literacy strategies to help science teachers

Literacy Strategies and The Common Core: Helping

Students to Become College & Career Ready

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Making Textbook Reading Meaningful

• Slides 2-11 from:Guthrie, J.T. & Klauda, S.L. (2012). Making Textbook Reading Meaningful. Education Leadership, V. 69 (6), Alexandria, VA: ASCD

5 Crucial Practices That Motivate Adolescents to Read Informational Texts

• Develop Dedication• Build Self-Efficacy• Show Students the Text’s Value• Use Social Motivation• Give Students Choices

Develop Dedication • Effective Teachers go beyond the textbook to use a variety of

texts.

• They do not offer curriculum that is a mile-wide and an inch deep

They do provide in-depth units of study in which students have a chance to read extensively and deeply about topics.

Dedication

• One leading 8th grade science textbook covers symbiosis in one page

Compare to Content Orientated Reading Instruction (CORI) at the University of Maryland (www.corilearning.com)

• Where 1 week is spent on the concept of mutualism alone using a multitude of texts

Dedication

Build Self-Efficacy

• Do not avoid the text book because it is too hard

• Students need repeated experiences of successfully learning from textbooks and informational texts to build self-efficacy as learners

• Use supplementary texts• Gradually increase task selection and task

complexity

Demonstrate the Text’s Value

• Apply information to concrete classroom tasks, presentations, labs, and units of inquiry

Use Social Motivation

• Think-Pair- Share

• Collaborative Reasoning (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001)

Students build on one another’s ideas to explain a major concept or topic of inquiry by adding key elements as they synthesize to form consensus.

Vocabulary Example

• The teacher may say:“Read this paragraph silently and then reach agreement within your group on the three most important words in the paragraph. Be prepared to defend your choices to the class. You have three minutes.”

Guthrie & Klauda, p.67

Give Students Choice

• Not in terms of whether or not to do assigned reading and subsequent assignments

• Do give limited choices such as:– Which paragraph to emphasize in drawing

conclusions– Which examples to reread– Supplemental reading

From Teach Like A Championby Doug Lemov

Use Technical Vocabulary

• Good teachers get students to develop effective right answers using terms they already are comfortable with:

“Volume is the amount of space something takes up.”

Great Teachers

• Great teachers get students to use precise technical vocabulary:

“Volume is the cubic units of space an object occupies.”

Rationale

• The “great” response expands student vocabularies and builds comfort with terms the student will need to be college ready.

Expanding students’ vocabulary and self-efficacy with informational texts will help stamp out “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Follow-up

• The 5 crucial practices that motivate adolescents to read informational texts are grounded in research John Guthrie & Susan Kutz Klauda did at the University of Maryland.

• Using the practice of social motivation, review this presentation and develop 3 questions you have regarding Guthrie & Klauda, and/or Lemov’s premises on using informational texts

Living the Questions

• Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue…the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Rainer Maria Rilke

References

• Chinn, C.A., Anderson, R.C., & Waggoner, M.A. (2001). Patterns of discourse in two kinds of literature discussion. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 378-411.

• Guthrie, J.T. & Klauda, S.L. (2012). Making textbook reading meaningful. Education Leadership,69 (6),64-68.

• Lemov, D. (2010). Teach like a champion.San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.

Follow Up & Discussion Questions

• The 5 crucial practices that motivate adolescents to read informational texts are grounded in research John Guthrie & Susan Kutz Klauda did at the University of Maryland.

• Using the practice of social motivation, review this presentation and develop 3 questions you have regarding Guthrie & Klauda, and/or Lemov’s premises on using informational texts

5 Crucial Practices That Motivate Adolescents to Read Informational Texts

• Develop Dedication• Build Self-Efficacy• Show Students the Text’s Value• Use Social Motivation• Give Students Choices