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ScaffoCdting Strategies

The strategies provided on the following pages are effective for supporting

the reading, writing, listening, and speaking practices of diverse learners.

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CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK Research -Based Approaches that Promote Student Learning

T he research supports the use of a combination of literacy best practices which, when used with one another, result in enhanced literacy for diverse learners. The practices relate to 1) the roles of the teacher; 2) a focus on reading and writing; 3) the importance of speaking

and listening; 4) an emphasis on thinking; and 5) the establishment of a student-centered classroom. Students have experienced positive results where teachers have introduced and used these practices throughout the content areas or through a required literacy course that all students must take. The key is to use all of the following five best practices regularly as part of every student's high school program.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Context

Students learn skills in context Research does not show strong results for students who learn skills in isolation and are then expected to apply/transfer them appropriately at their own discretion. Better results occur when students learn skills in conjunction with examples and teachers stress the relevance and usefulness of these skills to students' lives.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Explicit Instruction

Students learn reading comprehension strategies through explicit instruction. Research clearly supports the teaching and use of a variety of reading comprehension strategies with adolescents before, during, and after reading.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Modeling

Teachers frequently use modeling/apprenticeship as a teaching technique and framework. Reading and writing are complex combinations of skills that vary by context Reading a scientific journal does not require the same set of skills as reading a historical novel. Writing geometric proofs, lab reports, short stories, poems, and persuasive letters requires overlapping but not identical sets of skills. Moreover, people who are proficient in some aspects of reading and writing are novices at others. It is important for students to see themselves and their classmates as developing readers and writers, continually trying to learn the craft Teachers can effectively support literacy development by making visible their own processes as more expert readers and writers in their respective fields.

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Scaffolds Before, During, and After Reading ince the 1970s, a number of specific teacher strategies for building reader comprehension were identified and validated. These strategies center on the notion of providing struggling readers with support as they learn how to read. Strategies such as questioning, discussion, and

writing serve as supports or scaffolds for struggling readers. Teachers should model and students should practice: relating prior knowledge to the text and making predictions about the content before reading, interpreting the meaning by constructing mental images and summaries during reading, and asking questions and seeking clarification after reading (Pressley, 1999).

The term scaffold is a Vygotskian metaphor for teacher support of a learner through dialog, questioning, conversation, and nonverbal modeling, in which the learner attempts literacy tasks that could not be done without that assistance. Roehler and Cantlon (1997) identified five types of scaffolding: (a) offering explanations, (b) inviting student participation, (c) verifying and clarifying student understandings, (d) modeling of desired behaviors, and (e) inviting students to contribute clues for reasoning through an issue or problem. Additional effective scaffolds, especially for struggling secondary readers, are to address the emotional aspects of learning and make learning benefits explicit (Brophy, 1999; Sanacore, 1997).

BEFORE-READING activities should emphasize methods of merging reader, text and content -enabling students to set appropriate reading purposes, recall related prior knowledge, preview and predict what the text will be about and select reading methods to suit their purposes and the text. Included in these considerations may be readers' decisions to expand their background knowledge through related discussion, exploration of key concepts, or related reading.

DURING-READING activities should enable students to monitor their comprehension through a variety of strategies and experience and acquire diverse fix-up strategies to improve their understanding where necessary.

AFTER-READING activities should teach students to review their understanding of text relate new ideas to their background knowledge, revisit the text to clarify and extend meanings, make responsible interpretations and criticisms of ideas from the text revise their thinking, apply the information to other texts and disciplines, and remember crucial learnings for future application.

Scaffolding Strategies

Scaffolding strategies are effective tools for comprehending (Pressley, 1999); they represent procedural rather than declarative knowledge, stressing "how" as much or more than "what" Strategies help readers to engage with the text, to monitor their comprehension, and to fix it when it has failed. Rather than a single strategy applied in a reading class, secondary students need to have a repertoire of strategies that they leam and apply in many reading contexts and not just in a reading class. As Pressley and Wharton-McDonald (1997) note, more social constructivist and transactional •^m\ approaches have led to strategies that are less formulaic and more successfully internalized by

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students. Many studies have demonstrated the success of these approaches for struggling secondary readers (see Carr & Thompson, 1996).

