There are common practices that we see often from school to school and district to district – some that serve our students well and some that we do because we’ve always done it that way. I’d like to take a minute to unpack comprehension instruction and how we might need to adjust what it looks like in the classroom. Here’s what we currently see the teacher and students doing during comprehension instruction:
The Teacher:
• Lots of “teacher talk”
• Students watching teacher practice the skill
• Calling on one student at a time to answer questions
• Simple, “right there” questions or prompts
• Waiting until the end of the instruction to ask questions
• Explaining the strategy and moving into application
The Student:
• Responding in single word utterances
• Memorizing strategies
• Forgetting to apply strategies across curriculum
• Watching the teacher as s/he discusses the strategy
Here’s what it SHOULD look like (says the most recent research studies)
Teachers organize instruction in routine ways that:
• Reinforce conceptions of reading as a meaning making process
• Provide guided support for making sense while students are engaged in acts of reading
• Shift responsibility for thinking and making sense of texts to students themselves through guided supports
• Sequence discipline-specific inquiry tasks and the reading of a range of discipline focused texts in ways that build knowledge and dispositions over time
• Focus classroom talk on how students make sense of texts and how they carry out thinking tasks
Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenge of Adolescent Literacy, 2010
What are you doing well and what adjustments do you need to make?