Surface learning – setting the foundation

The instructional goals of any lesson need to be a combination or balance of the three phases of learning – surface, deep and transfer. An expert teacher knows when and how to help students move from surface to deep and transfer learning. Despite whatever phase of learning the two key reminders are:

  • Learning intentions and success criteria need to be clearly signalled.
  • The instructional strategy with the highest importance is student learning.

Surface learning is the focus of Chapter 4 of Hattie, Fisher and Frey’s text Visible learning for mathematics. When students are at the the surface phase of learning, high-impact approaches that foster initial conceptual understanding are followed by linked procedural skills. The tasks are efficient, often more engaging and designed to raise student motivation. When considering the fluency quadrant, many tasks will be of low difficulty and low to moderate complexity. There should be discussion and opportunities to connect the tasks to students’ learning and understanding.

…observing someone doing something uses many of the same neural pathways as when you perform the action yourself.  (Hattie, Fisher and Frey, 2017, p107).

One of my favourite references. Number talks helping children build mental math and computation strategies by Sherry Parrish

Making number talks matter by Cathy Humphreys and Ruth Parker

This is why number talks, guiding questions, worked examples and direct instruction are so powerful. I am not going to go in-depth into these as the text does it beautifully. What I will say it that I was first introduced to number talks a couple of years ago when I was doing some work around the development of mental calculation. I became an immediate advocate and have bought a number of texts that illustrate how number talks are conducted.

I will also mention that direct instruction is especially useful in developing students’ surface-level learning but it has the following caveats. It should not:

  • be used as the sole means of teaching mathematics.
  • consume a significant part of the instructional time available for learning.
  • always have to be used at the beginning of a lesson.

All four activities enable teachers to demonstrate the kinds of questioning and listening strategies that exemplify excellent mathematical practice as well as give their students opportunities to begin building these habits of mind (Hattie, Fisher and Frey, 2017, p119). Self-verbalisation and self-questioning, skills that help students think critically, have an effect size of 0.64. The text also provides some simple sentence frames that can be used to facilitate student metacognitive thinking (which has an effect size of 0.69).

In the last part of the chapter, the authors consider how to use vocabulary, manipulatives, spaced practice with feedback, and mnemonics strategically.

Vocabulary instruction is important in all the phases of learning but it is often in the surface phase that students begin to build academic language. Researchers such as Beck that as teachers, we need to support students in the appropriate terminology but not give away the mathematical challenge. A focus on vocabulary has always been a focus in the work my colleagues and I have done in mathematics and numeracy. There are many vocabulary games that can be used in warm-up or transition times and we have always promoted the use of word walls and graphic organisers, the latter two being addressed in this chapter.

The CSA model used for problem solving strategies

Using manipulatives in all the learning phases helps build the links between the object, the symbol and the mathematical idea. It has an effect size of 0.5. Once again, my colleagues and I have promoted the use of manipulates and have commonly referred to the Concrete Semi-abstract Abstract (CSA) model.

Using the dual approach of spaced practice and feedback teaches students about the task and about their thinking. Spaced practice, giving multiple exposures to an idea over several days to attain learning and then spacing the practice of skills over a long period of time, has an effect size of 0.71. Feedback about the process (and not just the task) moves students into deeper learning and has the added advantage of giving a student agency so that they rely lesson on outside judgments and have a more positive mindset.

The use of mnemonics has an effect size of 0.45 and assist students to recall a substantial amount of information.

The authors give readers an insight into research based tasks that have a high effect size in the surface phase of learning. This strong start sets the stage for meaningful learning. Too often, however, the learning ends at the surface level. Teaching for deep and transfer learning must occur. My next blog will look at making learning visible in the deep learning phase.

Hattie, J., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2017). Visible learning for mathematics What works best to optimize student learning Grades K-12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

 

 

Comprehension – a practical approach

Since beginning my blogs, I have had several colleagues recommend the work of Sheena Cameron. As I have focused on comprehension in the last few blogs, it was timely to look at Cameron’s text Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies a practical classroom guide. Luckily, one of my work colleagues had a copy of Cameron’s book and I have spent the afternoon skimming and scanning her text. Her book is easy to read and very practical with lots of resources.

Cameron is an experienced classroom teacher and her book reflects this experience and current research. Her introduction acknowledges the importance of comprehension and the strategies that active readers use when engaging with text. Like many articles and texts on the teaching of reading, these active strategies used by good readers are divided into three stages of reading – before, during and after.

Cameron identifies a number of reading comprehension strategies and has organised them into groups: nine key strategies that often appear in research; two strategies that are important but receive less recognition; and two additional strategy sets that are indispensable to readers at any level.

