This video shared a lot of important information and strategies that should be taught to students in order to help build their comprehension while reading. I'm glad that Professor Duke described why teaching comprehension strategies becomes very important from third grade through fifth grade, not just the fact that they will be facing expository text, but the fact that the nature of the language becomes more "written" and academic as opposed to "spoken" language that students have been previously exposed.
I also really enjoyed how the teacher had a poster listing a variety of strategies students could use to guide their thinking about text. Thinking aloud, creating inferences, building predictions, rereading, looking for context clues, breaking down unknown words, are just a few of the strategies that are touched upon in the video. I like how that these are posted around the room, the teachers consistently model, and guide students through the use of these strategies. It rang true to me that a teacher should be more of a coach and less of a didactic speaker of information.
I don't think that any of the ideas in this video are new, but I would happily use many if not all of these techniques in teaching my future students how to build their comprehension. Giving students the opportunities to explore texts through discussion and writing along with explicitly teaching comprehension strategies, teacher modeling of these strategies, and guided use of these strategies. Students need to know why and how these strategies are used and they need to be given a variety of facets to explore the use of these strategies.
Teaching these comprehension strategies can help all readers, even struggling readers. All readers need to have a repertoire of methods that they can fall back on in order to understand what they read. Struggling readers will realize that comprehension is the goal of reading and they will have the tools to lead them to their goal.
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