Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis

Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis

This book was recommended to me by a 5th grade teacher at the Bronxville middle school.  The authors' take home message is that effective use of reading comprehension strategies deepens understanding.  As reading comprehension equates to thinking skills, enhancing such comprehension improves a readers ability to think independently.

The meat of the book's message consumes roughly 200 pages, the remaining 100 devoted to the useful appendices.   On top of your standard table of contents the book contains an additional list for all of the reading comprehension strategy lessons found throughout the text.

Unlike my last review, I'm taking notes and writing this review as I go.  Bad idea? I have no idea.  Also the review is organized so that the more you read on, the more detail of the book I go into.  Also, beyond "Synopsis" is essentially just syntheses of sections of the book that are more or less notes for myself.
   

Synopsis

Before beginning, the words "skills" and "strategies" are used interchangeably as often a strategy is itself a skill.

Strategies That Work introduces the reader to the stepping stones reading comprehension which is how to take students from the level of novice to expert.   I may have even learned a thing or two myself.

Such stepping stones begin with rudimentary elements like the efficacy of an instructional approach and matters of teachers competencies.  Once groundwork such as this is secure, reading comprehension skills can be honed by teaching, modeling, and reinforcing specific strategies in order of complexity.  Such includes making connections, questioning, visualizing and inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing information; each of which are the prerequisite for the subsequent skill/strategy.   

My only gripe is that the material of part two could have been better organized and distilled.  The way the methods for honing a skill are laid out, visualization or determining importance for instance, suffered the most from this deficit.  What would have been great would have been a note as to how exactly a method honed a skill and a generic version of such a lesson to teachers could create their own versions following such parameters.  

The above sometimes left me frustrated or staring blankly, lost in the text, for over a minute like I was having an epileptic seizure.  Part three of the book somewhat made up for this.  I say somewhat because I still at one point in my life had to drag my eyes across text and information that just wouldn't get to the damn point.

Regardless of its shortcomings, I'm glad to have read it as I've gained some exposure on the topic, have a resource to turn to, learned a thing or two personally, and gained perspective.  It's not the 'how to' manual for reading comprehension I was hoping it would be, which is perhaps why I feel a bit let down by it.  While there are probably better books out there covering the same topic don't discount this one.  

Each Section

Part 1: The Foundation of Meaning  - Focuses on how readers extract meaning and relate to it, sound instructional practices for teaching reading strategies, general approaches to engage students with their reading and thinking, and finally how to match instruction with specific literature and help students choose books they enjoy and apply the strategies on their own.

Part 2: Strategy Lessons and More  - Provides a step by step guide for specific strategies that focus on increasing complexity for students.  The authors also note specific considerations that must be made when planning a lesson; to name two, one's own interest and enthusiasm for the content and how one intends to stress students apply the practices on their own.

Part 3: Resources That Support Strategy Instruction - Includes seven.  With the intent to enhance comprehension, each appendix is a compendium of useful resources for teachers to refer to when in need of things like literature selections  for certain content areas (science, history, etc), adult level literature selections for the classroom, professional journals, and assessment measures for 4th graders. 

Each Chapter

Part One

Chapter 1: Strategic Reading - Reading comprehension is the ability to think independently.  To hone students' skills, as the Wong's put it, an effective teacher must teach, model, and reinforce.  

Chapter 2: Strategic Thinking -  Effective readers question the material before, during, and after reading as well as self-monitor their comprehension and self-correct when they notice their understanding or attention wavering.  Students range from those oblivious to their own lack of comprehension (usually focused on something like decoding words instead of extracting meaning) to reflective.  When students can connect the text to themselves, other works, or the world at large comprehension becomes easier.  Essential reading strategies of increasing complexity include making connections, questioning visualization and making inferences, determining importance, and synthesizing information.

