EduBlog Insights

I had the pleasure to meet Jill Castek and Lisa Zawilinski at TRLD this year. They gave an excellent presentation entitled “Instructing Students in the New Literacies of Online Reading Comprehension.” Both of these ladies are members of the New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut. Their excellent handout is on the TRLD site. They went into a lot of detail talking about ‘Internet Reciprocal Teaching’ which is an instructional model being developed to instruct students in online reading comprehension in classroom settings. Their research is done in a very participatory way. They actively partner with teachers in order to develop these skills and strategies with them in the classroom environment. They believe this is a flexible way to look at pedagogy. It is not a series of step-by-step concrete lessons. They look at a wide variety of content areas - reading, writing, listening, speaking, and content areas. There are three phases

• Teacher led stage - teacher models strategies and the discussion process
• Collaborative stage- teachers and students interact to support strategy development
• Reciprocal & Inquiry stage - students apply strategies by facilitating student-led discusssion during authentic reading events based on student -direct inquiry projects.

View video clips showing student-led Internet Reciprocal Teaching groups.

Check out the blogs they have built with the students:

Wildcat Class Blog

Wildcat Student Blogs

Idea Exchange

Nierlich Students

Also, take note of the wiki they have built with their students:

Nierlich Class

The pictures below will show some of their slides and you can see how they used instant messaging to clarify assignments with the kids through the process. They said this really worked great with the quiet students. They ranked sites as to their relevancy and the students were really active in this process. They have to scaffold within each stage- a scaffolding with strategies. They turn the job of introducing new strategies to students - groups of experts who will teach their peers. Again as Leu noted in his keynote, many of the weaker offline readers were quite strong online.

It was a great session led by two dynamic educator researchers. Take the time to browse through their site- lots of relevant and worthwhile information there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Conferences, Reading, TRLD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.