Teaching Strategies
Read Alouds with Cloze Reading
The teacher will read aloud all of the mentor texts in this unit. Read alouds help students get a sense of the rhythm of prosody and fluent reading when they hear an expert reader modeling it. Additionally, for students who are still emerging readers, having the text read aloud to them offers them access when their decoding skills would be a barrier to understanding the content of a text. While I do read alouds, I also employ a technique called “Cloze” reading, in which an important word is omitted for students to fill in chorally (out loud as a group) as they follow along with my reading. These words are usually pre-selected and are either easily decodable through learned phonics rules or have been explicitly taught for a unit. For example, in Fry Bread, I might read the line “Fry bread is shape” and select “shape” as a word for Cloze reading. This word is easily decodable, but it is also essential to the text and is a key word in the literary concept being taught: the use of senses. Cloze reading helps keep students engaged because they know they are being held responsible for some of the reading, and it can also alert them to the most important words in a text.
The Think Aloud
Thinking aloud is an incredibly useful tool in almost any lesson because it makes explicit the teacher’s implicit thinking process. For example, if I were writing a poem by myself, I would experiment with line breaks by changing various verses and deciding mentally what I liked best. As a model, this would be useless to students because they would not understand why I changed what I changed. For a “think aloud,” I would do the same process of changing line breaks, but I would narrate my thought process as I go, such as, “I’m going to break the line here because the next word is important, and I want to emphasize it. Then I’m going to read the poem aloud to myself to listen to how it sounds.” This models for students the types of questions they should be asking themselves as they make various decisions in their writing. It also shows why I made the choices that I did– they were not arbitrary.
Individual and Small Group Conferencing
The final high-leverage teaching strategy I will use in this unit is conferencing with students in various formations. Individual conferencing is particularly useful for students to get specific feedback on their piece of writing, especially when they may be an outlier in terms of writing, reading, or any other skill. But small group conferencing can also be very useful when multiple students are struggling with the same skill or are ready for a challenge in the same area. Meeting as a small group can also help students share their ideas with one another and use each other as resources, rather than letting the teacher be the ultimate authority. In conferencing, I look at student writing beforehand to select the piece of feedback I want to focus on and pull some examples from student writing to show in the small group to point out the same addition or revision that can be made for all of them, and then have students compose or revise on their own. I also will use spontaneous conferencing during student work time just based on what I notice as I circulate the room, but having some planned conferencing can help make the best use of time and can encourage students to collaborate.
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