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The article I read for this journal focused on the differences between readers who are engaged and those who aren't. An engaged reader is a student who wants to read both to gain knowledge and for their own enjoyment. Sometimes it seems as you talk to students that there aren't that many of these. As you could probably assume, students who are engaged in reading are more likely to be successful readers. The reason that I chose this article was first because it was directly applicable to our class. Another was that I would like to be able to get more students to become engaged readers. If it is possible to get some students to want to read on their own it would be a great accomplishment. I think very often students don't like to read because they aren't interested in the readings they are assigned. If, as a teacher, you are able to find subject matter that can interest students they would be much more likely to be engaged readers. The research in this article found some interesting information. One interesting bit was that students' motivation to read decreased as they aged. This seems to make a lot of sense to me. For one thing I believe that very often the reading that students are assigned is very, for a lack of a better word, boring. It could be a good thing to try to provide students with a greater variety of books that may be able to evoke more motivation to read. Another part of this article spoke to the idea that relating the information in readings to real life experiences. This seems to me to be one of the most important things a teacher can do. If teachers are able to relate the information in the readings to real world experiences the students are more likely to grasp the information. Simply having the students read a text and then not providing any real-world context doesn't accomplish a whole lot. For me, the information that has stuck with me the longest is that which was related directly to stories that the instructor told

Engagement and motivation are huge topics in education right now. Small things we can do to tap into students' interests can provide links to help students make connections between school content and their worlds.

 http://www.amazon.com/Motivation-Breakthrough-Secrets-Turning-Tuned-Out/dp/0743289617/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1328620537&sr=1-2-catcorr The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child, author Richard Lavoie, is a well written resource guide for teachers who wish to figure out how to motivate their students. Parents can learn from the guide as well, but the author primarily addresses educators who seek to improve relations with their students and figure out how to help them work to potential. Richard Lavoie is a consultant and a lecturer with over thirty years of experience as a teacher and an administrator at special education facilities. He explores strategies and techniques that are proven to inspire children to learn. He outlines strategies that will be most effective in igniting the interest and eagerness of kids, especially given their different needs. He outlines several different ways that children are motivated to do their best work. He teaches of the six Ps to motivate children. Some seek praise; others seek prizes, power, projects, or prestige. Some are people-oriented and are motivated when they work with people. Six different chapters address the various motivating factors and how they can be identified and used in the classroom. Personal accounts from Lavoie's years as a teacher allow us to see how he has put his lessons into practice. I appreciate the way that Lavoie challenges teachers to find out what motivates their students, even those students with special needs or who are classified as difficult. He encourages parents and teachers to work together to spark any child to reach his/her full potential. He covers learned hel

Wendy, it looks like maybe your review got cut off. You can add to it by adding an additional comment.

This sounds like an interesting book, and strategies for inspiring students to learn is always a good thing. I would like to add this book to my professional library. Even though I will not be a special education teacher per se, I have special education students in my classroom. Anything that I can do to help them will be valuable.

Hedin, L.R. & Conderman, G. (2010). Teaching students to comprehend informational text through rereading. The Reading Teacher, 63(7), 556-565. Doi: 10.1598/RT.63.7.3 "Striving readers may view the purpose of reading as decoding an assigned section rather than building knowledge." When I read this quote, I knew that this article would be of interest to me. As my building continues to examine the ramifications of the Common Core, informational text is something of concern. Should other content teachers be required to teach reading strategies using informational text? (Here, I am hoping, my readers reply with a resounding "YES!") This article gives specific strategies to use with students, with a focus on encouraging rereading. Below is an email that was sent to my colleagues:  Subject: The Secret to Informational Text  Perhaps my subject line was a bit misleading... Attached may not be "The Secret" to our informational text woes, but the article details strategies we can use in our classrooms now that will help our students with comprehension. After reviewing our NWEA scores, we have all seen the difficulties our students have with informational text and comprehension. The Common Core has a significant focus on informational reading and writing. In order to prepare for this shift in instruction and curriculum, I have found this very useful article. "Teaching Students to Comprehend Informational Text Through Rereading," details key ideas like helping our striving readers set the purpose for reading, identify text features, and strategies we can use in our daily instruction to strengthen their comprehension of texts. It questions whether our students are simply great "decoders" (they can read the words because they understand sound/letter relationships) or are they truly constructing meaning. The role content teachers play in the development of successful readers is HUGE! Many of these strategies seem basic, but because of that, they will be simple t

This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.

