In chapter 2, Keene starts the chapter off visiting what appears to be the ideal classroom. It is large, inviting, full of sunlight, decorated as if a home itself, it looks great and smells even better. The students are all engaged with a book of their choice around the classroom. While it does seem to be the perfect environment to foster a love of reading and learning, the teacher confides in Keene that she feels she isn't really teaching. Keene chooses this point to further reminisce into her own past as a teacher and a reader. We learn of her and her colleagues' experiences both hating to teach from basal readers and to give excessive worksheets, and loving their own discussions about books they loved and were currently reading. Many places started shifting from textbook instruction to more hands-on, discussion based teaching strategies. There especially was a need for this shift after more and more data showed the same thing: too many students could read but not comprehend.
The problem later became that the shift was too drastic, and now there was virtually no "teaching" in the classroom, therefore they wanted to find a happy medium. This happy medium started being born when new data surfaced that showed that proficient readers use the same seven or eight strategies when reading. The idea now was to first make students aware of their own thinking when reading, delving further into the world of meta cognition, then helping them improve and develop their own strategies to mirror the strategies that have proven successful. This instruction of meta cognition and reading strategies could be the "teaching" everyone had been longing for, without resorting to basal readers.
These proven strategies that most proficient readers use are: * Activating relevant prior knowledge before, during, and after reading text. * Determining the most important ideas and themes in a text. * Creating visual and other sensory images from text during and after reading. * Drawing inferences from text. * Retelling or synthesizing what they have read. * Utilizing a variety of "fix-up" strategies to repair comprehension when it breaks down.
** This chapter was difficult for me to relate to entirely. Being a special education teacher, I am accustomed to teaching a variety of "fix-up" strategies but I do not feel I spend enough time developing what is not "broken". Also, as many of you have heard me whine about before, I AM teaching from a reading program (SRA Corrective Reading) as per my orders so I definitely do not spend enough time on strategy instruction. I'm looking forward to incorporating the other strategies into my teaching. We're almost done with SRA!
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I wanted to comment on the last paragraph above. I'm also a middle school special education teacher and know exactly what you mean about spending a lot of time on teaching "fix-up" strategies. But I PROMISE that the comprehension strategies listed in your book DO work also. I tried them this year for the first time and my students use them willingly every time they read a story. It really helps them. Your kids will get it if you consistently use them before reading new stories.
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