Quick Thinking Jobs for Reading Fiction Books

Table I.2: Benefits of the Literacy Triangle

Students

• Students who are lagging in their literacy skills will be able to get caught up, allowing achievement to soar in all content areas . • Student metacognition and comprehension will reach deeper levels, contributing to more meaningful and memorable learning . • Students’ enjoyment of literacy will improve because the reading, discussing, and writing tools are fun, relevant, meaningful, and respectful tasks that encourage them to engage with text . • Students will feel motivated and take more ownership for their learning because of the self-assessment and reflection built into each strategy . • Students will have their needs met when teachers use the differentiation section for each strategy . • Students will develop routines of discussing and writing about what they read and cultivate rich background knowledge and concept development . • Students will engage in culturally responsive literacy instruction, providing them opportunities to make meaning, choose texts, and lead discussions . • Your planning time will be drastically simplified because you are planning the integration of the most important components in literacy . • You will have less reteaching because front-end mastery will occur more often . • You will experience fewer classroom behavior disruptions because of the increase in student agency, ownership, and engagement . • Your students will read and communicate with deeper understanding and have a more positive literacy mindset . • You will be able to teach more in less time . Your classroom time will be more of students thinking and learning and less of you telling them about the content .

Teachers

• Chapter 3 details the literacy triangle and discusses the importance of the literacy mindset and how it affects the amount of effort that students will exert as they encounter textual challenges.

Part 2 includes chapters 4–7. Here, we journey into implementation of the literacy triangle. In chapters 4–6, we share before-reading, during-reading, and after-reading strategies to strengthen your students’ literacy skills. For each element of the literacy triangle journey, we offer the big three planning actions and strategies to support each action.

For each strategy, we provide a definition (What Is It?), the rationale or research supporting it (Why Do It?), and how to teach the strategy the cha-chas way for highest impact. We describe step-by-step teaching (chunk) the strategy in a high-impact, cognitive-science-friendly manner so that learning is memorable and visible (chew and check). In addition, we provide possibilities for differentiation (change), including ways to enrich a strategy (bump it up) and scaffold it (break it down).

To provide further support, we’ve included a box with each strategy indicating, with a check mark, the grade level and literacy area where it is most effective, and a star indicating where it might also be beneficial. We also provide possible criteria for success to challenge students to take ownership of their learning (student agency or self-assessment). Providing students with criteria for success helps them know exactly what is needed to demonstrate mastery of the learning

target. It also yields an effect size of 0.88 (Visible Learning MetaX, 2021). Finally, we provide technology support tools as additional options in each chapter.

Quick Glance

9 Reading Tool 9 Discussing Tool 9 Writing Tool

Group Brainstorm

Grade Level

9 K–2 9 Grades 3–5 9 Grades 6–8

Key

9 Main Use  Optional Use

• Chapter 4 examines the benefits of before-reading strategies, and we share some of the best strategies for accessing and building prior knowledge before reading and for setting a purpose to focus the students’ reading of the text. • Chapter 5 provides you with strategies to use during reading, including those to help make students’ thinking visible, to increase metacognition and help students make sense of text or know what to do when the text doesn’t make sense, and opportunities to discuss their understandings, or lack thereof, to strengthen comprehension. • Chapter 6 focuses on high-impact after-reading strategies that lead to deeper comprehension, such as providing minilessons to address skill gaps, having teacher-led and student-led discussions, as well as synthesizing the learning into writing. • Chapter 7 brings each piece together to form a big picture for you. This chapter includes our lesson plan template, complete with directions, and a variety of examples so you can get a sense of how easy and effective your literacy instruction can be. We include a wide range of checklists to support bringing students and teachers along on the literacy triangle journey. We even provide some suggestions and walk-through forms to help you reinforce literacy schoolwide.

The book is designed to support you and your students, so if you are just beginning your literacy instruction journey, you might decide to start at the beginning, while a veteran literacy teacher, who has been on the journey for a while but is looking for some new strategies to use, might choose to skip to part 2. If you are wondering how to choose the appropriate text or whether round-robin or choral reading would be best, or what type of thinking or writing would support the learning, then you may want to head to chapter 2. If having students synthesize their learning with deep discussion or in writing is your destination, then you may decide to fly straight into chapter 6. The choice is yours. Let’s get started on our literacy journey!

C H A P T E R 5

Staying Focused, but Flexible, on the Text Journey—During Reading

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while. —Malorie Blackman

The before-reading strategies intentionally pre-exposed and primed your students’ brains with snippets of information and vocabulary, painted the big picture of the text (organization, main idea, genre, essential questions, and so on), activated the students’ prior knowledge, gathered their supported predictions, and set a purpose for their reading. Your students are now prepared and excited to journey into reading, thinking, and ultimately comprehending the text. It is during reading where students make their thinking visible, often by text tagging (using flags or highlighting to mark the text) or annotating (recording their thinking on the text or on sticky notes that they place on the text). You are now ready to blend two elements of the literacy triangle (read and discuss) with some during-reading strategies.

Just as experienced travelers must remain flexible in the face of challenges like flight delays and lost reservations, students must remain flexible as they face challenges during reading to stay focused on the goal, which is comprehension. David Sousa (2014) defines comprehension as a “complex interactive process that begins with identifying words by using knowledge outside the text, accessing word meaning in context, recognizing grammatical structures, drawing inferences, and self-monitoring to ensure that the text is making sense” (p. 101).