TEACHING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES

My experience and my research into cognitive loading theory tells me that this smorgasbord approach isn't conducive to a coherent understanding for the learner of what is happening or real transference into life-long reading skills.

I can remember my own long term plan...two weeks of skimming and scanning, two weeks of main idea, two weeks of .... a haphazard 'a bit of this and a bit of that approach' followed by me urging students to use these strategies as they wade their way through the text I had selected for a guided reading lesson.

Two paragraphs in 25 minutes loaded with cueing and prompting for strategy use, many many teachable moments and the uncomfortable feeling at the end that I was doing most of the talking. This is an adherence to establishing metacognition at the expense of the habituation of thinking processes.

"All we seem to do is sit around talking about the strategies we should be using."

We do not dispute that learning to be an effective comprehender of text involves an integration of very complex mental processes and that understanding the metacognition is helpful. The problem is that if we get too involved at a micro level we, the teacher, and they the students, can easily get overwhelmed by this complexity. 

Our learners swim around in the pool of 26 strategies trying to remember which ones to use and when. It's a bit like trying to work out how an insect works. We take off the wings and the legs and any other appendages and examine them closely for clues ... and while we increase our understanding of the mechanisms, the insect no longer works. 

Learning to be an efficient comprehender doesn't work like that either. 

The comprehension skills we are after are the ones that happen instantaneously in the head of the reader WHILE THEY ARE READING. Our task is to train the brain to be active...awake...engaged, analysing, synthesising, engaging in multiple possibilities and discarding false trails as the reading occurs. 

Brian and I have spent years refining a routine which forces this type of mental activity during 'independent practice' until it becomes habituated. Asking a reader to unpack a sentence requires the reader to use multiple strategies in a nanosecond.  They identify and wrestle with unfamiliar vocabulary, make connections to their prior knowledge, generate images, make inferences, monitor whether they are getting it right ... it all can be done without endless teachable moments and cueing and prompting, all of which rob the learner of their sense of autonomy and create this overwhelming feeling of many many strategy fragments. 

And we allow them the space to achieve fluency before we load the brain up with another slightly more complex higher order skill.

More like a la cart dining ... a gradual progression through a series of carefully crafted dishes which compliment each other and generate a feeling of satisfaction at the end.