Group 1 – Key strategies

  1. activating prior knowledge

    IMG_1181

    From Cameron, S. Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies (2009) p 11

  2. self-monitoring
  3. predicting
  4. questioning
  5. making connections
  6. visualising
  7. inferring
  8. summarising
  9. synthesising

Group 2 – Other useful strategies

  1. skimming
  2. scanning

Group 3 – Additional strategy sets

  1. word attack strategies
  2. fix-up strategies

(Cameron, 2009, p9)

I really like how these strategies align quite nicely with those recommended in the elaborations of year 4 Australian Curriculum English (ACELY1692).

Cameron states that reading comprehension can be developed by: teaching the strategies explicitly; using a cooperative learning model; using the strategies flexibly and combining them; using the strategies across all learning areas; and building vocabulary knowledge.

She summarises her introduction by stating that a reader is not truly reading without comprehension; that the strategies are a method of helping students understand what they are reading; and that good comprehension enables purposeful and active reading.

I am very impressed with this text and intend to purchase a personal copy – a recommended read!

 

The Pinnacle – Comprehension

Understanding the Reading Process – The Big Six

The final component of Konza’s Big Six and the goal of reading is comprehension. Each of the first five components of the Big Six contributes to comprehension. This is a summary of Konza’s original paper and the supporting paper on comprehension.

Comprehension

10motivaposters-seussComprehension is not just finding answers in a piece of text – it is an active process whereby the reader creates a version of the text in his or her mind (Konza, 2011).

To comprehend text, students not only need to be able to decode but to also understand: vocabulary; background knowledge; the semantic and syntactic structures to help predict relationships between words; and verbal reasoning. Comprehension requires engagement with the text at a deep level.

Researchers have identified a number of behaviours and strategies that good readers use to gain meaning from text.  The following are four important behaviours that characterise good readers and these are expanded upon in Konza’s supporting paper on comprehension.

Briefly, good readers:

  1. Understand the purpose of their reading– they know why they are reading and how to accomplish the task eg when to skim, when to scan or when to read closely.
  2. Understand the purpose of the text – they are aware of how the author’s purpose is reflected in the a text and the particular characteristics of different text types.
  3. Monitor their comprehension – they can integrate what they are reading with what they already know; focus on relevant parts of the text; distinguish between major content and supporting detail; monitor predictions; and evaluate content.
  4. Adjust their reading strategies – they know when to go back and reread; when to slow reading rate; and when to use chunking and decoding strategies with their vocabulary knowledge.

Levels of text comprehension

Independent level: reader can read most of text fluently (no more than 1 in 20 words difficult – success rate of at least 95%).  To gain meaning from the text, students need to be able to read it fluently.

Instructional level: reader finds text challenging but manageable – can read with support (1 word in10 is difficult or unknown – success rate of 90%). Must have support.

Frustration level: reader has difficulty with more than 1 word in 10 – success rate less than 90%.  Constant interruption results in frustration. Reading the text aloud exposes them to more sophisticated language structures and vocabulary – teacher can also do think alouds.

Guidelines and strategies

  1. Comprehension needs to be taught, not just tested – strategies need to be taught and explained along with guided practice.
  2. A variety of reading materials should be used, including short text – text types of all lengths can be used with short ones being particularly useful for struggling readers.
  3. Active listening should be taught – oral comprehension precedes reading comprehension but requires active listening. Give students tasks such as listening for specific information and teaching them strategies to remember the information. Barrier games require active listening and can be adapted for any age group.
  4. Readers need multiple strategies – students need a range of active comprehension strategies (see below – elaborations from Year 4 Australian Curriculum English).

Specific strategies for developing comprehension

I will list Konza’s specific strategies and a couple of the ideas. For more detail, go to her supporting paper.

  1. Prepare students before reading – what do students already know, make predictions using title and illustrations, discuss other texts on similar topic, introduce new vocabulary.
  2. Facilitate engagement during reading aloud – read story/section with few interruptions – questions before and after reading more effective than during reading, emphasise new words that were introduced before reading, stop a few times for comments.
  3. Facilitate student comprehension during independent reading – teach students to use ‘fix-up’ strategies when meaning is lost, help them make connections.
  4. Promote comprehension after reading – identify key words, look for sequence and cause and effect, link to own experiences, retell story in different way – puppets, change the ending, change to another form, use graphic organisers, use glossaries, dictionary and thesaurus.
  5. Use questioning as a comprehension strategy – examples are Blank’s levels of questioning, Bloom’s taxonomy, 3H (Here, Hidden, In my Head).

Guidelines for classroom questioning

Konza also lists a number of guidelines for classroom questioning such as: phrasing questions clearly, using lower order questions and a brisk pace when checking understanding of basic factual material;  using extended wait time for higher order questioning; asking questions before and after reading for older and higher ability students; and mainly asking questions after reading for younger students and those who are struggling.

