10 Ways to Support Reading Challenging Text

It's summer time. A time off for teachers. A time to hit the reset button.

For me, it has been a summer of reflection and idea creation to make my upcoming year more cohesive and productive. Several personal and professional life events made last year more difficult that I would have liked and I am trying to make as many proactive steps as possible to avoid those downfalls this year. I also am very aware of the fact that I will be writing my thesis during the academic year and can only hope that adds to my experience, not subtract from it.

As per advice of my professor of my current class, I recently started browsing the NJDOE website. It led me to NJcore.org. This led me to Clark County School District Wiki-teacher page. The great thing about being a teacher in this day and age is that there are resources everywhere! That meaning that creating lessons plans is like a virtual game of 52-pick-up with everything scattered on the ground below leaving the teacher to put the pieces together in order for it to make sense for her students. As I began sifting through the resources I came across a webcast of Dr. Timothy Shanahan titled, "10 Ways to Support Reading Challenging Text."

So at 12:00am on a Tuesday I decide to watch what Dr. Shanahan has to say.

Anybody who has tried to teach reading knows how many different strategies there are to teach and how it is hard to pick just the right one for that particular lesson that aligns with curriculum but also teaches students the most effective way to read. Dr. Shanahan's list of 10 are as follows:

#1- Clarify Purpose for Reading
Why are we reading this? What do we hope to gain? More powerful than a simple prediction

#2- Build and Access Prior Knowledge
More of a focus on emotional reactions and inferences. Finding the key knowledge needed. Do we need to know content/facts or how a character reacts to a situation?

#3- Provide Apprentice Text
Start with an easier text but always move up to the more difficult text. Never allow a student to get just a little bit of information even though it is on their reading level. Challenge them to make connections from the apprentice text. Introduce easier text prior to harder text. For example, Jim Murphy's Great Fire prior to Blizzard. Make your students be successful- let them know it is going to be hard! It is not okay to just give them the simpler text. Apprentice text should be the stepping stones of content. Needs to be the same intellectual challenge. (7th Grade stepping stones- Touching Spirit Bear, The Outsiders, The Giver, etc.)

#4- Build Text Reading Fluency
It is not always the ideas that are hard, it is the text that is difficult. Students may have a hard time processing the language. He commented on Read First schools (need to look into this). Teach where to pause. Fluency practice with repeated reading, paired reading. I need more training in this area.

#5- Teach Vocabulary
We focus on decodable language first or general academic language, but the things that get in the way of comprehension are often metaphors, homophones, homonyms, idioms, etc. The example given was a science word of turbine. If we just teach turbine without teaching generate, the student will still have no concept of the work turbine. Ask, what words block understanding/comprehension? Teach them in addition. The vocabulary words chosen by editors focus on decoding and/or concepts. Focus on phrases, pragmatics, and key general terms. Make it a part of every day language. Additional idea- send these everyday words home to be used, even in junior/high school.

#6- Provide Help with Sentence Structure
Cause and phrase analysis, subject verb agreement, complex punctuation (split quotes)

#7- Provide help with Cohesion
Connection among ideas, pronoun relationships, WHO IS HE?, Anaphoric relationships, dealing with ellipses, substitutions, conjunctions. Finding out WHO IS THE SPEAKER? Repeating the subject is boring, so writers don't use it, but it sometimes makes it hard to interpret who is speaking.

#8- Guide use of Text Structure
How writer's organize their thinking, USE GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS, find patterns.
Idea- newspapers are great for this. Structure helps determine the importance.

#9- Guide Students to Recognize Author's Tone
Tone is subtle. Teach it through different points of view.

#10- Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies
-Preview text, activate prior knowledge, how to set purpose, monitor comprehension, ask/answer questions, summarize- BUT DON'T MAKE IT A ROUTINE. Teach students to monitor their own comprehension and be okay with no understanding it. Make the strategies focus on the text and allow students to make this a part of their practice. Reciprocal teaching EVERY time is not effective. Prediction isn't always the best for every text. Change it up! Make it meaningful.

#Bonus- Keep Kid Motivated
Make them see growth and gains.

Other key points that I liked from his presentation:
-Having a group of teachers read a common text ahead of time to discuss the important aspects that need to be taught. Teachers create achievement, not the curriculum.
-Stop teaching failure first! Give kids a chance to be successful.
-When you get lost, you go further. (Example, long distance running) Result: get stronger. Compared to weight training and other long distance activities. Make kids stretch.
-Don't avoid what is difficult. Push past what you already know and go further.
-There is not ONE right way to teach reading, there are MANY right ways because each text is different (like every person you meet).

Summary: Reading is a multi-layered task that takes much cognitive ability. It is linked to our speaking and writing skills. I need to strengthen teaching fluency to students and focusing on one strategy to teacher explicitly so my students can eventually do them implicitly. Also, I need to create stratified reading goals so that students can continue to grow no matter what level they are at and not feel like they are unsuccessful. What system can I use instead of 1-4? How can students gain their skills, see their progress, chart their growth, and find meaning in their reading?

What have you used in the past? Has it worked? How did you document growth?