educational research

Offline Reading Comprehension: Developing Strategic and Engaged Readers

visual representations and mind maps

This is my reflection in response to week 2 assignment and readings of URI’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy, EDC 532: Seminar in Digital Literacy with Kara Clayton and Dr. Julie Coiro.

STRATEGIC AND ENGAGED READERS

Strategic readers know that the purpose of reading is to understand, and that there are a number of comprehension strategies that they can adopt in order to build knowledge from reading. Strategic readers are able to apply such strategies in “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language,” as the Rand Reading Comprehension Study Group defines reading comprehension. Strategic readers process information by constantly monitoring their understanding. In that process, strategic readers, when faced with understanding challenges, engage in problem solving and self-correction.

Buehl (2007) provides insight into the seven cognitive processes of proficient readers, beginning with making connections to one’s prior knowledge – which is regarded as the one most critical strategy for learning to take place, since no new knowledge or understanding is constructed in a vacuum – to generating questions, creating mental sensory images, inferencing, prioritizing, and synthesizing the information being read. Add intrinsic motivation to that process and the result is a strategic and engaged reader. Importantly, the more one reads to understand, the more motivated one becomes, and the more social interaction ensues, for engaged readers are prone to sharing and socially connecting around what they are learning. The more one interacts, the more strategies are mobilized, and the more one’s knowledge base grows, leading to the desire to read more. That is the engagement cycle, as defined by Swan (2003).

Teachers and librarians not only can but indeed they must foster engagement and self-regulation as critical ingredients for strategic reading by means of a balanced comprehension instruction approach that encompasses a supportive classroom context and a model of comprehension instruction that models and supports the development of reading strategies for learners. (Duke & Pearson, 2002)

CONNECTIONS

The seven comprehension processes of proficient readers (Buehl, 2007) are mirrored in the six individual comprehension strategies that excellent reading teachers are intent at scaffolding and modelling for and with learners (Duke & Pearson, 2002). Think-alouds represent a strategy for activating schemata and generating questions. Inferencing and determining importance are engendered in text structure analysis. The ability to synthesize is exercised by means of summarization. The creation of visual and sensory representations is both a process and a strategy which boosts one’s synthesis capacity, also helping in the self-monitoring and self-correction process.

RAND (2002) provides us with the heuristic for thinking about reading comprehension, defining its components: the reader, the text, and the activity, all of which are nestled within a sociocultural dimension, which is by and large overlooked by NAEP (2015/2019). Indeed, how does a standardized assessment account for a virtually infinite sociocultural variance? If RAND gives us the reader, the text, and the activity, Duke & Pearson (2002) give us the teacher, and CORI (Swan, 2003) pulls in the sociocultural dimension by articulating skills and strategies, knowledge, motivation, and social collaboration.

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction gives us the ‘how’ by leveraging the three basic needs for intrinsic motivation, namely competence, autonomy, and belonging. In other words, learners need a sense of self-efficacy, choice, and opportunities for social interaction and human connection. CORI then represents the supportive classroom context articulated by Duke & Pearson, one in which learners read a lot, read for real reasons, engage in high quality talk about text, and ultimately strive for the construction of conceptual knowledge.

I find that one of the greatest challenges in my own teaching context, as well as in the Brazilian educational system, is making instruction coherent as opposed to fragmented, as proposed in CORI. Such coherence and transdisciplinarity entails a whole set of very unique beliefs that have not necessarily been cultivated by teacher training programs, and certainly not in traditional and mainstream educational settings. The shift from a fragmented to a relational and systemic view of and approach to knowledge construction and instructional design (as opposed to lesson planning) requires major transformations in teacher education and school culture.