The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.

I do love it when I find something that contradicts what I've previously done or known. Gives me pause to think. It will be interesting to see if this change in your thinking produces results in your students' writing. Keep us posted!

I really enjoyed this book, and it gave me great insights into how students are wired. How do they take in information and how do students use that information. There are four styles of students. The book goes into different ways of working with students and talks about how students concentrate, remember, and understand information. I liked the book because it provided useful information and tips on how to interact with students. I realize that learning styles have gotten a bad rap by some educators. Now having said that learning styles do present an interesting piece of the puzzle to how students learn. It is important to note that a learning style is a preference rather than an ability to learn. Individuals have a tendency to like information or processing to be done a certain way because there is a familiarity and comfort level. The awareness of a learning style can assist educators in setting students up for success by phrasing information in certain ways or pointing out that this information may be more uncomfortable for individuals to learn because of the way it is presented. The book is organized by learning style category and then by subject areas like concentration, understanding and remembering. The first six chapters focus on learning styles, and the remaining six chapters delve into specific topic areas as each relates to learning styles. The main topics of the book are learning styles, and three central topic areas related to learning. The topic areas are concentration, remembering, and understanding. The overall message of the book is that every person may have a dominant learning style, however each person has a certain amount of each learning styles' characteristics. Moreover as students, parents, and teachers become aware of their learning style it is meant to help them achieve and adapt to others who are not wired that way, not to be used as an excuse for poor performance or I can not do something.

You raise some important points, LeAnn. I think also it is important to help students (and ourselves?) learn to tap into other styles to further develop them.

Christine Cziko, a former high school English teacher, writes about a year-long undertaking that she was a part of that sought to transform students into capable readers.  Her desire to do something about the lack of reading ability that her students exhibited came out of her concern about her students' apparent inability to read independently or to understand what they read.   I was greatly impacted by this whole idea.  I would LOVE to do something like this at my school.  I have taught high school English at a private school where many common issues don't exist and I still had students not doing the reading or not understanding what they read.  However, once we read CS Lewis' The Great Divorce (which is written at a very high level) they were engaged and devoured the difficult text.  We would then come together and ask questions, discuss, and analyze the text.  I didn't have to beg my students to read it, they WANTED to.  One of the big differences was that I talked it up and let them know that it was going to be very difficult but that people would be impressed to know that they had read it in high school.  They were so proud to have read, analyzed, and understood this difficult text. 

This year my students read "The Westing Game" by Ellen Raskin. They absolutely loved the book and I had to beg them not to go ahead because doing so would spoil the ending. Teaching reading (or any subject matter) is so much more fun when the students are engaged. I wish we had these same experiences in everything we taught!

Zimmerman, S., & Hutchins, C. (2003). 7 keys to comprehension: How to help your kids read it and get it. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. 7 Keys to Comprehension is a powerful read that I would recommend for both teachers and parents that want to encourage reading for enjoyment and understanding. This book is simply written and well organized making it an easy read for teachers and parents. The book outlines the 7 key strategies that good readers use in order to create meaning. What I really like about this book is that each chapter is designated to one of the key strategies, making it easy to look up and refer back to. Inside each chapter the authors discuss each strategy and why it is important to reading success. The authors also provide examples of how to help children at varying levels (preschool, emerging, and advanced) with each strategy. As a teacher, one of my favorite things about each individual chapter is that a list of picture books and more advance books is given to use when working on the specific strategy. I also like that at the end of each chapter tips are provided to highlight the main idea of the chapter and simple ideas to implement the strategy. When I was teaching first and second grade, this book was always on my bookshelf because it was so easy to pick up and refer back to when I had students that were struggling. This was also a book that I had shared with my coworkers and parents because the strategies are used in every grade on some level and are not geared specifically for classroom use, but also for parents to use at home while reading with their children. Many times parents would ask me how they could help their child with reading and I would often lend them this book or give them strategies from this book to use at home. In lower elementary so much time is spent on decoding skills and learning to read the words, but a huge part of reading is comprehension and although stude

