Improving Comprehension

Edgar Dale, author of Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching,  included the following insights into what helps strengthen comprehension:

We remember...

10% of what we read

20 % of what we hear

30% of what we see

50% of what we both see and hear

70% of what we talk about with others

Offering our students guided, structured and purpose driven collaboration opportunites, will help them better understand our reading assignments.

Why Am I Reading This?

 In Cris Tovani’s book, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? she makes some excellent points about what we can do to help our students better understand our classroom reading assignments.  Too often students will not reread an assignment they don’t understand.  We asked them to read pages 34 – 39 and from their perspective, that’s what they did.  They read every word of the assignment.  Did they understand the words that developed phrases into sentences to form concrete ideas?  That wasn’t the assignment.  “Mr. Teacher, you asked me to read, not to understand.”

Perhaps it’s not that blatant, although I think it happens more times than we’d like to admit.  There are plenty of approaches we can use to help our students better understand the reading assignments we give and that’s were Tovani’s insights are helpful. 

The following excerpts are from chapter five, “Why Am I Reading This?”

“It’s funny that we don’t ask of ourselves what we ask of our students.  When we are planning a unit, preparing to teach a new class, or picking up a textbook for the very first time, we don’t expect to master everything in a semester.  Yet we expect our student to master the information in less time than we the experts did.

“If we don’t help students pull out essential information by giving them a purpose for their reading, they will often get lost in the extraneous details.  When we share a clear instructional purpose, we give our students a lens through which to read the piece. For example, a U.S. history teacher may say to his students, ‘By the time you finish reading tonight, I want you to be able to discuss the causes of the Civil War.”  The teacher is not telling students the causes; he is merely giving them a sense of what will be important for tomorrow’s discussion.

Clear instructional purposes often give guidance for how the reader might hold her thinking… A clear instructional purpose can greatly improve a reader’s comprehension, because the reader has an indication of what to read for.

Some teachers think that setting a purpose limits the scope of the students’ reading – that it dumbs down the work and makes it too easy on the kids.  I agree that I am limiting the scope of student reading, but I don’t agree that I am constraining their learning.  When I read new text with unfamiliar content, I need my scope limited.  If it’s not limited, I try to remember everything in the text.  I quickly realize that I can’t do this and soon give up.  When someone gives me something to look for , reading feels less overwhelming.

There are a lot of things that we as teachers can’t control.  But we can control what we ask our kids to do with the information we assign.”

Inspired by this chapter, The Reading Club recommends giving your students a purpose for every reading assignment. Tell them what to look for.  Tell them what kind of information you want them to hold on to by the reading’s close. 

If we assume our students will grasp the important information on their own, what happens when they don’t?  Avoid that confusion by clearly stating what you want your students to do with the information they discover when reading the assignment.  It doesn’t have to be a long, detailed discussion.  Use bullet points, Intelligent Writing Surfaces ©, LCD projectors, Moodle, yellow chalk on green boards.  

How you convey the purpose for the reading assignment matters little.  That you clearly and consistently convey the purpose for the reading assignment matters most.  

Readingly yours,

The Reading Club

Welcome Back!

This year the Reading Club will take a different approach.  For the past two years we have used a variety of methods to improve our students' reading skills. Many teachers have adopted various reading strategies into their students' learning experiences to help them better understand course content.  Thank you for your willingness to try out strategies and explore ways we can help our students become better readers of our content, but more importantly better thinkers and learners.  Please continue using the strategies you think fit your content area.  If you are interested in more strategies, this year's focus will be perfect.

This year the Reading Club will offer ideas you can roll into your classroom.  We'll use this blog to explain the ideas and benefits they proffer.  The Reading Club blog will be like a Wal-Mart for teaching strategies.  We'll throw some strategies on the shelf and you can shop for those you think fit your various classroom needs.

