Two Important New Learnings: Video Analysis

In chapter five, by Cris Tovani, “Why Am I Reading This” explains how educators need to establish a clear reading instructional plan. In order to accomplish understanding students need to concentrate on main ideas from the readings. Tovani explains that it is vital for teachers to model how students should hold their thinking or slow down their reading. Throughout the chapters she gives examples as question strategies, highlighting text, or summarizing key points. As this will benefit students in their reading assignment. Tovani also explains throughout the chapter that teachers should model thinking aloud. This strategy will benefit students on how to negotiate difficult text.

One of the first things that this author would do is to teach students how to make connections while reading. When students make personal connections with what they are reading by using their prior knowledge, it helps them to retain information. There are three main types of connections we make while reading text; we can make connections to what we are reading and our own experiences in life, we can make connections from one book to another (like reading a Nancy Drew book and reading a Trixie Belden book), and we can make connections to what we are reading and things that are going on in the world around us. By helping Jose learn to make connections while he reads, Jose will be able to more readily remember what he has read and make sense of it (Comprehension Strategies, n.d.).

Introduction: Ways of Reading can be difficult to understand at times, but if you break it down it becomes easier to understand. Some of the quotes written by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky can be used to look at the greater picture and do not just apply to reading and writing. Three quotes really stuck out to me while I was reading the introduction of this book. It was not just because they were great advice on reading and writing, but because they can also be applied to everyday life or certain situations in life. There are lessons to be learned in this introduction such as challenging others and students, understanding that there are different interpretations of things, and finding the meaning as you go along.

Strategic readers monitor their thinking and recognize when errors are committed but they also know what strategy to use to correct the error. For example, they may need to reread the text to make sense, use context clues to understand unfamiliar words. No matter what the obstacle is, a fix-up strategy is applied. The K-W-L is a well- known teaching technique to assist in the monitoring strategy. The K-W-L chart provides the teacher and students opportunity to participate in discussions before, during, and after reading. It helps the student to ask and answer questions, identify the main idea and detail, and summarize the text (Santoro, Baker, Fien, Smith, and Chard, 2016 p. 284).

Within their table groups which had been set up deliberately by the teacher to get children with similar reading levels together, the children had to explore different features of the book. One group would work on questions they wanted to ask the characters, another would take in turns to read the book and highlight words they did not understand or had trouble reading. Tennant (2014: 165) tells us that the text used during guided reading should be challenging but the children should still be capable of decoding it. I observed this to be true during my school placement because the children were able to show a wide understanding of what was happening within the book however when they were asked questions about how the character was feeling or what they think would happen next, they took a bit more time to try and get an understanding of this. Tennant (2016) states that “the teacher’s task is to deepen the reader’s understanding of the text by initially ascertaining what sense the reader has made of the text just after having read it”. Tennant’s statement can be evaluated as useful for teaching a good level of guided reading because teachers have to broaden the children’s knowledge of the text. My own observations seemed to be a success because each group was paired with an adult and each adult was drawing out information from pupils by asking questions that got them thinking. Not only were they getting an idea of what children already knew about the text but they

Teachers can help improve student reading comprehension by generating questions that get students to think about what the text means, and by

When Grace was asked comprehension questions during our first tutoring sessions, she was able to correctly answer comprehension questions by looking back at the pictures, but not based on what she had read. To improve her comprehension, tutoring sessions were used to help Grace become a purposeful and active reader. Before reading any books, she was asked to look at the cover of the book and to make connections with the book to things in her own life. She was then asked questions about the book and asked to make predictions on what she thought would happen in the book. After reading the book, Grace was asked to confirm or refute her predictions. Through working together to understand the books, making connections to the books, and looking for predictions, Grace is now able read a book with few pictures and correctly answer comprehension questions correctly more than 80% of the

The method by which I was taught to read literature effectively and discerningly similar to the formulaic pattern played out in the introduction to chapter five in the Brown and Yarborough text. The steps were to identify the setting, primary theme, characters, common motifs, and illusions to outside works. From there I was left to identify the authors intent. I was told that each work of literature was a puzzle with a simple solution, and it was the readers duty to find it. I was fortunate enough to take AP Lit my junior year and, in doing so, learned how to properly read and interpret text. Often enough, I would find myself identifying subtextual themes before noting the truth of the text itself. My largest downfall as a reader was falling

Can you identify some of the strategies we learned in the first lesson to help us with our comprehension? As good readers, it is important for us to be able to identify the main idea,

Our group chose to research reading comprehension development and how to teach our young readers how to gain knowledge from text. We have observed our students relying on their background knowledge rather than acquiring meaning from the text. We would like to learn more about the resources that are available to help our students develop comprehension strategies.

Since the intervention I was researching didn’t have any studies completed to determine their success, I investigated approaches to teaching comprehension to see if they at least align with best practices. As an instructional leader, I will need to have a current understanding of best practices. In the future, I will make sure I continue to read scholarly articles and professional books.

What have you learned about the act of reading and interpreting a text/story/ How have you grown as a reader and critical thinker? Provide examples from both the text and the class.

Since this is a topic that I did not learn a lot of information about from observing I felt that the best place for me to gain knowledge on the topic is through my textbook. In my classroom I will follow B-D-A. Before, during, and after reading (B-D-A) is a proven way to teach content and reading while maximizing student learning potential (Cooter and Reutzel, 2015. P.501). The first step is to complete the activities that are done before reading. My students will be taught vocabulary in all of the content areas and once the vocabulary will be displayed on a word wall to help the students remember and familiarize themselves with the vocabulary. A good way to gain students comprehension is through previewing the text before reading which helps

In the 1970s and 1980s, comprehension strategy instruction became the center of most research. What the research had discovered was that good readers apply comprehension strategies with almost every reading task, where poor readers use fewer strategies. A great point is that “comprehension strategies can be taught, and strategy instruction will lead to improved comprehension for all students” (Block and Pressley, 2003; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 200; Paris et al., 1991). The main goal of strategy instruction is to create self-regulated learners who can take their learned comprehension

Reading comprehension at a knowledge level is a complex task. Reading comprehension instruction that attempts to move students beyond the knowledge level to a place of true understanding is daunting at best and not something that can be left to guess work. A review of current literature in