Inferring, questioning, determining importance. It's not easy to explain these abstract reading strategies to elementary readers, yet knowing how they work and how to use them is an important first step to connecting with texts. Fortunately Tanny McGregor has developed visual, tangible, everyday lessons that make abstract thinking concrete and that can help every child in your classroom make more effective use of reading comprehension strategies.
Welcome to Debbie Miller's real classroom where real students are learning to love to read, to write, and are together creating a collaborative and caring environment. In this book, Debbie focuses on how best to teach children strategies for comprehending text. She leads the reader through the course of a year showing how her students learn to become thoughtful, independent, and strategic readers. Through explicit instruction, modeling, classroom discussion, and, most important, by gradually releasing responsibility to her students, Debbie provides a model for creating a climate and culture of thinking and learning.
Every teacher of reading plays a vital role in helping to catch those readers for whom learning to read does not come easily. Through examples from both adults and children, the authors explain and describe the complex integrated network of strategies that go on in the minds of proficient readers—strategies that struggling readers have to learn in order to construct their own reading processes. This book is essential reading for all who work with struggling readers in any context and contains a wealth of resources, including a thorough explanation of all the sources of information readers use to solve words, examples and scenarios of teacher/student interactions, prompts to use with struggling readers, lessons on modeling, and assessment guidelines.
Sometimes a single word changes everything. In his groundbreaking book Choice Words, Peter Johnston demonstrated how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. Now, in Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives, Peter shows how the words teachers choose affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom, and ultimately their futures. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and to create classrooms that support not only students' intellectual development, but their development as human beings.
What works in education? How do we know? How can teachers find out? How can educational research find its way into the classroom? How can we apply it to help our individual students? Questions like these arise in most schools, and busy educators often don't have time to find the answers. Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock have examined decades of research findings to distill the results into nine broad teachingstrategies that have positive effects on student learning:* Identifying similarities and differences. * Summarizing and note taking. * Reinforcing effort and providing recognition. * Homework and practice. * Nonlinguistic representations. * Cooperative learning. * Setting objectives and providing feedback. * Generating and testing hypotheses. * Questions, cues, and advance organizers.
Linda Dorn and Carla Soffos describe the process of comprehension as a reflection of the mind—a window into the reader's thoughts. In Teaching for Deep Comprehension they discuss comprehension from a socio-cognitive perspective — specifically, how teachers can use the social context of reading workshop to promote deep comprehension. The book is framed around three guiding questions:
Can comprehension be taught?
How does a model become a barrier to comprehension?