Month: August 2023

When it comes to helping our students develop comprehension as they read, we need to remember that, as teachers, we can have a separate or slightly different routine or strategy than the students. We often get caught up in oversimplifying instruction for students and mix strategies that need to be for us as teachers and strategies kids might need to use to help them when understanding breaks down.
For students, the focus should always be on learning something new, building knowledge, learning about life, and growing as humans. This will keep them more engaged. We should have kids focusing less on standards and strategies that are for us as teachers to help us teach.
We need kids to be engaged in the lessons and what they are reading, not the standards. We need to give them a goal for reading. It can be a content goal focused on learning something about the topic they are reading or learning more about life and how to handle different situations that might arise from characters of fiction. We can then have our own goals focused on standards and a strategy or strategies to support students as understanding breaks down. Kids are not excited about standards and strategies. Students find these boring and need to be more engaged. When we get them excited about learning a topic or life skills when reading about interesting fictional or real-life characters, we will see higher engagement. We can then bring in the strategies, check in with students, and see if they are meeting the standards we need to use to help us focus our instruction.
We can continue to think about comprehension as a process to help us do this. Think of it as an assembly line making a product in a factory. Multiple processes and steps have to happen to get to the finished product. The product is text understanding that can be applied and transferred to multiple situations. Getting students to explain the main idea is a product. Understanding text structures is a process that can be used to help readers get there. Thinking about the author’s purpose is also a process that can help. They are not the final product. The main idea is a product, but it can also be combined with other texts and applied in different situations that can further our learning and understanding.

As teachers, we must consider which of these many processes our students might struggle with. This will help us consider what we have to focus on to plan for instruction. This includes instruction as you confer individually with students within the reader’s workshop or at the guided reading table, not just whole group lessons. Consider what fixup strategies you can give the reader to help them understand what they are reading. Consider how you can help them access their background knowledge. Consider how you might help them build new knowledge. It takes integration and elaboration.
When students are having difficulty with a product, it is usually because of a breakdown in a process. It is not the product itself that is faulty.
In future posts, we will dig into some of the processes that could be causing a breakdown. Realize that utilizing background knowledge, which includes content knowledge, we expect students to have as they move through grade levels. You have to consider what the student is bringing and what the text is demanding.

Consider this:

We do not want to be choosing texts for kids to practice a strategy. We want students to choose texts they find interesting to grow their knowledge of a topic or to learn more about life through characters they enjoy. When we do, we lose kids natural curiosity and engagement. Reading becomes less authentic, and when we ask them to transfer knowledge, skills, strategies, etc., into new situations, it becomes cumbersome for students. We lose sight of reading for an authentic purpose. Kids stop reading to learn something. We get caught up reading to do something.

Troy