Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning

by Doug Buehl

This book provides middle school and high school educators with literacy development strategies that emphasize effective learning in content contexts. Expanding on the first edition of this book, author Buehl addresses teachers outside the reading field who may not be familiar with the ideas that circulate in professional reading journals. He introduces readers to these ideas with a user-friendly collection of 45 literacy skill-building strategies that can easily be adapted for students at a variety of ability levels. With the development of state and national achievement standards in reading, writing, social studies, mathematics, science, and other curricular areas, it is more important than ever for educators to develop the literacy skills of older students. The activities in this book will help you instill in your learners the skills and desire to read increasingly complex materials, and provide explicit instruction in reading comprehension and study strategies across the curriculum.

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction, Read For School, School

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1995

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a textbook for a class I took, and it is a book I will keep. Buehl includes many graphic organizers along with the instructions to use them. There are practical ideas that work in this one.

[Erin M-M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great resources...

[Mischa Gray]

Great resource for the secondary teacher.

[Kim Shank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for content area literacy strategies for middle school and secondary teachers!!

[tessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

love the graphic organizers in the back. very much appreciated.

[Jon Den Houter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am practicing active recall AKA retrieval practice to help solidify in my neurons what I've read!

Chapter 1: Fostering Comprehension of Complex Texts
This chapter references 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It!, and idea I am familiar with. So, I am well equipped to understand this chapter since I have a lot of background knowledge with which to perform the first key: make connections to prior knowledge. I did like how Buehl very concretely named skills for each of the seven keys. For example, a skill that goes along with the 4th key, making inferences, Buehl says is "predicting." Predicting is an easier skill to introduce to students than is making inferences. Another example is for the 2nd key, "asking (or generating) questions," for which Buehl names "self-questioning" as a skill. Self-questioning is more effective to teach students than simply questions because, so often, when I teach students to question I am generating my own question, when really what needs to happen is students need to come up with their own questions. Another example is for the 5th key, determining importance, Buehl gives the skill of identifying text structures. This is a wonderful, concrete skill to teach students versus the more nebulous skill of determining what's important in a given text. Furthermore, Buehl defines synthesizing as "[students] summarizing what they read into personal understandings." The key to that definition is "personal understandings"—doing this is what will make the reading stick in students' minds even after the final exam. Buehl elaborates in a later paragraph: "Because [students] have not personalized an understanding of what an author is telling them, new learning is highly vulnerable to rapid forgetting" (10). Finally, regarding the 7th key, I prefer Buehl's phrase "problem-solving strategies" to Zimmerman's "fix-up strategies."

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the required text for my class, Developmental Adolescent Literacy, EDR 631.

[Chessa]

I think this book is good for us. Especially for me as the candidate of teacher. In this book we can see the variation of strategies in teaching.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a feeling that I am going to be going back and referring to this book often in my work.

[Mary C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! It was very easy to read and Buehl gives great supporting examples to understand the classroom strategies. I will be referring to it frequently.

[Amanda Krich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good templates. Falls somewhere between content and disciplinary literacy.

[Alanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are several ideas and graphic organizers that I intend to use for my math classes. I like the tempo of the writing and the way material is organized.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has invaluable examples in the second half of the book that can be adapted for the classroom.

[Mismawati · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is very interesting for me,because it i can find out my reasearch poposal about history memory bubbles strategy

[Madison Kozeny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a grad class. I particularly liked this texts. It includes many great strategies and I can see myself referring back to this again and again.

[Alanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good strategies for teaching any subject. I am glad I was able to attend a class where these strategies were practiced because they come to life in a more memorable way than reading alone.