Developed by Barbara Bradbury

Question: How do we get reluctant readers to identify themselves as readers?

Text: Reading for Understanding by R. Schoenbach, etc (see annotated bibliograpy)

Background: This school year, I have been using the Reading for Understanding text as a guide for developing my curriculum. I find this text useful because it focuses on the relevance of building a strong classroom environment that supports the social and personal aspects of reader identification, along with the cognitive and knowledge-building dimensions. At the center is the metacognitive conversation that needs to be happening between the teacher and students in order to get students to identify as readers and thinkers. The text provides guidelines for teaching and creating the four classroom dimensions (social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building) along with ways of developing the metacognitive piece. This text is not scripted, but rather invites the teacher to use what information she wants based upon her understanding of her own students. The teacher, then, employs her own metacognition when implementing the comprehension strategies from the text.

Activity: (Middle-School Focus) For the presentation activity, take one example from each of the four classroom dimensions and align it with the concept of metacognition.

The activity will center around one lesson taken from my curriculum this year.

Unit = Reading and Writing Fiction

Text = Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman

Strategy = Think-Alouds (examples include: predicting, summarizing, clarifying, questioning, finding a problem, using fix-ups, picturing, making connections)

Tool = Think-Aloud bookmarks and Post-its (The bookmarks provide the types of Think-Alouds along with 1-2 sentence starters for each.)

Words to Own = Purpose, Procedure, Schema, Strategy

Personal: Developing reader identity; Developing metacognition

Social: Small groups; Sharing reading processes

Cognitive: Setting purpose and procedure; Monitoring comprehension

Knowledge-building: Building schema

Begin by reading aloud/discussing purpose and procedure of activity.

Read aloud chapter of text while using Think-Alouds (monitors comprehension and builds schema).

After reading, share Think-Alouds in small group.

This activity builds upon reader identity by putting the comprehension monitoring in the hands of the students. Also, with the Think-Alouds and subsequent discussion, students are developing metacognition by thinking about their thought processes.

Developed by James R. White

Questions: What are some of the relevant issues we should be aware of in the quest to motivate the adult reluctant reader? How do these issues compare/contrast with those facing younger readers?

Activity: Weekly devotion of class time to reading the local newspaper as well as other timely periodicals.

Objective: Cultivate an interest that is habit-forming by use of material specifically designed to be current, intellectually digestible as well as pertinent to the general public. Such use serves as an effective stimulant of the reader’s prior knowledge enabling the class to draw inferences, present interpretations and formulate conclusions more readily. In addition, the often visceral connections made between a student and a topic of particular notoriety(e.g. the war in Iraq) promote a passion and animation seldom exhibited in responses to traditional texts. It is the hope that continued exposure and exploration of these resources can help erase the stigma of reading as being a purely academic, strenuous exercise.

Background Reading: Mosaic of Thought; Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys.