Reviewing the Textbook Strategies: Reflection Blog #2

Reviewing the Textbook Strategies: Reflection Blog #2
REED502
Chadrick Shoales

Strategies Available to Teachers
There are several strategies available to teachers which help them approach and address student reading skills. The text, Reading Strategies for the Content Areas, by Sue Beers, lists a number of those strategies. Some of those strategies look appealing to me because they relate to my current position. I will try out some of these strategies in my classroom in order to improve reading skills. Beers (2003) stated that “when you provide students with a clear understanding of the strategies and the opportunity to use the reading tools that support them, you will be successful in helping good readers become independent strategic readers” (p. 26). I want to select the strategies and reading tools which help students to be able to have a better chance with MSA testing in regards to strategic reading.
The Textbook Strategies
The text, Reading Strategies for the Content Areas, by Sue Beers, offers eight independent reading strategies as well as suggestions of how students can use each strategy independently. Beers (2003) stated that “once we expect that students will read and process the material using reading strategies, we will no longer be frustrated by their reading ability, and they will gain independence in the content area” (p. 20). The goal of every teacher teaching reading is that student can be capable of reading and comprehending texts on their own. When this happens, teachers can be more flexible and creative with their lesson planning, rather than just preparing students how to read to have a chance at comprehending the MSA tests, specifically the benchmarks. Beers book mentions the following eight reading strategies:
• Independent strategic readers have strategies to use when encountering new words.
• Independent strategic readers connect new knowledge to existing knowledge to make personal meaning.
• Independent strategic readers think ahead to what might be coming in the reading.
• Independent strategic readers continually evaluate their own understanding of what they have read.
• Independent strategic readers create images of what they are reading.
• Independent strategic readers periodically summarize what they have read and learned.
• Independent strategic readers use textual cues, visual, and text organization to increase their understanding.
• Independent strategic readers have a plan for how to approach the reading task. (p. 20-25)

Once again, in addition to these reading strategies, suggestions of how students can use each strategy independently were also included in Beers book. Some strategies, suggestions, and ideas are more suitable to some teachers than others depending on the teacher, the teaching situation, and the students.
Strategies I Will Try and Why I Selected Them
Of the eight strategies, I plan to try to have my independent strategic reading students create images of what they are reading, use textual cues, visuals, and text organization to increase their understanding, and to have a plan for how to approach the reading task. As an artist I prefer books with several images and I am a visual learner. My students are visual learners as well. Creating images of what are being read using text clues, visuals, and text organizers is something I can easily incorporate into my art classroom or my afterschool program. If my 1st graders are having trouble processing the sequence of events in a story, I can have them brainstorm what the events by drawing pictures. They can sequence those pictures in order of the way they think that they happened. I also could let my art students highlight keywords as I read an art article to them in class to increase understanding of the main points of the text. Boyer (2008) stated that a school used visual clues and “students quickly asserted their understanding of the text and were more willing to participate” (p. 22). My students can also look at the pictures in a story or text and find clues and ideas to what the story is about. Beers (2003) stated that students can “recognize that pictures in the text are there to help provide clues to the reading” (p. 25). By simply viewing works of art, and creating stories from them, this can also help students analyze pictures in the books that they read. Every reading task should include a plan. I would have students brainstorming not only what they are going to do in a piece of artwork in art class, but also brainstorming a plan to find an answer in a reading task. Part of that plan would begin with looking at the words in a text. Beers states that a teacher can “review vocabulary that is important to the content” (p. 25). If students underline the vocabulary words that they know in a reading, they can start decoding what the text is about. Once they have an idea of what the text is about, they can have a better chance of making sense of an article independently.

References

Beers, S., Howell, L. (2003). Reading Strategies for the Content Areas. Alexandria:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Boyer, S. (Spring 2008). Graphic Novels to the Rescue. Education Forum: Toronto,
34(2), 21-23. Retrieved February 21, 2010, from ProQuest Host Research Database.