When My Students Cant Read, What Should I Do

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When My Students Cant Read, What Should I Do?

• A Summary of Important Strategies from
• When Kids Cant Read , What Teachers Can Do by
  Beers
• Writing Next, by Graham and Perin
• Reading Next, by Biancarosa and Snow
• PowerPoint by Mary Ulrich

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Part I and Part II

• Part I Reading Strategies to Improve Adolescent
  Literacy
• Part II Writing Strategies to Improve Adolescent
  Writing

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Part I

• Reading Strategies to Improve Adolescent Literacy

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The Optimal Mix

• Medical personnel need to tailor treatment to an
  individual patients needs. Sometimes, more than
  one type of treatment is necessary.
• To continue the metaphor, teachers need to tailor
  intervention strategies to an individual
  students needs. Often, more than one strategy is
  needed.

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Fifteen Key Elements to Improve Adolescent
Literacy Achievement

• INSTRUCTINOAL IMPROVEMENTS
• -Direct, explicit comprehension instruction
• -Effective instructional principles embedded in
  content
• -Motivation and self-directed learning
• -Text-based collaborative learning
• -Strategic Tutoring
• -Diverse texts
• -Intensive writing
• -A technology component
• -Ongoing formative assessment of students
• INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS
• -Extended time for literacy
• -Professional development
• -Ongoing summative assessment of students and
  programs
• -Teacher teams
• -Leadership
• -A comprehensive and coordinated literacy
  program

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Connecting When Kids Cant Read, What Teachers
Should Do to Reading Next

• USING Kylene Beers Reading Strategies from When
  Kids Cant Read, What Teachers Can Do
• 1. Assess dependent readers needs see pages
  24-26 in Beers book listed above
• 2. Create an instructional plan of what you will
  do when your student cant - see page 28

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Connecting When Kids Cant Read, What Teachers
Should Do to Reading Next (continued)

• 3. Learn what skillful readers do see pages
  34-35 know purpose for reading, use a variety
  of comprehension strategies, make a range of
  inferences, use their prior knowledge, monitor
  their understanding, question the authors
  purpose and point of view, are aware of text
  features, evaluate their engagement and enjoyment
  with a text, know the meaning of many words,
  recognize most words automatically, read
  fluently, vary reading rate, and hear the text
  ads they read.
• 4. Teach comprehension strategies explicitly and
  directly clarifying, comparing and contrasting,
  connecting to prior experiences, inferencing,
  predicting, questioning the text, recognizing the
  authors purpose, seeing causal relationships,
  summarizing, visualizing. Teach explicitly and
  directly by thinking aloud as you model a
  strategy.

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INFERENCESTypes of Inferences Skilled Readers
Make

• Recognize the antecedents for pronouns
• Figure out the meaning of unknown words from
  context
• Figure out the grammatical function of an unknown
  word
• Understand intonation of characters words
• Identify characters beliefs, personalities, and
  motivations
• Understand characters relationships to one
  another
• Provide details about the setting
• Provide explanations for events or ideas that are
  presented in the text
• Offer details for events or ideas that are
  presented in the text
• Understand authors view of the world
• Recognize the authors biases
• Relate what is happening in the text to their own
  knowledge of the world
• Offer conclusions from facts presented in the
  text
• See page 64 in Beers for comments teachers can
  make to help students make inferences

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A Strategy Making Inferences

• Use It Says-I Say-And So (p 165, Beers) to make
  inferences from Two Minute Mysteries

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Some thoughts to think about

• Best instructional improvements are informed by
  ongoing assessments of the strengths and needs of
  the students.
• However, these types of assessments, often
  informal and occurring on a daily basis, are not
  often suited to the way we must report progress,
  as in letter grades and percentages.
• Teacher teams need to establish coordinated
  instruction in reading during collaborative
  meetings to make sure that students dont slip
  through the cracks.

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Outcomes to Measure

• Word-level reading
• Fluency
• Reading level
• Reading comprehension
• Writing
• Motivation
• Content achievement
• State assessments
• Student response
• Fidelity of model adoption/implementation

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Optimal Mix

• Research and professional opinion support all
  fifteen elements from Reading Next however, the
  optimal mix of these elements has not been
  determined.
• Three elements are more foundational than the
  others
• PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• ONGOING FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS, AND
• ONGOING SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS AND
  PROGRAMS
• These elements are not all inclusive due to the
  complex nature of improving adolescent reading,
  but are the required foundation on which the
  other elements should be built.

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Reading Literacy Conclusion

• With carefully selected programs that allow
  teachers to use unique mixes of the fifteen
  elements and a requirement to use common
  evaluation guidelines and procedures, we, the
  teachers, can enhance adolescent literacy
  achievement right now. Lets do it!

