Educators across content areas have turned to Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning for almost two decades. This fully updated 4th edition delivers rich, practical, research-based strategies that readers have found invaluable in the context of today’s classrooms. Buehl has written all-new chapters that focus on the instructional shifts taking place as the Common Core State Standards are implemented across the United States. These introductory chapters will help you • Understand the research base for comprehension strategies in content classrooms • Learn how to tap into students’ background knowledge to enhance comprehension of complex texts and build new knowledge • Show learners how to question a text • Teach reading and thinking through a disciplinary lens At the heart of this edition are more than 40 classroom strategies, with variations and Strategy Indexes that identify the instructional focus of each strategy, pinpoint the text frames in play as students read and learn, and correlate students’ comprehension processes across the phases of strategy implementation. In addition, each strategy is cross-referenced with the Common Core’s reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language standards.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.