Motivating Every Student in Literacy

(Including the Highly Unmotivated!) Grades 3-6

Sandra Athans, Denise Devine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138439702
• eBook ISBN: 9781317923084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Motivation and literacy go hand in hand in this practical book of strategies for classroom teachers. It provides effective tips and tools to motivate and grasp the attention of even the most reluctant readers. With numerous classroom examples, case studies, and blackline masters, this book will help you to boost motivation and literacy in your classroom right away. Motivating Every Student in Literacy (Including the Highly Unmotivated!), Grades 3-6 provides an effective model for improving reading levels and increasing motivation. Under the guidance of Athans and Devine, classroom leaders develop their own Motivation Improvement Action Plans, where small-group instruction, end-of-unit assessments, and other practical approaches work to increase individual student effort. Woven throughout are process-driven and novelty strategies to address possible reasons for a child's lack of motivation. In this guide, you'll find illuminating case studies, quick-reference chapter summaries, reproducible student plans and contracts, and action plan tips.

1

Motivation and Literacy: A Vision for Success

Identifying a starting point doesn’t necessarily imply there will be an end, but it gives us hope. Defining goals and establishing a tone will help guide your vision.

Does This Happen in Your Classroom?

Ms. Stewart sat together with six students at a small table near the back of the classroom. She glanced at the clock, keeping track that Mr. Evans, who provided remedial reading support services, would be finishing with his group of readers in twenty minutes. She had five more minutes with her first group and would then call her second group to the back. Juanita was sharing her summary of a passage from Love that Dog, which the students had read at the start of their small-group instruction. The students chuckled quietly, amused by Juanita’s descriptive interpretation of the important ideas. Pleased with Juanita’s progress and the others’ level of engagement, Ms. Stewart glanced around the classroom, quickly assessing the progress of the eight other students who sat at their desks. They were involved in a variety of independent reading projects. It was clear that Steven had made little progress with his assignments; he was well behind the others and was flipping through pages of his book, expressionless. Caitlyn was busy inspecting different colored erasers in her pencil box. She quickly selected one, having spied Ms. Stewart watching her, and returned her box inside her desk. Ms. Stewart assumed Steven and Caitlyn would need to catch up on their reading activities in study hall during recess; this would be their third visit to study hall that week.

Although the names may be different, Stevens and Caitlyns are in every classroom and in every grade level. We recognize that each student is unique, yet we are all too familiar with the type of student who, for whatever reason, is unmotivated to work to his or her potential—we remember them.

Our studies into motivation began as a result of the countless episodes such as this one with Steven and Caitlyn. It was never our intention, but rather an incidental outcome of what we considered—at the time—a loftier goal. Initially, our objective was focused on our reading comprehension instruction. Our goal was to substantially improve the reading ability of all of our students. At the onset of this challenge, we identified best practices from authorities and shaped an instructional approach for reading comprehension that seemed to work well within our classrooms. By our seventh year, we were delighted that most of our students were making significant gains. Evidence supporting this was duplicated many times over; students’ classroom performance on pre- and postinstruction benchmark assignments and tests showed strong growth, and the number of students passing our state language arts tests at proficiency levels or higher, was growing. Our success was invigorating. As we had hoped, our students were making substantial progress in reading comprehension skills—most of our students, that is... except for the Stevens and the Caitlyns.

Why Motivation and Literacy?

All too often, vague complaints resound that the Stevens or the Caitlyns simply are not using their best effort. These broad generalizations are just that, and they rarely serve as a workable beginning to address the much larger problems that stem from students who are disengaged and challenged by a lack of motivation. Being able to define student behaviors and performance in more concrete terms such as within the parameters of a literacy approach seemed like a well-defined beginning. In an article about critical thinking, Daniel T. Willingham contends that when trying to provide instruction on this elusive concept, success will be more readily forthcoming if its content is presented in a framework that makes use of it, such as the “Scientific Method” (Willingham, 2007). We found the same is true when trying to affect student motivation—it needs grounding.

