Nov.- Teaching Comprehension

This chapter was definitely a good reminder that I need to teach my developing readers valuable strategies, teach them why and when to use those strategies, and then provide plenty of practice to employ the strategies!

Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicit:

1. Direct explanation. The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.
2. Modeling. ...
3. Guided practice. ...
4. Application.

The first page in this chapter says that the emphasis on skills should not be at the expense of comprehension. Instead of just assessing comprehension, I need to spend more time actually teaching comprehension. This really jumped out at me. I realize, from reading this chapter, that I need to spend a certain amount of time explicitly teaching the strategies that have been proven beneficial for achieving full comprehension. I liked the 20% to 80% rule: explicit strategy instruction should take up no more than 20 % of the reading class, and the rest of the time should be spent with students actually reading and applying the strategies.