The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Organization

In my last post, I examined some of teachers’ frustrations and the causes of students’ inability to read effectively or their reluctance to do so. I promised that this week’s follow-up would include some AVID-approved strategies for addressing the issue. Instead of writing one enormous e-mail that you’d take one look at and delete, I’m breaking this into four chunks--pairing Reading with the remaining letters of WICOR (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, and Organization).  I’ll begin at what seems to be a sensible jumping-off point:  Reading and Organization.

 

The WICOR of Reading: Part 1--Reading and Organization

 

Things go more smoothly when there’s an organizational scheme. I tell myself that every time I open my Google Drive or hunt for an important item I received in the mail at my house and put somewhere I'd be able to find it later. It’s true about reading, too. By employing strategies associated with the “Organization” component of WICOR, teachers can coach their students to reading success.

 

Organization can refer to helping students develop structures and procedures for managing time and materials, but it can also refer to providing students with strategies for tackling the tasks and surmounting the challenges they will encounter in school and in real life.

 

Here are a few strategies and thoughts about the relationship between reading and organization:

 

1. Throw Out the Worksheets and Equip Students with Real-World Reading Skills:  One way teachers strive to “help” their students read is to provide them with worksheets and study guides that direct them to the most important take-aways from whatever they have been asked to read. I’ve yet to see any research study or reading guru who thinks this is an effective practice. This attempt at organization may allow students to locate a handful of facts in a text, but it does nothing to teach students to look for the main idea, to sift facts from opinions, to make inferences about an author’s claim, to determine the meaning of words or terminology in context, or to follow a flow of ideas in a text. Teachers who force their students to read text on their own may encounter resistance from students at first, but this is only because you’re asking them to do something difficult. You’re like a physical therapist asking your client to perform a painful muscular movement that is essential for recovery and progress; your client will curse you as you do what you have to do to make him better.

 

2. Talk to Students About What Effective Readers Do:  I’m an effective reader. Most of you are, too. Sometimes, we forget that the things that seem to come naturally to us aren’t always second nature to our students.  They don’t know that effective readers expect text to make sense, adjust their reading rate in response to the difficulty of the text, reread when comprehension breaks down, summarize, form mental pictures, and use context clues to sleuth out the meaning of unfamiliar words. It’s okay to talk with students about what you’re doing as you read--even to do a “Read Aloud/Think Aloud”--or to make them practice the skills more overtly as they read until the skills become automatic.

 

3.  Marking the Text: Marking the text while reading is one way to provide some structure for your students. Ask the students to underline key points, to circle important characters or terms, to write annotations--gist statements, questions, predictions, connections--in the margins as they read. Don’t go overboard; you don’t want the complexity of the text marking strategy to get in the way of comprehension.

 

4. Provide a Reading Prompt: We often assign writing using prompts that direct student work and state our expectations.  Seldom do we think about providing a reading prompt to do the same thing. A reading prompt establishes a purpose for reading and informs students what to focus on as they read. With a reading prompt, students don’t have to be psychic as they try to guess what the teacher wants them to get out of the reading.

 

5.  Consider Text Structures:  Textbooks, articles, editorials, poems, stories, and even novels have organizing patterns.  Asking students to pay attention to and analyze the organization schema writers use will not only help them learn to make meaning from texts but may also cause them to be more deliberate about creating effective organization in their own writing and thinking.

 

6.  Make Time for Reading:  What you make time for is an indication of what you value. If you want to communicate to students that reading is important, make time for reading during class. Daily is best. Or at least several times a week in English classes. In my experiences visiting English and reading classes in the district, the most cheerful and enthusiastic student readers are in classes where the teacher asks them to read daily and reads and talks about reading with them.

 

Stay tuned for Part 2. . . . Coming up next week, I will examine the connection between writing and reading.