CCP: Episode 41 // Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies
What makes someone a great reader?
Ask any elementary student and you’d likely hear responses like:
“Great readers can read fast.”
“Great readers use expression.”
“Great readers can read all the words correctly.”
These answers are all correct, however, we want students to understand that reading is more than just being able to read the words on the page. What we really want students to be doing while they read is thinking!
That’s where reading comprehension strategies come in. Reading strategy instruction gives students a guideline for how to think about what they are reading. Educational experts call this “metacognition,” which can be defined as “thinking about thinking.” This concept is at the heart of why we teach and encourage students to use reading strategies. Students need to understand that thinking is essential to reading.
Today is the first of 8 episodes on the topic of reading comprehension instruction. We will go over a new strategy each month starting next week and ending in May. I can’t wait to share with you some tools and some strategies that you can pass on to your students to help improve their reading comprehension.
Buckle up as I share with you some helpful tips, strategies, and resources for teaching your students reading comprehension.
You’ll Learn:
(Timestamps Shown)
The difference between skill and strategy (1:28)
Why we teach reading strategies (3:53)
The 7 main reading comprehension strategies (4:46)
Making Connections
Visualizing
Predicting
Asking Questions
Determining Importance
Inferring
Synthesizing
The book that basically taught me everything I know about reading comprehension strategies (6:55)
How to introduce strategies (and why you should introduce them all together) (8:15)
How to model reading strategies (10:14)
What a mini lesson might look like (12:08)
Which order to teach the 7 reading strategies (15:17)
LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Constructing Meaning Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction by Nancy Boyles (affiliate link)
Grab my FREE Reading Comprehension Strategy cards below:
free reading strategy cards
These reading comprehension strategy cards are the perfect visual for your students when teaching each strategy.
Each card comes with a kid-friendly definition of the strategy and make great teaching tools for mini-lessons or small-group instruction! Enter your name and email below and I'll send you your FREE set!
Access the Reading Comprehension LINKtivity series inside the LINKtivity® Learning Membership
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TRANSCRIPT
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Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go. Hey there, welcome to the episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast.
Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited about today's episode because it's going to be the first of several episodes on the topic of Reading Comprehension Instruction. Today's episode is the first of 8 episodes that I'm going to be spreading out throughout the rest of this school year, and it will wrap up in about May. Each month I'm going to be tackling a new reading comprehension strategy and we're going to talk all about what it is, what you need to know about it before introducing it in your classroom, and some helpful tips and strategies for teaching it to your students so that they begin using reading comprehension strategies to improve their reading. We know that as seasoned readers and of course as teachers, the whole reason that we read in the first place is to understand what we're reading. If not, there's no point of reading. We've got to give our students some tools and some strategies that they can fall back on to help improve their reading.
First, I want to talk about the difference between a skill and a strategy. A lot of times teachers use these two words interchangeably, there really is quite a significant difference between a skill and a strategy. When I say strategy and when you hear the word strategy, think of it like a tool in a toolbox. When we read we're constructing meaning and it's important that we're building upon things that we read and we're building upon it to learn new information. A strategy, like that tool, is there to help us build our meaning of what we're reading. A skill, on the other hand, is something that readers rely on to navigate through a text. Something like finding the main idea, drawing conclusions, comparing/contrasting, and sequencing. Those are all skills that, of course, we're going to use our comprehension strategies with but those are skills that help us kind of navigate the text and we use our comprehension strategies to understand it. Reading strategies are all about actively thinking while we're reading, engaging our minds, and thinking about what's going to happen next and relating with the characters. These are all things that we're doing during the reading process, whereas a reading skill is often something that we're doing after the fact. We're going back to find the main idea and the details to support it, or we are comparing and contrasting the things that we already read about or we are thinking about the story and retelling it in a sequential order so those are the skills that we use. The reading strategies that we want to teach our students are the strategies that help them to think about their reading while they're doing it. And by doing so, they understand what they read. I just wanted to make that distinction before we get too deep into this series over the next few months, because, again, I know a lot of teachers use them interchangeably and we really want to make that distinction between a reading comprehension strategy and a reading skill.
