Reason To Read

1. Reason To Read For people who like to read, searching for reading reasons at first seems silly. We adults have already found a multitude of reasons to read. Sometimes we are conscious of these reasons, but often, I suspect, many of these reasons have become internalized. Kelly Gallagher Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle School and High School (2003)

2. Reading Purposefully and StrategicallySecondary Literacy 2

3. DO NOW What reading strategies do you use? • Examine a challenging text and make notes of the comprehension strategies you use. • Read the Biology text: page 392-393 • 3 minutes solo – read and jot down strategies you’re using to comprehend • Take 4 minutes

4. What Strategies Did You Use? • Discuss in your table groups.

5. What are we learning? CMWBAT… • Reflect on our own process in reading difficult content area texts • Define 6 comprehension strategies • Select at least 2 activities to support comprehension to use in lesson plans • Draft a Think Aloud

6. Why are we learning this? THE TAKE-AWAY… Expert readers apply strategies unconsciously. We need to teach students this skill. To do this well, we must be meta-cognitive about our own reading comprehension.

7. Agenda • DO NOW – Reflecting on our own strategies • Introduction • 6 Key Comprehension Strategies • Supporting Activity Jam Session • Gradual Release of Responsibility • Think Aloud • Close

8. Putting Ourselves on the Line If teachers are going to make the process of reading visible, they can’t sit safely at the edge. As older, more experienced readers, they have an obligation to talk aloud about groping for understanding or reaching for a genuine reading. Dennie Palmer Wolf -- Reading Reconsidered: Literature and Literacy in High School (1995) • Stop-and-Jot • 1 minute: What’s the take-away here? What’s your obligation as a sophisticatedly literate teacher? What do you hope to be the outcomes? What are you apprehensive about?

9. “I read it, but I don’t get it.” • This is really an invitation… • More often a pitfall: • “Just read it again.” • “Pay better attention.” • “Find the main ideas.” • “Try harder.” • “It really isn’t hard to avoid reading – you just ask someone what it means, or wait for the teacher to explain it.” – Lisa, high school senior

10. So – What Are the Strategies? Your job as the strategies are revealed: • Predict: ask yourself, “What might this look like in my classroom? How would this strategy support comprehension?”

11. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Inferring • Using background knowledge to hypothesize, interpret, or draw conclusions from the events, information or clues in the text.

12. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Predicting • Anticipating what will happen next in the story or what will be described next in the informational text based on knowledge of genre, character type, or familiar sequence.

13. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Questioning • Asking questions to clarify meaning, wonder what will happen, or speculate about the author’s intent, style, content or format.

14. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Making connections • Connecting information or events to personal experience • Text-to-self • Text-to-text • Text-to-world

15. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Visualizing • Creating mental pictures of what is happening in the text.

16. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Self-monitoring • Recognizing when you understand what is going on and when you are confused. • Recognizing when you have stopped paying close attention to the text and therefore need to re-read

17. Reading Comprehension Strategies • Inferring • Predicting • Questioning • Making connections • Visualizing • Self-monitoring

18. Strategy Jam Session: Stations You’ll need: your ISAT unit plan and 2 lesson plans. In your journals: • List one strategy you would like to try in your classroom • Jot down answers to the following questions: • What’s an example of a text/assignment/objective for which I would use this strategy? • How does this strategy support comprehension? • (Optional) I would modify this strategy to address my content by… • Share in your group: your answer to question #1 • Take 4 minutes in each station

19. What’s going wrong here? “I really wanted my African-American history students to visualize the Amistad Uprising because the primary source that explains it is so rich with imagery, so I made my objective “SWBAT visualize key scenes in a primary source.” In order to teach it, I had my students use watercolor to depict four key scenes.” • From which planning pitfall is this teacher suffering? • The Take-Away: Strategies are a means to an end – comprehension. “Doing” the strategy is never the objective, but rather the scaffold or support for getting to comprehension. • Strategies = P(lan) not the G(oal) in minding the GAP. • What might be a more appropriate objective?

