Well...it is that time of the year again~back to school!! Part of my job at the school that I work at is to assist with Professional Development and this year part of the focus will be on ways to help our students become strategic readers. Teachers that can make abstract thinking visible and concrete will cause the students to understand their thinking and students will think to understand. The goal of reading is not just to read words correctly, but to glean meaning from text. In the book Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny McGregor she lists schema,, asking questions, inferring, visualizing, determining importance and synthesizing information as being essential to a reader.
As we study Tanny McGregor's book this year I will share through my blog the different strategies she stresses and the activities that we found effective for our students. I had never pondered the idea the process of thinking as virtually invisible unless the individual explains their thinking . As teacher it is important that we consistently make our own thinking visible to our students in order for them to begin to recognize their own thinking process. Throughout the year the students will explore the following strategies deemed by McGregor as merging reading and thinking.
1. Schema- making connections and activating prior knowledge
2. Inferring: figuring out what an author wants us to think. An inference is mainly based on the references found in the text that leads one to a conclusion.
3. Questioning: Proficient readers will produce questions before, during, and after reading text.
4. Determining Importance: extracting useful and needed information.
5. Visualizing: creating mental pictures in which a reader uses the 5 senses.
6. Synthesizing: the changing of thought as a reader responds to text.
As students begin to make sense of these strategies and understand them in a concrete way they will begin to know when to call on a particular strategy when reading text. Throughout this year we will discuss in depth the above strategies and ways to make them visible and concrete to our students.