All right. Let's dive into what it means to teach reading comprehension strategies with your students. If you ask any group of students what makes somebody a great reader, you might often hear responses like, great readers can sound out words, great readers stick with a book instead of putting it back before they finish it and getting another one or you might hear a student say, great readers read really fast and fluently. Of course, all these answers are correct. However, we want students to understand that reading is more than just being able to read the words on a page. What we really want students to be doing while they're reading is thinking. That's where reading comprehension strategies come in. Reading strategy instructions will give your students a guideline for how to think about what they're reading. Educational experts will call this metacognition, which is basically defined as thinking about thinking. This concept is at the heart of why we teach and encourage students to use reading strategies. Students need to understand that thinking is essential to reading. Seasoned readers use reading strategies fluidly without much effort but young readers need to be taught explicitly to do one or more of the following reading comprehension strategies. They are making connections, visualizing (sometimes called picturing), asking questions, predicting or guessing, determining importance, inferring and synthesizing. Let me say those again, making connections, visualizing, asking questions, predicting, determining importance, inferring and synthesizing.
Those are the 7 main reading comprehension strategies that students should be using and should be taught how to use while they're reading. They help them to think about their reading and they should be taught in whole group, small group and individual settings. The mistake that a lot of teachers make, and I'm guilty of this myself when I first started teaching, is that we teach these strategies in isolation, meaning we only teach making connections and we practice that for a few weeks. Then we move on to visualizing for a while, asking questions and so on, and we make our way down the list. But the reality is, is that's really not how our minds and our brains work. While we're reading, we want to encourage our students to use the strategy that best fits the story that they're reading or best fits the particular section that they're reading. You know, you wouldn't use only a hammer for an entire project and never reach for your wrench or for a nail or anything like that if you need those tools. We want to teach our students the same thing in reading as well that we reached for the strategy that's best going to suit us and best support our comprehension. I think a best practice for reading comprehension instruction is that you introduce all of the strategies up front and then you isolate strategies later with additional follow up practice. We're going to talk a lot about that in this series. So stay with me here.
Reading strategy instruction is something that you're going to obviously fall back on all year long. You might want to first introduce the word strategy to your students because it's something that they're going to be hearing throughout the school year so it's important that they do understand what the word 'strategy' means. I always liked to use a comparison with a sports game. I would ask my students, 'hey, what's the goal of playing on a baseball team or a basketball team?' And the students would usually respond with 'to win, of course'. In order to win, they can't just go out on the field or the court or run around without any plan of action. Instead they have to come up with a plan or a strategy to help them reach their goal of winning the game. And in the same way, readers can't just read the words on the page. They have to use strategies, a.k.a. their reading plan, to help them win at reading. And of course, winning at reading means that they've understood the text. Early on in teaching, I read a book by Nancy Boyles called Constructing Meaning Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction, I will link to that book in the show notes. This book basically taught me everything that I needed to know about teaching reading comprehension strategies. She was the one that showed how important it is to not teach reading comprehension strategies only in isolation, but to rather equip our students with all of the strategies and get better at each one as we go. She does understand that introducing all of the strategies at once might be a little overwhelming, specifically for younger students. In that case, it's perfectly fine to take two or three lessons to introduce all of them but the idea is that you get them all out there and up front over the course of two or three lessons max, so that students can see them, they can hear them, they see them modeled through your read aloud instruction. Then as they feel comfortable, they can begin using the strategies that best work for them. You can most definitely highlight a certain strategy when you see the need for it and by giving students access to all of the strategies will help students to understand that the end goal is to be able to use multiple reading strategies together as needed. They don't want to spend the entire book just making connections or just visualizing. Instead, readers use whichever strategy supports their comprehension at any given time.
