Strategies
The sequence of instructional activities will start with students' current needs, interests, and abilities. Then the activities and skills will build so that students will develop the expertise to be committed readers. Orientation skills will be reviewed, demonstrated, and practiced: setting learning goals, modeling, guided practice, group discussion model, cooperative learning, kwl, self-assessment, criterion-referenced feedback and reflection.
Long novels are intimidating to reluctant readers. Children's literature and short texts will be the passage to the longer age-appropriate reading for high school. Reading related articles, essays, movie dialogs, cartoons and song lyrics will help develop a knowledge base for students who may not be sophisticated enough to bring historical, biographical, political, social, gender, class, culture and racial background to the discussion. Because the targeted students are African American, African culture will drive the material, but students will progress from self-centered to center of the universe. Readers need to find themselves reflected as they gain confidence in criticizing their reading. A balance of gender-based material will be introduced as cooperative, not as adversary. The abbreviated reading will not replace the longer text. The expectation of increasing the reading achievement of the students is very high, so this unit will not dumb down the requirements.
Reading efficiently, accurately and critically is a skill. The more one reads, the stronger the skill. The more engaged the reader is, the better he will scrutinize his reading. Students will read every day. Time will be allotted for students to read silently. Students also will be assigned to read for homework. Lessons must be a developing process: from the knowledge level, to comprehension, to application, to analysis, to synthesis, and to the evaluation level.
Learning is social. Research has provided the strategies and shown the benefits of guiding students to offer and accept their voices and choices in a student-centered activity. Literature circles will provide an atmosphere of discussion, cooperation, and an exchange of ideas. Reading, along with discussion, will be whole class, in pairs or groups of five. Eventually students will be encouraged to read solo. The teacher will serve as the gentle guide for discussion by providing some historical or biographical background, asking canny questions and encouraging students to think outside of the box and venture outside of their world.
Students will use graphic organizers to structure information in reading and writing. They will identify similarities and differences, solve problems, make decisions, create a rubric to assess the reading, and make analogies. Students will compare and coordinate new knowledge with what they already know.
To make the learning meaningful, the culminating activity has a knowledge artifact (book review), a transformational approach (reading urban books in comparison with recommended books) and a social action (book reviews to book websites and a literary newsletter, encouraging the whole school to read the top ten books). Besides points and grades, students should receive the Mary Mcloud Bethune Award for leaving a legacy of sharing knowledge.
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