OCTOBER: TEXT: Teaching Comprehension

The eighth chapter of the Routman text discusses the guiding principles of teaching comprehension and well as the importance of helping students peel away the layers of a text, early in their education. It emphasizes that fluency should not be the sole focus of early childhood education… rather forming connections with the text and developing critical thinking skills should be at the forefront of instruction from the early grades.

As someone who works with students with tremendous skill deficits, I cannot deny the importance of teaching fluency, decoding, and word calling strategies. There is a reason that those skills are emphasized during students’ early years; it is the prime time to acquire language. However, critical thinking skills such as predicting, questioning, visualizing, etc. are far more hard-won than simply mastering reading fluency at a particular grade level. My students (who are selected for a summer remediation program) can often demonstrate small but important gains in word calling. Yes, this is easily demonstrable and is motivating for my students. However, it takes them most of the summer (8 weeks of intense intervention) to master even two of three comprehension strategies that they can use when they read. Moreover, almost all my students require multiple demonstrations, repeated opportunities for practice in a variety of groups, and many thinkalouds before they can apply it (at least somewhat seamlessly) to their reading. All of these areas are addressed in the Routman text. However, as a teacher, I found its sequence of skills to be especially relevant. I have seen many lesson plans where strategies are taught in isolation, heaped one upon the other, in the hopes that it will lead to remarkable test scores at the end of the year. That rarely happens. Teaching strategies are singular constructs are neither a good idea nor a profitable use of time. Instead, helping students understand when to use those strategies, either by itself or in conjunction with another strategy, will help students achieve proficiency as readers. This is (at least in my opinion) is a self-perpetuating cycle. Confident readers are far more willing to take risks than those who have no confidence in their ability to read. Those are the types of readers we want our students to be.