Fostering and Teaching Comprehension

As I wrote in an earlier post, this summer I have really been making an effort to revisit and reflect on last school year in order to better plan (and teach) this year. I'll have four preps this fall: Global Perspectives, AICE Language--Level A, Dual Enrollment Composition, and Intensive Reading C. It's a lot to think about and, to be honest, the class that scares me the most is Intensive Reading (IR). The students in IR failed the FCAT, maybe once, maybe three times. The FCAT is gone--hooray! However, an unknown high-stakes exam will be replacing it. Yes, unknown because-a month away from school starting for teachers--we have no idea what the test will look like. Which means, you guessed, it no way to use the summer (when I am not teaching all day and grading at night) to prepare for it. Not that I teach to the test, but it would be nice to have some idea of what my students will face. The state did release some resources this week, such as item specifications and an online website to practice. Not much help at the moment, though. So, I am doing what any teacher does: I am going back to solid research to plan. One of my favorites that had been on my to read list is "Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension" by Duke, Pearson, Strachan, and Billman, which came out in Samuels and Farstrup's (2011) What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction (4th ed.). In this chapter, the authors describe 10 essential elements to foster and teach reading comprehension. While most relate to elementary school students, I've been reading and commenting with secondary students in mind and the curricula I had to teach last year and may have to teach this year (We have not been told what curricula we will be using this year . . . that's an issue for another blog post). I want to focus on the author's first essential element: Building Disciplinary and World Knowledge. A couple of quotes need sharing: --" . . . reading, writing, and language are best developed when they are put to work as tools to help students acquire knowledge and inquiry skill in a specific domain" (p. 58) --"words are not the point of words; ideas are" (p. 58) --"when we link knowledge development to reading for comprehension, both knowledge and comprehension are the beneficiaries" (p. 58) --"by emphasizing generic reading instruction at the expense of disciplinary learning, we may be . . . cutting off our noses to spite our faces" (p. 58). When I really studied the above quotes and read them with my given curricula in mind, I realized that there was little match up. The implications for me are: (1) vocabulary instruction in reading classes, especially, cannot rest on weekly word lists and/or the words selected by the publisher (words, by the way, that I would NEVER have chose, but are mandatorily tested by my district. Those selected words are on the mandated test that I must administer because it is tracked by a computer program and the district looks at my students' scores) and (2) reading strategies need to be taught as part of "something." One of the two required programs that I had to teach (and which was tested) was not tied to inquiry nor was it thematically interesting. The other mandated program was computer-based non-fiction reading with multiple choice questions and vocabulary words to the side of the text. Each student read a slightly different version of the article (based on Lexiles) and was given different vocabulary words and different reading questions. It was hard to "teach" because the pressure was to get lots of articles completed. Inquiry could have been done but at the expense of the "number" of articles "they" (whoever they are) wanted us to get through. My point is that if "they" want us to help kids get better at reading and comprehending then we need to be given the time, freedom, and tools (because we are experts) in order for us to DO IT WELL. This year, the content and reading practices that my Cambridge courses employ are perfectly adaptable for the kids in my IR classes. Kids in IR classes deserve the same critical reading, thinking, and discussion opportunities that their "more advanced" peers receive on a daily basis.