Who am I?

I'm a passionate teacher who is constantly looking for better ways to connect my students to content and concepts. These are some of the best resources and ideas I've found and how I use them with students.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Shared Reading- Doorway to Reading


Today, I went to the third day of training on using Shared Reading in Content Classes.  This amazing training by the ERD people in Jefferson County, CO, was intriguing, thought provoking, and exciting.

The basic concept of Shared Reading is to mimic the effect of reading one on one with a parent.  Clearly, teachers cannot read one on one with every child; however, by using some of these strategies over time, the student can become a more self-sufficient reader.  http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/em_lit4.html

In middle school, where I live, this strategy is used in content areas to extend the student's ability to read a variety of different genres, gathering and processing information. http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/12  The teacher uses a 3 day strategy to teach the student, not the content of the reading, but how to attack and absorb that type of text. For example, the teacher may be focusing on political cartoons, illustrated texts, data tables, or diagrams.  The three days look like this;
Day 1- Focus lesson on text features and predictions
Day 2- Clarifying, Questioning, Determining Importance, or Visualizing
Day 3- Summarizing, Inferring, or Synthesizing

Without a doubt, not only is the overall strategy effective with students of all ages at building a higher independent reading level, but the individual strategies are also research-based and "wise" practices.  Using Shared Reading in the classroom can develop community experiences that the teacher can reference again and again during the year to aid the students in being able to understand their own content.  These strategies provide the types of scaffolds found in Gradual Release and Reciprocal Teaching that help ELL, Sped, and LD students interact on the same level as other students in the class.  The discussions around how and why an author writes allows students to move forward into creating their own texts using the modeled examples.

While in some aspects I feel like the strategy as applied by my district may be a little too structured, I understand the benefits of that structure in training teachers and beginning practice.  I hope to be able to modify and adapt for my classroom as I gain confidence and skill at this complicated endeavor.  In future posts I will share student work and discussions.

Things to Remember
1.  This strategy is about helping the students learn to read a type of text...not to learn content.
2.  Use focus lessons and modeling so that students can see YOUR thinking about the text.
3.  Make anchor charts that can be brought out again when students use a similar text independently.
4.  Keep the strategy short...this is meant to only take up 10- 15 min of a lesson.
5.  Give students a chance to process and practice through turn and talks, table top blogs, post it chats, and other processing activities.

Give it a shot.  I think you'll like it!  





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