| Abstract |
Nothing matters more than kids' thinking. As teachers, we want to honor kids' thinking and teach them to become critical, thoughtful, independent readers. To help them turn thinking into meaning and to understand what they read, students need an arsenal of strategies to navigate and synthesize text. And they need to know when, where, and how, to use these strategies. Strategic Thinking builds on the comprehension instruction in the book, Strategies That Work, and the videotape series Strategy Instruction In Action. In this four-part video series, Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis spend a week with Jessica Lawrence and her middle school language arts students. They focus on teaching the comprehension strategies of inferring in fiction and determining importance in nonfiction. These two strategies are essential to comprehension for intermediate and middle-grade student. On each program, Steph, Anne, and Jessica plan instruction, lead mini-lessons, confer and share with the kids, and reflect on their teaching and the students' learning. Throughout the lesson sequences, students grapple with information, themes, issues and ideas as they read literature and content-related text. As the kids read and respond orally and in writing, they merge their thinking with the text, adding to their knowledge and discovering the power of their own thinking. |
