The Stenhouse Blog

Quick Tip Tuesday: Finding the meaning of unknown vocabulary

When reading nonfiction texts, many children are hindered in their understanding when they come across an unfamiliar word. To solve this problem and to equip students with the necessary strategies to decode unknown words, Tony Stead shows students how to look for clues in the text and how to use a book’s glossary for clues. In his book, Reality Checks: Teaching Reading Comprehension with Nonfiction K-5, Tony outlines many other practical approaches to help children become confident readers of nonfiction.

In Lisa’s classroom we realized that before providing demonstrations, we needed to initiate talk about what strategies the children themselves used when faced with challenging vocabulary. We achieved this by reading part of a text on whales. When we came to a challenging word, we stopped and talked about ways we could determine its meaning. The children came up with many suggestions, so we charted their responses.

Strategies to Use When You Don’t Know the Meaning of a Word

■ Look in a dictionary.
■ Ask a friend.
■ Ask the teacher.
■ Context clues
Read back.
Read forward.
Read over. Stop and think.
Look for important words around it.
■ Look in the glossary.
■ Break the word apart.
Think about the meaning of each part.
Put it back together.
■ Use the picture.

It was not surprising that looking in a dictionary was their number one reply, yet the set of class dictionaries appeared to be gathering dust, indicating it had been some time since our learners had used them. It is also the number one response of most children in classrooms where I’ve worked, because they have been instructed so many times to rely on this strategy. Yet rarely do they employ it when faced with an unknown word. They find going through a dictionary laborious and tedious, and the reading becomes joyless. This is especially true when they encounter a barrage of unknown words in one piece and find themselves with the dictionary as their main source of reading rather than the selected text.

Many children haven’t even been instructed in how to properly use a dictionary and spend their time aimlessly flicking through pages, hoping the unknown word will magically appear. What is even more frustrating to learners is that if they happen to chance on the word, its meaning uses even more complex vocabulary than the word itself, leaving the children totally confused.

The children were aware of a multitude of good strategies that could assist them, but they rarely used them. Clearly they could talk the talk, but not walk the walk. We sorted the strategies into two categories: primary and secondary. For primary strategies, the reader uses methods within the body of the text to solve word meanings. Secondary strategies require the reader to go outside the body of the text, whether it be a glossary, a dictionary, or simply asking another person for assistance. We encouraged children to use primary strategies before secondary strategies. This way they were not always having to go outside the body of the text to find word meanings, which inevitably interrupts the reading and compromises comprehension. An example of the list below can be found in Appendix E.

What to Do if You Don’t Know the Meaning of a Word

Primary Strategies
■ Context clues
Read back.
Read forward.
Read over. Stop and think.
Look for important words around it.
■ Break the word apart.
Think about the meaning of each part.
Put it back together.
■ Use the picture.

Secondary Strategies
■ Look in the glossary.
■ Look it up in a dictionary.
■ Ask a friend.
■ Ask the teacher.

Once the lists were completed, we modeled how they could be of assistance when students were faced with unknown vocabulary. We knew explicit modeling was needed, which is often the missing link in instruction. Too often we solicit talk from the children and they give us what we want to hear, yet they have not internalized how to use the strategy independently.

We brought the children to the meeting area, and Lisa and I took turns reading Chapter 1 of a text called The Voice for the Animals by Evelyn Brooks. We made sure all the children could see the text as we read it to them. We told the children that as the text was read, they should raise their hands if they heard a word whose meaning they didn’t know.

What Are the SPCAs?

“Throughout the United States, there are many local organizations that work to save the lives of abandoned and mistreated animals. Each organization is known as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). The people who work at SPCAs rescue and care for these hurt creatures. At the SPCAs the animals are cleaned and fed. If the animals are healthy and well behaved, they are offered to people for adoption.”

When we read the word abandoned, several hands were raised, so we stopped reading and wrote the word on chart paper. We referred them to the first primary strategy—context clues—and asked whether there were any words or ideas around the word that gave them hints about its meaning. The children told us that mistreated and organizations that work to save gave them clues, so we recorded those on the chart next to the word abandoned. We asked them to discuss with the student next to them possible meanings of the word based on the key words around it and recorded their responses.

We then asked which words were most likely the true meaning. The children came up with the words hurt and left through the process of elimination. They agreed that smacked didn’t make sense because lots of people smack their dogs when they are naughty, and an organization that tried to stop this didn’t make sense. As Katie put it, “You’re not saving an animal’s life if you stop the owner from smacking it.” The words yelled at were also quickly eliminated for the same reason. This left hurt and left, which both made sense, so we then looked to other primary strategies: breaking the word apart and looking at the picture. These appeared to offer little support, so we suggested we leave our primary strategies and look to the first secondary strategy: the glossary. This was met with some resistance, as the children informed us that only words in bold such as prevention and adoption would be in the glossary. Therefore, in the children’s eyes this was a waste of time. When I showed them the glossary with the word abandoned, they were stunned. “But how can that be?” Jeremy asked. This was a good question, so we gave the children some time to think until Alex asked to look at the previous pages of the book. I showed the children the page before, which happened to be the introduction.

