Making movies in my head

What do you see when you read?

It's not a question I have ever given much consideration before. I read, I think, I interpret, I make meaning, I ponder, I wonder, I connect, I learn, I enjoy, I treasure.

In my new role I have been asked to facilitate a reading comprehension intervention group for Year 6 students. This request has made me somewhat nervous. My training and experience has been in secondary HSIE teaching. I have never been taught how to help students learn to read. I've just used my own instinct and intuition when it's been necessary. It is an area that I would love to be more equipped in to support students. To be a part of the unlocking of unhindered futures and the opening of limitless possibilities - this would be truly rewarding.

So, lately I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking and over the last few days have participated in a reading comprehension training course. R3: Reframing Readers Resourcefully. This program was developed by the Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta to support students with reading comprehension difficulties. Its main focus is on reframing students' thinking about the way they approach reading and resourcing them with multiple strategies to help them make meaning from the text. It was developed and implemented in 2015 in response to the significant needs of Stage 3 and 4 students. The program has seen incredible results helping students make meaning from the words that they read.

Key to this program is explicit modelling of reading strategies. One central teaching strategy is the 'Think Aloud'. A 'Think Aloud' models to students exactly what I am thinking when I read a text. I target specific stopping points in a text to highlight to students. The stopping points depend on what my learning intention is. The idea is to take what is hidden and often a mystery to these students and bring it right out in the open and shine a big fat light on it all.

What do I do when I come across a word that I don't know? What questions do I ask? What approach do I take if the text does not make sense to me? How do I use all the clues in the text to help me make meaning? What do I predict as I read? What do I infer? What clues do I use to infer?

What do I see?

Visualisation.

I have also been reading Nanci Bell's Visualizing and Verbalising. She has based her program on the theory that students who do not understand what they read do not visualise as they read. As I pondered this idea, I have been more conscious of what I visualise when I read. I noticed that when the picture in my head becomes unclear or I am not sure what my next picture should be, this is my unconscious prompt to reread or use other strategies to make sense of the text.

So, it follows that students who do not visualise, may have no internal prompt to realise what they are reading does not make sense. They keep on reading... words in, words out... with no concept that they are actually meant to understand what they are reading. And that there might be other ways to approach reading that will help them make sense of the text.

My nervousness has faded (not completely erased). My excitement is growing. I have come away from this week with a newfound understanding that teaching students to comprehend is not that complicated and I probably have skills to do it. The program is quite simple. It's about using the same explicit approaches to teach and model reading comprehension strategies. It's about intensity - a small number of students for high impact. It's about consistency - everyday for 50min for 20 weeks.

My first learning intention for the group will be for students to use visualisation strategies when reading texts. I can't wait to get started. I can't wait for students to start making movies in their heads.