Issue 58: Aug 31, 2009 Connections Newsletter

Does Your School/District Have a Comprehensive Approach to Literacy?

Barbara McSwain and Carol Brewer
Aug 31, 2009

A comprehensive approach to literacy is important and necessary for effective communication and life-long learning.  Most schools and districts, when asked, will say they have a comprehensive literacy program, yet when analyzed, the literacy program will often have gaps.  To help you identify if your literacy program has any gaps, we provide a look at the areas students should have the opportunity to address each day.

1. Is your literacy program balanced?  It is important that each day time is spent on Teacher Directed Reading, Phonological Awareness and Phonics, Vocabulary, Flex Groups, Self-Selected Reading, and Writing. It is imperative that elementary students have large blocks of scheduled time devoted to literacy initiatives.

2. How much time is spent each day giving students opportunities to learn and demonstrate their ability to identify and orally manipulate individual sounds that are found within spoken words?

3. Are students taught the relationship between letters and letter combinations in written words and spoken sounds explicitly?  Are students able to apply the phonics skills they have learned when reading words and sentences in stories each day?  How are phonics and phonological awareness taught and demonstrated on a daily basis?

4. Does the word work in the classroom include grade level standards-driven vocabulary as well as phonological awareness and phonics?  Do students understand that words have multiple meanings?  Do students recognize root words, prefixes, and suffixes?  Have students been exposed to a variety of fiction and expository texts?  Are signal words from comprehension strategies being taught explicitly?

5. Fluency is the ability for students to read orally with speed, accuracy and expression.  How many correct words per minute should students be able to read at this grade level?  Do students read with expression as well as comprehension?

6. Are teachers explicitly teaching comprehension strategies and applying them across content areas?  In every reading selection are students required to identify the Main Idea and Details, as well as, make inferences regardless of any other comprehension strategy that is being taught?

7. Is writing a central activity to all literacy skills across content areas?  Are students writing every day in every subject?  Are both the writing process and summary point writing being addressed every day?

8. Does your school or district have all of the above literacy components occur every day, including flex groups and self-selected reading?

If you answered no to any of these questions, the Comprehensive Literacy model can help you. There are workshops for implementing a comprehensive literacy model for teachers and administrators. Monitoring for literacy initiatives sessions are also offered for leadership. Please contact Client Services at www.LEARNINGFOCUSED.com or by calling 866-95LEARN (886-955-3276) to schedule a workshop.

Frequently Asked Questions and Responses about Vocabulary Instruction

Cindy Riedl
Aug 31, 2009

1. Why is it important to teach vocabulary?
• When vocabulary instruction is integrated into the content, a student's depth of understanding increases.
• Students struggling with understanding vocabulary and concepts produce misunderstandings that interfere with comprehending the content of the curriculum.

2. Why should you fit vocabulary strategies into an already full curriculum?
• The pay off for taking the time to explicitly teach key vocabulary is well spent when students demonstrate a greater understanding of the content, which is reflected by an increase in their test scores, class participation and self confidence.

3. What is previewing and who should do it?
• Students with limited prior knowledge about a topic or concept benefit from discussing and practicing key vocabulary before instruction.
• Previewing the meaning of words and building prior knowledge about the topic prior to instruction or reading a passage reduces the cognitive load and allows accurate connections to be made to new content.
• Previewing can be accomplished 2 to 3 days before classroom instruction with at-risk students by reading specialists, resource teachers, classroom teachers during Flex Groups, or ELL teachers, but it is accomplished for all students in the classroom during the Activating Strategy using a variety of vocabulary strategies.

4. What does research say about vocabulary instruction?
• Time is wasted when students are instructed to memorize words that will be tested at the end of the week.  This produces short-term memory retention with minimal application or connections.
• Having students discover new word meaning using context is less effective than once thought.
• Teaching vocabulary in context linked to new learning can raise test scores 33 percentile points. (US DOE 2002).
• To understand written or spoken words, students must know about 95% of the words.
• The relationship between word knowledge and comprehension is unequivocal.