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Part II

• Writing Strategies to Improve Adolescent Writing

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Eleven Elements to Improve Writing Achievement

• Writing Strategies
• Summarization
• Collaborative Writing
• Specific Product Goals
• Word Processing
• Sentence Combining
• Prewriting
• Inquiry Activities
• Process Writing Approach
• Study of Models
• Writing for Content Leanring

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Some Thoughts About the Eleven Elements

• In a the best world, teachers would incorporate
  all eleven elements into their everyday writing
  program.
• Reality says thats not possible, so another
  approach is to use the elements to build a unique
  writing program to support individual students
  needs. This will likely produce the biggest
  return.

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The Optimal Mix?

• Researchers do not know what combination is best
  or how much of each element to use which will
  maximize writing instruction for low achieving
  writers in particular. Nor do they know which
  combination of elements works best for which
  types of writers.
• The eleven elements are part of a literature
  review which aims to provide specific practices
  that have shown to be effective across a number
  of contexts.

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An Example of the Writing Strategies Element

• Writing Strategies
• An example is self-regulated strategy development
  (SRSD) used to help students learn specific
  strategies for planning, drafting, and revising
  text.
• There are six stages
• 1. Develop background knowledge
• 2. Describe the strategy
• 3. Model it teacher shoe s how to use the
  strategy
• 4. Memorize it - the student memorizes the steps
  of the strategy, possible through a mnemonic
• 5. Support it teacher supports/scaffolds
  student mastery of the strategy
• 6. Independent Use students use strategy with
  less support

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To Get to the Independent Use Stage

• Teach students self regulation skills (goal
  setting, self-monitoring, self-instruction,
  self-reinforcement). They help students to manage
  writing strategies, the writing process, and
  their behavior.
• TWO MNEMONICS for students are
• PLAN (Pay attention to the prompt, Listen to the
  main idea, Add supporting details, Number your
  ideas)
• WRITE (Work from your plan to develop your
  thesis statement, Include transition words for
  each paragraph, Try to use different kinds of
  sentences, and Exciting, interesting, 10,000
  words)

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An Example of the Collaborative Writing Element

• This is peer writing as a team. A higher
  achieving student is assigned to be the Helper
  (tutor) and a lower achieving student is assigned
  to be the Writer (tutee). The teachers job is to
  monitor, prompt, praise, and address concerns.

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An Example of Setting Specific Product Goals
Strategy

• This method provides students with objectives to
  focus on specific aspects of their writing. An
  example might be a position paper in which a
  student write a persuasive letter designed to
  get the audience to agree with him/her.
• In addition to the main goal, a teacher provides
  sub-goals include a statement of belief,
  provide examples or supporting information.

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An Example of the Sentence Combining Element

• This strategy helps students to create more
  complex and sophisticated sentences through
  activities in which students combine sentences.
• Some specific goals
• Combine a high writer with a low writer and have
  them produce the following
• 1. Combine smaller sentences into a compound
  sentence using and, but, and because
• 2. Embed and adjective or adverb from one
  sentence into another
• 3. Us adverbial or adjectival clauses from one
  sentence into another
• 4. Make multiple embeddings involving adjectives,
  adverbs, adverbial clauses, and adjectival
  clauses.

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An Example of Inquiry Activity Element

• Students examine an object and write about it.
• Think of a seashell. Students examine a seashell
  by looking at it, touching it with their eyes
  closed, listening to it, etc. Students list
  details, becoming more and more precise and
  fine-tuning their descriptions, comparing the
  object to others, eliciting similes and
  metaphors.

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An Examples of the Study of Models Element

• Present students with models of excellent writing
  and examine them. The models may be written from
  opposing viewpoints. Using those models the
  teacher gives the students a writing assignment
  the next day in which they take an opposing
  viewpoint from another classmate.

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An Example of the Writing to Learn Element

• This element includes the element of
  summarization and is effective in content area
  classes. An example is to have students write
  about the parts of a flower and their purposes.
  Students come to a deeper understanding of the
  subject.

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Learning to Write and Writing to Learn

• Learning to write is a skill that draws on
  sub-skills and processes handwriting, spelling,
  vocabulary, punctuation, capitalizations, word
  usage, grammar, use of writing strategies.
• Writing to learn is a tool for learning subject
  matter. It deepens and extends students
  knowledge.

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• Learning to write leads to writing to learn which
  leads to, at the most advanced stage, using
  writing as a personal tool for transforming ones
  own experiences and knowledge.
• THE GOAL IN WRITING IS KNOWLEDGE TRANFORMATION

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Heres Your Challenge!

• The large number of students who struggle with
  reading and writing literacy has not changed
  noticeably in decades.
• What has changed is our society, which is now
  driven by ever-increasing knowledge and
  ever-accelerating demands for reading and writing
  skills.
• The disparity between modern life demands and
  inadequate literacy achievement in eight million
  struggling readers and writers demands that we
  help these students by reforming our strategies
  and techniques for improving reading and writing
  literacy.