IMPLICATIONS/QUESTIONS/CRITIQUES

Fragmented teaching is not time productively spent, at least not for learners. It may make teaching and planning less complex for the teacher, but it is ultimately disengaging for all involved in the educational experience. I was particularly struck by the difference between lesson planning and instruction design: intention. Johnson (2014), referring to the implications of the TPACK framework, says:

“The framework supports and deepens literacy practices, allowing teachers to become thoughtful instructional designers. Washburn (2010) writes, ‘Instructional design differs from lesson planning, the term we traditionally use to describe a teacher’s pre-instruction preparation. Designers communicate by intentionally combining elements’ (pp.2-3)”

  • I wonder what a teacher development program that enables teachers to operate that shift from fragmented to systemic, from instructor to coach, from planner to designer, looks like?
  • I wonder what will it take for teachers of all subject areas to realize that they are, first and foremost, literacy teachers?

 

References:

Duke, N.K. & Pearson, P. D. (2002). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. In What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, 3rd edition. International Reading Association.

Swan (2003). Why is the North Pole Always Cold? In Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI): Engaging Classrooms, Lifelong Learners

Johnson, D. (2014) Reading, Writing and Literacy 2.0. Teaching with Online Texts, Tools, and Resources, K-8 (chapters 1 & 2)

Buehl, D. (2014). Fostering Comprehension of Complex Texts (Chapter 1 pages 3-11) in Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (4th Edition). International Literacy Association.

RAND Reading Study Group. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] Abridged Reading Framework for the 2015/2019

Eco-systemic thought: Education, Learning, and Citizenship in the 21st Century by Maria Cândida Moraes

The following is my version of a chapter in one of the books by Brazilian educational researcher Dr. Maria Cândida Moraes. The original work is in Portuguese, and apparently there are no English versions of her work available online. This is a personal work of translation which aims at sharing the extremely pertinent thought proposed by Moraes with my English-speaking community. I also felt compelled to engage in this translation, for it requires a certain density of understanding which I find extremely rich. In the words of Moraes herself:

“We know by experience that in all translation there is some betrayal, and that in all interpretation there is reconstruction by that who interprets. Pedro Demo (2000) comes to the rescue by saying that ‘hermeneutically speaking, knowledge never manages to stay the same, even if it wanted to. Transmitting is never just reproducing […] and all copy is, at least partly, also reconstructed’ (ibid.: 125)” ~ Maria Cândido Moraes

I hope you enjoy reading Moraes as much as I have.

 

moraes Part 3: The Eco-systemic Paradigm for Education (pgs 241 – 246) 

Today we know that, adjacent to the roots of quantum, biological, and complex thought, there are epistemological seeds capable of grounding the process of knowledge construction, the development of learning, networked knowledge, self-organizational processes, autonomy, and creativity. These are seeds which can also influence human thought to develop towards a new way of constructing and reconstructing not only education, but also, and most importantly, a better repositioning of the learner/apprentice with regards to the world and life, providing a more adequate perspective of what reality is as well as the meaning of the individual’s own humanity.

The epistemological grounds provided by these theories strongly oppose the traditional causal model present in instructionist theories, at the same time offering some important pedagogical keys embedded in these macroconcepts and that, perhaps, might be better understood and explored by educators and science in general. Today, more than ever before, we have come to the realization that our school is reproductive, authoritarian, and autocratic in that it works with knowledge in its most linear approach, materialized in the teacher that talks and the student that listens and copies. The more aligned the student is with the teacher’s own linearity, the better his grades.

In reality, the theories approached here unfold the complex nature of knowedge and learning. They also reveal certain meaningful parameters, principles, and values which may serve the reconfiguration of a new educational scenenery and which may foster pedagogical practices that are more dynamic, integrating, complex, and holistic, and which thus require a greater conceptual clarity with regards to knowledge, learning, and the complexity involved in the educational processes.

Education, culture, and society are all complex systems, whose workings entail diverse areas of human knowledge, and which require a broader, more ample view of the solutions for their issues. We have an educational reality which is systemic and which, therefore, requires a treatment compatible to its nature.