I had not read it to them, and there was the word abandoned in bold print. This was a valuable learning experience for our children, for they realized that you can’t assume a word won’t be in the glossary just because it isn’t highlighted on a specific page. They had also learned that when trying to locate the meaning of unknown vocabulary, you sometimes need to use more than one strategy. Harry summed it up perfectly when he said, “I feel like a detective looking for clues and some of these are hidden from me. You have to look carefully.”

Harry’s notion of being a word detective was one that appealed to the children, so we ensured that when reading texts that had complex vocabulary we always put on our detective hats and used our strategy chart to help solve the mystery. Sometimes Lisa and I would provide texts that contained vocabulary that could be solved only with the use of a dictionary. Other times we used texts with complex vocabulary that could be easily solved by simply breaking the word into parts, such as compound words. Our goal was to get our learners to start using these strategies naturally as they read independently so that their comprehension of informational texts was not lost. To achieve this goal we needed to provide ongoing demonstrations.

Add comment March 23rd, 2010

Quick Tip Tuesday: Vocabulary activities

When word journals didn’t help Sara Kajder’s students enhance their understanding of texts, she looked for different, more visual ways of deepening their understanding of what they were reading. She shares some of these strategies in Bringing the Outside In: Visual Ways to Engage Reluctant Readers.

Vocabulary Square
This is a paper and pencil activity that is the primary tool in my classroom teaching for working with vocabulary across grade levels and content areas. Developed by Jim Burke (2002), the vocabulary square is a graphic organizer that focuses student attention on a selected word, its roots, its synonyms/antonyms, and its role as a part of speech. Most important to my students’ work and understanding was the section of the square that asked them to draw a picture that represented their understanding of the word and its meaning.

Why is that picture such a big deal? Oftentimes, my students were masters at copying definitions and terms from the dictionary. However, in asking them to create a visual representation of their understanding of the meaning of the term, I was asking students to go beyond “putting the definition in your own words.” Instead, I was requiring that they show me the definition through their own eyes.

Some of my students are with me right from the start. They want to convey what they see—and they get right to it. For others, there is a great deal of initial “moaning” about having to draw in an English class. We get past it quickly enough once students begin to see the entrance that these pictures provide. As Thomas, an on-level eighth grader, explained, “for one of the fi rst times, I’m actually saying something about what I know, and I don’t have to worry about if the words are right. The words, for me, come after the picture. So, I can see what I know, and then write about it.”

The vocabulary square is a quick, compact, and tight glimpse into what a student knows about a word—providing me as teacher with a speedy view into what they understand and, perhaps more importantly, what they don’t. If I’ve asked them to define “resilience” and am met with a picture of broken glass, I know that there is a problem. More likely than not, the students’ images invite rich classroom discussion about vocabulary—a kind of unprompted dialogue that we never had prior to the use of this tool. Most of my middle and high school English students didn’t regularly discuss the differences between the denotation and the connotation of a word’s meaning. With these images, it happens readily.

Vocabulary Word Wall (or, The Notebook Made Public)
Once my students became accustomed to depicting their understanding of a word’s meaning by drawing it in the vocabulary square, I decided to shake things up a bit. Some students were talented illustrators, but the bulk of my kids usually needed to provide me with some description of what their images were supposed to be. Further, I still had some students who were struggling to convey what they knew graphically or visually. I needed a different tool.

For this task, digital cameras were placed into the hands of students and taken outside of our classroom space. After scrounging what resources I could get my hands on, I ended up with a ratio of about one camera to four or five kids. The challenge was for students to take photos representing the key vocabulary terms studied or, perhaps more importantly, those vocabulary words which students identified as they read. The process (and strength) of the activity was explained by Nada, a fifth grader, offering that “taking pictures lets me understand the defi nition on my own terms. I picture the word, create the picture, and then start to know the word.”

Yes, the camera alone provided motivation. But it wasn’t the camera itself as much as it was the process of composing with images. Here, I wasn’t just teaching about how writers use words (symbols) to convey their ideas. I was also teaching about how illustrators and photographers create texts and make those texts work. Alongside our discussions of vocabulary were new discussions of how words and images could promote or silence particular views. Students found images to be “everyday,” thus making literacy more tangible and valuable to them. For example, Julia, an eighth grader in Ms. Powell’s class, worked to represent “cumulative,” “intermittent,” and “voice”

Students were asked to print several of the images that they collected, using varying sizes of paper to post their work on the rear wall of the classroom. We labeled the posters not with students’ names, but with the words defined. The most surprising element of the assignment for me as a teacher wasn’t the way that students (even reluctant ones like Adam) took up a camera and actively, mindfully pursued the “right” image. It wasn’t the rise in participation and completion of the assignment. It was the “clumps” of students that I found around the back wall three weeks after the first round of the assignment. Students were still talking about the ways the images communicated intended meaning or the ways in which “the picture fit the word.”

This wasn’t a “one-shot” activity. Instead, it was a task that we repeated as students encountered new reading assignments or we explored new words that they found in independent reading. That said, the more regularly we were acquiring images, the more regularly it became necessary for students to “check out” the cameras as opposed to taking class time for image collection—and we made several “tweaks” along those lines. What stayed constant was the root of the assignment—visually represent the words that you’re looking to define.

