Comprehension

Hayley Hilgenberg - Jessica Stoneham Diana Kindig - Margaret Wells LeAnn Loft-Brewster - Amber VanCassele

Tentative Agenda
Family Feud 5:00-5:15 PowerPoint 5:15-5:45 Station one 5:45-6:05 Station two 6:05-6:25 Break 6:30-6:40 Comprehension under construction 6:40-7:00 Rest of PowerPoint 7:00-7:15 Wrap up and discussion 7:15-7:30

Survey From our survey we could see

that the top strategies that our class seemed familiar with were: Checking for understanding, schema, using text features, sequencing and inferring. The strategies that the class responded as not being familiar with or not feeling comfortable teaching were: Reciprocal teaching, synthesizing, paraphrasing, monitoring and fixing it up. Specific strategies that include these such as: High-5, REAP, and Comprehension under construction.

What strategies do you use when you read?

The most popular answers from our class: Summarizing Using visuals Checking for understanding Re-reading

What strategies are most important? Summarizing

Checking for understanding Quite a few put that they didn't know or they thought all of them were equally important One person answered that it depends on the student and that you need to build off of their strengths!!

How do you know which should be used?

Before

the year 2000, teachers were teaching 45 different strategies. This is too many for readers to learn and actually use effectively. Now the research supports nine strategies we see repeated and recommended in the current literature. These strategies are all seen on our CAFE menu. We will be talking about and showing you how to use these today.

What is Comprehension?

The dictionary definition of Comprehension: a : the act or action of grasping with the intellect : Understanding Do I understand what I read? Meaning making -Comprehension is the process of readers interacting and constructing meaning from text, implementing the use of prior knowledge, and the information found in the text.

Continued
In the past, comprehension was viewed as restating the text. We know now that there is a lot more to comprehension than worksheets and regurgitation of text. Today skillful readers use:

prior knowledges Making meaningful connections inferring asking questions to determine importance synthesise these strategies with the material being read

**Research shows correlation between the amount of background knowledge concerning text and comprehension

Reading is Thinking: Who Knew?

"When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself."

-----Plato, philosopher

Taking time to explore metacognition sets a foundation on which to build. -- Tanny McGregor

Why is it important?
Well Duh!
The Common Core Standards say that the standards are directed toward fostering students understanding and working knowledge of concepts of print, the alphabetic principle, and other basic conventions of the English writing system. These foundational skills are not an end in and of themselves; rather, they are necessary and important components of an effective, comprehensive reading program designed to develop proficient readers

with the capacity to comprehend texts across a range of types and disciplines."

Common Core
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy What it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the skills and understandings students are expected to demonstrate have wide applicability outside the classroom or workplace. Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature. They habitually perform the critical reading necessary to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally. They actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens worldviews. They reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic. In short, students who meet the Standards develop the skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening that are the foundation for any creative and purposeful expression in language.

Class opinion on why students struggle

They read too fast

They are not interested in the book Bad teachers

Struggle with decoding

Lack of phonic skills Dont know strategies

Why do students struggle?

Risk factors for comprehension difficulty

Poor attendance behavioral problems low academic achievement low socioeconomic status mobility issues - no coherence to learning retention Attention Deficit or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders

Continued

Other reasons for literacy struggles

Coming from underprivileged literacy environments, leading to few oral language and emergent literacy skills Limited prior knowledge - less schema to connect to Parents dont or cant read to children Negative learning disposition and motivation (This may be formed by our teaching techniques) Lack of quality literature to read

Struggling readers lack knowledge of strategies needed in order to fix their breakdown in comprehension. Breakdown occurs in part because they lack world knowledge, fail to understand key words. and the way sentences relate to one another. Struggling readers may also have difficulty with fluency due to decoding problems. Struggling readers need to be taught how to fix their reading when it is not making sense.

Case studyComprehension

Bob had difficulty retelling details from the story He became frustrated when he could not remember more or answer questions in the aided retelling He seemed to be a fluent reader but had little comprehension.

Ten Principles for teaching Comprehension

Ten Principles for Teaching Reading Comprehension! Refer to handout for description of the Principles!

Strategies we are familiar with from Caf

According to our survey our class seemed fairly comfortable with the CAFE comprehension techniques. Therefore, we decided to recap the top 7 that research shows to be the most useful and then introduce and teach the strategies you showed little knowledge of.

1. Activate Prior Knowledge 1. Questioning 1. Analyze Text Structure 1. Create Mental Images 1. Summarizing

High-5 uses five of the most highly effective strategies together to increase comprehension.
Activate Prior Knowledge
Make connections to what you know develops a schema to

fit information
into. Reader assimilates new information to create new meaning. Use informational texts to refine and expand kids' knowledge of world.

Questioning
Ask and answer questions before, during, and after reading.

Text structure awareness

The mental awareness of how writers organize information. Narrative and expository texts have different text structures.

Creating a mental image

Being able to visualize how texts are structured enhances comprehension. Diagrams or graphic organizers help to visualize structure.

Summarizing

Read

Read the text!

Encode

After reading the text, paraphrase what you read in your own words.

Annotate

Write brief notes from your understanding of the text that explains and/or critiques the text.

Ponder

Evaluate the annotations you made for accuracy and completeness. Consider how the text relates to other readings or related issues.

Time for center based instruction!

Comprehension under Construction

Comprehension Under Construction (CUC) is a strategy which vears aways from the typical Basal reader style strategies and sticky note extravaganza that classrooms have been using.