The article I read was inspirational and made me think about my teaching style/methods in a whole new way. The article was about helping children use literature as a way to grow intellectually and emotionally. This article described that no matter what the medium, we must create educational experiences that strive to make the individual learner the central focus-the star of the lesson. If we do this, then the lessons have an outstanding chance of helping children grow. Throughout the reading, a study of an inner city, African American adolescent named Kevin is depicted. Kevin struggled to succeed in school and in life. He received tutoring from the author of this article (Terrence Hackett). After getting to know Kevin, Hackett realized that he had a difficult life and the fact that Kevin saw himself as a survivor. Kevin's home life was in turmoil in ways that are unfortunately all too common for inner-city single parent families. As his tutor, Hackett decided to have him read the novel, "Hatchet" by Gary Paulsen. This book united his world in a meaningful way. Kevin's real life was a survival story. This book matched his lived experience. It was personally relevant to him, and as a result he was interested and engaged.

It's probably not realistic to make every student a star in every lesson. Being aware of different ways to reach different students--and being wiling to try--is important. Thanks for sharing this article.

I believe we need to make learning and reading relevant to all students. It is a challenge to find ways to engage all students, but I think we can come up with common themes with kids in our classrooms as a springboard for doing this. Thanks for the link! :)

For my first journal article I read an article about helping struggling readers in the middle school age range. The reason that I found this article interesting was because there are so many students that I encounter at the high school level that have a very difficult time reading. Sometimes I wonder how they are even able to complete assignments with a lack of reading skill. If students were able to improve their reading level before they got to the high school level it would be far easier for these students to learn. I learned through this article that the San Diego area has a program called the Accelerated Literacy program to help struggling readers. This program has teachers specifically assigned to improving struggling students' literacy. They work with the students in a more direct fashion to help them improve their reading. I like the idea of focusing on improving this skill with the students because it is such a big part of what the students will need for the rest of their lives. Also, these teachers in the Accelerated Literacy program came up with themed booklists to incorporate the curriculum as well as finding books that students would find interesting. This, to me, is a very important piece. If a teacher is able to spark an interest in reading these students will probably be a lot more likely to be successful at it. Also, if the books are tied to the curriculum, these students will also be learning pertinent information. I know lots of school districts have programs like this, but I really liked the idea of coming up with booklists that might spark interest with students. Improving reading ability in students impacts how they will be able to learn for the rest of their lives.

Brett, I liked this site and the information it provided. As having been a "second dose" reading teacher for ms students, it is always great to have leveled books that are motivating for students. Thank you for sharing!

Brett, I think the idea of themes for students to choose from is a great idea. These students need to be challenged, but many may feel resentful and give up if schools continue to throw them literature that simply does not interest them.

The ability to read well is the most important skill children can acquire. Reading ability and the desire to read vary significantly among groups of children, however. This article discusses the results of a study taken in 98-99 of kindergarteners. It provides information on how schools and families can improve the reading skills of native English speaking children, particularly poor elementary school level boys of color. It states that boys typically learn to read at an older age than girls, take longer to learn, and comprehend less easily than girls. It talks about reading genres that boys prefer, such as adventure, science fiction and fantasy and books that have characters like themselves. They discuss the value of reading aloud to students and in providing silent reading time along with a wide variety of books for boys to choose from. Lastly, it gives suggestions for parents and communities to provide opportunities for young people to help engage them in regular reading.

Based on reading this article, what strategies might you incorporate in your classroom/school? Have you previously engaged in any practices to increase boys' reading?

I always try to do a survey with students for likes/dislikes, strengths/weaknesses. I use this information to help students find reading material they are interested in and give them a choice when reading. I also purchased books like Guiness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and MythBusters to put on my informational book shelf. Boys seemed to have liked these books very much.

Lyons, W. & Thompson, S.A. (2011, October). Guided Reading in Inclusive Middle Years Classrooms. Intervention in School and Clinic, 47: 158. Retrieved January 27, 2012, from http://isc.sagepub.com.huaryu.kl.oakland.edu/content/47/3/158.full.pdf This study was interesting, because it focuses on something that I am sure so many teachers struggle with - how to teach students who demonstrate a wide variety/range of ability and needs. This study took a really "rough" socioeconomic level of 4th -8th graders and their teachers, and using guided reading as their main method of instruction DID see an 80% of students advance at least one, if not more levels. This was attributed to the fact that in small guided reading groups teachers could spend more time with small groups of students, targeting individual needs. That was the warm fuzzy. Of course, the part that this article mentions in the end, and would stop most teachers in their tracks before attempting to duplicate this, is that each classroom was equipped with several teachers and teacher assistants to make this work. Additionally, there were many times where the rest of the class NOT consisting of the 3 to 5 students in the guided reading group were supposed to work independently. All in all, every study has its flaws - the interesting thing here is that despite them, students still improved overall.

oops...ok I edited my post and stuck the citation in it...thanks!

Interesting to note some of the different terms used in the Canadian Schools, such as "families living in vulnerable circumstances" and "enhanced funding." Probably akin to our use of "at-risk" and "Title I." You are right, most teachers would "stop in their tracks" with regard to the two teachers. This article refers to an inclusion setting, in which the special ed teacher "pushes in" with the special ed students and co-teaches with the gen ed teacher. I did a NCA QAR visit last spring in a school with 4 or 5 teachers in a grade, and 4 paras in the school. It was either 2nd or 3rd grade. Every day at the designated time, all the paras would go into that pod of the school, and the students would move around to different teachers or paras and everyone got guided reading every day. It requires a shift in thinking and lots of collaboration and cooperation, but it can be done.

Mike Schmoker's "Focus" is a tremendous commentary on the elements of good instruction and the current state of education and teaching.

This reference text is divided into two sections: "What we teach, How we teach, and Literacy" and "Curriculum, Instruction, and Literacy in the Content areas." If one was to read this book, you would not necessarily need to read it "cover to cover." I believe that Section I is important for all teachers or those who have a hand in education. Section II, because of the way it is divided, could be read based on interests. There are specific discussions about how to integrate literacy into content areas. I felt that the discussion of literacy in mathematics and science was extremely interesting. Mike Schmoker's message was calling educators "back to the basics." As I read, I found myself scribbling in the margins, because the comments being made were so true they were almost "taboo." Schmoker contradicts the current "educational bandwagons" that so many administrators and districts may jump on. He quotes Pfeffer and Sutton, saying "leaders resist simplicity; they are often irrationally enamored by novelty and complexity" (p 16). It was refreshing to read such a strong argument for "pure, effective teaching." Regardless of the technology or other tools in the classroom, without a firm grasp on the ways to provide clear instruction, students will not learn. I have already used sections from this text in my building's PLC time. Though I have not used a specific strategy, I opened the dialogue about what should "be in a good lesson." Schmoker encourages the "five minute limit" where lectures cannot span longer than that before students are given a moment to talk or write. Formative assessments need to be used throughout daily lessons in order for the teacher to be guided into the next portion of the lesson. I have started to integrate more of these checks for understanding into my teaching, and I have found that I catch more misconceptions sooner than I would have normally. I also see that sections I felt required more time were grasped at a faster rate than anticipated

"Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. to help build my students' prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text." Includes links to articles used as well as articles used in previous years.