Beginning with honors-level ninth-grade classes, I also used an extension or reinvention of the activity, challenging students to record literacy events as they experienced them outside of the classroom. In Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy, Myers explains that speech events are an essential part of situated knowledge, offering students opportunities not only to study language in action but also to examine differences between presentational and conversational modes of communication (1996, p. 143). Extensive discussion in class explores how students use images to capture oral texts and “bring meaning into being” (Kress 2003, p. 70). Building on their visual and verbal literacy skills, my students paired their images with fairly sophisticated written reflections, explaining the event, what meaning it represented, and how it enriched, complicated, or challenged their understanding of literacy. Here, literacy wasn’t just limited to the ways in which students engaged with print texts, but instead reached out to include exchanges outside of and beyond the classroom.

Image Flashcards/Visual Word Collection
This is the individualized recasting of the word wall assignment. Here, students use notecards or 4×6 pieces of paper to print out images that they’ve acquired to represent the definition of a particular word. It’s more difficult to manage in that there is never enough technology for each student to have access to a camera at all times—which does result in the occasional student entering the classroom and lamenting that he or she “missed a key shot” the night before. To keep it equitable, I maintain a sign-up sheet, and keep a close eye on which students are dominating that list. Further, with the price-point of cameras bulleting downwards, we’re finding that this is the one classroom tool that is in greater supply. Many kids have access at home, and simply bring their saved images on disk, CD, saved to the network, and so on. The key remains the same. Students are using the camera to “read their world” while reading the texts we explore as a part of our class.

The image serves as a bridge into doing more than just recalling the definition(s) of the word; it provides students with an opportunity to defi ne, connect, and integrate the word into what is already known. We’ve done many different things with the reverse (or blank) side of the card. There is the traditional approach—write the definition (in your own words) along with the part of speech and an example sentence. There is the connect-to-text approach where I ask students to identify and record the use of this word in the texts that we read. Often, I ask students to ask questions that they have about the word, it’s use, it’s connotation, and so on. This challenges students to confront potentially “problematic” words head-on. Simply put, the value that is added here is that students are using visual images along with a reading/writing space that is portable. These cards are one part study tool, one part reading artifact, and one part “mini-step” into the literacy community within our classroom.

Add comment March 2nd, 2010

Quick Tip Tuesday: Framing the Text

“As the teacher, what you do (or don’t do) before your students read a major literary work will determine their level of motivation and interest,” writes Kelly Gallagher in his book Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. In this week’s Quick Tip, Kelly shares some of the framing strategies he uses before teaching George Orwell’s 1984. Poems and Internet searches, along with other strategies help students get the most out of a challenging text, even before they begin to read.

Before beginning major works, I often assign Web searches. Prior to a class’s reading George Orwell’s 1984, for example, I give my students this assignment: Next week we will begin reading George Orwell’s classic, 1984. One of the central characters in the novel is named Big Brother. When I search Google for the phrase “Big Brother,” over one million examples are found. Obviously, the phrase “Big Brother” has become a permanent part of our culture, and it might help us when we begin reading the novel if we understand what this phrase means and how it’s used. By next Friday, please complete the following “Search for Big Brother” assignment: Search the Internet for references to “Big Brother.” You might use Google.com or Yahoo.com to assist your search. Find references to Big Brother in at least three different genres. You may choose from the following, or find other categories:

• Books (other than 1984)
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Music
• Poetry
• Business
• Art or theater
• Television or film
• An organization or business
• Speeches
• Essays
• Humor (jokes, cartoons)
• Letters to the editor
• Editorials
• Political cartoons

Try to find examples from different genres that seem to be addressing the idea of “Big Brother” in the same manner, theme, or idea. Try to find examples that your classmates will not find. Print these examples and include a paragraph of your own, explaining what you think the phrase “Big Brother” means. Explain how you think this meaning cuts across the different genres you have selected. Bring the examples and your explanation to class Friday. Be prepared to discuss and share in groups.

On the due date, students get together in groups and share their Big Brother examples and their ideas on what the phrase might mean. After each small group has had time to share, a person from each group is randomly chosen to share a “big idea” with the entire class, and I write their ideas on the overhead for the whole class to see. I also take the students’ Big Brother examples and turn them into a collage on the bulletin board.

This activity is an effective warm-up to the reading of 1984 because the discussion that ensues from the Web search is student-generated and always rich. It allows many of the book’s themes—oppression, totalitarianism, invasion of privacy—to surface and be discussed prior to the students’ reading the novel. This strategy could be adapted to fit any book that might be unfamiliar to readers. For example, students beginning Wiesel’s Night might search “genocide”; students preparing for Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter might search “witch trials.”

Anticipation Guides

Anticipation guides, developed by J. E. Readence, T. W. Bean, and R. S. Baldwin (1985), can be used to frame the major ideas and themes that students will find in the book they are about to begin. These guides help them understand that as long as books have been written, literature has expressed universal truths about the human condition. In reading Romeo and Juliet, for example, students will discover that many of the issues in this four-hundred-year-old play are still relevant to them today. Before having them open to Act I of Romeo and Juliet, I often ask students to consider the issues they are about to encounter in their reading.

I express these issues in provocative statements and ask students to what degree they agree or disagree with them. Figure 3.1 presents an anticipation guide for Romeo and Juliet, the left-hand side of which students complete before reading the play.