This same complexity is present in the knowledge construction and learning processes, whose non-linear nature is seen in the interpretive processes which are dialogically complex because they are intrinsically reconstructive and productive, as explained by Pedro Demo (2000). We know by experience that in all translation there is some betrayal, and that in all interpretation there is reconstruction by the one who interprets. Pedro Demo (2000) comes to our rescue by saying that “hermeneutically speaking, knowledge never manages to stay the same, even if it wanted to. Transmitting is never just reproducing […] and all copy is, at least partly, also reconstructed” (ibid.: 125).

However, we know that such comprehension is not easy, especially to those educators who are accustomed to grouding their work in specific theoretical references. In every day life, a majority of people is also used to perceiving and interpreting the world from the perspective of classical physics, which apprehends the visible reality as being structured, stable, and most events as predictable, predetermined, and rationality being the state of mind best suited and most greatly used for the construction of technical-scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, we also perceive that physicists themselves stimulate, in their heated philosophical discussions, the possibility that there is something wrong in the materialistic realism founded on the notion that real objects are independent from subjects or from the way in which we observe them, thus signaling some epistemological developments (Goswami, 2000).

Today, it is no longer possible for us educators to ignore the epistemological implications of the scientific knowledge involving the concepts of self-organization, complexity, chaos, undeterminism, and non-linear dynamics which determine living systems. We notice that these macroconcepts or new themes, when allied with cognitive science (Varela et al., 1997), set forth a more challenging vision of the morphogenesis of knowledge, a non-linear vision of the dynamics of reality, which, more than ever, unveils the intricacies between cognition and life (Maturana & Varela, 1995). For these authors, living systems are cognitive systems, and life is a process of cognition. The interactions which take place within living organisms are aways cognitive interactions that are built upon the very flow of life. It is in this flow of life that, upon actions and reactions, we shape our world and are shaped by it. From this structural imbricacy, subject and world emerge together. And what is the meaning of that for education?

We have come to realize that this theoretical reference corroborates to a better understanding of the complex bio-psycho-sociogenesis of human knowledge, as explained by Hugo Assmann (1998). In this view, one acknowledges the evolutionary trajectory or the presence of heredity in the constitution of human beings, associated with the diverse environmental contexts in the way human competences develop and evolve.

From Biology, we have learned that each learner possesses his own structural dynamic, which is unique and untransferable, and which does not admit replication. It is something constitutive of his personality, of his ways of being, of learning and of ‘feelthinking’ (Moraes & Torre, 2002). It is, after all, something inherent to the learner’s way of knowing and being in the world. By the same token, inspired by Maturana, we know it is from the congruence between his structural dynamic and his historical-cultural journey that the individual is capable of interpreting reality and of realizing his own humanity.

From Physics, we understand that reality does not exist outside of the observer, which explains why we create the world in our image and likeness. From Physicochemistry, especially with Prigogine, we learn that equilibrium states, both in mechanics and in thermodynamics, resonate in biology as it does in society. Fluctuations resulting from both external and internal causes may result in new structures and, under certain circumstances, noise, disturbance, randomness, detours, and other conditions, morph into a source of order and renewal.

Which meaningful implications do these concepts suggest? One of them is the acknowledgement of motivation as the driving force of self-organizing processes, and that it depends on what takes place inside the system. Motivation is always endogenous, happening from the inside out. And to what extent is the cognitive dimension of the individual a part of the self-organizing dimension of life? If we consider the notions that “the whole is in the part which is in the whole” (Morin, 1995: 109), it becomes easier to undersatnd that the cognitive dimension also possesses a self-organizing dynamic, not only in relation to autonomy, but also in the individual’s actions upon the world around him, since autonomy depends on the group of the individual’s relations with his environment.

From this new theoretical framework, what is it to learn and to know? If we must define this paradigm more clearly, what are the dimensions which might be involved in this theoretical construction?

 

MORAES, Maria Cândida. Pensamento Eco-Sistêmico: Educação, aprendizagem e cidanania no século XXI. 2 ed. -Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2008.