Teresa Ritchie's Blog

Response to Shared Readings: Modeling comprehension, vocabulary, text structures, and text features by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Diane Lapp February 17, 2010

This article describes the observance of effective teachers in several schools in an attempt to validate the benefits of modeling reading to students.  The teachers mentioned in this article inspire me to model thinking as I read to my students.  Their strategy was to read texts to students and think aloud as they did so.  This is ingenious.  I think that many times children are asked to expound on a text when they have no idea what that means.  However, when they observe their teacher thinking aloud about a portion of text that s/he just read, this modeling teaches them how to do the same.  It teaches them how to think about something.  But what is so good about this technique is that teachers don’t just think aloud without specific structure.  As the top of page 550 says, the teacher uses such strategies as “activating background, inferencing, summarizing, predicting, clarifying, questioning, visualizing, monitoring, synthesizing, evaluating, and connecting.”  Here is an example (you’re gonna love this).  As a third grade teacher showed her class a wordless book called The Red Book, she said this about the cover:

It seems to me that this boy is cold.  I see his hat, scarf, jacket, and boots.  But it’s just all red on the cover so I don’t have all of the clues I need to make a good inference or prediction.  But I can tell that he’s walking quickly, and when I add that to the clothing, I predict that it’s cold where he is (pg. 550). 

And these are strategies just for increasing comprehension!  For each of the other areas that the teachers covered during the observations,  i.e., vocabulary, text structures, and text features, they used even more strategies.  This article is rich with ideas for the new teacher.  I believe that incorporating all these ideas into our own classrooms will prove to be fruitful in creating readers who read well, understand what they’re reading, and as a result, enjoy reading.