Second-Language Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Learning with Multimedia Lee B. Abraham Hispania , Vol. 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 98-108 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20063468 This article presents a research study where ESL students were put into 3 groups a control group, a forced look-up group, and a choice look-up group. The study was trying to find out if using multimedia would aide in the increase in vocabulary in ESL students. The study found that students in the control group had little vocabulary growth, but the students in the two other groups had the same percentage growth of 18%. When I first started reading this article, I was interested to see if using multimedia tools would increase the vocabulary. I was specifically interested in the use of technology. There is no differentiation about which types of multimedia are better. As I further read, I thought that the students who were given a choice of what to look up would make more growth, because they would be working off their own motivation, but the study showed that whether they were forced to look up words or had a choice, they made the same growth. This reinforces the importance of teaching my students to use context clues, but when that doesn't help, to learn how to use a dictionary and the computer to find the meaning for words.

Barrett-Mynes, J., Moran, M. J., & Tegano, D. (2010). Supporting struggling readers using interactive read-alouds and graphic organizers. Voices of Practitioners, 5(2), 1-12. This article discusses a four week study that was done in order to determine the effects that collaborative discussion and child-created graphic organizers used during read-alouds had on children's comprehension. Over the course of the study it was found that: 1. The children need less guidance from their teacher and became more collaborative with their peers in their discussions. 2. The use of graphic organizers became more child-created and required less teacher guidance. 3. Students in the study received higher scores on standardized tests. The article concludes that both collaborative discussions and child-created graphic organizers enable students to construct new knowledge and begin to organize their thinking in response to the comprehension of text. It was also found that by depending less on the the teacher for guidance, children were able to take more control and ownership of their learning. When I taught first and second grade, I loved using graphic organizers and read-alouds to help build reading and comprehension skills. I liked the fact that graphic organizers can be as creative and/or as structured as you would like. The most important factor for me is that graphic organizers can be used with any subject to help a child organizer their learning in a way that is helpful for them as learners.

I agree, it seems like the student's in the study would have had to have some prior experience with graphic organizers to be able to create their own. I loved using graphic organizers in my classroom, although with 1st and 2nd graders they were primarily teacher guided, I think that they were helpful for students to organizer their thoughts and be able to have a visual representation.

In first/second grade it is absolutely appropriate for the teacher to guide and scaffold the student use of graphic organizers.

"Teachers of English need to reach the tough guys out there, and they are probably not going to do it by prescribing another go at The Sound and the Fury. The problem is not so much that tough guys lack the brainpower to read: they simply do not want to." I like the suggestions given for books to motivate adolescent male readers given in this article. I appreciate how Lawrence Baines has collected information over the years to share with us as teachers.

I always try to do an interest inventory with students and find books that fall into these interests to offer for independent reading time. I also love informational books that center around sports and life oddities, such as Ripley's or Guiness Book of World Records. Boys seem to like these types of books. I have used Sports Illustrated for Kids also as an offer for reading. For class books, I have used "The Air Down Here" by Gil Alicea, a teenage boy from the Bronx. It is written in journal format and tells about his life in his own words. I used this with 8th graders and the boys especially seemed to "grudgingly" get interested and want to read more! I also found that books about aliens, Big Foot, Sasquatch and those types of informational books were interesting to them as well!

When I was a media center teacher, I could not keep the Guinness or Ripley books on the shelf! I think besides the "ew" factor, another draw is (of course) the pictures, and small chunks of text.

Since my goal is to be a special education teacher I figure I'd make that the focus of my article search. This particular article is meaningful because it lists specific strategies to help the student with a reading disability. The first strategy listed is to encourage reading by finding reading material that the student enjoys. Reading material they want to read will help to improve reading comprehension and fluency because the student won't feel forced to read something they are not interested in. Keeping a graph of the student's reading progress helps to motivate them to improve their reading skills by making it a challenge. Also readers who struggle can track with their finger or a ruler in order to keep their place and their focus. Sounding out stumble words is a strategy to use when the student is struggling with a particular word. A strategy that I have never thought to use before is to record the student reading so they are able to listen back and judge their own fluency. For secondary students, have them keep a word journal notebook. They can record the words they get stuck on when reading and then study them. Lastly, using reading games is a great strategy for any age group. Even high school special education students enjoy a game of Scrabble, and playing word games improves their reading skills. The bottom line is to make reading fun for all students, and especially for readers with disabilities.