Because the focus of this work is to improve student motivation within literacy-based activities—reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and thinking—we begin by sharing a brief overview of our approach to reading comprehension instruction. This provides a context for subsequent discussions and also enables you to draw parallels to your own literacy activities. By doing so, you can determine how to make the best use of the suggestions in this book. We also provide prompts where you might wish to reflect on your classroom practices now that you’re taking a fresh look at routine activities with a critical eye on student motivation. As mentioned in the Preface, it’s not important that you follow our approach to reading comprehension instruction, yet we do highlight activities that research suggests are beneficial. Because of this, we are confident that many components of our approach will sound familiar and that many of them—in some shape and form—may already be in place in your classrooms. Also, the strategies and techniques introduced here can easily be integrated into other literacy-based activities.

Our Approach: The Quality Comprehension Model

Like all teachers who provide instruction to intermediate-level learners, we desperately hoped that our students’ skill at learning to read would soon flip-flop to reading to learn. When this flip-flop proved to be more of a flop, we knew we needed to intervene or the challenges of our content-rich curriculum would be overwhelming. For nearly a decade we identified and study the best practices we could find and refined them for our classroom. Over time, our reading comprehension instruction progressed and evolved into a four-part approach, which we now call the “Quality Comprehension Model” (Athans & Devine, 2008):

1. Teachers lead small-group instruction in key comprehension strategies using teacher-selected leveled materials.
2. A Read-Along Guide, which is a writing component used by the student, supports the reading instruction.
3. Students take part in independent activities, practicing the strategies they’ve learned through direct instruction or participating in other literacy activities.
4. Assessments (formal and informal) that follow each unit of instruction allow teachers to determine if a student has achieved an acceptable level of competency with a skill and also enable students to demonstrate in writing what they have learned.

These practices are largely based on methodologies espoused by authorities such as Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (1996, 2001, 2002, 2006), Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis (2000), Ellin Keene (2006), and Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman (2007), among others. We’ve provided some detail on each of these components and invite you to draw comparisons to your own practices.

Small-Group Instruction in Key Comprehension Strategies

Teachers meet with small groups of students who share similar reading skills and abilities. During this instructional time, teachers typically provide direct instruction, model desired outcomes, monitor student progress, and then assign independent work. The process is based on the highly successful “Gradual Release of Responsibility Model,” credited largely to David Pearson and Margaret Gallagher (1983).

Key comprehension strategies comprise the content taught during direct instruction. The seventeen strategies we focus on were collected from a variety of sources, as well as some of our own. They represent the skills that good readers use instinctively. Today, most authorities agree that it is best to teach a few strategies so they are learned well (Gambrell, 2007) rather than many that are not learned well. However, we are also aware that many strategies need little or brief direct instruction (Willingham, 2006/2007); and so we balance these ideas, always taking our cues from the direction in which our students’ needs point us. Figure 1.1 features brief descriptions of all seventeen strategies.

Figure 1.1. Comprehension Strategies—Skills Good Readers Use

Comprehension Strategies	Description
1. Using Fix-Up Methods When Meaning is Challenged	1. When meaning is lost, students must become aware and take action —reread a passage, review earlier sections, or read on for about two sentences.
2. Finding Word Meaning and Building Vocabulary Using Context Clues	2. Coming across new and unknown words is common. Sounding out, chunking, and linking words are tools to aid us while using context clues to make meaning of words or phrases.
3. Using Visual Text Clues To Figure Out Meaning	3. Text features such as punctuation, type font, spacing, titles, and subtitles give clues to aid meaning.
4. Making Connections	4. Prior knowledge and experience help us connect to our reading and in turn build our knowledge.
5. Asking Questions	5. Engaged readers ask and answer who, what, when, where, why, and how questions as they read.
6. Visualizing to Support the Text	6. Readers ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Content
• Free Downloads
• Preface
• Meet the Authors
• 1 Motivation and Literacy: A Vision for Success
• 2 Superhero Strategies to the Rescue!
• 3 Underdog Strategies to the Rescue!
• 4 Reaching the Highly Unmotivated
• 5 Frequently Asked Questions
• Appendix A: Case Study Outcomes: How We Motivated These Students
• Appendix B: Motivation Tools
• References