How Smart Readers Read and Become a Community of Learners

How Smart Readers Read and Become a Community of Learners

In my classroom it will be my duty to teach students how to be smart readers.  Being a good reader is a skill that takes practice and I will need to present students with engaging texts which will help them improve their reading skills and comprehension.  I feel students will develop their own preferences as to how they read best, but as their instructor it will be necessary to expose them to different strategies.  For instance, I plan on encouraging students to read with a pen and notebook at all times.  Although students will not always be able to mark up the text they are reading, keeping notes in a chronological order with page numbers allows students to stop and realize what they are reading and refer back to key concepts when needed.  I will also ask them to use those handy smartphones of theirs as dictionaries.  There is nothing more frustrating than reading a passage and not understanding a certain word.  Although the context may help in determining meaning, knowing the actual definition is extremely helpful.  Therefore, I plan of having students create their own vocabulary lists.  They will keep track of all the words they come across that they do not know and put them on the wall with a brief definition and how it was used where they found it.  This way the students are leading their own vocabulary lists and what they are learning is relevant and frequently revisited, which will also help retain content knowledge as well.

Using different strategies, as the book suggests, will also help students with comprehension and producing artifacts that demonstrate their learned skills and understanding of concepts.  I particularly like many forms of Directed Reading and Thinking Activities.  Just like any lesson, a clear objective assists any student in accomplishing what is being asked of them.  So why would a reading assignment be any different?  Clear guiding questions and assigned roles give students something to search for within the text, and it almost becomes sort of an adventure rather than a task.  And there are many different ways to present these sorts of activities.

Through teaching students how to become smart readers, I am creating a community of learners. And being their adviser, life coach, and concerned role model, I need to convince students that whether they like it or not they are lifelong learners.   I also need to establish a risk taking climate that accepts mistakes under the basis that errors produce teachable moments, because we all remember the times we mess up.