5. How can teachers identify key vocabulary in a trade book?
• Chapter by chapter record words that will be challenging to the readers in the book, on paper, in a list.
• Make a check next to the word for each additional occurrence of the word.
• When done, you will know the total number of challenging words in the book and the number of times each word appears.
• Use this information to prioritize which vocabulary should be previewed before students read the passage or chapter.
• Another way to identify word frequency is to use a computer database program.

6. If teachers could only do three things to teach vocabulary, what would they be?
• Give the definition, description and the contextual information about word meaning to students.
• Involve students actively in word learning, i.e. writing the meaning in their own words, visualize and create memory enhancing connections using symbols or pictures.
• Provide multiple opportunities for using the word in a variety of contexts.

7. What should high school teachers do about SAT words?
• Google SAT games.  Have students use interactive web sites!
• Use the SAT words in your classroom discussions and encourage students to do the same.  Expose students to high quality oral language in the classroom. Make it a challenge!
• Promote word consciousness. When a word from the SAT word lists is discovered in literature or during content reading, take the time to explain the meaning, how you might use it as high quality oral language and then have them personalize it by using it themselves with a partner.

8. Why not teach all unknown words in a text?
• Too many for direct instruction.
• Direct instruction takes a lot of class time.
• Students may be able to understand a text without knowing every word.
• Students need opportunities to use word-learning strategies to independently get the meaning of new words.

Learn more about Vocabulary Instruction by clicking here.

How to Evaluate, Assess and Test Well!

Debbie Willingham
Aug 31, 2009

It is important that we evaluate the knowledge and skills students have gained in a variety of ways.  We often spend too much time stressing the memorization of factual information with the idea that students must "get" the information before they can go on to more application-based and critical thinking uses of the knowledge.  Most teacher-made tests are still written as fact-based, answer summaries of teacher lectures or readings.  Because we know and love our subject with a passion, we think everything is important and that we must convey every detail to our students.

In order to evaluate, assess and test well, however, you need to have a variety with different types and styles.  First, you must know what you want your students to know - what the standard says students should know, and you must know the content yourself.  Next you must let your students know up front what you want them to know, which reiterates the importance of Essential Questions.  Then you have to decide how you will know if and how well they know the information.  At times, it is important to have students create products and performances as culminating assessments in lieu of standardized tests, but sometimes you also need to have them write about what they know to see how they can put together factual information in a way that makes sense and gives you a true understanding of their depth of knowledge on the topic.  Three good ways to evaluate using a summative assessment of students' depth of knowledge in writing are constructed-response questions, thematic essays, and document-based questions.

Constructed-response questions are open-ended, short answer questions that measure both the Acquisition and Extending Thinking levels of students' learning.  They often use a range of stimuli such as graphs, charts, short readings, quotations, works of art, or cartoons. To set them up in a test format, each set of questions (usually three) should be based on one given stimulus. The first question is usually based on information taken directly from the stimulus, the second question usually asks students to make connections between and among the different parts of the stimulus, and the third question often brings in additional outside information related to the topic that goes beyond the stimulus data.

Thematic essays go beyond recall and reiteration of facts to ask students to make connections and linkages among the concepts within the topic. In essence they are asked, sometimes through the unit essential question, to pull together the concepts or subtopics learned within the unit to explain the bigger picture or theme of the unit. Students are expected to analyze, evaluate, construct support, or compare and contrast in a properly written, logically developed essay. A rubric should include how well students use relevant details and examples, how well they develop the theme by pulling together the pieces, and how the essay is logically organized and written.

Document-based questions also ask students to make connections using higher level thinking strategies, but they provide students with a common base (the documents) from which they demonstrate their depth of understanding by using the documents to support their answer to the question. Students often look at issues from multiple perspectives, take positions and support their conclusions using the documents, or make analogies based on a variety of data in the given documents. A rubric should include how well students analyze and interpret the documents, how they incorporate relevant outside information, and how they pull together a well-supported answer using all the elements supplied.

It is important to try new ways of evaluating, assessing and testing our students' knowledge and understanding. There are many ways to do this well, and using a wide variety over time will ensure that your students are learning and continuously practicing strategies for becoming successful thinkers, writers, debaters, and test takers.

Learn more about how to evaluate, assess, and test well in the LEARNING-FOCUSED book:  Connecting Learning to Assessments.