Chapter 3: Strategy Instruction & Practice - Teach, model, reinforce, and design lessons with the intent to gradually release responsibility so that students shift towards independence.  Examples of teaching and modeling would be reading and thinking aloud or lifting text onto an overhead while focusing on something like visualization or determining importance by analyzing the text.  Anchor reading strategies to engaging lessons and refer to it/them when necessary.  Students should take notes as they go in margins, on sticky notes, or in their own books.  This accomplishes many things including keeping them engaged but most importantly self-aware of their thinking and strategy selection among other things.

Chapter 4: Teaching With Short Text - Short text takes on many forms (articles, essays, journals, picture books, poetry, etc), covers many content areas, can be filled with sophisticated ideas and perspectives, and range in elements like it's quality and writing style.  Using short text as a vehicle for teaching comprehension strategies is simpler, more effective, and can be more accessible (engaging) than using longer text.  Because the adult world typically involves the reading of short text, utilizing such material may better serve students.  Short text is best text for skill honing.

Chapter 5: Book Selection - Much goes into the selection of books by teachers for comprehension instruction that must be considered when searching for the right book.  Picture books are again stressed as their accessibility and potential complexity of content (literary devices or even social implications) are underscored.  They can be used for strategy lessons, building knowledge, and can be challenging.  Assisting students with the ability to appropriately select their own books involves helping them consider readability, interest, and the purpose of their original search (to find information or to relax, for example).  Book selection is a lesson itself!

Part Two

To become an effective reader, students must master each of these skills.  Again, each of these skills is a prerequisite to the more complex one following it.  

An anchoring lesson is absolutely necessary for all of these skills.

Chapter 6: Making Connections - Making connections is step one.  This chapter emphasizes that students' connections must be authentic (actually connections) and to help them relate what they're reading to something outside of the text itself in a relevant way.  Doing so should be performed via 'coding' text for connections like text-to-self (T-T-S) or taking brief notes in margins.

Connections not only deepen understanding but facilitate retention.  How text relates to ourselves, other literature, and our world enhances understanding by building upon what we already know. 

To elaborate, it's a known fact that the more we know about one topic, the easier it becomes to remember and apply related new information.  If, for example, an engineer that works on hydroelectric dams were to watch a presentation about some new innovation and listen to detailed information, they will remember much more and understand greater implications than if I were to watch it because they, all things being equal, can anchor everything they see to something they already know.   

Chapter 7: Questioning - After connections comes questions and questions are the product of curiosity.  The end goal here is to create curious learner with the habit of questioning, recognizing types of questions, and addressing them.   The teacher needs to create such curiosity, help students organize and categorize their questions in such ways that enhance understanding, and eventually help students create meaning through questioning (inferences). 

The chapter closes by differentiating between assessment (answerable) and sincere (unanswerable) questions and their place in academia.  In short, sincere questions are likelier to enhance understanding than assessment whereas assessment questions are best for checking up on student progress and seeing if they're paying attention!

Chapter 8: Visualizing and Inferring - Typically the two co-occur.  Visualization (all of the senses) involves making inferences (presumptions) using the limited information known and inferring often utilizes visualization its vehicle to a conclusion.  Both help create a more meaningful, complete picture of what's read and can be used to bring dull textbooks to life, and make historical texts relevant. 

Students should be encouraged to reread text to ensure the accuracy of the information they've gleaned from it as such is the foundation of their visualizations and inferences.  This chapter felt like it could have been boiled down significantly even though it was only about ten pages.

Chapter 9:  Determining Importance in Text - It's best to introduce this skill using non-fiction as it's less ethereal than fiction.  Teaching students how to determine importance in text has numerous cornerstones and strategies.  Students need to know how to get an overview of the text quickly before delving into it and know how to best handle information (notes/highlighting/cue words).  The goal of lesson examples provided is to get students comfortable handling information (notes) and skilled at inferring where importance lies. 

Chapter 10: Synthesizing Information - Synthesis, the incorporation of new information with current knowledge to generate new ideas, requires the mastery of each previous skill.  It's essentially Connections 2.0.  The lessons focus on getting readers personally involved in the text to get the juices flowing, summarizing and personally responding to text, and compare/contrast style work.  Compare/contrast style work lays before students their thinking making novel connections jump out at them.  Teachers can encourage momentary reflection after each page to keep student's engaged and thinking.   

