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Spotlight
on Literacy
Supporting
Readers, All Readers, with Seven Strategies
by
Rebecca McKay
Director, Literacy and Professional Development
This is the last
2006-2007 Spotlight on Literacy and the end of another successful
Cornerstone school year. Thank all of you for the work that you do
every day in Cornerstone schools and for giving me the inspiration
to keep trying. I often picture your faces as I write. But today, I
am seeing the faces of struggling readers who do not comprehend what
they read. In this last newsletter, I would like to continue the discussion
of struggling readers, address reading comprehension, and the current
state of American classroom environments. By scrutinizing the
meta-cognitive strategies, we are armed to support our children, all
of them and we can ready ourselves to begin the 2007-2008 school year
with a renewed energy for the implementation of quality instruction.
What
are the seven strategies?
In the Cornerstone network, our children are fed a steady diet of great
books, teachers reading aloud, and teachers sharing their thinking around
the comprehension strategies. I often forget that we as a network of
teachers are an anomaly. Michael Pressley and colleagues wrote
that research has consistently endorsed the teaching of the comprehension
strategies yet this type of comprehension instruction is rare in elementary
schools (Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Hampson, & Echevarria, 1998).
Despite a quarter of a century of research on comprehension, it seems
that many teachers still lack understanding of the reading comprehension
process (Baker, 2002). Revisting and recycling through the research keeps
our work current, fresh, and deepens our learning. This is the
time, the 2007-2008 school year, to go deeper in our understanding.
The strategies are:
- activating prior knowledge
or schema
- determining important ideas
and themes
- asking questions
- creating visual and sensory
images
- drawing inferences
- synthesizing
- utilizing fix-up strategies
to repair comprehension (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997).
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