Chapter 8: Teach Comprehension
I love how this chapter gave so many strategies for teachers for how to teach comprehension. It stressed the importance of balancing providing our students with comprehension strategies and with time spent reading. My biggest takeaway came from this quote, "There is a huge difference between strategy instruction and strategic instruction. Just teaching strategies is not enough. Strategies must be 'invoked' by the learner if they are to be used to increase understanding" (p. 129). All of our instruction has to be meaningful to our students and the most meaningful instruction comes from monitoring our students and accommodating their specific needs.
One way that I can improve in this area is to help my students understand the purpose for all of the comprehension strategies I teach. I want them to be able to apply them while they are reading but the biggest way to do this is to show them how much they can improve the reading experience. I need to work on making it clear to my students why a specific reading strategy is important and how it can help them understand the text better, before just expecting them to apply it because I taught them how to do it.
Josi, great take-away! It's so true that we can "practice" reading strategies over and over with worksheets, but worksheets make no real connection to actual reading. Another time you might help students with comprehension strategies is during a reading conference. Thank you, Josi!
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