The basic reading/thinking strategies

Wonder what you do as you read? What all good readers do. However, our struggling readers don’t always know what goes on in the minds of good readers; they need to be explicitly taught the strategies and guided to use them on their own. Daniels and Zemelman (Subjects Matter, 2004) list the following good reader strategies:
1) Visualize (to make mental pictures or sensory images from ideas, situations, details in the text)
2) Connect (to make connections between what they read and their lives, other texts or media, and the world)
3) Question (to ask questions of the text, of the author, of themselves as they read; to actively wonder)
4) Infer (to predict, hypothesize, interpret, draw conclusions)
5) Evaluate (to determine what’s important, to make judgments)
6) Analyze (to notice text structures, the author’s craft, vocabulary, purpose, theme, etc)
7) Recall (to retell, summarize, remember information)
8) Self-monitor (to realize when they are confused or uncertain or have lost attention)

It’s not enough, however, to just talk about the strategies and model them for the students. These strategies need to be embodied in very specific, concrete tools that we provide for our students as they read. That means that the graphic organizers we use to guide students’ reading must ask students to try out these strategies; the guiding questions we ask must lead students to use these strategies; the collaborative activities we plan must engage students in these strategies; and the language of our classrooms must reflect these strategies.

Best Practice Teaching Strategies

At a NSDC workshop I recently attended, the presenter shared with us the list of teaching strategies that her former Gwinnett County, Georgia, school district adopted. They are the following:
• Frequently access learning
• Use nonverbal representations
• Model strategies and skills and practice
• Teach essential vocabulary
• Teach summarizing strategies
• Provide collaboration experiences
• Teach and require goal setting
• Use inquiry-based problem solving
• Use and teach questioning and cuing
• Assess and/or build background knowledge
• Teach comparison-contrast/similarities-differences
• Use technology effectively
These are considerations we should keep in mind as we plan our lessons and reflect on our practice.

Before-During-After

Effective teachers don’t just assign reading and expect students to “get it.” They craft the preparation for the reading, help students organize their thinking as they read, and plan meaningful work after the reading to guide students to reflect on, integrate, and share the ideas they culled from the assignment.
While the questions at the end of the passage might seem like the way to go, those questions can be tedious to students and result in cursory responses. As you plan for activities to help students construct meaning, think about the purposes of before, during, and after work. Harvey Daniels and Steve Zemelman, in Subjects Matter (2004) describe in detail what teachers need to do BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER reading to help students improve their comprehension:
BEFORE Reading activities are ones that

1. get students focused on and excited about the reading
   
2. develop purposes for reading
   
3. activate students’ questions, beliefs, and predictions about the reading
   
4. help students make connections between their prior knowledge and the new material, which will help them make sense of the reading
   

DURING Reading activities help students construct meaning and process and question ideas as they read. These activities often as students to

1. visual what is happening in the reading, whether it is a story or a science experiment
2. make connections between the reading and their lives and the world around them
3. question the author or the text
   
4. make inference (going beyond the information given to other implications)
   
5. distinguish between main ideas and minor ideas as they read
   
6. monitor their understanding and comprehension as they read, noticing when they lose track of the meaning
   

AFTER Reading activities help students reflect on the reading by guiding them to

1. synthesize ideas, connecting what they’ve learned to information they already know
   
2. make inferences and connections
   
3. look back at questions they initially had and decide if they have had those questions either answered or changed
   

As you plan for readings for you students to complete, always consider: What am I doing to help them make meaning BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER they read?

30-30-30 (Think-Aloud Scaffolding)

This activity from Jeff Zwiers' Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12 (2004) is called 30-30-30 because it divides a text into thirds, and the reading and thinking are scaffolded as you move through the text. In order to get through 100% of a text with enough time for you to model and for the students to both practice and do alone, make sure the passage isn’t too long. This 30-30-30 uses the “gradual release of responsibility” model first developed by Pearson and Gallagher (1983).
Elementary teachers have used “think-alouds” for decades in their reading instruction. The teacher and her students look at a picture in a children’s book, then the teacher says to herself (and to her students), “Hmmm, I wonder what this picture is about? What’s happening here?” She continues as she reads, asking herself questions—about the text, about her own thinking, about the author’s intent. The purpose is to model for the children the kinds of thinking that goes on in a good reader’s mind, to push the young readers to begin to be metacognitive.
Effective secondary teachers use think-alouds too, even if they don’t realize they do. This exercise helps students focus on the kinds of questions they should be asking themselves as they read aloud by making think-alouds the point of the lesson.
Here are the steps:
1. Make sure you have a list of reading strategies available to refer to as you model. If you have found that students are not using a specific strategy (like summarizing, questioning, using context clues, etc.) then use that strategy as you model your thinking aloud.
2. Start by modeling some prereading strategies by thinking aloud (predicting the author’s purpose, asking questions of the title, graphics, headings, etc.). Ask the students to also do some of this questioning. Besides modeling what good readers do, you are building background knowledge.
3. Now, for the first 30% of the passage, read and think aloud while your students listen and perhaps take notes. You might even mention the strategy you are using as you think aloud to yourself (and to the students).
4. For the second 30% of the passage, continue to read aloud, stopping occasionally at places where you want students to think or question. Ask students to work in pairs to actually think aloud. You might want students to share some of their think-alouds with other pairs or the class. This would also insure that they are actually using the specific strategy you have discussed. Continue with this teacher-directed reading aloud and stopping for the middle 30% of the text.
5. For the last 30% of the text, have the students read silently, taking individual notes on sticky notes and pasting the notes in the margins where they stopped to think silently about their reading. This would also make a great “share with your elbow partner” activity, so students could compare the spots where they stopped to think as well as the questions or ideas they thought about. If you think you need to give a little more structure to this independent work, you could put a minimum on the number of thinking stops the students would need to make.
6. Finally, as a postreading activity, do another think aloud where you model the process of putting it all together, either summarizing or determining the author’s purpose.