Konza (2011) concludes by writing that comprehension enhances both the quality of our learning and the quality of our lives. Some children will acquire comprehension skills easily whereas others will require teachers to have a deep understanding of all the processes involved and how best to teach them. the simplest way

My Addition

Australian Curriculum English

For readers in Australia – these are the comprehension strategies mentioned in English/Year 4/Literacy/Interpreting, analysing, evaluating

Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning to expand content knowledge, integrating and linking ideas and analysing and evaluating texts (ACELY1692)

  • making connections between the text and students’ own experience and other texts
  • making connections between information in print and images
  • building and using prior knowledge and vocabulary
  • finding specific literal information
  • asking and answering questions
  • creating mental images
  • finding the main idea of a text
  • inferring meaning from the ways communication occurs in digital environments including the interplay between words, images, and sounds
  • bringing subject and technical vocabulary and concept knowledge to new reading tasks, selecting and using
  • texts for their pertinence to the task and the accuracy of their information

Australian Curriculum

More on vocabulary

Marzano’s Six Step Process to Teaching Academic Vocabulary

Six is the magic number. My last blog looked at Konza’s take on vocabulary as a part of her big 6 in understanding the reading process. Today’s blog will look at Marzano’s six step process to teaching academic vocabulary. I love this process for the explicit and deep teaching of vocabulary as it can be used in any year level and for any learning area.

This is an example of selecting an essential word from a year 8/9 biology unit. I deliberately chose a year level and learning area that were unfamiliar to me.

Teaching the word: mutualism

1. Provide a description, explanation, or example of the new term. (Include a non-linguistic representation of the term for ESL kids.)

The idea is to make this interesting and something that students will remember.

Telling a joke: What’s worse than a giraffe with a sore throat? Why, a crocodile with a toothache, of course.

crocodile and plover

Nile crocodile and Egyptian plover

Showing a photograph and telling  an interesting story. Introduce the Nile crocodile, an animal that is a messy eater and cannot move food from side to side as its jaws only open and close. It also can’t move food around with its tongue and this results in food becoming caught in its teeth which attracts parasites, bacteria and leeches. Thankfully the Egyptian plover works mutually with the crocodile. The crocodile beeches itself, remains very still and leaves its mouth open. The plover enters the crocodile’s mouth and eats the scraps and parasites – a win win situation. The plover gets to eat and the crocodile gets it teeth cleaned.  (This would also be a great teaching moment to show where Egypt and the Nile river are located).

The crocodile and plover have a mutualistic relationship – one where both of them benefit. In science, we call this mutualism. This is one of the three types of symbiotic relationships, the other two being commensalism and parasitism.

Using a video clip: I found a short video clip that added to the description.

2. Ask students to restate the description, explanation, or example in their own words. (Allow students whose primary existing knowledge base is still in their native language to write in it.)

Marzano

Recording sheet example

Oral rehearsal: give students time to discuss what mutualism is (pairs or small groups) and then have them rewrite the definition in their own words. If this is a second language, let students write the word and its meaning in their first language.

3. Ask students to construct a picture, symbol, or graphic representing the word.

Model first: Some students will be reluctant to draw but the idea is to have some kind of graphic representation  that will help them remember the word.

Share: Sharing the different representations helps students see others ways the word can be represented.

4. Engage students periodically in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the terms in their notebooks.

instagrok

Instagrok word map

There are lots of ways students can practise using the word and broadening their understanding of it. Writing synonyms or antonyms. Finding similarities or differences. Completing an analogy – Mutualism is to symbiosis as ____________ is to  ___________.  (As mutualism is one of the types of symbiosis, I wrote …as an edge is to a triangle).

5. Periodically ask students to discuss the terms with one another. (Allow in native language when appropriate).

Oral rehearsal is vital and giving students time to talk about the word and all its accompanying vocabulary enhances student knowledge. This can be done as Think-Pair-Shares. As you have seen this step has been done when students rewrote their definitions and drew their graphic representations. They could explain any new learning or clarify confusions or disagreements. Allow time for students to make any revisions.

6. Involve students periodically in games that allow them to play with terms.

There are so many games that can be played: Pictionary, memory, jeopardy, charades, talk a mile a minute, bingo, create a skit…

students helping

Students studying together

sea anenome

Sea anemone and clown fish

For the word mutualism I made a simple game that matched images of animals in symbiotic relationships to a human representation  – mutualism  – sea anemone and clown fish – students helping one another with an assignment, commensalism –  barnacles on a whale and student copying neighbour’s homework, parasitism – flea on a dog and someone taking another child’s tuckshop money.

Look at all the words the students would have learned by examining this one word in detail. Mutualism – mutual, mutualistic, commensalism, parasitism, plover, Nile, Egyptian, relationship and the list goes on.