Explicit Instruction of Strategies

To learn a strategic approach to reading, struggling readers typically must be taught how, why, and when to use it. An effective way to teach a reading strategy is to follow the Pearson and Gallagher "Gradual Release of Responsibility" model (1983). Teachers model through a think-aloud (Davey, 1983; Wade, 1990), sharing their self-talk about how they strategically approach reading, making their expert thinking visible to struggling readers. Guided practice in the strategy follows the modeling as students attempt the reading strategy within a context of support from peers with the teacher evaluating its effectiveness, adapting it as needed, and generating a consensus as to its effectiveness. Most important is sufficient independent practice of the strategy in different texts and contexts as students take ownership of these strategies, adapting them to these different reading situations. The shifting of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the learner allows the struggling reader to adapt and internalize strategic reading.

Reading Practice

As struggling readers are learning strategic reading, they need frequent sustained periods of reading connected prose (Hansen, 1987), such as opportunities to read uninterruptedly from a book, newspaper, magazine, or other whole piece of text for at least IS to 20 minutes. But independent silent reading, conducted without guidance or feedback, is not sufficient to build reading improvement (National Reading Panel, 2000). This suggests that students also need the opportunity to talk about ideas in texts, in order to move comprehension beyond the word level (Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997), that is, guided practice in building consensus.

To build fluency, reading practice with active support and feedback, such as guided oral reading and repeated reading, was found to be effective across multiple grade levels (National Reading Panel, 2000). Not recommended for reading practice is the popular "round robin" reading, in which students read aloud in turn to the whole class from a common textbook. Not only do students find its purpose unclear, it can be an embarrassing experience for adolescent readers who lack fluency. It promotes a perception that reading is word pronunciation more than comprehension (Wood & Nichols, 2000).

Recognition and Honor of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

Culture, dialect and language contribute "funds of knowledge" (Moll et al., 1992) that are assets in the building of reading proficiency for all readers and particularly those who are CLD. Through assignments, activities, classroom discussion, and reading materials, teachers can provide ways for students to connect what they know with the academic literacy of school (Williams & Snipper, 1990). Teachers can help students make these connections by modeling emotional response to a reading (e.g., the aesthetic stance articulated by Rosenblatt, 1978) as well as the analytical or efferent stance. Acknowledging literacy histories in the classroom helps to create a climate of respect, which invites the participation of all students.

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Assessment During Teaching

Following the diagnostic instruction principle (Gillet & Temple, 1990), the effective teacher begins instruction by assessing the reader to determine strengths and weaknesses, without the labels of disability deficits. To provide appropriate support, teachers should know the history of a student's reading difficulties, the interventions made, and the instruction missed. For example, the teacher can look for evidence of the development of reading proficiency such as phonemic knowledge at the primary grades, background knowledge at grades three and four, and strategy knowledge at the upper grades (Willson & Rupley, 1997). The teacher uses the reader's strengths to approach and build the areas of difficulty. Assessment follows the instruction and is both summative (Did the instruction work?) and formative (Where do we go from here?), beginning the instructional cycle anew. Teachers assess and scaffold students at three junctures: before, during, and after reading.

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Scaffolding Students9Interactions with Texts

S S Annotating A Text

Annotating a text is an effective strategy to promote active and critical reading skills; this strategy provides a number of useful acronyms that students can use to remember different elements of writer's craft when reading and annotating a text.

s Anticipation Guide

Anticipation guides are typically used as a pre-reading strategy to engage students in thought and discussion about ideas and concepts that they will encounter in the text.

• • Collaborative

Annotation This strategy engages students in a process of co-constructing their interpretations of a text through a collaborative annotation activity.

• s s Frame of Reference

The frame of reference strategy teaches students how to create a mental context for reading a passage; this is accomplished by helping students to consider what they know about a topic and how they know what they know.

