Reading Comprehension

After having looked at numerous reading comprehension strategies some themes began to emerge for me. For students to penetrate a text and get its meaning lots of factors have to work together. I used to hold the naive opinion that comprehension would sort of take care of itself if students were engaged with the material and it was at a good level for them. Level alone does not usually determine if comprehension will occur. It is important to use appropriate reading strategies that match the level and content. Interacting with the reading by annotating, leading discussions, and rephrasing passages are some of the ways that helped me digest texts in this course and I will probably be using them more in my own teaching.
I also came to better understand some of the links between writing and comprehension. Writing summaries, predictions, and notes as part of the reading process I was familiar with from my own education but I picked up some specific ways to integrate those activities into my lessons. What I had not given thought to previously was the role writing plays in helping students understand the minds of authors and how this can be a tremendous aid in comprehension. Students become familiar with a particular genre of writing and face the choices authors have to make and apply the literary devices appropriate to the genre. They then are better able not only to identify those features of texts they read but are better able to infer meaning and read critically.

Vocabulary: Let's Get Systematic

Here is a summary of my vocabulary reading: Effective content vocabulary instruction in the middle: Matching students, purposes, words, and strategies by Kevin Flanigan and Scott C. Greenwood

The authors note that the 3 tier system for vocabulary instruction is not specific enough to guide middle school teachers through teaching content vocabulary.
By systematically categorizing vocabulary we can identify words to prioritize and specific strategy and timing to make the most effective use of instructional time. If you are familiar with the 3 tier model of vocabulary instruction this should easy for you to grasp. This is a process that is a bit new to me, but I will become right at home with.

Overview:
Breakdown the vocabulary words into groups. Take the order of tier 1,2,3 words and invert it, and call it levels.

LEVELS

1. "Before" words -- essential to understanding the text and students must have an in-depth understanding of them to make sense of the text. They need to have significant time spent on them.
2. "Foot in the Door" -- essential to understanding the text but do not require a broad in-depth understanding to do so. New label / new concept or new label / known concept are 2 subtypes.
3. "After" words -- These words can be taught after the text is read if need be. Here we have words that are clearly defined within the text, high-utility words useful across multiple subjects, and words of greater precision (dour vs unhappy)
4. "No Teach" -- These are words the require no teaching. These can be words the students already know, unknown words that do not advance the learning goals, or words with sufficiently rich context relative to their importance that the text itself is sufficient.  

Armed with the four levels follow this procedure to identify the words.

1. Read the text and determine the instructional goals of the lesson. Everything depends on your goals, which may differ from the textbook's.
2. Identify words students should know after the lesson. (Levels 1-3)
3. Chunk related words together based on conceptual kinship. (ex. fulcrum, lever, pivot)
4. Identify words that are prerequisite to constructing meaning from the text. (Levels 1-2)
5. Identify the words students should know, but don't need to make sense of the text. (Level 3)
6. Based on your learning goals, what do you want the student to know about each word? This will help you determine how you teach the word.

Included in the article are some helpful tables that take the answers from the question in step 6 and suggest a vocabulary teaching technique.

Taken almost straight from the reading:

Bear in mind this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of outcomes or strategies. I linked up the strategies to external resources so you can get more information should you need to. 

Level 1

Outcome: compare/contrast content area concepts across multiple common features

Strategy: Semantic Feature Analysis

Outcome: know the defining features of a concept in depth and compare/contrast it with similar concepts

Strategy: Frayer Model

Outcome: deep knowledge of one word/concept
Strategy: Semantic Concept Mapping (<-- this link has info on the Frayer Model and SFA also)

Level 2

Outcome:  basic, “foot-in-the-door” knowledge of the word/concept

Strategy: Definition + Rich Context

Outcome: briefly extend their knowledge of a word/concept with which they are already acquainted

Strategy: Concept Circles

Level 3

Outcome: I want my students to be able to use adjectives that describe people (ex. obstreperous, trucu- lent, brutish)

Strategy: “Applause, applause!” or “Have you ever?”