It would also be an opportunity to explore the meaning and use of the suffix –ism.

All of these steps should be modelled first (I would use the gradual release of responsibility – I do, we do, you do together, you do alone).  The steps can also be done in any order and can be completed over a period of days as students explore the word deeper. Some steps can overlap. 

Selecting a word for study

To select a word for study, I like Fisher and Frey’s guidelines:

  1. Is the word representative of an essential idea or concept?
  2. Will the word be used repeatedly within and across units of instruction?
  3. Is the word transportable across other disciplines?
  4. Does the use of the word invite contextual analysis?
  5. Does the word offer an opportunity for structural analysis?
  6. Do the selected word honour the learner’s cognitive load?

From: The Value of Intentional Vocabulary Instruction in the Middle Grades

 

 

 

Vocabulary

Understanding the Reading Process – The Big Six

my powerful words

My powerful words poster for a week

In my role, I deliver a lot of professional development and I love presenting a session on vocabulary. I was lucky enough to ‘inherit’ an original professional development session on vocabulary from my mentor and friend, Kay and her colleague, Chris. Over the years, I have delivered several vocabulary sessions and I don’t think any one session has been the same.

I am always reading new research and incorporating new ideas and strategies and there are a couple of ideas in Konza’s papers that I will use in a session I am running in a few weeks.  In today’s blog, I will be summarising Konza’s synthesis of research on vocabulary, both from her original paper and the supporting vocabulary paper.

Vocabulary

Bromley (2007, p 528) wrote vocabulary is a principal contributor to comprehension, fluency and achievement. Vocabulary development is both an outcome of comprehension and a precursor to it, with word meanings making up as much s 70-80% of comprehension.

Vocabulary is a key component of reading and if students know the meaning of a word, there is far more chance that they will be able to read the word and make meaning of the sentence. Vocabulary is generally learnt indirectly through repeated exposure – conversations, listening to stories, reading and through the media.

Some children will arrive at school as highly competent vocabulary users and will absorb words easily. They will be more likely to acquire the skills of reading easily and thereby continue to build their vocabulary knowledge. Other children come to school with small vocabularies and are often not skilled in learning new words, have a more restricted range of words and less access to the vocabulary of books. Consequently, they are more likely to have difficulty acquiring the skills of reading and will be unable to use the skills of reading to develop vocabulary further.

A number of researchers have found that direct instruction is effective for vocabulary growth in all students. In primary school, a rich bank of words that permeate across many contexts needs to be developed. ‘Rich and robust’ (Beck & McKeown, 2002) vocabulary development entails careful choice of words for instruction, strategies that develop deep understanding, regular use and an increasing ‘word consciousness’ in all students. Biemiller (2010) recommends teaching as many new words as possible and Pressley et al (2007) advocates ‘flooding’ classrooms with a range of long-term vocabulary interventions. Konza’s paper on vocabulary includes guidelines and strategies from all three ‘schools of thought’.

Guidelines and Strategies for Vocabulary Development

1. Build vocabulary instruction into everyday routine

  • model high quality language.
  • incorporate vocabulary building into directions and teaching.
  • organise frequent small group interactions to build oral language.
  • preteach critical vocabulary.

2. Select the best words to teach

  • Konza lists 5 questions that will help with word selection (see her paper).

    vocabulary in maths

    Some tier 2 and tier 3 words for a year 2 maths unit

  • There are three tiers of words: Tier 1 – basic and high frequency words; Tier 2 – words that appear more frequently in text than in oral language and   are less likely to be learnt without assistance; and Tier 3 – subject specific words.
  • Tier 2 words should be the focus of direct vocabulary instruction – maximum of 7-10 Tier 2 words from any one book or piece of text.

3. Explicitly teach word meanings

  • Read aloud the sentence and show the word.
  • Have students repeat it several times – brainstorm meanings – look for helpful parts – reread the sentence.
  • Explain the meaning with a student-friendly definition and synonyms.
  • Provide examples.
  • Ask questions to determine understanding.
  • Provide sentences that students can judge as being true or false.
  • Students write own sentences to be judged true or false.
  • Consciously use the word throughout the following days.

4. Teach students to use contextual strategies

  • An example are words that may be in bold or italics – indicates important or new terms and are often explained in a glossary.

5. Teach students to use graphic organisers to explain word meanings

  • using concept maps, word trees, word maps and Y charts are different ways of explaining word meanings in detail.
  • help students develop a clear and accurate concept of a word.

    instagrok

    Using the online instagrok to form a word map

 

Goal

The goal is to develop ‘word consciousness’ – enjoying learning new words and using them in different ways. Teachers who appreciate and enjoy words and understand the power and value of a rich vocabulary pass that enthusiasm and knowledge on to their students.

The word snoop

Enjoying the English language