Chapter 7: Comprehension Strategies

In Chapter 7 of the Literacy for the 21st Century Book they give multiple different strategies of how to be sure your students understand the information they are reading. In my opinion, some of them are just busy work that give the teacher time in class to do some of their own work. However, the predicting, connecting and questioning strategies are three strategies I would implement in my own classroom. Predicting what is going to happen then reading to see what actually happens is a great strategy because you can see into their creative mind and see if they know how the story is progressing in regards to what should be next. Connecting the text to their life experiences, to the world or the other texts is also very important. This will allow the reader to look back on what they have read and remember it possibly because it is something that has happened to themselves in the past. This memory jogs their thoughts on what may have happened to the characters in their book by either it happening in a similar way or a completely different way. The questioning strategy is a good one if you implement a buddy system. In this you would have two students read a certain passage one night and the next day bring in questions about either the literary text or questions on inferencing things in the text. This way the students would be testing each others knowledge. They would also be able to use this as an assessment if the teacher gave them the questions they had to give each other, but they could talk about them together.
My placement uses the predicting strategy the most. My CT will read the back of the book and give them a general overview and possibly even read the first few paragraphs. She will then ask the students what they think will be happening in the book. They will continue reading and sometimes they have to write a follow up journal on how what they thought would happen and what actually happens is either similar or different. This also brings in the writing aspect of reading, considering they go hand in hand.
The evaluating strategy is the least effective since the readers are assuming responsibility for their own reading. At an elementary and middle school level, I don't think you can quite take what the students say completely truthfully. So, when they evaluate themselves they would be giving higher scores than what they should actually be getting. However, a good way of implementing this strategy would be if you had the students do their own eval. and you as the teacher did the same eval on them, except yours would have actual detailed questions. This way you would see the difference in their scores and your own and if they are being truthful or not.