Nice job pulling out the specific strategies, Wendy.

This article provides five strategies for improving adolescent literacy. The first stragegy is to help students with explicit vocabulary instructions, and then on to comprehension strategies like being careful about what text you select and showing them the strategies to use for that type of text. The third strategy was providing extended forum for discussing vocabulary and text, and that is something that I need to work on with my ninth graders. One of the goals of this article is to improve adolescent literacy and the strategy is to increase student motivation and engagement, which I latched on to right away. One of the ways this article suggest doing it is by making "literacy experiences more relevant to student interests, everyday life, or important current events." I am using this technique in my Ninth-Grade Civics class this semester. Students are learning that the way you read a newspaper is different than reading a textbook. Each week they must select a current event related to Civics and write a brief report about it. Three students are randomly selected to give information on their current event each week. I use a form to help guide them through current event articles, and focus on textual evidence in articles. In other words, what statistics and facts are the writers using to make his/her point? Also, what adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs does the writer use to convey a message or tone of the article? The students' vocabulary and reading are increasing, and they are becoming more informed citizens. It brings Civics alive for them and into the present day.

Journal # 1 Shedd, K.M., & Duke, N.K. (2008). The power of planning developing effective read-alouds. Beyond the Journal Young Children on the Web. November, 1-6. The article that I read is about the importance of reading aloud to students and the effectiveness of read-alouds. The study has found the effectiveness of read-alouds depends on a number of factors: * open-end questions * a careful selection of high-quality text * teacher excitement while reading read-alouds are important part of children's development of literacy skills. The article gave many suggestions on how to select books appropriate for grade level and for the audience. There were also ideas on how to get students involved before, during and after the read alouds. After reading this article, it made think about how I do read-alouds in my classroom and if I incorporate all the suggestions from this article during my read-aloud.

What do you think you might do differently as you do read-alouds in your classroom? I found it interesting and found myself reflecting on my practices. I love to read aloud to students, and as a classroom teacher, did it almost exclusively for the enjoyment and the experience of story for students. As I learned more about developing literacy, my read-alouds changed, and became more intentional. But after reading this article, I think I could do even more to plan for even more effective use of the strategy. I really like the idea of using the sticky notes to mark spots to question. (PS--I love Nell Duke. She really knows her stuff. Got to see her at the MRA pre-conference last year.)

I do read alouds throughout the day, which are books that we need to read for our Reading program, science or Paragon (history). At the end of the day I do author of the week, we talk about the author, illustrator, I go to the library every week and grab 5-7 books from the same author and don't really look inside the books to see if it is age appropriate. There has been a few times that the books have been over my students heads or too babyish for them. After reading the article I really need to take a minute and look at the pages and make sure the books are appropriate for my students.

For my first journal, I read this article about multi-sensory language arts instruction.  It claims that if you can provide students with visual, auditory, and tactile-kinesthetic methods for learning, they are more likely to be successful.  One of the things that I agreed with most strongly that it seems many educators today shy away from is the idea that students should "practice to the point of automatization."  Automatic reading is not the key to comprehension but it is surely a necessary foundation for meaningful reading.  When I was a student, we practiced grammar and spelling until it was second-nature and generally my current abilities testify to that.  However, we have steered away from correctness in favor of sparing student egos.  I do not think that it has done them any good.  I wholeheartedly agree with this article that we MUST train our students to be good readers and writers. 

More emphasis is being placed on fluency. You can't understand what a text means if you can't figure out what it says. We don't want students to simple "bark at print" but there has to be a balance between fluency and comprehension.Was there anything in the article you would apply to your own teaching?