Here's how you begin to introduce the strategies themselves. You're going to start very basic with your students. You're going to give them a basic definition of each strategy and maybe a quick example of how you use the strategy in the past. You can compare the strategies to more concrete ideas if needed. For example, when you're explaining the visualizing strategy, you might describe it like playing a movie in your mind. Or inferring is like a light bulb going off in your head when you finally figure something out. As we go through this series on reading comprehension strategies, I'll give you some more concrete ways to introduce the strategy to your students but essentially, you're going to begin very basic with just a simple definition of each one. Let me give you an example for making connections. You might say something like this. Often when we read, we find ourselves saying 'that makes me think about a time when or that reminds me of another book I read or reading that reminded me of something I saw on the news', that's called making a connection. We can connect what is happening in the book to our own lives, other books we read, or even things going on in the world. While you're providing this very brief and short, simple introduction to making connections, you can hold up a card that says making connections so that students are reading the name of the strategy, they're hearing about what the strategy is, and they're starting to make that connection between the two. Then you can have these strategy name cards up somewhere in your classroom for easy reference, any time that you use the strategy. After you've introduced making connections, you're going to introduce visualizing into a very similar explanation of the visualizing strategy for your students.
I have a free set of Reading Comprehension Strategy Cards that you can download. It's over in our Members Resource Library, which you can get access to by becoming a member if you are not already. If you head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/41, I'll have the link there to get those free Reading Comprehension Cards that you can use when introducing them to your students.
After you have introduced each reading strategy over the course of one or two mini lessons, now you're going to begin modeling these reading strategies using read aloud texts. Of course, this is something that you're going to do throughout the entire school year because, again, reading comprehension strategies are something that we are always using and we are always improving on, so you want to teach that to your students. However, in this initial introduction period of reading comprehension strategies, you want to provide lots of modeling of these strategies in action. I love using picture books for this, even in the upper elementary grades. I think picture books are perfect for modeling because you can cover an entire story in a short amount of time and showcase multiple strategies throughout. As you begin modeling the strategies in your read aloud, you're going to gradually ask for student participation. When you first start, you'll be doing most of the work, modeling the strategies. However, as students get better and grasp how to use each strategy, you can then begin to invite them to share their own thinking. One other thing to note here is that you don't have to feel pressured to use every strategy, every time you read, because that's not real reading. We don't always need every strategy. You don't always need every tool in the toolbox, but they're there when you do. Make it as authentic as possible when you're modeling these strategies and don't force one that doesn't make sense, Only model the strategies that feel natural in any particular text. Over the course of several sessions in your many lessons, you'll be able to cover each strategy several times. When you do model each strategy, make sure that you use it by name, that you stop and think aloud. Say something like when I read that, I made a connection so that students can see that you are clearly using the making connections strategy. Of course, I would suggest that you preview the text ahead of time so that you can plan out exactly where you will stop and model a strategy. So that you can check the text in a way that feels natural and so that it doesn't overwhelm the students.
Here's what your mini lesson might look like before reading. You're going to activate that prior knowledge, that schema and ask, what do you already know about the topic, the genre, or the author? Then you can make any predictions about what the book will be about or what you'll learn if it's a nonfiction text and ask yourself any questions that arise from reading the title or by observing the front cover. You're using already your prediction and you're asking questions strategy. Then during reading, you're going to stop often to think aloud and share the strategies that you're using. You're going to use phrases like "When I read" or "I wonder" or "I noticed", "I'm visualizing", "I'm inferring", "I'm predicting". At first I was thinking, but now I'm thinking and so on. You're going to model how to check for understanding by asking yourself questions like, 'Do I understand what I read?' Or 'I just learned.' or 'Wait, I'm confused about what I just read. Let me back up.' The during reading part is obviously where the most comprehension strategy, instruction, and modeling is going to take place. Then after you read, of course, you're going to check for understanding or you're going to model how to check for understanding. You're going to look back to see if any questions that you asked were answered or were your predictions correct and share any final thoughts about the story as a whole. When you first begin modeling the strategies, resist the urge to go into too much detail about any one strategy while thinking aloud. These beginning modeling sessions are really just to help students see how you're integrating multiple reading strategies in a single text, you can use your guided reading, your small group instruction, or even your individual reading conferences to really hone in on strategies that you see need more attention with individual students. You can also revisit a strategy as a whole class later on when your students are ready to dive deeper into a specific strategy and apply at the next level. The idea here is that you're giving students all of the strategies up front. You're modeling them for them. Then as the year goes on, you're going to start to notice which strategies students really rely on or which ones they're neglecting. Then you're going to hone in on those strategies that need a little bit more practice. Keep in mind that the mastery of integrating all the strategies will take time. It's going to take not even just your one school year that you have with the students, this is something that students are constantly building on as they become fluent readers throughout their entire school career so don't expect students to use all seven strategies too soon. Some might rely on two to three strategies at first. Encourage them to continue to use those strategies and where appropriate, introduce new ones or encourage new ones and provide the appropriate scaffolding to help them start to use those strategies on their own and use your conferencing time or your guided reading groups to give them that additional instruction that they need for a particular strategy. Now, of course, you're going to let the students take the lead as far as letting you know what strategies they need work on, just by your observations of their reading. If you're looking for a logical way to present the strategies to your students as a whole class, or when you're ready to dive deeper into each strategy in isolation, here's what I suggest.
