Strategies for Comprehension for Middle and High School – A Parallel Experience

Jane Cook’s Notes from Presentation at the American International College Literacy Conference

by Cris Tovani, author of I Read It But I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers and Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?: Content Comprehension, Grades 6-12

Cris Tovani is a full-time high school English teacher in Denver. She believes that reading comprehension is everyone’s issue and everyone’s job. Teaching kids how to think when they read is a challenging job.

Cris does readers’ workshop for 9th, 10th and 11th graders. They are “double-dipped” to her after their English classes. The other half of her job is as a Literacy Coach, helping kids be better readers in content areas. Her goal is to eliminate the need for the remedial reading classes. She found that the kids “read it but didn’t get it”. They were fluent decoders but they weren’t comprehending what they read. As a Literacy Coach, Cris tells her colleagues that they are the best readers of their content and they need to figure out how they read their content. Then they need to model and teach the kids the strategies that they use as a fluent reader of their content. Cris calls this a parallel experience.

The way people think about text doesn’t change as they get older. What changes is the sophistication of the text. She has had to redefine her definition of reading. Kids think reading is barking at print. Unless you have options for thinking about text and some strategies for comprehension, you’re not reading. She wants kids to know that reading is thinking. She shared a phony photo and talked about how she increased her wait time to get the kids talking about the photo. She captured their thinking. Then she gave them an article and did the same thing.

Watch the way you read. Name that thinking. Go back to your own process as a reader. When I watch the way I read, I realize…

-  questioning

-  connecting

-  inferring

-  determining importance/making connections

Figuring out the “How” of Reading Comprehension Instruction (see handout)

-  purpose determines what’s important

-  when you’re confused, there are signals:

¨  mind wanders

¨  think about more interesting things

Don’t teach the reading, teach the reader.

There’s a big difference between thinking when you read and regurgitating what you’ve read. Sparknotes.com is an online version of Cliff Notes. Using Cliff Notes is repeating somebody else’s pre-thought thoughts. Kids need to practice constructing their own meaning.

Figure out what your kids struggle with. Then figure out how you deal with that same struggle and then teach your kids what you do.

When I watch the way I read, I realize…

·  sometimes I need help getting into a book

I need support structures in place to help me:

·  some background knowledge

·  knowledge about the way the piece is structured

·  a way to hold my thinking (there’s a time and place for sticky notes-it’s got to be to help students as readers or to help the teacher assess students as readers)

·  a purpose for the reading

·  time to read so I can get “into” the book (kids need 35-40 minutes every day) (she started at 7 minutes with her reluctant readers)

·  trust that the author will write a good story

Implications for instruction: If I need these support structures through a book, certainly my students do, too.

When you watch the way you read, you need to find unfamiliar text so that you can approach it the way your students do.

PM – Strategies for Comprehension for Grades 6-8 – A Parallel Experience

Cris Tovani (continued)

Cris introduced the Concentration of Medication in the Bloodstream math word problem which was a released 8th grade CMT item. It contained data, a table and blank graph (see below) with a written word problem asking us to solve for and plot the concentration of certain medications in the bloodstream. She asked us: How are you going about solving the problem? Then she asked us to name our thinking as we solved the problem.

t / C
1
1.125 / 0 / 0 / 0
2.0
2 / .5 / .89 / .9
3
4.375 / 1.0 / 1 / 1
4
9 / 1.5 / .69 / .7
5
16.625 / 2.0 / .44 / .4
7
43.875 / 2.5 / .30 / .3
6
28 / 3.0 / .21 / .2
3.5 / .16 / .2

Implications for instruction:

·  read the whole problem and see what they’re asking you to solve for

·  make sure kids understand formulas and why they put numbers and letters together (+3)

·  teach kids how to convert fractions to decimals and why we need to do that

·  the beginning reading sets the context and allows you to check the validity

·  reading is problem solving

Below is a high school math teacher’s charting of her thinking for this problem:

Fact / Thinking
Compare 2 graphs
Formula / How do I do this? Do I need a calculator? Where do the numbers go? Do I have enough information to solve it?
Graphing / Where does the formula come from? Which is X and which is Y axis?

Until you know the kids, it’s hard to know what they are struggling with. Often though, there are recurring themes from one year to the next. She suggested that you pick 2 or 3 things that you’re going to keep hitting throughout the year.

“Thoughtful reading is only rarely a matter of flashing insight. More often it is a gradual, groping process.” Denny Palmer Wolf, Harvard

If I value comprehension, I might have to…

·  redefine my definition of reading and

·  rethink my delivery

Ways to Help Students "Hold Their Thinking"

Source: Cris Tovani, 2001

  1. Give students a specific purpose for their reading and writing. Give them something to look for and write as they read. Model how readers mark text and use sticky notes.
  1. Show students how to use a Double Entry Journal. The left side of the page holds words lifted from the text. The right side of the text holds the readers' thoughts about the words.

·  Confusing parts in the text

·  Personal connections to the piece

·  Places indicating character traits

·  Reasons for an event

·  Steps in a process

·  Words evoking questions

·  Interesting facts that support thinking

Share with your students what you do to help yourself remember what you read. Perhaps you write in the margins or maybe you jot notes to yourself. Notice how you as an "expert reader" remembers what you read and share that with your students.