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Our group met this week to discuss Strategies that Work. I find I'm doing a lot of thinking about how "readers weave a variety of strategies together to make sense of text." As a staff developer, I often see teachers who start the year with making connections. For the first six weeks of school, they work on connections and then the move into say, for example, visualization. As a teacher, pacing is always hard. I find I often struggle with how much time I should spend on something before moving on. When we make the decision to stick with one strategy for an extended period of time, we are working toward mastery. However, our understanding and application of reading strategies is always a work in progress and if we chunk strategy instruction in the same way we chunk units of study, I don't feel that our students we know enough quickly enough. Harvey and Goudvis write, "we introduce the strategies one at a time but quickly move on to introduce additional strategies so that kids build a repertoire of strateiges and use them flexibly to understand what they read." I like this thinking, but I am still perplexed by time. What is "quickly?" How much time should we spend on each strategy? What does the ebb and flow of a school year of strategy instruction look like? |
Discussion Groups 