Chapter 11: Strategy Instruction in Context - The best vehicle for teaching, modeling, and reinforcing is content that will eventually be formally studied by students.  If students will be studying a certain era of history during the school year, for example, skills should be honed using text that focuses on that era.  This way student's background knowledge is built simultaneously.  Not only does rich background knowledge help down the line, but it sparks students' ability to make connections, question, synthesize, etc. 

Methods and strategies here also discuss ways enhance learning, student engagement, and ways to help students that are failing to achieve a particular learning objective we had in mind.  The gradual release of responsibility was omnipresent in this chapter.  Students must be granted time to work on their own (and carefully observed)so that the responsibility of learning shifts from the teacher to self-guided learning.  So tack 'release' after the Wong's (Wong & Wong, 2009) teach, model, reinforce.

Chapter 12: Assessing Comprehension - If you don't know what students are thinking, you don't know what they're understanding.  To get to what they're thinking, teachers have to read students' body language, eavesdrop during group work, really listen to what they're saying (sure they can say they're visualizing but are they?), keep track of exchanges to create an anecdotal record of progress, perform effective one on  one interviews with students to monitor understanding and misconceptions, et cetera.  Many if not all of these can be achieved verbally or with written responses.  In sum, get a grip on what they're actually thinking.

Part Three

The majority of the books recommended in this section are either picture books or short text.

Appendix A: Great Books and Author Sets to Launch Strategy Instruction and Practice - Books specifically chosen for their relevancy for teaching a certain skill/strategy.

Appendix B: Great Books for Teaching Content - Books covering content areas (science, history, et cetera)

Appendix C: Adult Text Sets - Great books for adults to read to build background knowledge in a variety of areas.  Choose select pieces of text to demonstrate how adults use reading skills/strategies to gain deeper meaning. 

Appendix D: Magazines and Newspapers for Kids and Young Adults - Magazines selected for young readers

Appendix E: Professional Journals for Selection of Children's Books - Professional journals that review books for classroom use.

Appendix F: Response Options for Each Strategy - Forms, worksheets, and charts to guide students through certain tasks to reach a learning objective.

Appendix G: Assessment Interviews with Fourth-Graders - The point is not to assess understanding of story events but to capture their thinking throughout reading.  These interviews are best to do at the beginning of a book to see how students handle information on their own, before stories are resolved, and before they are distracted by major story events.  Small groups of 2-3 students works best.

Random Note(s)

• Inverse relationship between how exciting/interesting text is with corresponding task is necessary.
• I've picked up taking notes as I go (coding).
• When students fail to achieve the objective of an assignment, such as using a desired skill, make the instructions clearer, model again, and if necessary hone the requisite skills for the current task/skill.

Book Criticisms

• Nitpicking, but I don't like how the authors always refer to students as  'kids' 
• Personally I just don't like the feel of the content layout.  It reads for me like a novel and is more or less laid out like one.  As a consequence I think there is a lot of fluffy content around whatever the authors are trying to convey as important to the reader.  What I liked about the Wong's book was how it was extremely well thought out, organized, to the point, the content became exciting to me, and ideas were reinforced effectively.  This text however falls short in each of these areas I believe.  The distilled information is indeed useful, but it just took me much longer to figure out and get to than was necessary. 
• The lessons feel at times repetitious and filled with unnecessary information and anecdotes.  Sometimes they are also quite similar to the ones beforehand.  Essentially the reader only needs to get the message of each chapter and can refer to the lessons later when designing a lesson plan.  At least as things stand.  The trouble is that much of the message is mixed in throughout the lessons, not just in the beginning prior to lesson examples.

Works Cited:

Harvey, Stephanie, and Goudvis, Anne. Strategies that Work: Teaching comprehension to enhance understanding. Markham: Pembroke Publishers Limited. 2000

Wong, Harry, and Wong Rosemary. The First Days of School: How to be an effective teacher. Mountain View: Harry K. Wong Publications, Inc. 2009