Week 12: Metacognitive Assessments and Comprehension Video

This video was extremely informative. It offered vital information and strategies that should be taught to students in order to help build their reading comprehension. In the video, Professor Duke explains why teaching comprehension strategies becomes very important in elementary grades 3-5, because it is at these grade levels that students are exposed to expository text, and when a student is reading an expository text the teacher can not assume that the student has prior knowledge or prior understanding of the topic that is being discusse, so that is why comprehension of the text is important.
I really like the idea of having a poster in the classroom listing a variety of strategies (such as thinking aloud, creating inferences, building predictions, rereading, looking for context clues, breaking down unknown words) that students could use to guide their thinking about text. I also liked how the teacher consistently modeled and guided students through these strategies and how to use them; this is definitely an instructional practice that I will implement in my future classroom.

I would definitely use many ideas in this video in my future classroom to help students build their comprehension. I would help my future students learn how to build on their comprehension skills by through discussion, writing along with explicitly teaching comprehension strategies, teacher modeling of these strategies, as well as guided use of these strategies. Comprehension strategies are basically sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension.