March 2010
| Volume 67 | Number 6
Reading to Learn
Marge Scherer
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Thomas Newkirk
To truly comprehend and appreciate texts, we need to read more slowly. Schools should provide a counterbalance to our increasingly hectic digital environment, where so many of us read and write in abbreviated messages and through clicks of the mouse. To help students reclaim the acoustical properties of written language and appreciate the passages that inspire them, teachers can use a variety of strategies that promote slower, in-depth reading. Strategies include memorizing, reading aloud, attending to the beginnings of books and stories, rethinking time limits on reading tests, annotating pages, reading poetry, and savoring meaningful passages.
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Connie Juel, Heather Hebard, Julie Park Haubner and Meredith Moran
Understanding how to think like a scientist, writer, or historian can provide students with direction as they read particular texts. Disciplinary habits of mind can extend students' reading comprehension by providing scaffolds for thinking; they can promote media literacy by suggesting a standard for evidence in a given arena. Strategies like visualizing, summarizing, and questioning as well as entry points like character analysis and composition help readers comprehend literature. Readers using a scientific lens hone in on evidence in a text whereas those using a historical lens clarify who the author is and why he or she is taking this point of view. Teachers can decide which lens to adopt for a text by taking into account the text's message and vocabulary load, thinking about what students might discuss, and clarifying the discipline involved and the thinking specific to that discipline.
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Gay Ivey
Ivey argues that the texts we ask students to read in school are an important aspect of literacy-based learning. Instruction in reading strategies may help students comprehend the limited, factual content offered by traditional textbooks. But "in this strategies-crazed era in literacy policy and practice, we may be missing a more fundamental challenge—identifying and making available the texts that inspire students to care about learning new information." Ivey offers examples of how teachers can use such texts at various grade levels and in different subject areas to encourage students to become lifelong readers and critical thinkers.
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Cris Tovani
In a training session on technology, a high school English teacher is dismayed to find herself grouped with others who, like herself, don't have a high level of confidence in technology. The experience gives her a taste of what struggling readers must continually face and leaves her with four insights: (1) beliefs affect effort, and effort affects success; (2) learners need both time and experts to improve; (3) using past assessments to judge students' abilities in reading is an unsound practice because it fails to take into account what students have learned in the interim; and (4) because students read different kinds of texts at different reading levels, we need to be far more flexible in the way we group them.
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Donalyn Miller
Studies have shown that voracious reading improves students' academic performance in a variety of realms. In this article, 6th grade teacher Donalyn Miller explains how she has helped her students become committed readers. Her students are required to read at least 40 books each year in a variety of genres and styles. She gives them time to read every day and teaches them to find hidden time in the school day to read. Instead of teaching whole-class novels, she allows students to choose their own books. To build and assess their comprehension skills, conducts book talks and facilitates small-group discussions, and her students share their reading experiences with enthusiasm.
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Kelly Gallagher
The "elephant in the room" when we talk about preparing critical thinkers for the 21st century, Gallagher believes, is U.S. students' lack of reading proficiency and their general disinclination to read. Gallagher's provocative argument is that a significant factor behind the decline of reading in young people is a set of practices schools engage in (with the hope of raising test scores) that actually kill students' love of reading. He calls these practices readicide. He discusses four trends in instruction that encourage shallow thinking and reading and limit both the amount and quality of true reading students engage in: (1) Schools value the development of test-takers more than the development of readers; (2) Schools limit authentic reading experiences; (3) Teachers overteach books; and (4) Teachers underteach books. Gallagher suggests approaches and strategies, drawn from his work as a high school English teacher, that teachers should try to counteract these trends.
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Cynthia Barry
A librarian and discussion leader uses the Touchstones Discussion Program to introduce middle school students to great texts and promote deep thinking. Readings are drawn from folktales, literature, law, philosophy, history, social sciences, mathematics, and science. The discussions incorporate principles of dialogue for use at any grade level: a communal reading of a text, an exploration of ideas on the basis of inquiry, a cultivated ability to actively listen to others, a respect for differing points of view, a facility in expressing ideas, and an openness to change. As they read closely, pose questions, and probe ideas, students learn to value their voice, respect others' ideas, and become lifelong learners.
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Grant Wiggins
Wiggins's examination of released state test items in Massachusetts, Florida, and Ohio reveals that, in both language arts and mathematics, U.S. students do poorly on questions that demand making inferences, applying knowledge, and drawing conclusions. Through several sample test items, the article demonstrates students' difficulty solving fairly simple questions requiring interpretation and transfer. Wiggins recommends that more states follow the lead of these three in making item-by-item results available. At the district and school levels, he calls for educators to refrain from both test-bashing and test prep. His analysis suggests that a renewed emphasis on teaching for understanding would improve state test scores.
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Joanne K. Olson and Kouider Mokhtari
Teachers often seek to improve students' comprehension of science texts by addressing structural features common to these texts, such as specialized vocabulary or the use of such representations as graphs and charts. Although science teachers can tackle these issues in their science classes, research has also shown that language arts teachers can effectively promote student learning in these areas by addressing these structural features within the language arts curriculum. In the science classroom, teachers can enhance reading and improve science learning by focusing on the following: promoting students' conceptual understanding of fundamental science concepts; organizing instruction so students constructively engage in experiences with science phenomena before reading about them; increasing students' awareness of how information is organized and displayed in science texts; teaching students syntactical structures common to science (such as "If…then"); and enabling students to express their understanding of science by doing science, talking about science, and writing about science, in addition to reading about science.
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Ruth Shagoury
Making connections between a text and the reader's life or experience is at the heart of reading comprehension, Shagoury asserts. Preschool and kindergarten teachers should get students into the habit of looking to books as a place to find life-relevant meaning even before they can actually read. Although researchers like Keene and Zimmerman have identified central strategies for strengthening reading comprehension, early elementary teachers wonder how they can use such strategies with prereaders who have little knowledge of books or even the English language. Shagoury, a researcher who observes literacy instruction in many preschool and kindergarten classrooms, shows how they can. She gives concrete suggestions on how early educators can choose fruitful books to read aloud, encourage reflection, use familiar books to teach text features, bring ELLs' home language into reading instruction, and look for indicators of emerging readers' comprehension skills.
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Ellin Oliver Keene
The author, a leading expert in reading comprehension strategies instruction, describes how teachers in schools across the United States are taking this instructional approach in "exciting new directions." To illustrate how teachers can push students beyond superficial application of comprehension strategies to deeper levels of understanding, she narrates her in-depth conversation with a student named Jacob. She recommends that teachers teach comprehension, not just assess it; give students time to develop their thinking; probe beyond students' initial responses; and consider the desired outcomes of strategy use.
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William G. Brozo and Douglas Fisher
"Studies of effective secondary school reading programs demonstrate one thing clearly: We cannot significantly improve the literacy skills of adolescents without comprehensive staff development," write Brozo and Fisher. In this article, they draw on their work in one rural and one inner-city high school to present five principles to guide such professional development: (1) offer teachers a manageable number of new strategies; (2) move from workshop to classroom; (3) establish forums for teacher empowerment; (4) vary and formats used in staff development; and (5) start with those who are most eager, and then spread the learning to others.
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Bruce Hansen
One of Bruce Hansen's 4th grade students, Kendra, was reading well above grade level. Another, Gerard, was behind. Hansen struggled with how to ensure that both students grew as readers. He wanted all of his students to choose reading as a free-time activity, as Kendra did. He tried reading groups, reading aloud, and sustained silent reading, and each approach met with some success. Most students were taking an interest in reading for pleasure. Hansen wondered, however, if they were actually learning any new skills, which was required in his school's reading program. When Hansen started teaching engaging novels to the whole class, using read-alouds, silent reading, and reading with a partner, he discovered a way he could embed skills instruction into literature lessons, instead of relying on isolated lessons and worksheets. Students across the ability spectrum were able to learn something new while they enjoyed a good book together.
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Robert J. Marzano
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Jane L. David
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William M. Ferriter
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Thomas R. Hoerr
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Larry Lewin
It is high time, Lewin claims, to promote critical thinking and analytic response skills in our students. One activity that leads to more critical thinking—and reading—is teaching students to ask higher-level questions as they read. Lewin describes three question-asking activities that he coaches teachers in using: "Questions to My Teacher" requires each student to generate a question on a specific text and pass that question in to the teacher. The teacher groups all student questions into categories by the complexity of thinking behind each query, and uses those categories to initiate discussion on good questioning. "Sidekick" questions are questions students ask the author of a text directly. The third activity is coaching students in how to ask "skeptical" questions that critique the author's position or formulate an alternative argument.
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Erika Daniels
Many students come to high school without the reading skills they need to succeed in their content-area classes. This article describes a 9th grade intervention class developed by reading support teachers at one urban high school to address this problem. By explicitly teaching such comprehension strategies as monitoring for understanding, summarizing, visualizing, questioning, and predicting, the teachers improved the performance of these struggling adolescent readers.
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Marie Carbo
Every year, about one-third of U. S. public high school students fail to graduate on time. Many of these students give up because of dismal reading skills. Even when adolescents with poor reading skills stay in school, their repeated failure and negative classroom behaviors tend to sap too many effective teachers' energy. The approach and reading instruction strategies developed by Reading Styles can help at-risk adolescent readers make significant gains in reading level in a short period of time. Carbo describes four key interventions at the heart of Reading Styles, which any classroom teacher can implement to some extent: (1) assess students' reading styles and match instruction to those styles; (2) use specially recorded, challenging stories; (3) provide reading choices and high challenges; and (4) allow movement, offer comfortable seating, and use color.
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Jill Ostrow and Jane Wellman
Jane Wellman, a teacher of English language learners, used a true story about some escaped cows as the stimulus for a literary project that connects the classroom to the home. With the help of fellow educator Jill Ostrow, Wellman wrote a short rhythmic story about the cows, created picture books of the story for each of her students, and made a DVD of herself reading the story. The students took the books and DVDs home to share with their families. The project was so well received by students and families that Wellman and Ostrow are developing a series of books and videos about the school and the community.
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Barclay T. Marcell
In a humorous look at the real world of DIBELS testing, an elementary school reading intervention coach chronicles how the focus on fluency (narrowly defined as reading speed) has pushed reading comprehension to the side. Her school uses fluency benchmark scores to identify students as "at risk" or "some-risk" and to provide interventions. But the author has found that ignoring comprehension until a student learns to decode fluently misses the point of the reading process, which should be "an integrated flow of skills and strategies, fueled by motivation."
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Jamie Greene
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Teresa Preston
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