Discipline-Specific Comprehension Instruction

1. Teaching Comprehension

1.1. Instruction needs to be explicit, strategic, purposeful, integrated, and ongoing in secondary classrooms.

1.2. It should also promote student engagement and self-regulated learning.

2. Teaching Comprehension Approaches

2.1. Two main approaches: strategy and content instruction

2.2. Strategy instruction: encourages the reader to employ his or her mental processes, and use certain strategies to interact with the text.

2.3. Content instruction: attempts to engage students in the process of attending to text ideas and building a mental representation of the ideas, with no direction to consider specific mental processes.

2.4. Both approaches can be combined for best results.

2.5. It is vital that students learn certain literacy strategies in tandem with content in their content-area instruction.

3. Fluency and Comprehension

3.1. Fluency is "freedom from word identification problems that might hinder comprehension in silent reading or the expression of ideas in oral reading."

3.2. Two components: accuracy and automaticity

3.3. Automaticity refers to recognizing words without attention or conscious effort.

3.4. Three major components: rate (WPM), accuracy (decoding text without errors), and prosody (intonation, expression, and phrasing).

3.5. Fluency is dependent upon the text type and the reader's familiarity with vocabulary.

3.6. Modeling fluent reading will help students understand how they should sound when they read.

3.7. Accountable talk will facilitate fluency because it is based on using the language of each discipline to communicate ideas, question each other, expand on meaning, and facilitate collaborative learning.

4. Independent Reading

4.1. It helps students develop their fluency skills. Teachers should encourage wide, independent reading.

4.2. Create a classroom library that offers a wide selection of discipline-related books, magazines, electronic media, and comfortable places to read and talk with others about books.

4.3. Give students a choice on their reading.

5. Building Comprehension through Text

5.1. When students are involved in close reading of the text, they notice a lot of things about the text itself.

5.2. The aim is to keep students in the text through engaging, relevant, and guided instruction before they distance themselves from the text--make the learning a shared experience for all.

5.3. By focusing classroom discussion on the text, all students have opportunities to engage.

6. Text Structure and Comprehension

6.1. The CCSS place significant emphasis on comprehension and text structure instruction for increasingly more complex text that is both narrative and informational.

6.2. Content literacy skills taught by content-area teachers using discipline-specific reading materials is vital for improving comprehension skills.

6.3. Interventions for students in secondary grades usually include decoding, vocabulary, comprehension, and text structure.

7. Text Structure Instruction

7.1. Narrative text tends to be organized around literary elements such as setting, characters, problem/solution, plot, and theme.

7.2. Informational text tends to be based on a hierarchy of main ideas and subordinate main ideas, often reflected through the use of headings and sub-headings.

7.3. In addition, knowledge of informational text features can aid students' comprehension.

7.4. Helping students manipulate and "play" with words and parts of sentences orally, and in writing, can help build fluency in sentence writing and comprehension.

8. Textbook Organizational Patterns

8.1. Common organizational patterns in textbooks include the following: analysis, cause/effect, comparison/contrast, description, definition/example, explanation of concepts, listing and enumeration, problem/solution, and sequence or time order.

8.2. Because authors organize their texts in different ways and students come with varied knowledge of text structure, teachers should help them learn how to recognize these organizational patterns in disciplinary texts.

8.3. See Table 7.1 for examples.

9. Text Marking, Annotating, and Text Coding

9.1. Teachers can develop a variety of text codes to help students actively "code" fiction or informational text as they read.

9.2. Text coding or marking of digital text usually involves two processes: highlighting and sticky notes.

9.3. Annotating is an interactive reading process that allows the students to comment or reach meaning as he or she is reading.

9.4. To model text coding and annotation, select high-interest reading materials your students will enjoy. Introduce text coding to your class and explain that using these codes will help them focus their reading and make it active.

10. Note-Taking

10.1. Note-taking about what is important helps with retrieving important information.

10.2. Note taking remains an essential and basic level or processing and interacting with the text even though it may vary from discipline to discipline.

10.3. See Tables 7.3-7.6 for examples of note-taking strategies.

11. Summarizing

11.1. Summarizing is a difficult skill for many students across grades and content areas.

11.2. Throughout all summarization steps, teachers should emphasize the importance of textual evidence, clarity, and the purpose of writing a summary to promote better understanding of text(s).

11.3. In order for summarization to be effective, the student must be able to process the ideas in a passage and/or across texts and consider how they are connected to one another.

11.4. To teach summarization effectively, preview the passage and ask the students to think about what they expect the passage to be about. after reading the text, have students generate the main idea in their own words and support it with text details.

11.5. First sentence: thesis of their summary

11.6. Towards the end: use words like "in summary," or "in conclusion," etc.

12. Strategies for Discipline-Specific Comprehension Instruction

12.1. A body of research has demonstrated that explicit teaching of strategies that help students understand what they read improves their comprehension of text.

