In the article, collaborative reading is described as a highly efficient strategy that contributes to the students’ deep understanding of texts and their ability to decode difficult materials. This approach was initiated by Alexa Sorden, a former literacy coach and the school’s founding principal (Minero, 2019).
It implies the combination of shared and close reading – students read texts together under the supervision of a teacher and work in small groups or independently to prepare the texts’ critical analyses. In general, all-grades students spend 15-20 minutes daily deconstructing above-grade-level texts (Minero, 2019). Due to this practice, they subsequently develop an individual portable methodology for deep reading comprehension.
The strategy divides the process of reading into five main phases: the main idea’s understanding, text annotation, the identification of details and key ideas, the author’s craft dissection, and summarizing (Minero, 2019). For collaborative reading, informational texts and fiction passages are chosen beforehand by teacher teams.
Students receive handouts with texts, vocabulary, and questions for critical thinking at the beginning of every week. Every class has a chosen student facilitator with excellent reading skills who aims to provide support to his or her peers. In the classroom, texts are primarily read aloud by a teacher with a particular focus on elocution and intonation.
Students subsequently discuss unknown words and texts’ main ideas in the group. Students learn to annotate texts and highlight essential details and textual evidence that may support the text’s main idea. They deconstruct texts in order to identify the authors’ intentions for writing, summarize key findings, and draw conclusions. All process involves collective reading, the discussion of critical-thinking questions, and individual tasks that are later shared and discussed by all students.
Reference
Minero, E. (2019). Driving deep reading comprehension in K–5. Edutopia. Web.