Researchers and educators alike note the mutual benefits of pairing reading with writing and vice versa:
Having students write about a text should enhance reading comprehension because it affords greater opportunities to think about ideas in a text, requires them to organize and integrate those ideas into a coherent whole, fosters explicitness, facilitates reflection, encourages personal involvement with texts, and involves students in transforming ideas into their own words. In short, writing about a text should enhance comprehension because it provides students with a tool for visibly and permanently recording, connecting, analyzing, personalizing, and manipulating key ideas in text (Graham and Hebert, 2010). Writing helps students better understand what they read by engaging them actively in practicing comprehension. Students must understand what they are reading to present their ideas about texts effectively in writing. This requires students to go back to the text, reread, and clarify misunderstandings. Again, writing about texts pushes students to practice the habits of effective reading (Hampton and Resnick, 2008). Setting up time for students to talk and write about what they are thinking is one way to move students forward as people who think independently about what they are reading … People who share what they wonder about, what they notice, and what they are thinking in a variety of ways (Czekanski, 2012). Writing makes reading comprehension visible and that, Australian researcher John Hattie (2008) reminds us, is the heart of effective teaching. When we can see what our students know and what they need to know, we can create clear goals for each student and provide the targeted feedback they need to surge forward: Teachers need to know the learning intentions and success criteria of their lessons, know how well they are attaining these criteria for all students, and know where to go next in light of the gap between students’ current knowledge and understanding and the success criteria of: “Where are you going?,” “How are you going?,” and “Where to next?”
156
CHAPTER 5: TEACH
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs