Secondary Reading Instruction (Part 2): Deepening Middle School Content-Area Learning with Vocabulary and Comprehension Strategies

Transcript: Don Deshler, PhD

What learners in the twenty-first century need are a sophisticated array of advanced literacy skills that will enable them to be very adroit learners as they move throughout their schooling career so that they can deal with new academic dynamics that they encounter. What we need to do is take what we know solid things about and do our best at preparing all the students who come into our classrooms. I would always be asking myself as a content teacher—be it a science class or a literature class or whatever—what kind of strategies would students use most? How am I going to, on an ongoing basis, integrate those strategies into the instruction that I do with students? How will I model these strategies for them? How will I set expectations for them to use them themselves? How are we going to have conversations around how did these strategies work for you? And so within the content class, the core of what we’re doing is teaching the specified content, but envision that we’re wrapping that into the core strategies that we feel as teachers are really important for students to acquire, to help them not only learn the content that is immediately before them, but what do we envision them encountering down the road years ahead? And so if we choose a few—not a lot—but a few high-leverage strategies and really teach them time and again and engage kids in a variety of ways in talking about and refining and working with them, kids are going to be having conversations about the content and who they are as learners around that kind of content. When teachers do that on an ongoing basis, students start to acquire—bit by bit—higher levels of literacy competencies.

Transcript: Deborah Reed, PhD

So close reading, as we’re beginning to understand it more, involves having students iteratively revisit the text. So the first time they read it, they just get a basic understanding. Then they can go back and examine the use of certain words, and then they can go back again and really dig into the ideas.

In Possible Sentences, before reading, we want the students to already be thinking about how the author might use these words in the text. And that gives them a framework as they read for looking for those words. And after reading they go back and explore those particular sentences more carefully to see if the author’s usage of those terms is consistent with the information that the student provided in the sentences prior to reading. So that supports that iterative look at word usage and the way that the author is communicating information.

And in Anticipation-Reaction Guides, we have the student establishing what the basis of their own perspective might be on a key concept or a key theme prior to reading. That’s the framework again for the student looking at the presentation of the information in the passage while reading and then as they go iteratively back through the passage exploring the evidence that’s provided by the author for the author’s own perspective and somehow rationalizing or reconciling the student’s perspective with the author’s perspective. There are college and career readiness standards that encourage having students explore perspectives and analyze the author’s purpose in providing an explanation or assessing the extent to which the evidence in the text supports the author’s claim, looking very carefully at the author’s word usage, and the message that they’re conveying. All of those are important college and career standards that connect well with the ways that we’re suggesting Possible Sentences and Anticipation-Reaction Guides be implemented in the classroom.