Did you find anything useful at these link? Have another outcome/strategy pairing not listed in this article? I'd love to hear it.

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 _______________ UPDATE _______________ 

After today's fruitful discussions I deepened my understanding of this article. In the expert group the techniques were well received and identified as a good framework for prioritizing time and effort. By working on content vocabulary always with an eye toward the learning goals of the lesson systematically optimize our efforts. 

More importantly, I was able to more clearly identify the times when this approach would be appropriate. Spoiler alert: not always. This technique lends itself to teaching vocabulary related to unfamiliar content. It does not address the need for general ongoing vocabulary building that can be better supported by student selected vocabulary and personal journals.

Role in Literacy of Motivation - Choice vs Freedom

Motivation

---------- Autonomy ------ Mastery ------ Purpose ----------

There have been research results coming out of the fields of economics and sociology have begun to make contributions to our understanding of motivation. I like the concise autonomy, mastery, purpose framework put forth by author Dan Pink. If you have a minute the video above is about 10 minutes and it is a fun way to get introduced to it. That autonomy trumps extrinsic rewards may seem somewhat surprising to economists but it certainly rings true to we educators.

I think the more that we find out about the importance of motivation the more the traditional classroom setting seems to present challenges in the area of providing choice, real choice. There are topics we must teach and there are only so many student contact hours in which we can engage students. There are two avenues I see to enhancing student motivation to read through offering choice. The first is limited choice. Call it what you want, guided, structured or whatever mental gymnastic you can imagine. This is going to be the goto strategy for much of the content we must teach.

Cartoonist - David Horsey, 2008

The more radical alternative I find myself attracted to is to allow reading anything. I am not sure how much of a difference it would make, between choice and freedom. I imagine that it is sometimes the case for struggling or reluctant readers that left to their own devices they would choose to read things that would be hard to talk about in class or be hard to justify spending time on.

MORE

Mark Osborne's  MORE short animation masterpiece 

Not an assigned post, but a prelude to my own musings on motivation. Our outlook and emotional state color our outlook on extrinsic motivation.

Technology in Literacy Instruction and Learning

What is the role of technology in literacy instruction and learning? 

Technology is a term used to mean different things to different people. Before I can make sense of this question for myself I think it useful to get some clarity on the terms involved. My working definition:

Technology is the machinery that humans make as a result of applied scientific knowledge. The cultural practice of using technology is inseparable from technology.

There are technologies that allow us to store, retrieve and analyze information. There are technologies that allow us to communicate. Each type serves the purpose in instruction and learning that they were designed for.

Technology augments the communication and information processing tasks inherent to teaching and learning. It can sometimes be difficult to tell when a technology is being used appropriately. When I am selecting, recommending or seeking a technology for learning here are some things I try to keep in mind.

Communication:

1. Distribution Model: one to one, one to many, one to few, one to self, one to public, peer to peer, teacher to student, collaborative (few to few)
2. Restriction: how is the distribution model maintained, trust? passwords? wishful thinking? 
3. Persistence: transient, temporary, lingering, semipermanent, self-replicating 
4. Ownership: what entity will own the product of the communication in the event that it is persistent
5. Temporal: How long does it take for the message to reach its audience, instant, seconds, minutes, hours
6. Directionality: Two-way or broadcast
7. Knowledge of Receipt: Does the sender know whether the message has been received?
8. Expectancy of Return Communication: Do you expect a reply? (in the overwhelming number of cases this is not dictated by the technology itself, but by the culture surrounding it's use)

I use these distinctions to understand the appropriateness of a particular communication channel for classroom usage. Current events for example can be looked at through Twitter because you can get live data from many people on the ground where the event is taking place. Contrast this with building a persistent, many-to-many wiki to synthesize a whole class's learning in preparation for exams. (Sweeten the pot by having an open-wiki test.) 