After recording their opinions on the various statements, students use the items on the anticipation guide as starting points for discussion (and often writing and debate). These discussions get them thinking about the big ideas they will soon discover in the play. Upon completing the reading, the students revisit the anticipation guide and complete the right hand side. Sometimes reading the work solidifies beliefs they already had, but often they find that significant shifts in their thinking have occurred as a result of their reading the work. Students complete the unit by choosing one statement from the anticipation guide that speaks especially to them—a “hot spot,” one might say—and use this statement as the basis of an essay.

Theme Spotlights

While anticipation guides prompt students to think about many of the ideas they will encounter in a text, the theme spotlight assignment focuses students’ attention to one major theme to be studied. Figure 3.2 is an example of a theme spotlight for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though this strategy can be easily adapted to any major work. By inspiring rich discussion and passionate writing, theme spotlights help prepare students to consider the big ideas in the work they will read. They may also suggest further activities. For example, students who complete the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme spotlight might then chart the degrees of evil found in the book.

Focus Poems

One way to prepare students for a major literary work is to let them read thematically related poetry beforehand. From these poems, students are asked to make inferences about the major work they are about to read.

For example, in preparing to teach All Quiet on the Western Front, it may become readily apparent that students know very little about World War I. This lack of knowledge can make it difficult for them to get into the novel. To help bridge this knowledge gap before they begin to read, students are given packets of poetry written during or about the war. They are asked to read all the poems more than once and to begin generating a list of things they can infer about World War I simply from reading the poetry. In Figure 3.3, for example, students were able to gain insight about World War I from reading Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In addition to “Dulce et Decorum Est,” other Owen poems that are excellent to help students understand World War I include:

“Miners”
“Greater Love”
“Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”
“Futility”
“Sonnet”
The World War I poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg are also excellent. Among my favorites of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems are:

“They”
“The Rear Guard”
“The General”
“Glory of Women”
“Everyone Sang”
“One Passing the New Menin Gate”
Isaac Rosenberg’s poems include:
“Returning,We Hear the Larks”
“Break of Day in the Trenches”
“December 30th”
“Louse Hunting”
“Dead Man’s Dump”

These poems and others can be found by simply searching “World War I poetry” on Google or any other search engine.

Add comment November 17th, 2009

Quick Tip Tuesday: Talking and Reading Aloud

This week’s Quick Tip comes from Talking, Writing & Thinking About Books: 101 Ready-to-Use Classroom Activities That Build Reading Comprehension by Jo Phenix. The set of activities in this downloadable and printable PDF focus on using oral reading to enhance students’ understanding and to generate ideas for their own writing.

Some of the activities include creating a radio advertisement, writing a song, giving a speech, and “chalk talk.” Download this chapter from Jo’s book right here!

Add comment September 22nd, 2009

Questions & Authors: What does a good fact look like, anyway?

In this edition of Questions & Authors, a bright student struggling with his history papers and tests reminds Sarah Cooper, author of Making History Mine, that sometimes the basic concepts that are obvious to teachers, are not quite as obvious to students. Sarah teaches eighth-grade English and ninth-grade world history at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada, California.

As I was planning for the upcoming school year, I found myself thinking a lot about a student I’ll call Andrew, a ninth grader I had last year in my world history class. It was obvious he was bright and engaged with the world—he could identify state and federal politicians when they came up in current events discussions, and he loved nothing more than to argue about something intense, such as national health care policy or the arrogance of Roman emperors. On days when he was absent, the discussions were not as fiery, not as fun.

Yet Andrew’s essays on in-class tests and his paragraph responses on reading quizzes did not show his passion for ideas. His history writing was consistently vague and sounded as if he was not doing the textbook reading, even when I knew he was from the notes he took. His thesis statements and topic sentences were spot-on for ninth grade, with sentences such as, “Greek democracy lasted only a brief time because its leaders became power-hungry and greedy.” However, the essays didn’t follow up on their promise, and I kept writing the same comments: “Your ideas are great, but the essay needs more facts.” “More specifics.” “More evidence needed.” In our one-on-one conversations, he was earnest about trying to include more facts in his papers.

Yet it wasn’t until the beginning of fourth quarter—an appropriate in-the-clutch time for Andrew, who loved the school’s JV football team he had joined in the fall—that it became clear what I was not teaching, and thus what he was not learning. After yet another test on which Andrew scored a B-, he made an appointment to see me after school, spurred on by his mother’s urging and by his desire to take honors European history in sophomore year. We looked at some recent essays, and he asked the golden question:

“Ms. Cooper, you say I need more facts. But I have facts. They’re just not the facts you want. What does a good fact look like, anyway?”

I had been teaching history for nearly a decade without ever having been asked that question. I was dumbfounded that I had never addressed this, and I wanted to make it right.

I started by saying, “A good fact in a history paper is something you can picture in your head, like in a movie. Here, let’s look at some examples:”

Too general: “The Minoans were good in art.”
“No, I can’t really picture that,” Andrew said.

A little better: “The Minoans did a lot of paintings on the walls of their palace.”
“Okay, but then I don’t know what the paintings looked like,” Andrew said.

Right on: “The Minoans painted frescoes with bright colors and natural scenes.”
“Oh, now I really get it. You have to be able to see it,” Andrew said.

“So maybe I’m taking notes the wrong way,” he thought out loud. “I tend to write down the main ideas of each paragraph or section. Are you saying I should write down more specifics?”

