Reading hour
‘Reading hours’ are groups sessions which are held on a weekly basis in classrooms where the students together read the same book while the teacher – applying reading strategies – supports the students in their reading and understanding of the text. The teachers are provided with our reading comprehension strategies, as well as contextualized lesson plans. The long-term goal of the reading hour is for the class sessions to be incorporated within the curriculum so that it is used as a method to continuously and systematically achieve learning competences set out in the curriculum.
Reading Strategies
The Reading Strategies’ – applied in our classrooms are evidence-based models rooting from the ‘Reciprocal Learning’ model of Palinscar and Brown (1984), which is a guiding method for improving reading comprehension skills and is connected to Vygotsky’s theory on the zone of proximal development, as well as the Transactional Strategies Instruction (TSI), which is a method that is used to understand the reading.
The primary goal of Reciprocal Learning is the promotion of self-guidance and has 3 primary components 1) Dialogues, where everyone gets to have a say; 2) Reciprocal cooperation, where adequate feedback is provided to each other; 3) Structured dialogue using four strategies:
a. Developing questions
b. Summations of texts,
c. Clarifications on words and paragraphs, and
d. Predicting what will happen next
Whereas TSI is composed of four parts, which will leave the teacher responsible for 1) clearly outlining what they will be doing and how; 2) gradually deliver the responsibilities over to the students; 3) encourage opportunities of cooperation; 4) monitor and encourage the interpretive discussions.
The Material