Information Storage, Retrieval, and Analysis:

My criteria for the information category is simpler. I see a role for analysis technology to whatever extent it's use does not interfere with learning. For example: calculators don't come into play until the arithmetic operations are well understood. Retrieval and storage are important but perhaps not really interesting to discuss in relation to their roles in learning*.

Technology as subject matter.

The history of the development of technology is pretty interesting. Doing a short research and reflection on the history of SGML and HTML is an example of a task you could do with a variety of ages. In the same way history of science helps to ground an understanding of the scientific method the occasional dose of history in recent technological advances can deepen and ground students' understanding of how to select and use technologies.

*One exception is the vetting of information during research, which is essentially a social process. There are some communication technologies that have come into their own recently that speed the social process of community knowledge building. Using psychology, game theory and good old fashioned community building there some unique sites where students can engage socially in knowledge production. They are becoming enormously relevant in instruction and literacy development but not at all in conjunction with schools. In fact, these self-regulating communities tend to have such a high premium on genuine interest that students of regular school classes tend to have their questions ignored. I'm fascinated by the thinking that goes into these sites. 

http://stackexchange.com/

Literacy History

My parents read fiction for leisure, particularly my father who was at one time a high school English teacher. I was regularly read to. I acquired an above average vocabulary by 3rd grade but it was from verbal rather than literary experience. Both my mother and father played scrabble and enjoyed crossword puzzles with great regularity.

I never felt drawn to books, however, and though I can't ever remember a time in my life having difficulty understanding a text reading was not something that I had any particular affinity for. I enjoyed watching public television all through my childhood. Preferring nature shows and shows about science above all others, NOVA, Wild Kingdom, Life on Earth with David Attenborough. I loved watching, though I rarely understood the nuances of English drama like Masterpiece Theater and comedies like Monty Python that were on later in the evenings. These I would watch with my mother. Educational shows like Sesame Street and Electric Company I watched many hours of. I never cared much for the books that were a part of my required readings in high school, but as I said I did not have trouble understanding them.

When I went to college I probably had only voluntarily read 3 or four books after 5th grade. I had quite a different experience with reading there. The material was occasionally challenging as with Kant and Heidegger and it was enormously more interesting. At this time I began to develop a modest but important reading habit. Non-fiction science popularization books, accessible philosophical works, books about how to meditate, and books on martial arts techniques became my staples.

A second strand of reading that began to weave its way through my life were a series of highly recommended works of fiction that my then girlfriend now wife took turns reading to each other. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one that sticks out in my mind. This experience of reading together deepened our relationship and serves as the basis of the way she and I absorb pop culture into our household in a sort of measured and deliberate pace. We watch cartoons with our children and read to them in a way that seems to be aimed at that same kind of knowing one another through shared experience.

I was always disappointed by cartoons on television as a child, with the exception of Robotech, which was on when I was a 3rd grader. Though not strictly a Japanese cartoon, Robotech had many elements of Japanese cartoons which made me like it. The distinction between good and evil in their stories is not so clear or heavy handed and more time is devoted to plausible back stories. I may have been more prone to enjoy these from watching the programming on public television that on the whole had more nuanced and plausible stories.

I majored in Studio Art in college and eventually parlayed that into an illustration job when I lived in Taipei. During this 2 year period I worked within the confines of a professional publishing work-flow. I had an editor that oversaw my work. I had to write and edit text myself occasionally. It was the best job ever and I really don't think I became confident in my writing and my literacy in general until I had that job. I also got a crash course in technology while working that job. There are worse ways of learning about technology than editing and illustrating server hardware, laptop, and cell phone repair manuals and user documentation.

I have a sense that the early encouragement I received to watch certain television programming and the linguistically rich verbal atmosphere I was brought up in played an enormous role in shaping my literacy. My favorite movie: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Book: Godel Echer Bach, Cartoon: Adventure Time, Word game: Banannagrams.

Gaslighting

There was nothing before.