P.O.S.S.E.

1. P.O.S.S.E. 5 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE READING COMPREHENSION

2. Comprehension in Context • Reading Comprehension is one of the most fundamental skills for academic success. Without it students will have difficulty in: * Following Directions * Test Taking * Completing homework assignments * Keeping on task in classroom activities. WHY IS IT A PROBLEM? -Many teachers do not feel it is their responsibility to teach reading comprehension strategies, they feel it should fall solely to the Language Arts/English teacher -Students are not provided adequate training in reading skills and strategies

3. What is P.O.S.S.E.? • POSSE is a reading comprehension strategy designed to model habits of strong readers to students and teach them how to utilize these strategies • Developed by Carol Englert and Troy Mariage in 1991 • Most effective when taught at an early age, though can be introduced at any grade level • Most useful in English or Social Studies classes, though can be used in all contents • Provides opportunities to implement other organizing tools such as note cards or graphic organizers

4. What it Stands For • P- Predict Ideas • O- Organize the Ideas (can use note-taking or graphic organizers) • S- Search for the Structure • S- Summarize the Ideas • E- Evaluate your Understanding -POSSE provides steps for before, during and after reading

5. It’s all about “P” • Studies conducted with POSSE by Nicole Pesa and Sarah Somers with 7th and 8th Grade Classrooms drew the following conclusions: -Students actively use most of the steps of POSSE, except for the “Predict” step. -Possible Reasons: Students do not remember to use the P step without a teachers prompting or they do not have enough time to utilize all the steps. In this case, the study found the Predict step was most likely to be skipped. -This is the step that must be emphasized most to students for this reason

6. More P’s, Please • Students tend to automatically utilize the final four steps of POSSE, but not the first. • This causes problems with Socratic Questions after reading (questions that require background knowledge in order to make real-world connections) • Provide practice with Prediction processes wherever possible

7. How do you teach it? • RECIRPOCAL TEACHING- can be used to teach students how to comprehend material by providing teacher and peer models of thinking behavior and allowing them to practice with their peers. • Steps: Teacher should lead this dialogue first, demonstrating how the strategies can be used in reading. • Gradually, students should be given more and more responsibility to maintain the discussion • Eventually, the students should be leading the discussion and the teacher serving as a facilitator. • The most important part of the instruction is the teacher’s releasing control of the discussion to the students

8. Does it Work? • Pesa and Somers (2007) conducted research at a Chicago Middle School with 2 Separate Classes with several reading strategies. What they found: *Students do not properly implement all steps of the POSSE reading strategy without prompting. This lead to only 21% of the students being able to properly identify the main ideas of the passages they were provided to read. Because they do not take the time to familiarize themselves with the text before reading or organize information they have difficulty determining what information is most important.

9. Study, Continued • The Study taught several strategies over a 16 week period to two classrooms, including predicting, questioning, visualizing and evaluating • Through this, students developed higher critical thinking skills about texts, demonstrated the ability to both formulate and answer Socratic questions • Advanced students demonstrated a firmer grasp on structure than other students in the study • By the end of the program, the two classrooms both overall demonstrated increases in their responses to questions concerning self-monitoring, (3.2 and 5 % increases respectively), visualizing (4.9, 4.0 %) and making connections (3.8 and 4.4%) • Without the cooperation of content area teachers, students will most likely not transfer strategies to areas outside of the Language Arts classroom. • Content area teachers responsibility to align methods of instruction with reading strategies taught in the English classroom.

10. Tying it all Together • POSSE should be taught to students at the beginning of the school year, and practiced continuously throughout the year • Will greatly help students in areas such as standardized testing • Tovani (2004) “With explicit instruction that demonstrates what good readers do, struggling readers can be taught HOW to comprehend the text.”