Embedded Files
Problem
When students were asked to read aloud in small groups there were always students who did not engage or participate in small group reading activities. As a result, multiple students were missing out on valuable content knowledge they needed to complete learning activities and practice skills such as reading comprehension and small group discussions . To address the lack of engagement and support students to build essential skills, my teaching partner and I implemented a small group practice called Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR). CSR is a research based reading strategy that requires students to work together in small cooperative groups to practice skills that build speaking and listening skills as well as reading compensation and engagement, while providing an opportunity for students to develop valuable content knowledge. CSR teaches students to engage in strategies they will use before, during, and after reading complex texts. Before reading students are taught to work together to preview the text by looking at the title, bolded print, pictures, etc, and make a prediction by discussing what they think the text might be about in the text. Then they take turns reading aloud. As they engage in reading, they are required to pause frequently and identify and discuss the main idea from that section. They are also asked to engage in identifying and discussing things they understand (clicks/ahas) and things they do not (clunks/huhs).
Once students have finished the text they engage in a wrap up that requires them to identify what they learned as well as the main ideas of the text. They are asked to dig deeper and create a question they can ask to push their thinking further. Finally, they are asked to reflect on their experience (i.e. how well they fell they worked in their group, if/where they got stuck, how they overcame challenges, and what they can improve upon for next time).
Hypothesis
If Collaborative Strategic Reading (CRS) is taught and practiced in the class, students should be more actively engaged in reading complex texts and they should be better able to identify the main idea of a text, ask clarifying questions and ultimately increase their understanding of what they have read. This will be measured through data collection from reading logs and data collection related to student engagement during small group reading activities.
Target group
Students with IEPs who are reading below grade level based on MAP testing scores.
Planning & resources
Teacher Made Materials
Data collection
Data collection
Baseline data
My co-teacher and I had already started teaching and using this strategy during the first marking period, as a result I do not have solid baseline data. However, I used the MAP testing data to identify target students.
Measuring success
There are two types of data collected and that will continue to be collected over the course of the school year. The first is directly related to overall engagement. To tack this my co- teacher and I both track engagement in the reading activity every 5 minutes. The data that is collected is the number of students in the room at the time and the number of students who are actively engaged in the reading protocol activity, Then that information is calculated into a percentage. (see below).
The next set of data collected comes directly from their reading logs. It is based on the skills that students were able to show.
Overall findings & impact
I believe that it is too early in the process to determine how well CSR works as a reading intervention strategy. However, it clearly increases engagement during small group reading activities because students have actionable steps to apply before, during and after reading.
Actionable steps
If you want to use this strategy in your classroom, I recommend …
Teachers explicitly teach into the Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) Protocol through explicit verbal and written instructions.
Teachers need to model the CSR Protocol to ensure that once they understand the directions they have an opportunity to see how CSR can look.
Early in the process students may need prompting to engage in the process (i.e. guiding questions, sentence starters)
Julie Cohen | julie.cohen@uamaker.nyc
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