Assessment

In order for a child to continue improving their reading skills, it is important to first know their current level of reading. Teachers must do this through assessment. Although many people tend to think of tests or exams when they hear the word "assessment", there are many different forms that this could come in. Assessments are simply a way to help teachers know more about their students' knowledge and what they can do to increase this knowledge.

To effectively execute this process correctly, a school first needs to catch any reading problems that a child may have in reading early and have a method for doing this that is easy to use for all educators. In addition, a school needs to have intervening services that will work with the students to address the issues that they may be having. These services need to be effective, efficient, and beneficial. In order to make sure that a student is improving from these interventions, a student must be monitored and tracked. So that a student is effectively monitored, teachers need be trained with this knowledge. There are many teachers today that have a lack of knowledge in what to do for low-achievers. This, of course, is incredibly important. However, teachers do not need to address these issues alone. Teachers and educators should form a skilled team that discusses the student's issues and what people can do to fix them.

All of these components are a part of the RTI approach, which is a systematic method for addressing the educational issues that a student may be having in class. The process is fairly long and detailed, but has provided many students with the assistance they need.

This image displays the three Tiers that are a part of the RTI model. This will make the RTI method a bit easier to understand

1. What are your thoughts on the RTI Model?

Guided Reading

"Guided reading is 'small-group reading instruction designed to provide differentiated teaching that supports students in developing reading proficiency."

In order for students to get all that they can out of reading, they need to approach reading in the way that best allows them to learn and comprehend.To make this possible, students can be put into small groups with other students who are on similar reading skill levels. The teacher then works with the individual groups, catering to the needs most appropriate for those specific students. 

The way that a teacher chooses to teach reading with these skills in mind may change depending on the the students' needs. Here are a few examples of different 'guided reading' activities:

As defined in the article, "An Experimental Evaluation of Guided Reading and Explicit Interventions for Primary Grade Students At-Risk For Reading Difficulties" from Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, "Guided Reading is frequently implemented as a component of classroom reading instruction or as a supplemental intervention. In practice, implementations of Guided Reading vary widely." 

Thoughts to Ponder: 1) How do you remember learning to read? 2)What guided reading activities do you remember doing? 3)What kinds of guided reading activities do you think will be most effective for your students?

Comprehension Part II

Last week, I wrote my blog about Vocabulary, so this week I am back-tracking to go back and write about Part II of Comprehension and Think Alouds.

Part I of Comprehension and Think Alouds covered why comprehension is such a critical part of the reading process. We learned about ways that teachers can incorporate this vital piece of the puzzle into the reading skills that are being taught to students.

Part II of Comprehension featured an article titled, "The Comprehension Matrix: A Tool For Designing Comprehension Instruction". This article explained the way that a teacher can effectively teach and cover each part of comprehension. According to this matrix, there are three main parts to comprehension: the reader, the text, and the situation. In addition, there are three main stages where comprehension is used: prereading, during reading, and postreading. In order to fully comprehend the idea of a text, it is important to focus on all aspects of this Comprehension Matrix.

When students are first reading texts and learning about comprehension, it is important that the teacher guides the students and clearly makes connections in the story apparent. If the teacher models the appropriate way to comprehend and understand a text, students will then pick up these habits and use them while they are reading their own.

In Part II, we also learned about Think Alouds which are when a reader models what they are thinking in their head while reading, aloud. This poster I thought could be a very helpful example, explaining what a Think Aloud may look and sound like.

1. Do you believe Think Alouds are the most effective way to instill good comprehension habits in children?

Vocabulary

"Vocabulary is critical to reading comprehension", says authors, Patricia Cunningham and Richard Allington, in Chapter 6 of Classrooms that Work. As we have read through Chapters 1-6 of this textbook, it is clear that there is not one distinct key to reading to comprehension; there are multiple critical components that eventually lead to successful reading comprehension. Like all of the various building blocks we have discussed before, vocabulary plays an essential role in how well a student will be able to read, understand, and comprehend.

It's a pretty simple concept: if a student doesn't understand a large amount of the words that he/she is reading in a given book, then the student will have trouble understanding the book as a whole. Therefore, a student with a vivid, strong vocabulary will have a greater success in reading. So how do we create "vivid, vital, and valuable vocabularies"?

There are many teachers (in the past and present) who believe that strengthening vocabulary comes from looking up the definition to a set of  "weekly vocab words". I can remember doing this very often throughout my elementary and middle school years. I was recently surprised to see that there are still teachers who assign this on a weekly basis. A couple of weeks ago, I was a tutoring a student and she pulled out a list of vocabulary words that she had to define. Although this can help students learn the meanings and define words, this activity does not really lead a student to better reading comprehension.

There are many ways that teachers can improve the vocabularies of students and, in turn, strengthen their reading comprehension. Some examples of this are the following: (Chapter 6 of Classrooms that Work)
-play show in tell with objects that students might not be familiar with or know the names of, in addition demonstrate the use of new vocabulary in the way that you describe these objects (get objects from both home and school)
-use classroom experiences/stories to develop a greater vocabulary by using descriptions that students may have not heard before
-use technology and media to introduce new objects and concepts that students may not be familiar with and experience in everyday life
-play charades with new vocabulary words
-teacher read-alouds with introduction of three, new vocab words in a story; After learning the new vocabulary words, display a picture of the book and the vocab words that go along with that particular story. An example from Pinterest is to the left.

In addition, the article, "The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom: Modeling Sophisticated Word Use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth" by Holly Lane and Stephanie Allen, explains the way that a teacher vastly improved her five-year-old students' vocabulary simply through the daily classroom and routines of the students. In the beginning of the year, Ms. Barker used simple terms to describe the classroom jobs for the students and the students used basic vocabulary when executing their classroom jobs, but as the year went on the teacher began using more challenging and descriptive vocabulary--and so did the students.

What do you believe is the best way to improve a student's vocabulary?