• s Getting the Gist

The goal of getting the gist is to teach students to re-state in their own words the most important point as a way of making sure they have understood what they have read. This instructional strategy can improve students' understanding of what they have learned. Getting the gist can be taught by focusing on one paragraph at a time.

jO$S*\ s s Inferential Reading

The inferential reading strategy provides a list of the various types of inferences that readers make while reading even seemingly straightforward text; recognizing that there are different types of inferences helps students to analyze text more consciously and strategically.

s V s Interactive Notebook

This highly adaptable strategy encourages students to use a two-column note-taking strategy. In the right column, they take notes to synthesize essential ideas and information from a text, presentation, film etc.; in the left-hand column, they interact with the content in any way they choose (personal connections, illustrations, etc.).

s • s Intertextuality

At first glance, intertextual reading looks like paired reading via themed reading. However, it is far more. It is an activity for before, during and after reading; and it can be led by students or the teacher. When reading intertextually, teachers and students read widely within and across genres, canons, and eras as a way of exploring one novel, short story, or poem.

• S Key Concept Synthesis

The key concept synthesis strategy helps students to identify the most important ideas in a text, put those ideas into their own words, and then make connections between among these important ideas

V S Listening to Voice

This strategy helps students to analyze and interpret writer's voice through the annotation of a passage, with particular emphasis on dictions, tone, syntax, unity, coherence, and audience.

• Literature

Circles

Literature Circles are small, peer-led discussion groups whose members have chosen to read the same poem, essay, short story, article, or book" (Darnels, 2002). Literature circles promote dialogic interaction among students and empower to take an active and self-directed role in their reading

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V s Metaphor Analysis

This adaptable strategy teaches students how to analyze a complex metaphor and substantiate interpretive claims using textual evidence.

V Multiple Reads

The essence of reading comprehension is creating meaning. Multiple reads, coupled with opportunities to share thinking, support thought processes of the students as they interact with texts. Because meaning must be constructed, multiple reads provide opportunities for students to increase their understanding of texts.

• V Parallel Note-taking

The parallel note-taking strategy teaches students to recognize different organizational patterns for informational texts and then develop a note-taking strategy that parallels the organization of the text.

V V V QAR:

Question-Answer

Relationships

The QAR strategy helps students to identify the four Question-Answer Relationships that they are likely to encounter as they read texts and attempt to answer questions about what they have read. These include "right there" questions, "think and search" questions, "author and you" questions, and "on my own" questions.

V V s Questions Only

The questions only strategy teaches students how to pose questions about the texts they are reading and encourages them to read actively as they work to answer the questions they have posed.

• V y Quick-Write

The Quick-Write is a writing activity that requires students to write non­stop for a prescribed amount of time, usually for 5-10 minutes. It should be focused on one topic, generating as many ideas as possible. It may be used as a pre-writing activity or as an opportunity for students to clarify their thinking. S*^\;

s RAFT

This is a flexible post-reading strategy that helps students to analyze and reflect upon their reading through writing. Based on suggestions provided by the teacher or generated by the class, students choose a Role, an Audience, a Format and a Topic on which to write in response to their reading.

• • S Readers-Writer's Notebook

The conversational model says that a reader builds comprehension as he connects his own background, thoughts, prior knowledge, biases, and opinions. The ReaderVWriter's Notebook provides the place where students can conduct conversations with text and about text

V s V Reciprocal Teaching

The reciprocal teaching strategy enables students to activate four different comprehension strategies - predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing - which they apply collaboratively to help each other understand a text theyare reading.

V V Sociograms

A sociogram is a visual representation of the relationships among characters in a literary text. Students can make use of pictures, symbols, shapes, colors, and line styles to illustrate these relationships, to understand the traits of each character, and to analyze the emerging primary and secondary conflicts.

• s s Think Aloud

Skillful readers unconsciously use a range of strategies to make meaning from text. The think aloud strategy involves modeling these strategies by "thinking aloud" while reading and responding to a text By making ^ ^ explicit for students what is implicit for more expert readers, it becomes 11 possible for students develop and apply these strategies themselves. i

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V Transactional

Reading Journal

The name of this reading strategy is inspired by the work of Louise Rosenblatt (1978), who explained reading as a transactional process that occurs between the text and the reader. The Transactional Reading Journal builds on this concept (via Jude Ellis) and provides a flexible framework for engaging students in a process of active and personally meaningful interaction with a text.

V V s Writer's Craft Seminar

This reading strategy teaches students how to analyze text through close reading in order to formulate an interpretive thesis that is supported through assertions and textual evidence. Students present their interpretations to the class through a seminar format.

Adapted from Ladewig, B., Reading Strategies

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