Cris Tovani's text, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading says it all.  It acknowledges the uncertainty of how to teach reading and why it's important - and really not that difficult.  I wish every teacher could read this book.  That's why I applied for a MEEMIC grant that will hopefully put this text into your hands.  I'll let you know about this exciting possibility as soon as MEEMIC announces its grant recipients for 2011 - 2012.

"But teaching strategies for the sake of teaching strategies isn't the goal.  Being able to make connections or ask questions or visualize isn't what matters most.  The only reason to teach kids how to be strategic readers is to help them become more thoughtful about their reading.
Meaning doesn't arrive because we have highlighted text or used sticky notes or written the right words on a comprehension worksheet.  Meaning arrives because we are purposefully engaged in thinking while we read."    - Cris Tovani, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading

Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

I know it's a busy time of year, but when life settles down in a couple of weeks or right before life amps back up in a couple of months, check out this video. It presents interesting connections that readers need to make sense of what they read. 

Reading Club Trifecta

Uno:  Just a reminder to use a vocabulary graphic organizer in your classroom by April 15 to foster critical thinking skills and augment your students' comprehension skills.  The evaluation form is a quick assessment that will help you determine the activity's worth and it will help colleagues learn from your experiences.  You can find the graphic organizers and the evaluation in Faculty Shared: Reading Club: Vocabulary Graphic Organizers.

Zwie: My cousin Posterious has been browbeating me into using e-mail for Reading Club constituents.  Finally, I acquiesced.  Get your Reading Club updates via e-mail as soon as they are posted.  Sign up on the right side of the blog.  Get e-mail updates instantly!  It's just that easy.

Duos: "...if you really teach a kid how to read, which is to say to infer, the student can then take that critical reading lens he’s developed and apply it in important ways to other kinds of materials. He’ll be able to analyze a ballot proposition or a politician’s speech. So in teaching kids to read deeply, you’re really sharpening their ability to read the world." - Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide and Deeper Reading.

Gallagher's insight about the importance of reading bleeds into all content areas.  The hope is that the vocabulary graphic organizers and reading strategies we are using in our classrooms are helping students think deeply, critically and independently in all content areas.

Gallagher discussed his thoughts about the benefit of reading across the content areas in a recent interview for Education Week Teacher Professional Development. Read the entire interview.

Vocabulary thinking skills for all content areas

Here's a great quote from Janet Allen that explains why vocabulary research and development make a difference for students in all content areas.

The Reading Club thinks vocabulary graphic organizers are excellent tools to help all students improve the thinking skills found at the critical/independent level of Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy. 

Please try and use a vocabulary graphic organizer by April 15 and then complete a brief evaluation of the activity.  The Reading Club will post teachers' experiences so we can all gain knowledge and insight in helping our students better comprehend content in all areas.

Let the Reading Club know if you have any questions: Haupt, Kleine, Schlump, Harris, Carson, Brandt

Professional Development: Vocabulary

"Students need strategies they can use, not words they can memorize." - Jim Burke from his book, Reading Reminders: Tools Tips and Techniques

Please bring 5 vocabulary words, your students will discover before June, to Friday's professional development opportunity.  We will experience and apply various vocabulary strategies to these words.  The goal will be to discuss strategies that lend themselves to the learning goal for the unit or daily lesson using those words.


"Students cannot read what they don't understand."  Jim Burke, Reading Reminders: Tools Tips and Techniques

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'"  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

"Knowing what didn't work was easy.  Finding and reading the research related to word knowledge was also not very difficult.   Knowing how to implement that research in effective interesting ways turned out to be the hard part." Baumann and Kameenui. "Research on Vocabulary Instruction: Ode to Voltaire."

"According to some researchers (Baumann and Kameenui 1991) students in grades three totwelve acquire an average of threee thousand new words each year through osmosis or the context that their studies provides." Jim Burke, The English Teacher's Companion

Janet Allen's book, Words, Words, Words can be used in all content areas.  It's a great resource and best of all it's free.  In fact, my cousin Posterous, would chuckle if he knew I was including the link to the book.  Check it out and give it a read if you are looking for strategies to strengthen vocabulary learning.