Specify An Intervention And Provide A Rationale

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The day following the staff meeting, we met with the LLT. The agenda for the day was the development of an instructional intervention that could be taken school wide. Armed with every content literacy or "strategy" book the group could find, we set out to determine the ways in which teachers would engage students in reading, writing, speaking, and listening across content areas. In introducing this session, we acknowledged "there might be 50 ways to leave a lover, but there are at least 100 ways to engage in literacy learning." We discussed the fractured nature of most high schools and the fact that students experienced different instructional routines in every class.

While many instructional routines and Tag Heuer Replica Watches instructional interventions would meet our criteria, the LLT selected four that would be the focus of ongoing professional development for the first year of work. These are detailed in the following sections. The first instructional routine suggested by the LLT centered on note-taking. As one of the committee members ...
... noted, "You struck a cord with me. I see all of the different systems we require students to use at this school. I'd be so confused if I had to change methods every hour or so." In reviewing the evidence on note-taking, LLT members were impressed with Cornell style notes (Pauk, 1974). Using Cornell notes, students take notes and complete the tasks on the right side of the page. The left side provides them with a guide and the key points. These key points will help students quickly find information, locate references, and study for exams. Students can also use this column to add their own notes, drawings, and ideas. As Faber, Morris, and Lieberman (2000) found, the Cornell note-taking system increases comprehension and achievement. The committee recommendation was that Cornell notes be used for all note-taking activities.

Following the conversation on "external storage functions" during which note-taking was agreed upon, members of the LLT noted that comprehension was an issue for most students at Western and that previous efforts to address comprehension (such as test practice and homework packets) had not Replica Cartier Santos significantly impacted student achievement. The literacy peer coach reported that very few students performed poorly on assessments of phonics or phonemic awareness and that most were reasonable fluent readers. We explored the evidence based on think-alouds, read-alouds, and shared readings (e.g., Wilhelm, 2001) and discussed the ways in which content teachers could use this instructional intervention with students. We noted that thinking aloud while reading might serve a number of purposes, including the development of general comprehension skills as well as discipline specific thinking (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). We shared a piece of text and considered how scientists, historians, art critics, and literary critics might view this same piece of text. The committee recommended that every teacher conduct a think-aloud with a piece of text, broadly defined, every day in every class.