The bottom line is that we want our students to do more than recite a list of strategies, we want them to actually use the strategies, unprompted and to do so without having to record the event on a sticky note.

CUC lessons always begin with the teacher adopting the role of the Foreman Specifically the foreman surveys the job site (solicits background knowledge) and introduces the 4 workers who will build the groups collective comprehension.

Archie the Architect, who draws up the blueprint to predict what the building will look like.

5 Roles of CUC

Joe the Job Inspector,

who clarifies the meaning of words and ideas. Eric the Electrician, who keeps the group wired with questions that provoke sparks.

Burnie the Bricklayer, who cements understanding by connecting main ideas, brick by brick, into a cohesive summary.

Four Stages
teacher led stage

continues over several lessons as the teacher models

the strategies using authentic literature.

collaborative stage

the individual hats are given to students along with personal blueprints after proficiency is attained, the foreman announces a strategy switcheroo
and the hats are passed onto someone new in the group.

reciprocal stage

the group functions more independently, hats are initially rotated on a lessonto-lesson basis, as in literature circles.

metacognitive stage

each lesson ends with the query, who helped you most today? was it archie? why was this strategy helpful? the more often the teacher shares personal examples of strategy usage and

models to the students, the more the students understand the relevance of the toolbox

Our top 7 Comprehension Strategies from CAFE:

1) Back Up and Reread When meaning breaks down, going back and rereading again to understand the meaning of the selection. 2) Monitor and Fix up Readers stop and think if what they are reading makes sense, whether they understand what is happening in the story, or what the selection is about. If meaning breaks down, the reader has strategies to go back and fix it. (Summarize text, go back and adjust the rate at which one read, reread the text while thinking carefully, read on to see whether the information becomes clear, skim and scan the selection to gain meaning and finally, ask for help) 3) Use Prior Knowledge to Connect with Text Readers bring information from what they already know or what they have read before about a topic and connect it with what they are reading to increase their understanding of the text and to remember what they have read. 4) Make a Picture or Mental Image When students listen to or read text, they can create pictures in their mind or make a mind movie. When one visualizes what is happening in the story, they remember more of what they read or hear

5)Use Main Idea and Supporting Details to Determine Importance Understanding the most important idea about what is being read. This idea is often stated in a sentence in the passage, whereas other sentences comprise pieces of information that tell more about the most important idea.

6) Determine and Analyze Author's Purpose and Support with Text Reader identifies why author wrote a text, by giving specific examples from the text to support the reader's inference; deepens understanding for how to read and comprehend the text. 7) Use Text Features (Titles, Headings, Captions, Graphic Features) Nonfiction text contains common features such as titles, headings, and subheadings, captions, maps, diagrams, charts and graphs, legends, bold and italicized text, glossaries, indexes, and cutaways. Readers recognize and use these features to help them understand what they are reading. ***Especially helpful with the common core pushing nonfiction texts

Assessments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrKU6HyZ9gU&feature= share&list=SPACA9B5EE595E6C5E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIB9R7mkY2Q&list=SP ACA9B5EE595E6C5E

Embed Formative Assessments in your Everyday Teaching Assessments capture their performance and gives insights into understandings at a given point in the learning experience. *Assessments not viewed as an add-on but a natural component of the teaching and learning. Examples of formative assessments include teacher observation of student reading Discussion Informal written responses Strategy applications

Types of Assessments
*Questions to elicit important story components: What happens to get the story started? What did ____ do about _____? What makes it difficult for the characters to solve their problem? How is the problem solved?

*Questions about literal content of the text and questions that require inferences. *Error detection task

Supporting ELL and struggling readers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsintsvYv0&feature=share&list=SPACA9B5EE595 E6C5E An effective strategy for supporting ELL learners for comprehension is connecting to background knowledge as well as making mental pictures. Pictures and visuals are the same in any language. This video shows how they used those CAFE strategies to support struggling learners.

Teacher View

Mrs. Cheryl Allein, 3rd Grade Teacher 21 years experience The most effective strategies I use:
Go back and reread. Look back in the text and highlight. Use graphic organizers. Text tag key ideas and details. Use own words to describe what happened. Use post its to tag information per page or paragraph.

Mrs. Deborah Weber Elementary Special Education Teacher Geneseo Alumni "The most frequent strategies I use are...."
-prediction to get them thinking about what can happen next, connect to own background knowledge, and to be able to use what they have read so far to make appropriate prediction (summarizing)-text tagging where the students go back to text and underline where found answers, especially in non-fiction texts-inferencing- examples: have students think about why something happened, why a character did something, why they feel someway, why feelings changed throughout story, etc.-summarizing using transition words such as first, second, next, right before, right after and so forth

Student views when asked what comprehension is:

8th grade female student viewed comprehension as: "It means to comprehend something or understand something." 4th grade female student viewed comprehension as "questions." 4th grade female student viewed comprehension as "key details, or the theme." 7th grade male viewed comprehension as "complicated." 2nd grade female indicated that "comprehension means to understand what the story is saying.

Things to remember:

Strategies should be introduced explicitly one to two at a time. Must integrate these strategies into ongoing teaching, not just in lessons. Remind students about strategy use emphasizing that is what strong readers do. Motivation: Provide interesting texts, allow choices, reading level to allow independent practice Studies show more on task behavior when choosing own text Engagement increases ----So does comprehension

Children and Adolescent Books

Check out our Wiki!

Resources can be found on our wiki.
We also have a brochure for you to take with you to reference the strategies we taught today!