Start with making connections, this is often the easiest for students to master, and many students are already doing it without prompting. In addition, when students make connections to the books that they read, it encourages them to stick with it. So that's always a very basic skill that we want to give our students is to stick with the books that they have started. The next strategy that you might want to dive deeper into is visualizing again, this is another reading strategy that students typically grasp relatively easily. Then you can move on to questioning because students naturally ask questions about life. Introducing this strategy early on or diving deeper into this strategy early on typically fits in their normal thinking process. Making predictions is a great follow up strategy for questioning, because often times readers make predictions based on their questions when they ask things like 'What will happen next?' is their question. They can say, I predict blank will happen because... and then we move into three strategies that are a little bit more abstract and a little harder for students to grasp. You want to get those maybe other strategies nailed down first before you really dive deep into the next three. The next one will be determining importance. This strategy is a precursor to inferring and synthesizing, because in order to infer and synthesize, students really need to learn how to pick out that information that will help them make their inferences and synthesis of a text. Furthermore, being able to determine important information is going to help students identify main ideas and themes of a text. Again, these are all more advanced skills that students will learn later on. Then you can move into inferring again. That's kind of a nice one after determining importance because it requires students to draw on background information as well as information in the text. If students already have practice with determining important information, they can develop better inferences. And again, this is tricky, an abstract concept for students. And finally, the most challenging reading comprehension strategy that students work towards is synthesizing. Synthesizing is a form of inferring, but it's a much longer process because synthesizing shows how our thinking and inferences change over time based on the information given in the text. So inferring and synthesizing can work together. As we go through this series on Reading Comprehension Strategies over the course of the next several months, I'm going to go in that same order as well. I'm going to begin with making connections, then move on to visualizing, questioning, predicting, determining importance, inferring and synthesizing. Remember, you're still going to be integrating strategies in your whole class instruction, but you may need to isolate in small groups and individual practice. When that's the case, this is a nice order to go in.
All right, teacher friends, I've covered a lot of information in this episode to help set the foundation for Reading Comprehension Strategy instruction, that's a mouthful, in your classroom this year. I'm going to kick off the first strategy next week and then I will continue to cover a new strategy once a month moving forward. We'll still be sneaking in some other topics on the podcast here in between the strategy instruction episodes so that you have a little variety as you're riding into school, working out in the gym, cleaning at home, wherever it is that you are listening to this podcast. Be sure to head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/41 to grab your free Reading Comprehension Strategy Cards that you can use in your classroom when you introduce the strategies to your students. They'll be a great way for you to build that reading strategy foundation with your students. As well as a link to that book Constructing Meaning by Nancy Boyles, which will give you an even more in-depth understanding on Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction. It's certainly what I have used as my comprehension tool kit, and I hope that you will check it out as well. It's a great, great resource that every teacher should have in their classroom.
All right, that's it for me today. I will check in with you again next week, all on Making Connections and we'll kick off our Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction. Have a great rest of your week. Bye for now.
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