Comprehension Going Forward: Best Practices in Reading Comprehension Instruction
Course Description:
Improving reading comprehension is the cornerstone that academic achievement is built upon. Once students comprehend what they have read, they are able to improve their critical thinking skills, apply their knowledge across subject areas and incorporate these ideas into new perspectives. In this course, teachers will learn how to bring the joy back into reading instruction by teaching students how to apply deeper meaning to what they have read, make connections with science, math and social studies lessons, increase their understanding of higher-level language concepts such as figurative language and draw inferences and conclusions using their own experiences and acquired knowledge. As a result, students will increase their ability to go beyond the surface meanings of text and learn how to experience their reading materials, while learning how to compare and contrast topics, evaluate texts, create schema, generate hypotheses and theories and give supporting evidence to their beliefs and opinions.
Goals and Objectives
As a result of participation in this course, students should:
- Learn strategies to improve reading comprehension for struggling readers, english language learners and special education students.
- Increase their students’ comprehension skills across the curriculum, such as in science and history.
- Teach students higher order thinking skills: how to think critically about texts, analyze what they are reading, draw conclusions, support their opinions and infer meaning behind the action in the text.
- Instill a love of reading in their students, making the text relevant to their lives and helping them to expand their worldview by making correlations between different cultures, historical periods and personal experiences.
Texts/Readings
The required text is:
Keene, E., Zimmerman, S., Miller, D., Bennett, S., Blauman, L., Hutchins, C., Harvey, S., Goudvis, A., Buhrow, B., Cervetti, G., Larner, M., Tovani, C., Commins, N., Garcia, A., & McGregor, T. (2011). Comprehension Going Forward: Where We Are/What’s Next. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.