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Teaching Reading Strategies Online


Improve Comprehension Across the Curriculum

Course Outline


Course Description

This course is designed to assist teachers (elementary through high school) in the development of specific skills/methods needed to effectively teach strategic reading that improves comprehension across the curriculum. These methods will be used as a tool for thinking and learning in all content areas. The course will include strategies for comprehending non-fiction, informational, and narrative text, vocabulary development, Reciprocal Teaching, reflective strategies, writing strategies that construct and extend meaning, assessments, and strategic lesson planning. A framework for teaching reading will be established by examining current research and effective practices that will allow the teacher to develop content literacy for them and their students.  Reading is a complex process and teachers will gain an understanding of the metacognitive skills and strategic reading strategies needed to effectively utilize specific skills to facilitate student growth in the reading process.

Objectives

  • Reflect on strategic reading knowledge.
  • Examine current reading research.
  • Assess the developmental stages of reading. 
  • Identify the five essential components of an effective reading program.
  • Analyze the importance of teaching reading across the curriculum 
  • Consider the real-world literacy demands and the impact content area reading has on those demands.
  • Develop a rationale for developing literacy as part of content-area instruction.
  • Analyze the six indicators of what is reading.
  • Develop a sound understanding of characteristics, strategies, and key issues in content area reading
  • Examine the characteristics of a good and struggling reader and how they impact student performance.
  • Analyze the three interactive elements of reading.
  • Assess students’ reading abilities as a basis for planning effective instruction in the content areas.
  • Create an activity to compare/contrast narrative and informational text to reinforce explicit differences in the structural format.
  • Distinguish the importance of metacognition and how it affects the learning process.
  • Analyze the importance of acquiring cognitive tools for reading to help students become strategic readers.
  • Explore the role of problem solving and its relationship on reading for comprehension.
  • Assess the function of teaching the think-aloud process to help with self-monitoring techniques to focus on comprehension and identify when the comprehension is incorrect. 
  • Analyze four key cognitive strategies of reading: summarizing, questioning, predicting, and clarifying.
  • Develop activities that integrate the four key cognitive strategies for reading comprehension instruction based on content-area curriculum standards.
  • Analyze the various roles and methods used during the Reciprocal Teaching process.
  • Develop activities using Reciprocal Teaching for reading comprehension instruction based on content-area curriculum standards.
  • Analyze the demands and challenges that expository/informational text places on all classrooms.
  • Analyze the characteristics of informational/expository text and its features.
  • Explore the guidelines teaching students to use text structures in their classroom and apply it to their classrooms.
  • Develop an activity that uses informational/expository reading strategies designed to encourage metacognition, promote thoughtful interaction with text, and ensure high levels of comprehension.
  • Assess the purpose of before, during, and after reading strategies.
  • Distinguish between the characteristics of good and poor reading as they participate in before, during, and, after reading strategies.
  • Develop lessons and activities that use before-reading strategies designed to activate or build prior knowledge, set a purpose for reading, and motivate students to think and learn with text.
  • Develop lessons and activities that use during-reading strategies designed to encourage higher level thinking, promote thoughtful interaction with text, and ensure high levels of comprehension.
  • Develop lessons and activities that use post-reading strategies designed to encourage thoughtful reflection, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
  • Evaluate the text structures associated with narrative text.
  • Implement strategies to build story schema (background knowledge about stories) by showing how narrative text has recurring elements (story grammar): characters, settings, conflicts, major events, resolutions, and themes.
  • Develop lessons and activities that use narrative text strategies designed to encourage metacognition, promote thoughtful interaction with text, and ensure high levels of comprehension. 
  • Reflect on current research and statistics of vocabulary development and the implications it has on student achievement.
  • Assess how vocabulary knowledge provides a foundation for reading comprehension and enables students to expand their content-area knowledge.
  • Analyze a range of practical, effective teaching strategies that can be used to develop students’ vocabulary knowledge. 
  • Apply techniques for assessing students’ vocabulary knowledge.
  • Develop lessons and activities that help students learn concepts and vocabulary necessary for interacting with and comprehending content-area text materials.
  • Demonstrate how reflection is one of the primary ways for students to learn in the classroom.
  • Analyze reflective practices in their classrooms and understand the purpose of it in the classroom. 
  • Compare and contrast the types of reflection and questions used in the classroom.
  • Assess the characteristics of writing used in content areas.
  • Integrate effective writing activities into text-based content-area lessons and activities
  • Incorporate strategic teaching concepts into their daily classroom instructional practices.
  • Compare and contrast the six assumptions about learning and the implications they have on reading instruction.
  • Develop a unit that will help students independently use reading strategies designed to increase comprehension and retention of content area material.


Curriculum Design & Time Requirements

The following methodologies will be used during the course: cooperative learning, applied practice assignments, development of lesson plans and unit, and reflective written responses. This is an online sixty-hour, three credit graduate level course that is completed over a thirteen-week period.

Hardward Skill & Computer Requirements

Students may use either a Macintosh computer or a PC with Windows 2000 or higher. Students should possess basic word processing skills and have internet access with an active e-mail account. Students also are expected to have a basic knowledge of how to use a Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla Firefox etc.