Yes, I said, but warned him to be careful not to write down everything in the book: “What I would do is to think about main ideas in the section and then pick two or three specific facts you could use on any essay or reading quiz to back them up. For instance, if you want to say that the Minoans had an independent mindset, you could refer to their living on the island of Crete and to their acceptance of women in the priesthood.”

I wasn’t sure Andrew was taking away everything we were discussing, so I asked him to check his reading notes with me for the next several days. The change was astonishing—he now included a sprinkling of facts relevant to the main ideas he highlighted instead of a general overview of the entire chapter.

Before the final exam, Andrew came in to discuss what score he would need to achieve to get a B+ in the class, which would qualify him for  honors history in the fall. It turned out he needed a high B+ because his homework grade had been strong. “I can do that!” he said.

On his final exam he earned a solid A, pushing his overall grade into the high B+ range. It was as if a light had turned on for him—and it certainly had for me.

Sometimes we as teachers assume that the most basic concepts—What is a fact? What does analysis look like? Why should we ask questions about the world?—are as obvious to our students as they are to us. My meetings with Andrew reminded me that every student can improve, especially if I don’t assume understanding—and if I take the time to figure out what is really going on in his head, and in mine.

Add comment September 16th, 2009

Quick Tip Tuesday: Using metaphors to deepen comprehension

This week’s tip comes from Kelly Gallagher’s book, Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. Using William Maxwell’s story, Love, Kelly demonstrates how he teaches for effective first and second draft readings, collaboration, how he leads students to meaningful reflection, as well as how he uses metaphors to deepen students’ comprehension.

Students often have trouble thinking in metaphorical terms. To help introduce this concept, I use the following exercise.

1. Explain to students what “intangible” means and then have students brainstorm a list of random intangible items. List these on the left-hand side of a t-chart.
2. Ask students if they can infer what “tangible” means. On the right-hand side of the chart, have students brainstorm a list of random tangible items.

If your students are like mine, their brainstorming might result in the
following:
Intangible Items
love
hate
betrayal
jealousy
envy
trust
friendship
commitment
anxiety
confidence

Tangible Items
skateboard
CDs
driver’s license
bracelet
pizza
backpack
locker
Eminem
movies
video games

3. Have the students complete the following sentence by selecting one intangible item and one tangible item and then exploring the relationship between these two items as follows:
(Intangible item) is like a (tangible item) because ___________________________.
Here are some of my students’ responses:
Friendship is like a driver’s license because it will expire if you do not renew it.
Nicole, 14
Jealousy is like a backpack because it can get heavy carrying it around.
Omar, 15
Trust is like a video game because there are many levels to it.
Josh, 15

4. Once students have tried this and have shared with one another, I challenge them to extend their metaphors. I change the sentence template to the following:
(Intangible item) is like a (tangible item) because __________________________ ,
_______________________ and _____________________.
Using this new template, the previous student samples are stretched:
Friendship is like a driver’s license because it will expire if you do not renew, it takes skill to obtain, and it requires that you pass a test.
Jealousy is like a backpack because it gets heavy carrying it around, it’s hard to zip up, and everyone can see you wearing it.
Trust is like a video game because there are many levels to it, it requires practice, and it’s hard to repair once it’s broken.

This exercise is a good way to introduce metaphorical thinking. Once students grasp this concept, they are ready to apply it to their reading. For example, think about the love the boys had for Miss Brown in “Love.”How would you describe it? With the story in mind, complete the following
sentence:
The boys’ love for Miss Brown is like (a) _____________ because _____________.

Again, here are some of my students’ responses:
The boys’ love for Miss Brown is like an old oak tree because it has strong roots.
Karen, 16
The boys’ love for Miss Brown is like a sprained ankle because it hurts a lot right now, but the pain will ease with the passing of time.
Steven, 15
The boys’ love for Miss Brown is like a scar, because although it will fade, it will always be there.
Miguel, 15
When I read these responses, it becomes evident to me that these students understand the story “Love” at a deeper level. They see and feel what the author intended.

1 comment September 1st, 2009

Quick Tip Tuesday: Finding the time for meaningful comprehension lessons

In her book, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading, Cris Tovani shows how teachers can expand on their content  expertise to provide instruction students need to understand specific technical and narrative tets. In this week’s Quick Tip, Cris talks about what teachers need to think about when faced with the decision of what to give up in order to make time for more meaningful comprehension lessons.

Not Having Our Cake and Eating It Too
I know the biggest issue for any high school teacher thinking about making changes or additions to the curriculum is time. I hear this from almost every high school teacher I’ve met with over the last few years. What we’re being asked to do is almost impossible. We’re being asked to teach ridiculous amounts of material. We’re being asked to teach kids how to read and write and think in sophisticated ways, and we’re given a very, very short time in which to do it. Something has got to give.

An English teacher recently said to me, “I want my kids to read eight novels, but they’re not doing it. What should I do?” I don’t know if he was just expressing frustration or asking me for an easy solution, but I don’t have one to give. My reply to teachers with these concerns and frustrations is this: I want to lose 30 pounds and eat chocolate cake all the time. It’s not going to happen. I have to decide if I can eat chocolate cake once a month, or cut back in a different way to lose weight.

