Thinking and Discussing at Higher Levels in the Literacy Block

1. Thinking and Discussing at Higher Levels in the Literacy Block Jennifer Jones Lake Myra Elementary WCPSS March 2012

2. Why Higher Level Thinking?

3. Research Based Professional Text

4. Guided Reading "The ultimate goal of guided reading is to help children learn how to use independent reading strategies successfully." -Fountas and Pinnell

5. Purpose of Reading Print Reading Story Read & & Understand

6. Comparison of Guided Reading Models What stands out to you? Read Silently. Discuss together. Share out.

7. Setting the Stage for Thinking Deeply & Critically

8. “…a young string musician playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with excellent posture, bowing, dynamics and so forth with eventually surpass a student of music who is focusing on stretching to meet the short-term demands of getting through a challenging piece. The student working on process and simple music develops a feel for the whole, integrated effort, and this process becomes automated.” (PMR, p.33)

9. “It is not uncommon for students reading successfully within “just difficult-enough texts”(Clay 1993 p. 53) to make leaps of multiple levels between benchmark assessments.” -Preventing Misguided Reading p. 39

10. Strategy #2 Describe Guided Reading as a Session Rather than a Lesson • Teacher support enables students to problem-solve, connect and discover • Session is conversational in format • Students read a lot

11. Thinking Deeply About Story: Even for Our Emerging Readers “Our exercises in comprehension tend to be limited (e.g., who are the characters in the story?), which may actually develop readers who attend to story superficially.”…”So, our challenge becomes teaching beginning readers to decode while teaching them comprehend rather than inadvertently teaching them to decode instead of teaching them to comprehend” (Preventing Misguided Reading, p. 72).

12. Strategy #15 Engage All Students, Regardless of Instructional Reading Level, in Thinking Deeply About Story •Beyond a series of questions •Beyond “Today I want you to make a prediction.” •Beyond story retelling •Beyond details of the reading process but active in all of it •Meaning at the text level

13. The Language of Teaching Comprehension Instruction Deeply Little Questions What houses did each pig build? Big Questions How are the pigs’ houses different? Why did the writer have the third pig build the brick house instead of the second pig? Why did the wolf say the same thing at each house? What did the wolf say before he blew down the houses? What happens at the beginning, middle and end of the story? What did the pigs learn from their experience?

14. A Conversational Stance “Conversations about inferences students must make to understand the text deeply push students to approach the work actively, giving them a purpose for their reading that prompts integration of information. This active stance supports students as they think about the text in sophisticated ways and begin practicing the thinking work we want them to habituate and carry into the rest of their lives”. (Preventing Misguided Reading, p.76)

15. A Where is Your Level of Thinking?

16. Lower vs. Higher Level Thinking

17. Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

18. Critical Thinking Rubric

19. The Magic Word …followed by our opinion, it tells others the rationale for our thinking.

20. Thank You! Jennifer Jones jjones2@wcpss.net Helloliteracy.blogspot.com