Intervention Tool Chart :: Reading

Close Thinking is a strategy for complex texts that develops the students’ understanding through multiple opportunities to hear the same text. It is based on the thinking that each time the student hears the text, something new is discovered. Each time a student hears a short, complex text read aloud to them, the level of thinking becomes more in depth allowing the student to grasp the reading better and better each time. Teachers must scaffold this strategy to engage the students in a deep dive of the text and influential discussion.

Cover, Copy, and Compare (CCC) is a self-managed intervention that can be used to enhance accuracy in spelling, vocabulary, word identification, or other academic subject areas. In CCC, students look at an academic stimulus (e.g., spelling word). They then cover it, copy it, and evaluate their response by comparing it to the original word. If there is an error, the students engage in error correction procedures before moving onto the next item.

The Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) strategy incorporates cooperative learning, vocabulary development, questioning techniques, opportunities to practice, and students’ use of prior knowledge. As a multi-component reading strategy, its success is based on use of all four of the following components each time students read Preview, Get the Gist, Click or Clunk?, and Wrap Up. CSR was designed to be used with expository text, but can be adapted for other text.

Preview is one fourth of CSR, a learning strategy shown to improve students’ reading comprehension when all four parts of CSR are used by students. The role of Preview within CSR is for students to think about what they already know about the topic of the text and to make predictions about the text using features such as titles, subtitles, graphs, illustrations , and other text cues.

Root wheels are a visual representation that increases students understanding and knowledge of roots, prefixes, and suffixes. While 90% of the words that students encounter across various content areas are based on Greek and Latin prefixes, roots and suffixes, root wheels provide students a visual to enhance their understandings of vocabulary through deeper exploration. This strategy can also facilitate drawing and second language exploration.

The Sticky Notes Bookmark strategy engages student in the reading actively as they must identify four different aspects of the text being read. They must identify an interesting part of the book (!), a part of the book that has a vocabulary word that they would like to discuss deeper (V), a part that is confusing (?), and lastly a part that identifies an illustration, map or graph to help the reader understand the text (graph). Students using this strategy read with preconceived questions and markers to identify.

Structural analysis is a strategy that can be used to facilitate decoding as students become more proficient readers. The decoding strategies in structural analysis aid students in learning parts of words (prefixes, suffixes) so they can more easily decode unknown multi-syllabic words.

Text Structures such as sequence/order, compare-contrast, and cause-effect can be crucial to comprehending a passage, and graphic organizers help students to identify these text structures visually and structurally. This allows the student to understand what the author is saying by identifying how the author is saying it.

Text-Based Questions are questions that must be answered only by reading through a text. They are designed to engage the students after a reading and encourages higher level thinking from literal comprehension to critical thinking or inferential comprehension.