It’s a trade-off. Only you can decide whether it is worth giving up some content for the time it takes to design comprehension instruction that means something to your students. If you don’t value the thinking strategies, you won’t give up content. If teaching kids to memorize what is in the textbook is most important to you, then this type of work won’t be very successful.

We are also putting pressure on ourselves to cover vast amounts of content. Many state standards don’t tell us that we have to teach certain novels in English classes. State standards don’t always specify what years of U.S. history we have to cover in the history curriculum. Many students will dutifully complete any strategy assignment from a teacher. After all, that’s how I found myself one night facing a desk covered with sticky notes and banal comments. But that doesn’t mean the assignment truly has any value for students, or is pushing them to think harder as readers.

I don’t know if teachers can work any harder than they’re already working, so we’ve got to find ways to make students carry more of the thinking load in our classrooms. As I walk out of school with my colleagues at the end of each day, we’re all tired. We’re carrying heavy bags of books and papers, and our shoulders are slumped.

Meanwhile, our students bound past us to the parking lot, running and jumping down the steps two at a time, full of energy. I once heard someone say, “School should not be a place where young people go to watch old people work.” We’ve got to figure out how to work smarter, because what we’re being asked to do is really a challenge.

A young teacher from my district recently came to visit my classroom. He had told his teaching teammate he was coming in to see me teach. His teammate had read some of my work and said, “Take a lot of notes and find out what she does that’s supposedly so great.” This young teacher shared that request with me. He then smiled and said, “You’re really not doing anything great. What you’re doing is something I can take back and do in my classroom.” Then he got a bit flustered and his face turned red, because he had said something that might be perceived as unkind.

I took his words as a compliment. What I’m doing is not unique or revolutionary. I use simple principles of good teaching to design comprehension lessons, activities, and materials. I give students models, time to practice, and time to think. It’s common sense, and a lot of it comes from my own process as a reader.

What Works

1. Ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” and “How will it help students think, read, or write more thoughtfully about my content?”

Teaching Point: Good readers use reading, writing, and talk to deepen their understanding of content.

2. Remember that strategies are only options for thinking. One comprehension tool is not more important than another. There is no specific order, sequence, or template for introducing strategies to students.

Teaching Point: Good readers have a variety of ways to think about text. They can make connections, ask questions, infer, and visualize, as well as sift and sort the value of different pieces of information.

3. Ask yourself as the expert of the content and the best reader in the class: “Is this activity authentic?” Would a mathematician, scientist, historian, or artist ever read in ways that approximate what you are asking of your students? If not, how could you make the activity more genuine?

Teaching Point: Good readers don’t need end-of-the-chapter questions or isolated skill sheets. They ask their own questions, based upon their need for a deeper understanding of specific aspects of the text.

4. Don’t isolate strategy instruction into discrete, individual activities from day to day. Plan lessons based on student work from the previous day, using student response as a way to analyze how thoughtfully kids are approaching text.

Teaching Point: Good readers reread and return to text to build and extend their knowledge of specific concepts, or to enhance their enjoyment of texts they have enjoyed previously.

1 comment July 21st, 2009

Quick Tip Tuesday: How to model note taking

This week’s Quick Tip comes from one of Tony Stead’s books, Reality Checks: Teaching Reading Comprehension with Nonfiction, K-5. “In Lisa Elias Moynihan’s third-grade classroom at the Manhattan New School many of our learners wrestled with recalling and reciting all the information they read,” writes Tony. Students often just copied the text they read as a way of dealing with the massive amounts of information they came in contact with. Tony and Lisa came up with a way to model the process of note taking to help these fluent readers develop the layers of thinking and understanding this skill requires.

Lisa and I had been experimenting with ways to help our learners take notes and decided that the first step was to demonstrate the strategies we use. We knew that for children to be successful with this, they first needed to learn how to deconstruct text, then use their notes to reconstruct.

As part of a unit on animals, we used a book titled Creatures of the Night to demonstrate this process. We used a retelling web to demonstrate how we selected key words and phrases to help us remember relevant information. We broke the whole-class mini-lessons into four parts as outlined below, and did each in a different sitting so that we did not overload the children with too much information at one time. I believe this is a major reason why learners struggle with processing demonstrated information: we never take the learning apart and concentrate on small, manageable pieces. The common cry of “But I’ve shown them how to take notes and they can’t do it” is a reflection of our teaching practices rather than children’s cognitive abilities. Attempting to demonstrate everything in one sitting only frustrates and overwhelms the majority of our learners.

Session 1: Teacher Modeling—How to Deconstruct and Reconstruct Information
During this first session we knew it was important to establish the purpose of the whole-class mini-lessons so that the children understood how note taking could help them as readers of informational texts. Our next step was to show them how we achieved this goal through thinking aloud so that children could hear and learn from our thought processes.

Tony: I’ve noticed that often when you read nonfiction, you find it hard to remember all the information the author has told you. Would that be true?
Rosania: I find it hard to because there is so much and after I put the book down, I kind of forget.
Tess: That always happens to me, and then when Lisa calls us to a conference, and says to us, “So what did you find out about” from whatever it is we read and I just look at her and think I don’t know. I forgot most of it.
Tony: That’s what Lisa and I have noticed, so we thought we’d show you one way to help remember some of the information. Would that help?

There is a chorus of yes’s from the children.