The Frayer Model

Vocabulary is essential in all content areas; in fact, for math, science, and social studies, understanding of the content often hinges on essential terms or concepts. The Frayer model (developed by Frayer, Frederick, and Klausmeier in 1969) is an efficient, engaging way for students to make meaning of a difficult, complicated concept.
You don’t really have to even copy or make a graphic organizer for the students; they can do it themselves by taking a blank piece of paper and folding it in half and then half again, resulting in 4 blocks. At the center of the opened paper, where the blocks intersect, they should draw a circle or another box in which to write the term or concept.
The four blocks can be labeled with a variety of headings, depending on the term, the level of students, the needs of the unit. Here are a few options:
• Essential characteristics/nonessential characteristics/examples/nonexamples
• Definition/characteristics/examples/nonexamples
• Definition/sentence/I think . . ./non-verbal representation (a drawing)
• What others say/what I say/what it is/what it isn’t

It’s always a good idea to try out a new graphic organizer or note-taking organizer with an easy concept that requires little background information first so students can use the format before moving on to difficult content material. Once you are certain students understand the organizer itself, then move on to the material they are to read, view, listen to, or research and from which they will use to fill out their Frayer model notes.

The Importance of Similarities and Differences

Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock, in their book Classroom Instruction that Works (2001), give strong evidence for the effect that the individual classroom teacher has on student achievement. In this researched-based book, they describe 9 instructional strategies that affect student achievement. The strategy that they consider “the core of all learning” is identifying similarities and differences.
According to Marzano et al. (pp. 15-16), teachers enhance “students’ understanding of and ability to use knowledge” when they
• present students with explicit guidance in identifying similarities and differences
• ask students to independently identify similarities and differences
• represent similarities and differences in graphic or symbolic form

While the most recognizable similarities and differences organizer is the Venn diagram, using other lesser-used activities will often yield fresher insights. Besides comparing and contrasting, the following three are processes that require students to think at higher levels:

Classifying—this process asks students to note specific qualities or characteristics. A semantic features analysis chart or a comparison matrix that lists categories or characteristics would use this process.
Creating metaphors—similar to creating analogies, this process asks students to identify a general or basic pattern in a specific topic and then find another topic that appears to be quite different but that has the same general pattern. An example that Marzano’s group uses is comparing the function and structure of the cell to Star Trek’s Enterprise (the nucleus would be like the bridge).
Creating analogies—this process asks students to identify the relationship between pairs of concepts. Analogies are the most complex of the similarities and differences formats as they deal with the “relationships between relationships” (p. 26). Remember the old SAT analogy questions? (Newton is to force and motion as Bernouli is to air pressure.)

With these three levels of similarities/differences, modeling examples for the students before they work on finding their own analogies, metaphors, etc. will reap better results.

The Day before Vacation . . . a Self-reflection Gallery Walk

The last day before a holiday break is always a tough day for teachers—first, kids don’t want to be in school anyway, and those who are there expect class to be a party; second, often there are absences, so starting something new or completing some final assessment means there will be lots of make-ups once school resumes after the break.

Since self-reflections and self-assessments are an important component in the new lessonunit structures as well as an important “best practice” tool and key to learning, this might be a day for students (and teachers) to do some self-reflection.

Expecting kids to do self-reflection on their own requires some modeling. Giving a broad, open-ended topic (like “what did you like or not like”) is a bit unrealistic for the last day, but making the effort interactive, social, and collaborative, and giving some specific guidelines and topics upon which to reflect might make the activity both beneficial and worthwhile.

Here’s a suggestion:
1. Put kids into small groups (not too large—maybe 4?).
2. Come up with some categories upon which you’d like some reflection and/or feedback. Divide the different assignments, units, activities, aspects you want feedback on, etc. into categories, so each small group can have one or two to discuss as a group and come to some consensus.
3. Give each group a large piece of chart paper and a colored marker. If possible, give each group a different colored marker.
4. Ask each group to write their topic on the top of the paper (or you could already have the topics printed out in large type and they could paste the topic at the top), then the members of the group should brainstorm and write their suggestions, ideas, thoughts on the chart. They should consider what worked, what parts they had trouble with, where their understanding broke down, what they enjoyed the most, etc. Here’s where your modeling of sample responses before the groups begin will really reap benefits.
5. To run the gallery walk, post the reflections around the room. Have the groups move around the room, looking at the ideas, discussing them among their group, and adding their own thoughts to those already on the chart paper. To make orderly progress through the room, give the groups a designated amount of time they can discuss and write, then have all the groups move to the next chart at the same time. Five or six minutes might be enough—you’ll know.

6. Some ground rules:

• Each group has its own “color” marker, so you can see where each group adds to the charts as they discuss.
• Groups must stay on topic AND they must add at least one or two comments to each chart (a short amount of time helps with this).
• Disagreement is okay. Just explain yourself.