Ashley Smith December Blog Post Teach Comprehension

The chapter, Teach Comprehension discusses the need for teaching students how to go further in their reading  by discussing bigger ideas. The authors lets us know that we need to start building comprehension when students first enter school. We need to start teaching comprehension using the texts our students are reading and what we want them to be able to read and write. Next, we need to be careful about how we teach comprehension. Then, we need to be sure to balance it with explicit instruction with lots of time for our students to be able to practice and apply it. Other things we as teachers can do is:

• teach and apply our own comprehension processes make our reading/thinking processes more visible
• teach reading as the single most useful strategy
• use writing to help recall key points 
• teach students to survey texts before they begin to read  
• make  connections teach self monitoring
• have our students interact with peers to increase comprehension  
• use text that are easy enough and meaningful enough to support comprehension, keep fluency in perspective 
• teach students how to ask significant questions 
• use caution and common sense when teaching strategies.

Our students need to be able to do more than just read words on a page. They need to know how to break a text apart to understand the meaning of it. They need to not only understand the 'big  idea,' but also be able to delve deeper by analyzing characters and their motivations, the purpose of specific types of texts, as well as understanding themselves as proficient readers with the capability of understanding complex ideas. I find it so powerful that the author states that we need to introduce our students to challenging, interesting texts if we want them to become critical thinkers, inquirers, and problem solvers. Isn't this the reason we teach?  So often we read books without researching their content or reading them for ourselves before we introduce them to our students. I have so many books in my classroom that I bought just because they were cheap and I needed books to line my shelves. I have taken to looking through them and reading some and found that many of them have very little or no value to the reader at all. I asked myself if the book would be something my kids would find value in and the answer was no. I said all this to say that if their is not value to be had in a book then how can our students learn from it? How can they deepen their understanding to build comprehension skills if their are none to be had? By looking at the ways we teach comprehension we can challenge our students to become not only better, but more proficient readers and learners.