12.2. Strategy instruction works best when the strategy is applied to a specific text selection, when the teacher provides modeling, when students have many opportunities to use the strategy with varied text, etc.

12.3. For instruction to result in deep learning, teachers have to enable students to read and comprehend the texts of each discipline and also question texts, themselves, and others, consider diverse views, and build informed judgements.

13. Social Studies/History

13.1. Historical thinking involves questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternative perspectives, and recognizing one's own knowledge.

13.2. Teachers need to teach students how to reconstruct meaning from historical documents, identify the main questions, and also analyze the intentions of the people involved and the complex ways in which they interacted with their complex world.

13.3. Evidence-based argumentation is the "bread and butter" of history.

13.4. Historical documents also include artifacts, images, maps and charts that contain important information about a person, event, or place.

14. Metacognition

14.1. Metacognition is the act of thinking about thinking.

14.2. It plays an important role in communication, reading comprehension, problem solving, language acquisition, attention and memory, self-control, etc.

14.3. Teachers should assess students' beliefs on their learning prior to attempting to teach metacognitive tasks because the learners' beliefs and assumptions about learning impact self-regulated learning.

14.4. They should also teach students self-regulated strategies that will help them become more aware of their strengths, weaknesses, and how to adapt to learning tasks.

14.5. To develop students' metacognitive skills, teachers need to provide them with many opportunities to monitor their own progress, reflect, work collaboratively with peers, and formulate and share their thinking, knowledge, and explanations.

15. Comprehension Monitoring

15.1. It's a metacognitive strategy that involves the ongoing evaluation of a reader's understanding of the text.

15.2. Teach students how to carefully, purposefully, and closely analyze the text, look for patterns in text structure, ask someone questions about the text, consider graphs, images, and charts, and thin about what they are reading.

15.3. Teachers can use think-alouds to model how they monitor their comprehension when reading complex text.

16. The Goal: Deep, Transferable Learning

16.1. Deep learning involves the critical analysis of ideas, making connections to already known concepts and principles; it leads to long-term retention of concepts so they can be used for problem solving in new contexts.

16.2. Deep learning is the process of learning for transfer--taking what one has learned in one situation and applying it to another.

16.3. Comprehension instructional strategies that promote deep learning of content should be taught in tandem with content development.

16.4. Deep learning cannot happen without content; comprehension of content cannot take place without interacting, analyzing, discussing, raising questions about, and writing about the content.

17. How Can Teachers Promote Deep Learning?

17.1. First, have great insight in what it means to learn in your field.

17.2. Second, learn how adolescents learn and what are the personal and social factors that can interfere with learning.

17.3. Third, think about what questions might engage students actively, meaningfully, and deeply.

17.4. Last, develop your ability to ask important and intriguing questions that will engage your students in learning more deeply about your subject area.

17.5. Taking a discipline-specific approach to deeper learning will ensure that students learn how to read, think, write, argue, communicate, and evaluate in ways that are unique to each discipline.

17.6. Deep learning requires different roles from teacher (i.e., facilitator of student learning) and the student (i.e., active participant in their learning process) rigorous instruction, complex texts and complex knowledge, time and different decisions about content organization, curricular goals, and assement, and different experiences, activities, and learning environment..

18. Strategies to Use in Teaching Social Studies/History

18.1. Teachers can use each element of Thinking Like a Historian to promote students' critical understanding of historical evidence and text-based arguments.

18.2. Table 7.26 can be used to guide students' understanding of primary or secondary documents using the Examining the Author's Argument strategy.

18.3. The Examining the Author's Argument strategy involves students developing a comprehensive understanding of a document by identifying: the author, their purpose with this document, the author's biases, or errors in their writing, and evaluating the credibility of the evidence he or she provides to persuade that reader about the topic or event.

18.4. The Image Analysis strategy (see Table 7.27) will help students to critically examine, analyze, evaluate, discuss, and reflect on historical images; it will help build their understanding of the purpose of the image(s), the message it "communicates," evaluate the source, and reflect on how the image analysis added to, or challenged, their understanding of the person, place, or event.

18.5. Identifying Point of View strategy (see Table 7.28): analyze and interpret the intentions of the author, the author's word choices and organization of ideas, the author's orientation, and his or her motives and beliefs about the historical event, person, place, or concept.

18.6. Fact versus Opinion strategy (see Table 7.29): will help students differentiate between historical facts and interpretations and the ways in which historical evidence and people's interpretations are represented in historical documents.

18.7. Take a Stand strategy (see Table 7.30): will promote the development of students' historical thinking by inviting them to formulate an informed position on an issue. This can be used to facilitate informed small and whole class discussions, and evidence-based argumentations on a topic.