just did these with black acrylic paint on two pieces of construction paper, taped together.
Nothing in this set of strategies is earthshattering. What it does is to give us a framework, a road map that we can share with our students, so that we can explain to them where we’re going and they can see how far along the road they’ve come.
It’s actually not that simple to tease out: How is it that good readers instinctively know how to comprehend what they are reading?
We explicitly teach students comprehension strategies to ensure that they simply don’t become decoders but also learn to create meaning naturally and subconsciously.
Today’s students face a wide variety of texts and must be able to think critically and make judgments far earlier than in the past.
Explicit comprehension instruction arms all students – not just those students who are college bound – with the tools to do so.
Today there is a wide body of research supporting the effectiveness of explicit comprehension instruction and the need for students to become metacognitive – to think about their own thinking as they read.
One of the leading books about reading comprehension is Mosaic of Thought by Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmermann. It is a book that talks about a journey of teachers who had conversations about comprehension and how they could specifically teach their students how to think while they were reading. Language Arts classes were converted into writing workshops. Students were writing from their own experiences and sharing their writing with classmates. The teachers decided to try this same approach in their reading classrooms.
Practice: List three ways you already use these strategies in the classroom – or – ways you can imagine using them.
Practice: What strategies can you identify from Susan’s reflections, or from your own as you read this piece?
Practice: Write all the words you can think of that have the “oo” sound.