DIRECT, EXPLICIT COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION: A SECOND EXAMPLE
Reading Apprenticeship puts the teacher in the role of content-area expert, and late-middle and high school students are “apprenticed” into the reasons and ways reading and writing are used within a “discipline” (subject area) and the strategies and thinking that are particularly useful in that discipline. In reading apprenticeship classrooms, how we read and why we read in the ways we do become part of the curriculum, accompanying a focus on what we read.
Rather than offering a sequence of strategies, reading apprenticeship is focused on creating classrooms where students become active and effective readers and learners. To accomplish this, teachers are encouraged to plan along four dimensions: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building.
The social dimension focuses on establishing and maintaining a safe and supportive environment, where all members’ processes, resources, and difficulties are shared and collaboration is valued.
The personal dimension focuses on improving students’ identities and attitudes as readers and their interest in reading. It also promotes self-awareness, self-assessment, metacognition, and ownership.
The cognitive dimension is where students are given the reading tools and strategies they need to read like experts in the discipline.
The knowledge-building dimension focuses on building content and topic knowledge and knowledge of a discipline’s typical text structures and styles.
The main tactic is that of metacognitive conversations that make the invisible aspects of these dimensions visible and open for discussion.
Source: Jordan, Jensen, and Greenleaf, 2001.
EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL PRINCIPLES EMBEDDED IN CONTENT: AN EXAMPLE
The Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) provides teachers with an array of Content Enhancement Routines to enable them to teach complex curriculum content in ways that make it easier to understand and remember difficult subject matter. For example, there are routines that help teachers show how lesson or unit content is organized as well as to help them clearly explain the important features of a new concept. Additionally, SIM provides an array of targeted strategies to help students learn and deal with a variety of academic tasks. There are four reading strategies: the Word Identification Strategy, the Visual Imagery Strategy, the Self-Questioning Strategy, and the Paraphrasing Strategy.
The Word Identification Strategy helps students to break down multisyllabic words using three simple syllabication rules and a knowledge of roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
The Visual Imagery Strategy helps students create “mental movies” of narratives they read in order to increase comprehension.
The Self-Questioning Strategy helps students determine a motivation for reading by getting them to create questions about the material they will be reading, form predictions about what the answers will be, and locate their answers in the text.
The Paraphrasing Strategy helps students summarize the text stating the main idea and major details in their own words.
Source: Center for Research on Learning, 2001.