Making Sense of it All: Secondary Students and their Textbooks

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Making Sense of it All Secondary Students and
their Textbooks

• Robert Austin
• Utah State Office of Education

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Before We Start

• Setting our purpose for today
• Learning by doing
• Learning from one another

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Our Purpose

• When kids are struggling with texts, it could
  mean a variety of things. It may mean they need
  help with vocabulary, word recognition and
  fluency and automaticity, with spelling, with
  responding to literature and finding books that
  interest them, or with comprehension.

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With the time we have today, we will look at
comprehension and in particular the strategies
that you as parents and guardians of young adults
can take to help make the texts that students
face more comprehensible.

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• Much of what I use today comes from reading
  comprehension research from multiple sources.
  One of the best researchers is Kylene Beers,
  whose book When Kids Cant Read, What Teachers
  Can Do is chock full of great information.

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Mom, I cant find it

• One of the main points that has come across in
  recent research explicit instruction and
  modeling is essential. Comprehension can be a
  mystery for students. They dont understand how
  you found the answer to a question any more than
  they dont understand how you found the shirt
  hanging in their closet that they swear wasnt
  there when they looked.

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Modeling, modeling, modeling

• So as parents we need to have a bag of tricks.
  One of the first is explicit modeling of how we
  ourselves comprehend text when we read.

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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

• Reading is a complicated and seemingly magical
  process. Whenever we encounter texts we come to
  them with all of the background we have, as well
  as with a purpose for reading, an ability to use
  skills like making connections between what we
  read and what we already know, an ability to
  visualize what the writer is talking about ( with
  the exception of when it involves how to assemble
  a tricycle, usually on Christmas eve) and an
  ability to summarize what the reading selection
  is about. Many of us do all of these things and
  more unconsciously. We may not even be aware of
  all that we do.

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I just dont get it

• This wont help our students. Just as they must
  see the parts to a basketball game if they are to
  play, or understand how to play the trombone with
  explicit instruction, so too they need specific
  help with their reading. It is not good enough
  to say well, read it anymore than it was okay
  for Professor Harold Hill to use the Think
  System in The Music Man rather than having the
  kids actually play.

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Readers have to do more

• Clarifying
• Comparing and contrasting
• Connecting to prior experiences
• Inferencing
• Predicting
• Questioning the text
• Recognizing the authors purposes
• Seeing causal relationships
• Summarizing
• Visualizing
• I would add to this list Understanding text
  structure
• Understanding the line of reasoning or arguments
  the writer is making

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Strategies

• This is all pretty complicated and then you throw
  into the mix a text structure that students are
  not very familiar with, i.e. expository text, and
  you can have some troubles.

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Getting Started