Part 3: Comprehension Across the Curriculum

This new section in the second edition of Strategies That Work reflects the impor¬tance of using comprehension strategies in content areas such as social studies and science, the strategies needed for textbook reading in the content areas, and the genre of test reading - a genre our students are encountering more and more often.

Chapter 12:  Content Literacy: Reading for Understanding in Social Studies and Science

Chapter 13:  Topic Studies: A Framework for Research and Exploration    

Students encounter complex ideas and a wealth of new learning in the content areas, and they need to rely on the tools that will help them understand and make meaning of all this new learning.

To Consider:

• Consider your classroom practices and the work you typically ask your students to do. Compare your classroom practices to the list titled Hallmarks for Creating an Environment for Thoughtful Content Literacy Instruction (adapted from Ritchart 2002) on pages 207 and 208. In addition, compare your list to the list titled Literacy Practices for Social Studies and History on page 209. In your study group, discuss your responses to these questions: What commonalities do you see between your classroom practice and the suggestions in the lists? What challenges do you see in implementing the sug¬gestions? What are ways to overcome some of these challenges?
• Collect and peruse resources (picture books, news articles, pieces of short text, artifacts) on a science or social studies topic you’ll be studying in the near future. With the study group, brainstorm ways to launch the topic study. Do the texts you’ve gathered lend themselves to teaching a particular strat¬egy? Is there a particular book or piece of text that provokes your thinking or captures your imagination? Is there a way to involve children and their imag¬inations in an observation, exploration, or experience?
• Work together with your colleagues to plan strategy instruction within a content area. Use the study group meeting time to map out the topic study. Consider those strategies and responses that best meet both your students’ learning needs and the demands of the topic.
• Plan a topic study using the framework described in Chapter 13. As you implement the topic study over the subsequent weeks, discuss in your study group meetings the challenges you encounter and how you deal with them, the differences you notice in kids’ engagement with the topic using this framework, and adaptations you might use in the future with a similar topic study.
• The more kids know about a topic, the deeper their questions. Keep track of students’ questions throughout the topic study on large charts posted in the classroom or library. Students should keep their own list of lingering ques¬tions in their journals. These lingering questions are often the ones students are most interested in when it comes time to decide on research topics.

Chapter 14:  Reading to Understand Textbooks

Textbook reading can be difficult. It is essential that students apply comprehen¬sion strategies to textbook reading and interact with the reading. The more dense the textbook reading is, the more need there is for kids to interact with it, talk about it, and leave tracks of their thinking about it.

To Consider:

• Bring a selection of textbooks you use in your school to your group meeting. Together, examine the textbooks using the considerations listed on page 234. Discuss particular textbooks or particular parts of the textbooks that present special challenges in terms of their density, organization, writing quality, and so on. Brainstorm how to scaffold this reading with your students so that they are actively engaged in building their understanding while reading the textbook content.
• Bring a higher level textbook to your study group—perhaps one from a col¬lege or graduate school course on a topic that’s somewhat unfamiliar. Read a section “cold,” and then read it again, this time applying active literacy tech¬niques discussed in Chapter 14 and reading strategies you’ve built into your repertoire. Discuss the differences between the two readings. What strategies came in particularly useful? What similarities can you see between this expe¬rience and the experience of your students with textbooks? Choose some strategies to focus on in your next textbook reading with students.

   

• After trying out with your students some of the ideas for active reading with textbooks (page 236), discuss how it went with other members of your study group. What additional strategies will you try out next? What went well and what needs more scaffolding?

   

   

   

   

  Chapter 15: The Genre of Test Reading

   

  Our students these days encounter test reading more and more often. It’s not a genre that we encounter much in life outside of school, but it is one that our stu¬dents will continue to see from year to year. It’s important to build their confi¬dence in dealing with this genre.

   

  To Consider: 

• Bring to your study group a selection of released test items. Try to include some that you might encounter as adults—perhaps from teacher licensing exams or graduate school entrance exams. Examine the items for some of the signal words listed on page 242. Which seem to be used more frequently than others? Which are trickier than others?
• Find sample test items that seem to fit in some of the categories on pages 247 to 249 (vocabulary, literal, summarizing and synthesizing, and inferential). Track your thinking as you answer these sample items and discuss how you used thinking strategies successfully. Discuss tough spots and brainstorm possible helpful approaches.
• Using an adult test item (for example, from a licensing exam or graduate school entrance exam) model the kind of “thinking through a test” described on pages 251 to 252 for the rest of your study group. Take turns modeling the process and discuss how your process changed and improved as you learned to apply thinking strategies to test items successfully.

Part IV: Resources That Support Strategy Instruction

The appendixes in Part IV, thoroughly updated for the second edition, make up nearly one third of the content in Strategies That Work. The appendixes are sepa¬rated into five sections, including lists of great books for teaching content, a list of recommended magazines newspapers, and websites, and a list of professional journals for selecting children’s books. The assessment interview in Appendix D shows how we assess ongoing comprehension in authentic situations. Appendix E contains sample anchor charts for classroom use.

To Consider:

Appendix A: Great Books for Teaching Content in History, Social Studies, Science, Music, Art, and Literacy. Expand the text sets for teaching content into areas that you are particularly interested in teaching. This list covers many curricular topics common to American education, but not all. The choices are so vast and the number of books so enormous that your lists need to be constantly updated. Study groups are a great place to discover addi¬tional titles. Meet in the school or public library and search the stacks. Perhaps you might hold one session at your favorite children’s bookstore.

Appendix B: Magazines, Newspapers, and Websites. Check to see if your library has a good selection of kids’ magazines and newspapers and encour¬age the school to order any from the list or others you like. Search for and copy articles that are relevant to topics under study and add them to curricular text sets. Browse some of the suggested websites and discuss how they might be of value in your curriculum. Share ideas for other valuable websites you know of.

Appendix C: Professional Journals for Selection of Children’s Books. We all need to read professionally, but the sheer number of literacy journals is mind-boggling. No one can read everything that’s out there. Have each per¬son or grade level team in the study group select a journal that they will fol¬low throughout the year. To ensure that everyone gets a chance to see them, bring to the study group sample articles of particular interest, especially those with bibliographies, such as outstanding science trade books, picture books for teaching global understanding, and so on.

Appendix D: Assessment Interview with Fourth Graders. The assessment interview provides an opportunity for students to show us how they think about and reason through a short piece of text or picture book. Gather two or three students together and select short text that will stimulate use of the strategy (or strategies) you would like to assess. Let the students know you’re really interested in their thinking and that while they’re doing the talking you’ll be writing down what they’re saying.

• Bring to the study group notes and scripting from assessment interviews you’ve conducted in the classroom. Discuss how this information about children’s thinking guides your future instruction.
• Consider bringing in a small group of children and conducting an assess¬ment interview with the study group observing. Participants might focus on individual students to record thinking over time and then discuss evidence for how well students have internalized using particular strategies.

   

• Don’t forget to bring daily response journals and children’s work to the study group. Examining and discussing kids’ ongoing thinking is the best way to keep track of our teaching and their learning.

Appendix E: Anchor Charts for the Comprehension Strategies. These anchor charts are authentic summaries of lessons and conversations from classrooms. In every chart we include an explanation of our thinking about a particular strategy as well as examples of student thinking. The charts are anchors for subsequent instruction linking what we’ve already done to future strategy teaching and learning. Construct a new anchor chart with your kids and then share it with the study group. What better way to discover what’s going on in colleagues’ classrooms?   

                                            Study Guide for Strategies That Work, Second Edition Copyright @2007 by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis.