Integrating Comprehensive Instruction Across Content Areas for Special Education Students

Classroom Examples of Integrating Comprehensive Instruction Across Content Areas for Special Education Students

Struggling readers develop comprehension skills and strategies most successfully when the student takes ownership for learning and the teacher provides appropriate directions and supports. By means of this collaboration between student and teacher, students internalize rules and strategies for making meaning. Listed below are strategies that facilitate this type of learning:

Preparing for Reading
As a pre-reading strategy, teachers activate students’ prior knowledge about a subject by emphasizing the following:
• Initial Associations. The teacher selects a word, phrase or pictures about the key concept and asks the students what they already know about this topic.
• Reflections about Initial Associations. Teacher asks students to explain their associations, with such questions as “Why do these ideas come to mind? Students can expand their knowledge by listening to others in the class.
• Reformulation of Knowledge. Teacher asks students if they have gained any knowledge from the discussion. Students begin to personalize what they are about to read.

Reciprocal Teaching
The teacher models four distinct comprehension strategies and the student has opportunities to practice these strategies. Eventually students can work together in pairs or groups and use these strategies without the help of the teacher.
• Summarize in a simple sentence the paragraph that was read.
• Generate a question about the paragraph that was read to ask a fellow student.
• Ask for clarity of anything in the text that was unclear.
• Make a prediction about what will happen in the text.

Questioning Practices
There are four types of questions:
• Text-based questions where the answers are stated explicitly in the text
• Text-based questions where the student has to think and search for relevant information throughout the text.
• Knowledge-based questions in which the reader has to read the text to understand the question, but the answer is not in the text.
• Knowledge-based questions in which the student can answer the question without reading the text.

[Struggling Adolescent Readers: A Collection of Teaching Strategies (Paperback) by David W. Moore (ed.), Donna E. Alvermann (ed.), & Kathleen A. Hinchman (ed.) 2000. International Reading Association. pgs. 141-144.]