More Reading Strategies in Action:
Samples from Teacher Talk
What do the More Reading Strategies in Action teachers have to say about their approaches to teaching reading? These quotes from the “Teacher Talk” interview videos provide some insights:
Marc Milanich, 8th grade social studies
“When I have students read from a textbook, you have to look at, first, whether they understand what they’re reading before they’re going to read it. So first I look to see if there’s going to be vocabulary issues before we get started, to try and identify those words and look at them before we start reading. While they’re reading the piece, what we have to do is think about what we want them to leave the piece with. So often what you need is some sort of organizer, a graphic organizer, to help guide them through the reading, whether it’s a series of questions or some sort of a concept map which you want them to find. They’re very disorganized at this grade level, so you have to guide them through, as opposed to someone at a later grade level that might say, ‘Pick out an important point and relay that back to me.’ They’re not going to be able to do that. You’re going to have to guide them to the important points and then have them make the connections to each other.”
Pat Black, 8th grade algebra
“‘What special needs do middle school students incorporate throughout the year?’ is a major question I’ve been traveling through for three, four years now—since the initiative has come through our district to incorporate reading and literacy into every curriculum area. I’ve noticed that the textbooks and the mathematics literature is very involved and very complicated, and very hard to follow in most textbooks. What I try to do in terms of reading is to try to help kids decipher meanings out of examples in the books—how to interpret solutions to problems—and try to get kids to think on a different level other than just routine completion of problems. So we try to get in a little deeper-order thinking.
“One thing that’s probably a good thing or a bad thing about a mathematics textbook is that you can just follow the textbook. You could just sit there and turn the page and keep on going with it. And I know [that] as a starting first-year teacher, I was glued to that textbook. That textbook was my bible, and I didn’t want to put my bible down. And I pretty much did the examples in the book and then tried to give the lesson that was assigned in the book, and I was learning, and that’s the way you’re taught. Being taught that way, that’s the way I ended up teaching. Luckily, through a great district and some great administrative leaders, I’ve done some things through professional development where I’ve started learning about how does the brain function? And what is the best way to learn mathematics—what’s the best way to learn concepts in general? Throughout the years I’ve tried to push myself into an area that’s uncomfortable for me: not being tied to the textbook, and not being tied to just the examples in the textbook.”
Jennifer Bernhard, reading specialist
“Using a reading circle in the content area I have found to be beneficial to students, in that they realize they’re not responsible for the whole entire reading. If you can break the reading down into smaller tasks, it is more palatable to them. And that’s what I think works very well in the content area as well as the literary area, providing that the teacher reads the material ahead of time and knows what roles are there. For example, the reading that we did, I knew there was history in there. And I knew there was the human aspect, and I knew there were science facts. Not all readings are going to be that way. I can remember other content areas I’ve done where there was lots of geography and history, just those two, and maybe culture, and so I was able to create the roles for the three. So it may be a little bit labor-intensive in that you have to do a lot of reading ahead of time, and you have to do your own analysis as a teacher, but it is so worth it because it helps them.”
Tom Stull, 9th grade algebra
“I look at three different kinds of strategies when I’m teaching reading in math class: pre-reading strategies, during-reading strategies, and post-reading strategies. I kind of break them down into three different, specific areas. Depending on the text we’re going to be reading, I decide which pre-reading strategies do I want to use, which during-reading strategies do I want to use, and which post-reading strategies do I want to use?
“The biggest prior-knowledge issue we have in teaching reading in mathematics is vocabulary. The vocabulary is very critical in a math class because words have very specific meanings, unlike some of the meanings that they have when we use these words on the street. Also, we have to worry about reading graphics. We have a lot of visual symbols, tables, charts, and if a child doesn’t understand what this symbol means, then they’re not going to be able to make understanding out of the text.”
Jane Clouse, 7th grade science
“Middle school science students’ reading is a little bit different, I think, than if you were in a literature class, or just reading expository text. The vocabulary’s different. The arrangement is different also, because we’re trying to cover abstract concepts a lot of times that are difficult to follow. They’re covering processes that are sequential, and the student needs to be organized in a reading strategy. And they also need a little bit of guided reading. I would never ask a student to read aloud from a textbook, or an article or a text, without giving them the opportunity to preview that book or article. It’s unfair. I don’t like to do it, so why should I ask them? Because it could put them on the spot, and I want them to feel comfortable.
“We do a lot of dual reading in the classroom. We do a lot of choral reading—which is very useful because you can kind of stumble through some words, and you can share. And you can practice good reading habits in that respect, but only after you have looked at the article and given the students a chance to read it also.
“I do a lot of pre-reading. I probably spend as much time ‘pre-reading’ and ‘during reading,’ more so than I do ‘after reading.’ We have this block of time, and I found myself spending more time at the end saying, ‘Why didn’t they get it? Why didn’t they understand it? Why didn’t they see those steps?’ And I found that if I spend more time pre-reading guiding them through process and during reading guiding them through the process, then I spend a lot less time at the end of the reading process, and they usually have caught it by then.”
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