Strategic thinking

Streaming video - 2014

Nothing matters more than kids' thinking. As teachers, we want to honor kids' thinking and teach them to become critical, thoughtful, independent readers. To help them turn thinking into meaning and to understand what they read, students need an arsenal of strategies to navigate and synthesize text. And they need to know when, where, and how, to use these strategies. Strategic thinking builds on the comprehension instruction in the book, Strategies that work, and the video series Strategy instruction in action. In this four-part video series, Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis spend a week with Jessica Lawrence and her middle school language arts students. They focus on teaching the comprehension strategies of inferring in fiction ...and determining importance in nonfiction. These two strategies are essential to comprehension for intermediate and middle-grade students. On each program, Steph, Anne, and Jessica plan instruction, lead mini-lessons, confer and share with the kids, and reflect on their teaching and the students' learning. Throughout the lesson sequences, students grapple with information, themes, issues and ideas as they read literature and content-related text. As the kids read and respond orally and in writing, they merge their thinking with the text, adding to their knowledge and discovering the power of their own thinking. About the author: Anne Goudvis has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, and adjunct professor of reading and social studies. For the past ten years, she has worked at the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition as a staff developer and co-director of the Library Power project, a national initiative to improve teaching and learning in libraries and classrooms. Stephanie Harvey has spent the past thirty years teaching and learning about reading and writing. She received her B A. from the University of Denver and her M.A. from the University of Colorado. After fifteen years of regular elementary and special education teaching in the Jefferson County Schools in Lakewood, Colorado, Stephanie became a staff developer for the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), a partnership of leaders from education and business who support innovation in public schools. In that role, she has worked with educators throughout Colorado coordinating literacy projects, leading workshops, and conducting classroom demonstrations. Recently, Stephanie and Anne have released a number of videos on reading comprehension, including a single video called read write and talk with a focus on active literacy, a three-video series for English language learners called reading the world, and Strategic thinking, a comprehension series aimed at middle-grade readers. more