3 Strategies for Your Discipline

Section 1: Reading Apprenticeships and Beyond

Modeling Our Thinking

In learning a trade, an individual often goes through an apprenticeship. For example, as a student teacher, you will be experiencing an apprenticeship of sorts–where you learn from a person who has been in the profession and can model quality “work,” whether that be teaching or another profession.

As classroom teachers, we will need to help our students through their own apprenticeship–where they learn to read and comprehend texts more effectively and more independently.

So, what does it mean to be a reading apprentice? Students are learning to read by modeling strategies that they see you and others using in similar situations.

One key way is to use a Think-Aloud Strategy–where you actually verbally walk students through your own thought processes as a reader. It might help to think of this as modeling your behavior for them. Here’s a link to provide you more details: Think Aloud.

Ideally, we would like all of our students to be able to independently tackle any level of text. So, in working toward that goal, we want to gradually turn the responsibility of comprehending texts over to the students–but only after we’ve provided them with a variety of approaches. Once they have more options, then they can select an approach to help them succeed. That gives them the power of reading independently, as the teacher is not needed to provide as much assistance.

Here are a couple of articles that discuss how to help adolescents become more responsible for their literacy skills, including reading and writing, as we take into account their needs and abilities. Let’s take a look at: Becoming a Champion for Teaching Literacy in All Contents.

Likewise, NCTE provides an article that highlights ways to help students build insider knowledge–in the English/Language Arts classroom and beyond: Building Insider Knowledge.

Section 2: Bef0re-During-After Strategies

As we discuss strategies, we find that they are useful at various stops along the literacy journey. For example, some strategies are good to use prior to tackling a text. Other strategies are useful to implement while students are working with a text, while others help students comprehend the text’s information at the end of the reading experience. 

We’ll be looking at a variety of ways to support your students’ reading/literacy endeavors at different times throughout that journey.

One key is to consider how a variety of strategies can be used at any of these three stages of reading–before, during, or after.

Writing

Writing can be extremely supportive in students’ efforts to comprehend a text. They can use their writing to bring up prior knowledge and then detail their journey through the text. At the end of a text, whether it be a painting or a piece of music or a science article, students can benefit from responding in writing to that text.

Vocabulary

This is another area that can provide significant learning opportunities throughout the literacy experience. Previewing vocabulary that they’ll experience before they address a text can be extremely valuable, but approaches can also be used as they are reading and upon conclusion.

Before/During/After Approaches

Here are some links to ways to help your students learn during the entire “reading” experience. See how these work, while keeping in mind possibilities for using at least a modified version of these approaches in your own content-area classroom.

Digging Deeper and Synthesizing

While before, during, and after strategies are valuable, we are not insisting you use all three approaches with every text you address in your classroom. Instead, we want you to be aware of the various strategies and possible times to implement them. As a professional, you’ll be able to select the appropriate tools to help your students succeed, depending upon their abilities, difficulty of the texts, and difficulty of the content being addressed.

Fluency

For years, fluency has been seen as a valuable tool for helping elementary students with their reading, with a focus on oral reading. 

Researchers have addressed fluency at this level, butt interest has also shifted to older readers: Fluency Article. In this article, the authors focused on fluency issues with a class of struggling readers at the middle-school level.

And focus is moving on to the idea that fluency can also be beneficial to students beyond oral reading as an aid in comprehension. As noted in the middle school article, the majority of students in that study saw significant growth in comprehension–but, possibly most significantly, they experienced growth in their level of confidence when reading a text. The students were able to work together to address their reading skills by rereading and practicing oral presentations of their sections of a text.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, let’s think about what fluency is–it combines reading speed, tone, volume, expression–so many elements that can help support understanding of a text. 

We’ve all heard readers who are fluent and those who are not, especially with certain types of texts. Think about when your English teacher had you read Shakespeare aloud. We know Shakespeare is challenging, and the lack of fluency is incredibly obvious when middle or high schoolers struggle to read it aloud. 

Often, the result is:

• Choppy, disjointed reading–the reader mispronounces words…then is corrected by a teacher or a peer.
• There’s often little change in expression–through tone or pace.
• A small portion of text can take an amazingly long time to be read aloud. 

What are the rest of the students getting out of this experience?

• They’re losing meaning because of the student’s struggles.
• They’re bored and trying to read ahead.
• They’re making fun of the students who are reading aloud.
• Or, they’re nervously awaiting for their turn to read aloud.

And the teacher is…?

• Exhausted from having to continually assist the reader.
• Often embarrassed for the struggling student.
• Frustrated with the reader’s inability to read the text.
• And…frustrated with also having to keep the other students on task as they drift away from the text.

Now, let’s look at fluency in a different classroom–such as a band class. If we look closely, we’ll see fluency is an instrumental (pardon the pun) part of the band classroom. 

The band instructor helps students with site reading of the piece initially, then breaks it into sections (passages) to help students grasp the song. The teacher then stresses volume, the tempo, and the expression that is being conveyed in the piece–in an effort to make the performance (reading) more meaningful to the performers and to the audience. 

Sound familiar? It’s exactly what we as teachers want our students to be able to accomplish with the variety of texts we put before them in our classrooms.

Section 3: Questioning and Supporting Curiosity

There’s a good chance every student sitting in your classroom frustrated their family when they went through the “why?” stage  around the age of 3-5. Children are naturally curious. Yet, some teachers fail to take advantage of this…and by the time they’re in high school, they’re supposed to answer the questions, not ask them.

We suggest that you turn that around. Encourage your students to ask questions…to question authority, to quote a popular bumper sticker. Learning is impossible to avoid when you have a classroom filled with students wondering about various things.

In the following link, The Teaching Channel provides a way to take advantage of that curiosity and get your students thinking about their upcoming lesson in science. Check out this 60-second video:  Science and Word Cloud

Pretty simple, right? But effective as a pre-reading strategy. 

And, while he focuses on science, can you see yourself using this as a beginning point for your content area? Think of a time when you could use this to introduce a lesson. 

What words would you select? And what words would you see as the most important (and, thus, the largest words in the word cloud)?