Course Materials

The required text for this course is Teaching Reading in the Content Areas: If Not Me, Then Who? by Dr. Rachel Billmeyer and Mary Lee Barton. A variety of readings and resources will be referenced throughout the course. Additional supplementary readings and resources will be provided.


Session Outline

Session 1: Foundations of Teaching Reading Across the Curriculum
Contents:
  1. Introductions
  2. Establishing class/group expectations and norms
  3. Course overview
  4. Establishing individual course expectations and goals
  5. Course requirements
  6. Course registration
  7. Why is reading import across the curriculum?
  8. Examine the stages of reading
    • Stage 1: Initial Reading and Decoding
    • Stage 2: Confirmation, Fluency, and Ungluing from Print
    • Stage 3: Learning the New
    • Stage 4: Multiple Viewpoints
    • Stage 5 Construction and Reconstruction
  9. Real-World Literacy Demands
    • How we can prepare students (Workplace Competencies)
  10. Five Premises Basic to Teaching Reading
    • Reader constructs meaning
    • Role of prior knowledge
    • Metacognition-the ability to think about and control thought processes before, during, and after reading
    • Reading and writing are integrally related
    • Learning is a socially interactive process

Session 2: Understanding the Reading Process
Contents:
  1. Three interactive elements of reading
    • Reader
    • Climate
    • Text features
  2. Six assumptions about reading
    • Goal-oriented
    • The linking of new information to prior knowledge
    • The organization of new information
    • The acquisition of cognitive and metacognitive structures
    • Nonlinear, yet occurring in phases
    • Influenced by cognitive development
  3. Motivating students to take control of their learning
  4. Modeling problem solving
    • The think aloud process

Session 3: Cognitive Tools for Reading
Contents:
  1. Questioning strategies
  2. Summarizing strategies
  3. Predicting strategies
  4. Clarifying strategies
  5. Developing reading activities and lesson plan development

Session 4: Nonfiction/Informational Text
Contents:
  1. What is it?
  2. Content
  3. Text Features
  4. Text Structures
  5. Directed Reading/Thinking Activity
  6. Graphic Organizers
  7. Developing reading activities and lesson plan development

Session 5: Nonfiction/Informational Text: Before, During, and After Reading Strategies
Contents:
  1. Graphic organizers
  2. Anticipation/Prediction Guide
  3. Group summarizing
  4. K-W-L
  5. Pairs read
  6. Problematic situations
  7. Note-taking
  8. SQ3R
  9. Developing reading activities and lesson plan development

Session 6: Narrative Text
Contents:
  1. Prior Knowledge
  2. Connections to Text
  3. Monitoring Understanding
  4. Extending Understanding
  5. Character Map
  6. Story Frame/Map
  7. C Block
  8. Developing reading activities and lesson plan development

Session 7: Vocabulary Development
Contents:
  1. Mapping
  2. Graphic Organizers
  3. Pre-reading Predictions
  4. Feature Analysis
  5. Word Sorts
  6. Developing reading activities and lesson plan development

Session 8: Reflective and Writing Strategies
Contents:
  1. Journals
    • Response
    • Learning Logs
    • Double-Entry
  2. Exploratory Writing
    • Point of View Guides
    • Admit Exit Slips
    • Directed 3-2-1
    • Writing Warm-ups
  3. Finished Writing
    • Essays
    • Constructed Responses
    • Analytical Paragraph
  4. Writing-to-Learn
  5. Discussion Web
  6. Read-Write-Think
  7. Conversation Sparks
  8. Writing toward Understanding
  9. Developing reading activities and lesson plan development

Session 9: Reciprocal Teaching
Contents:
  1. The Four Reciprocal Teaching Strategies
    • Predicting
    • Questioning
    • Clarifying
    • Summarizing
  2. Reciprocal Teaching in the Whole-Class Sessions
  3. Reciprocal Teaching in the Guided-Reading Group and Literature Circles
  4. Assessment and Reciprocal Teaching
  5. Develop a Reciprocal Teaching lesson

Session 10: Strategic Teaching and Planning
Contents:
  1. Preparation and Planning
  2. Assistance and Associations
  3. Reflection and Readiness
  4. Assessments
  5. Unit lesson plan
  6. Course review
  7. Final examination
  8. Course evaluation


Grading

    Assignment Points   Grading Scale  
  Forum Postings   14      100 – 93 A
  Reading Activites   35       92 – 85 B
  Reflective Responses   27       84 – 77 C
    Project: Reading Strategies Lesson Plan   24            
  Total Points  110    

Student Requirements

1. Participation: Actively participate in all Forum activities.
2. Assignments: Complete all reflection assignments, reading strategies activities development, and final lesson plan development.

Student Academic Integrity

Participants guarantee that all academic class work is original. Any academic dishonesty or plagiarism (to take ideas, writings, etc. from another and offer them as one's own), is a violation of student academic behavior standards as outlined by our partnering colleges and universities and is subject to academic disciplinary action.

Register

To register to take TEI's Teaching Reading Strategies Online course, go to the Course Registration page.