McGregor, T. (2007). Comprehension connections: Bridges to strategic reading. Pourtsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Filled with pictures of actual teacher anchor charts and student work samples, the textbook offers a unique take on the common education textbook. The hand-written charts that star in its pages are modest, down-to-earth, and - most importantly - real. With chapters on metcognition (a.k.a. the literal comprehension strategy of self-monitoring!), visualizing, inferring, and determining importance (a.k.a. identifying important information),the textbook provides a simple layout dominated more by the real-word images. Anchor charts and hands-on instructional approaches - or "sensory experiences" as termed by McGregor - make up the majority of the textbook, providing teachers with unique, interactive, and fun strategies to improve reading comprehension. As an extremely palatable and engaging textbook, it is definitely worth at least a skim. |
Bouchard, M. (2005). Comprehension strategies for English language learners. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc. Although abundant in common strategies - like Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), Jigsaw Activities, Think Alouds, and Think-Pair-Share - that many teachers are already familiar with and that are not specific to comprehension within text, this textbook also offers unique variations of instructional approaches often associated with "comprehension within text," including "Summary with Illustrations" (summarization), "Using Illustrations to Interact with the Text" (plot comprehension through textual imagery), "Coding Text" (self-monitoring), and the "Herringbone Technique" (main idea identification through 5 Ws and an H). The descriptions of the strategies are complemented by full-page graphic organizers that are easily reproducible. Additionally, to provide opportunities for further exploration of the instructional approaches, sidebars indicate the foundational research upon which each strategy is grounded. |
McKnight, K. S. (2010). The teacher's big book of graphic organizers: Grades 5-12. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. With full-page graphic organizers and a binders conducive to photo-copying, this textbook is setup so that each of its one hundred (100) strategies - given in graphic organizer form - can be reproduced quickly and easily for secondary education teachers. Please note that it's inclusion on this list is not an endorsement of pre-made worksheets. However, with the plethora of strategies and graphic organizer ideas that it offers, this textbook should serve as a launching point for teachers to make their own worksheets - worksheets based on their students as well as the standardized format provided. Broken up into five chapters, McKnight offers graphic organizers for brainstorming, vocabulary development, note-taking, reading comprehension, and writing. Grounded in visual learning and thinking, this book of graphic organizers touches upon many of the skills needed for comprehension within text (i.e. decoding, plot structure, summarizing, etc.). |
McLaughlin, M. & Allen, M. B. (2009). Guided comprehension in grades 3-8 (2nd ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association, Inc. Split into two parts, this textbook provides strategies and assessment options for both comprehension within text (part one) and comprehension beyond text (part two). Focusing on the first section, there are blurbs about self-monitoring strategies, like INSERT and "I Wonder" bookmarks and Double-Entry Journals, plot structure strategies, like "Photographs of the Mind," and summarizing strategies like "Questions into Paragraphs" (QuIP). As an extremely dense textbook, it offers many unique and interesting approaches to elicit students' literal understanding of texts, especially around those three aforementioned components of comprehension within text. An appendix in the back of the textbook conveniently compiles all the graphic organizers and worksheet ideas for the strategies posed in Part One and Part Two in one place. Example bookmarks, charts, and maps are included. |
Wilhelm, J. D. (2012). Enriching comprehension with visualization strategies. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc. Drawing upon the power of art and visualization to aid students' reading comprehension, this textbook describes the benefits of graphic novels, the place of picture books as unit starters in secondary education classrooms, the use of pictorial plot summaries and video clips, how to read pictures, and many more strategies and instructional ideas about fore-fronting images, symbols, and illustrations as a way to enhance textual comprehension. Complete with a DVD that shows the described strategies in action, the textbook provides examples of student work (which accounts for most of the pictures in the text) and even aligns some of its posed strategies with the Common Core State Standards. Therefore, this is a contemporary, up-to-date resource for teachers in need of ways to evoke, encourage, and support students' visual intelligence, as posed by Howard Gardner in his theory of multiple intelligences. |
Wormeli, R. (2004).Summarization in Any Subject: 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Deve. Including many strategies for teaching summarization and summarizing techniques, Wormeli's Summarization in Any Subject: 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning serves as a resource for teachers from any subject interested in improving the summarization skills of their students. Strategies such as "Bloom's Taxonomy Summary Cubes" and "Carousel Brainstorming" are just two of many that Wormeli suggests throughout the textbook. By moving away from the traditional "pencil and paper" method of summarizing a text, Wormeli believes that students should engage in multimodal forms of summarizing such as art, music, video, movement, and drama. In addition to a myriad of summarizing strategies, teachers can also find lesson recommendations and a lesson plan structure that Wormeli believes is optimal for developing student summarizing skills. A valuable resource for teachers, Summarization in Any Subject advocates for the multimodal and untraditional improvement of student summarization across subject areas. |
Kissner, E. (2006). Summarizing, paraphrasing, and retelling: Skills for better reading, writing, and test taking. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. With summarizing skills and the ability to "write it in your own words" in need of improvement for many students - even at the secondary level - this textbook offers summary checklists, steps of summarizing, collapsing lists, story map outlines, and many more approaches to enable students to summarize both fiction and informational texts. Student work examples constitute the majority of pictures. Graphic organizers are also provided in full-page displays; however, due to the compact size of the textbook, are not ideal for photocopying (i.e. enlargement would be necessary). Although definitely a text heavy textbook, it is a comprehensive and thorough look at one of the main skills needed for comprehension within text. The table of contents does provide a way to navigate the text more efficiently, clearly highlighting the focus of the chapters. Especially pertinent ones for comprehension within text include "Summarizing for Assessment," "Using Story Elements to Improve Narrative Summaries," and "Scaffolding for Summarizing." |
Harvey, S. & G. A. (2007). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension for understanding and engagement (2nd ed.). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers. Chock full of strategies with picture books, sticky notes, and graphic organizers, this textbook lays out myriad instructional approaches and assessment options, spotlighting comprehension within text skills such as summarization (chapter 11), main idea identification (chapter 10), and self-monitoring (chapter 6). With an assessment page following every chapter, the predictable organization and coherence of the textbook is phenomenal. Easy-to-navigate, the textbook provides strategies and assessments for comprehension within text that go beyond the usual go-to procedures. For example, based on their self-proclaimed belief in one of their beginning, introductory chapters, they believe main idea identification goes beyond underlining or check marks beside them. Therefore, with fresh, unique takes on strategies and work sample pictures to guide the reading, this textbook is a valuable resource. |
Gore, M. C. (2010). Inclusion strategies for secondary classrooms: Keys for struggling learners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Although not specifically geared toward comprehension within text strategies, this textbook offers graphic organizers that pertain to the skill areas of literal comprehension. For example, a template for "Reporter's Notes" can help students identify and extract the important information - in terms of who, what, where, when, why, and how - in a text. This textbook serves as a valuable resource that - once sifted through - provides strategies and instructional approaches - as well as the aforementioned graphic organizer ideas - that can help not only students with special needs with literal comprehension, but also struggling readers. |