Tony: Great! I’m going to use this book Creatures of the Night because we’ve been looking at night creatures as part of our unit of study. We’ll be able to use some of this information for our class report. But before I show you how I take notes so that I can remember the information presented by the author, I need to ask you why I don’t just copy the author’s words.
CJ: Because they’re not your words. It’s a bit like cheating.
Tony: Talk to me more about this.
CJ: You need to be able to talk about it yourself.
Marielle: Yeah, CJ’s right. Just because you copied them down doesn’t mean you understand them.
Tony: That makes so much sense. I’m going to start by just reading this section to you about how creatures of the night taste their way at night.

I then read them the following from page 10 of the book:

Tasting Their Way
A few nocturnal creatures use their sense of taste to help them survive. As catfish swim along the bottom of rivers, using feelers called barbels, they can taste tiny particles of a food source upstream. A snake’s tongue “tastes” the air. By flicking the tongue out to collect small particles, the cottonmouth viper can pick up the scent of a mate or an enemy.

Tony: Now I need to read this information again. This will help me think more deeply about what I have read.

I read it again.

Tony: Now I need to stop and think about what ideas and facts are important for me to remember. I’m going to use a retelling web to help me. Let me see, I think I want to write down the word survive because this is an important word. It is the main idea of this page. I am also going to write the words catfish, feelers, barbels, and water. I’m putting an arrow from survive to these four words because I want to remember that a catfish that lives in water survives by using its barbels to taste. I’m writing the word feelers next to barbells in case I forget what they are because this is a new word for me. Now over here I’m writing the words snake, tongue/flicking, small particles, and enemy. This will remind me that snakes taste the air by flicking their tongues and tasting particles in the air. The word enemy will remind me that this helps them know if an enemy is nearby. Now I’m going to put the book away and have a try at retelling the information using just my organizer. This will help me say things in my own words. Okay, here I go. Let me tell you about night creatures and how they use taste to help them survive. The catfish that lives in water has feelers. These are called barbels, and the catfish uses these to taste food in the water. Snakes taste by flicking their tongues. They can sense when there is food or an enemy just by using their tongues.

I went back to the text and reread what the author had said and asked the children what they noticed about my retelling. They were impressed by my abilities to retell using the organizer, but Michael wanted to know why I didn’t use the word mate on either my organizer or in my retelling. This brought a few giggles but also lots of confusion, because obviously many of the children had no idea what this meant. I had intentionally made no reference to this word on my organizer for obvious reasons, but children miss nothing. They awaited my reply with anticipation, eager to see how I would wiggle my way out of this one. I simply told them that I didn’t think it was that important and moved quickly to the next teaching point, giving them little chance to reply. Thankfully this strategy worked, and I found myself breathing sighs of relief as I moved into the next part of the demonstration.

Having successfully avoided the subject of reproduction, I invited Lisa, the classroom teacher, to have a try at this strategy using a different page of the text. Having the children watch multiple demonstrations is always advantageous because it gives them time to process and think more deeply about what has been initially demonstrated. The librarian or a second adult, such as a parent, in the classroom is a wonderful resource to tap when attempting to show multiple demonstrations by adults. I concluded the session by reflecting on what we had learned about note taking and charted the children’s responses. (See the steps below.) I am a great believer in not only taking time for reflection at the conclusion of a demonstration but also recording thoughts and understandings so that learners have a point of reference for future
engagements.

Ideas for Taking Notes When Reading Nonfiction
■ Make sure you read the text at least twice so that you really understand what the author has said.
■ Write down key words or phrases that you think are important on a retelling web.
■ Put the text away.
■ Using only the retelling web, try to retell the information.
■ If you have problems retelling, look at the text again and see what extra words you need to include to help you remember.

Add comment April 14th, 2009

Quick Tip Tuesday: Framework for a successful mini-lesson

In the final chapter of their book, Teaching for Deep Comprehension, Linda Dorn and Carla Soffos focus on mini-lessons. They discuss the drawbacks of standardized, scripted lessons some schools use and some professional development materials provide. Instead, Linda and Carla provide a framework for a successful mini-lesson in this chapter, leaving it up to teachers to provide their own language to engage their students.

The Framework of a Mini-Lesson

The success of a mini-lesson is grounded in the teacher’s knowledge of the reading process as it relates to the students’ ability to apply strategic behaviors for comprehending the author’s message. The purpose of a mini-lesson is to enable students to accomplish a particular goal with assistance from the teacher. The teacher closely observes the group, makes mental notes of students who need extra help, and plans for ways to scaffold these students in small groups or individual conferences

The first step in conducting a reading workshop is to introduce a mini-lesson. The teacher uses books from the classroom library to demonstrate how authors craft their texts to support the reader’s comprehension. Prior to any mini-lesson, the students should have heard the book during read-aloud time; this previous experience with the book will give them a meaningful context for studying the strategy that will be introduced. Teachers should use a variety of texts in mini-lessons so that students can learn how to apply strategies for different types of texts. The teacher gathers all the students in a group and presents a brief and explicit teaching demonstration, usually making use of good literature, literature, which provides the basis for thinking out loud and demonstrating the strategy being taught. Typically, mini-lessons are approximately fifteen minutes long; longer mini-lessons run the risk of degenerating into a focus on items instead of a strategic process for problem solving. A mini-lesson should leave memorable traces in the minds of the students, enabling them to recall the important points of the lesson with ease. The mini-lesson follows a pattern within the workshop format. The workshop begins in a small group with the mini-lesson, proceeds to independent practice, and ends with a time for sharing.

