Tool 09

Following the completion of Tool 9, teachers will:

Consider their students’ language skills and target areas of language focus when reading aloud to the students.
Apply research findings into their read-aloud lessons to deepen student interaction with the text.
Choose a varied selection of expository and narrative texts to read to students.

Topic 1: We All Love a Good Book

This brief introduction sets the stage for stepping back from our intense study of reading instruction in the previous eight tools, to look at the benefits of an indisputably beloved activity in our classrooms – reading to children.
By turning attention to the read-aloud, teachers experience how all of their work with language comprehension and decoding in Tools 1-8, can be infused into the delightful practice of reading aloud.

Topic 2: Read-Alouds – What They Can Do and What They Can’t Do

As it turns out, there is plenty of research that supports the use of the read-aloud in our daily routines. In fact, it suggests that the read-aloud should be one of our go-to tools.
Teachers learn many supportive reasons to support the read aloud and also clear information about what read-alouds cannot be expected to do.

Topic 1: Read-Alouds and Listening Comprehension

Teachers revisit the Simple View of Reading and the Rope Model, and then talk about what they can expect with regards to listening comprehension development through the read-aloud.
Teachers are introduced to methods of assessing listening comprehension and also reading comprehension because the two are not synonymous. It is important to isolate a reading comprehension issue from listening comprehension to help us address student needs more accurately.

Topic 2: Engaging Students Through Dialogic Reading

This topic investigates one of the most researched and written about teaching techniques that demonstrates notable results with young children.

Topic 3: Modeling Comprehension Behaviors during Read-Aloud

Continuing to read to students can help keep a love of reading alive and at the same time we can model how to monitor reading, how to think deeply about what we are reading, in order to engage students as we read.
National Reading Panel (1999) highlighted several reading comprehension teaching methods that that can be incorporated into the read-aloud lesson.
Teachers are introduced to several of these methods: monitor reading comprehension, make your thinking visible, be a detective, visualize, summarize at set points, use queries to facilitate thinking.

Topic 1: Prepare for the Classroom Videos

As with each of the tools, teachers download a Classroom Video Lesson Descriptions booklet that outlines each of the lessons they observe during this section along with additional teaching methods, lesson ideas, and resources.

Topic 2: The Dialogic Reading Lesson

The key feature of Dialogic Reading is that the child and teacher are engaged in shared dialogue about the text, the pictures in the text, and connecting ideas to existing knowledge.
Dialogic Reading is demonstrated by a kindergarten teacher over three readings of a text.

Topic 3: Monitoring Comprehension Through the Read-Aloud

Several brief read-aloud lessons are shown to demonstrate thinking aloud monitoring methods with young and older students.

Topic 4: Listening Comprehension – A Query is a Beautiful Thing

The skill of asking those perfect open ended questions and working with students to answer those queries is supported during this section.

Topic 1: Planning Framework

Teachers bring their study of listening comprehension and reading comprehension together and plan to apply it in their classrooms.
Teachers access a planning form very similar to the Berger Framework they used to plan their reading comprehension lessons in Tool 6. The planning form contains reminders of many of the listening comprehension skills that were focused on in Tool 9.

Topic 1: Summary

Making our thinking transparent during read-alouds can really help students learn how to monitor their comprehension toward the development of a Mental Model. Tool 9 talked about processes and products, just like in Tool 6. Teachers can model the processes of reading comprehension during the read-aloud with the goal always on the product – what did we learn?

Topic 2: Video Conversation with an Expert