In chapters eleven and twelve we
are taught how to help struggling readers and recommendations from reading
research. Some key strategies for helping struggling readers are to build
supportive relationships, model thoughtful reading, use activities that build
engagement with text, promote self monitoring, use material students can
successfully read, and provide books and articles on tape. Out of these
strategies the one that I liked the best was modeling thoughtful reading. This
strategy would be done though think-alouds where the teacher reads to the class
while stopping to go through what their thought process is. This allows the teacher to model for their students how to go about reading while actively thinking and
questioning. I saw this strategy being used during my observations and it
seemed to work really well and help students to understand the reading better.
Chapter
twelve lists many recommendations for struggling readers based on research. I
feel like this chapter repeated many themes that were already discussed in the
book such as the idea that cooperative learning is a comprehension strategy
that has a solid scientific basis and students should read a wide variety of
materials in class. There were many other recommendations listed in this
chapter that I believe were discussed at some point or another in this book. Overall
this was a summary of everything that we have learned about literacy from
Daniels and Zemelman.
Overall the main
idea that I have gotten from this book is that it is our job as teachers to
facilitate reading in the classroom. Though this may not always be an easy task
this book has provided us with some very useful reading tools and strategies
that we will be able to use in the classroom to help all students at all
reading abilities and levels. Since the strategies that we have learned have
not been content specific I decided to do some research on helping students
with reading in a history classroom and have provided an article below on how
to do so.
Jennifer I like the insight on the think-alouds. I never really though about using them in a high school setting. I've seen it used when I visited my kids' elementary class where the teacher reads the story and stops from time to time to explain what she was thinking about the story and letting the students tell what they were thinking. I guess my issues is how to use it without making the students feel like they are in elementary school and I am reading to them. I wonder if you can get a student to do the reading and the modeling after showing the class how it is done.
ReplyDeleteI liked that you did research into reading based on our content. While I think the author makes a good point that historical reading is looking for bias, I feel like they used many of the strategies we learned in D&Z, i.e the current events connection and the claim-evidence connection.
ReplyDeleteI am curious to know, which strategy from your research on this site caught your attention and how you would use it in a classroom? I honestly might have overlooked something because there were so many different links.I know I am still grappling with how to teach with primary source documents that use old English.
I am happy that you were able to witness some of these strategies listed in this chapter in a classroom setting. I've had teachers like this in high school who would read certain passages and then ask questions before continuing. It always had me engaged and answering questions. You're right in the fact that part of a teacher job is to facilitate reading which can be done in every content. This book gives so many suggestions on how to go about doing it.
ReplyDelete