This framework is compatible with a gradual release model, which begins with a high degree of teacher support and ends with a high degree of student independence.

Step 1: Review anchor chart of comprehension strategies.
The workshop mini-lesson begins with a review of comprehension strategies from the anchor chart. As comprehension strategies are introduced and discussed, they are added to the anchor chart. This part of the workshop generally takes two or three minutes.

Step 2: Model the process.
The second step of the mini-lesson is to model the comprehension strategy being introduced. To do this, the teacher uses a think-aloud process with a mentor book—an appropriate text, generally from a previous read-aloud, that will help students notice and apply a particular comprehending behavior. The teacher preselects a particular segment from the mentor text to use as the think-aloud model, then reads the text aloud in class, stopping at three or four strategic points to describe his or her thought processes. At appropriate places, the teacher might solicit brief comments from the class, maintaining the focus on the strategy at all times. This step generally lasts eight to ten minutes.

Step 3: Provide guided practice.
The third step is to have the students apply the strategy with teacher guidance. Without guided practice, students might find the model useless; in any case, it would be quickly forgotten. Guided practice is the step that makes the model meaningful and enables students to see the connection to
their own learning. This step generally takes about ten minutes.

Step 4: Provide independent practice.
Next, the class moves beyond the mini-lesson to independent practice. Students must have opportunities to transfer their knowledge to different problem solving situations; otherwise, they become dependent on a specific context for activating a strategy. Although guided practice and independent practice are complementary processes, they involve different degrees of processing power. During guided practice, students apply a specific strategy with the goal of testing it in context; during independent practice, students must apply the single strategy in concert with other strategies, thus promoting deeper comprehension.

Step 5: Sharing.
The fifth step, sharing, occurs at the end of the reading workshop. Allowing a time for sharing serves two purposes: (1) it gives students a chance to share their comprehending processes with the class, and (2) it allows the teacher to assess the students’ learning. This part of the reading workshop generally lasts about ten minutes.

2 comments March 3rd, 2009

Quick Tip Tuesday: Connecting movement and comprehension

In Chapter 4 of their book, Starting with Comprehension, authors Andie Cunningham and Ruth Shagoury examine how using movement, mind pictures, and metaphors with young learners can help improve their comprehension. “Many young children still struggle with speaking about what is going on in their minds,” the authors argue, so movement is a natural way for children to express themselves, to reenact scenes from books, and to communicate what they know.

Comprehension Through Movement

My students don’t always use drawing and writing to comprehend texts; they also benefit from using their bodies and movement to make meaning. Many young children still struggle with speaking about what is going on in their minds. When students use movement to express ideas, we eliminate the need for fluency with words and allow them to communicate what they know using a different language. It is my job to guide my students to find ways to help them unlock and articulate what they want to say and how they want to say it – to find a voice in our literacy work. Reading comprehension through movement is an integral part of my reading workshop.

Years ago, when I was still teaching physical movement, I realized that body language is a crucial communication tool for young learners. I saw that for some young learners, speaking can be a tremendous challenge. In an attempt to understand those learners better, I also explored what a movement workshop might look like in physical education. Designed with intentions similar to reading and writing workshops, I connected movement with comprehension. In our twice-a-week classes, I read short picture books, then invited students to make sense of the book with their bodies and draw what was most important to them in their movements.

In the midst of my exploration with the comprehension strategies in the movement world, I had an enormous aha: I realized that students speak a language when they move. In my kindergarten classroom now, we use physical movement to make sense of what we read; it’s another tool as valid as conversation, visual representation, or writing. I still see students speaking a language when they move, just as I did when I was a physical education teacher.

Here are some questions I ask myself that help me make informal assessments as students move in response to a text:

• What parts of the story are children drawn to?
• Do they understand and respond to each other’s movements during sharing?
• Do they move to something in the book or something unrelated to the story?
• How does the moving seem to affect their understanding?
• Who is not moving and what is keeping them from doing so?

The Castle Builder is one example of using our bodies to make sense of text. Although I do not incorporate movement with each read-aloud, once or twice a month I offer an opportunity to move like the book. Depending on the strategy, the book we are reading, and the mood of the class, prompts might include the following: “Look carefully and see which picture you’ll move like.” “Move like a piece in the book.” “Move to your questions about the book.” “Move to the part of the book where your thinking changed.”

I usually pick one prompt and use it over and over again in the beginning of the year to make sure they understand what I mean. For instance, “move like the book” was the perfect invitation for one class of students. When I said this prompt, they all stood up and moved, excited to join their experience of reading the book with moving their bodies.

I find that some students — and some classes — connect more with the movement piece than others. Some books work better than others. To find a good “movement” book, I ask myself what parts I would move to and how. For instance, when reading The Castle Builder, I noticed a dozen ways that I would naturally move to the text. However, when reading The Hickory Chair, a book I love, I realized that moving to it would be difficult for me. It is not the quality of the story that dictates how “moveable” it is. Rather, the action communicated through the story is the crucial element. When the book lends itself to physical movement and we are genuinely interested in the book and its message, our physical engagement is much more significant.

Add comment January 27th, 2009