20. Strategies are a means to an end – comprehension. • Which is the scaffold and which is the objective? • SWBAT make inferences about essential and nonessential information in a problem • SWBAT solve 2 step algebraic equations

21. Gradual Release of Responsibility - GRR “Despite secondary teachers’ belief that… secondary students don’t need it, independence won’t happen unless we plan for it” Jennifer Kirmes, DC ‘05, “Independence is the Greatest Gift I Can Give: Using the Gradual Release of Responsibility Framework” • During this mini-lecture, pick one strategy and visualize how you will perform each step for an assignment in your content area

22. Hey Note-takers… • Feel free to take notes on the GRR mini-lecture on page 395 in your CM binder.

23. Gradual Release of Responsibility Excellent comprehension instruction involves the gradual release of responsibility over the course of a unit or the whole year. Explicitly Taught Shared Guided Independent Modeled • Similar to I Do, We Do, You Do • Differences • Heavy modeling • Over a unit or whole year

24. GRR Step 1: Explicitly Teach • Naming, explaining, and framing the strategy gives students knowledge of the strategy. • Build academic vocab • Rationale  motivate • Mnemonic or metaphor • Keep it short!

25. GRR Step 2: Modeling – expert thinker at work • Modeling explicitly gives students comprehension of what the strategy looks like. • Think Aloud • How rather than the what • Confidence booster to try the skill • Provides high expectations • Give the Think Aloud a special feel • Focus on one or two strategies

26. Domenica’s Think Aloud… Most tarantulas live in the Tropics, but several species occur in the temperate zone and a few are common in the southern US. Some varieties are large and have powerful fangs with which they can inflict a deep wound. These formidable looking spiders do not, however, attack man; you can hold one in your hand, if you are gentle, without being bitten. Their bite is dangerous only to insects and small mammals such as mice; for a man it is no worse than a hornet’s sting.

27. GRR Step 3: Shared Practice – trying it out together • Shared reading gives the students the opportunity to do part of the work of using the strategy with support from teachers and peers. • Looks like… • Teacher modeling – • But teacher as mannequin

28. Domenica’s Think Aloud - Shared Tarantulas customarily live in deep cylindrical burrows, from which they emerge at dusk and into which they retire at dawn. Mature males wander about after dark in search of females and occasionally stray into houses. After mating, the male dies in a few weeks, but a female lives much longer and can mate several years into succession. In a Paris museum is a tropical specimen which is said to have been living in captivity for 25 years.

29. GRR Step 4: Guided Reading – students supporting each other • Guided reading gives students the chance to do more of the work of using the strategy with teacher feedback. • Alone or in small groups. • Looks like…

30. GRR Step 5: Independent – we made it! • Independent reading gives students the chance to practice it by themselves with new text. • Looks like…

31. Gradual Release of Responsibility Excellent comprehension instruction involves the gradual release of responsibility over the course of a unit or the whole year. Explicitly Taught Shared Guided Independent Modeled

32. I Did – You Watched: The Think Aloud Explicitly Teach – Naming, Explaining, Framing Modeling

33. We Do – I Support – The Think-Aloud • Work with a partner • Pick a text with which to brainstorm your Think Aloud. Choose either: • Your content text from Sec Lit 1 (CM Binder 230-237) • advantage: easier to work with OR • A text you brought with you that you will teach this week • advantage: getting ahead • Pick a relevant strategy • Questioning is often good for Math; Visualizing is great for Science… • Take 7 minutes

34. We Do – I Support – The Think-Aloud • DEBRIEF • How explicit was my Think Aloud? • How student-friendly was I? • What else could I add? • Other – verbal tics I could avoid? Body language to include? How can I give my Think Aloud a special feel? • Take 2 minutes

35. You Do – I Watch: The Think Aloud, Final Draft • CM Binder Page 396: “Output – Think Aloud Script” • Use the graphic organizer or Post-It notes to record your Think Aloud • Take 8 minutes

36. What did we learn? • WHIP AROUND! • Why should we be meta-cognitive about our own reading comprehension? • Why is it important to give students a purpose for reading? • Why does excellent comprehension instruction involve the Gradual Release of Responsibility over the course of a unit? • Why is “doing” the strategy never the objective itself? • List as many of the key comprehension strategies as possible • List two supporting activities you’ll use this week!

37. Review of Mindsets • Just as students will rise or sink to meet our expectations in other ways, students will respond to the purposes and goals for reading that we set for them. • If we expect our students to read like Scientists, Historians, Engineers, Mathematicians, Linguists, Writers and Literary Critics – and if we teach them the strategies to do it – they will be able to reach those goals.

38. Where Are We Toward Mastery? • Think Alouds: strategies, caveats, ideas, and revelations to share?

39. Overview of the Secondary Literacy Course • Core Session 1: Why are Secondary Texts Difficult? • Core Session 2: Reading Purposefully and Strategically • Core Session 3: Building Comprehension Before, During, and After Reading