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Instructions / Notes for “Themes that Stick”
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In the spirit of “practicing what I preach”, I used the parts of my presentation dealing with comprehension to model how to teach comprehension strategies through a gradual release model. There is a considerable amount of research indicating that teaching comprehension this way can and does raise reading scores. Duke, Pressley, and Pearson have all found this to be the case.
One thing I had the teachers do is to write a “show don’t tell” paragraph. Here is the slide I used for that.
This activity develops the ability of the student to draw inferences. An important nuance in all this is that when done the way I am about to describe, most of the teaching time is spent letting students TALK about how THEY USED the strategy. In this case, they did that by sharing their “show don’t tell” paragraphs.