Sabrina Fair - Post #3 Routman Chapter 9: Emphasize Shared Reading

I agree with Routman’s assessment that shared reading is an important part of balanced literacy that is missing in many classrooms.   Shared reading is often overlooked, and unfortunately many students miss the opportunity to have fluency and strategic reading modeled for them.  At my former school, we had extensive professional development related to shared reading and those learning experiences helped me develop shared reading as a central component of literacy in my classroom.  

From my own teaching experiences, I know that shared reading benefits all readers.  Even our highest level readers need help applying comprehension strategies as they navigate more challenging text.  For example, inferencing can be a difficult concept for many students.   But through shared reading, teachers can model their thinking as they apply the strategy while they read.  This helps students understand the thinking that goes behind the application of the skill.

Many of my shared reading lessons have involved monitoring comprehension and applying fix-up strategies to get readers back on track when comprehension breaks down.  When I first began teaching, one of the things that I quickly learned about my students is that many of them had no idea that they were not comprehending text.  And, the times when students did acknowledge that there was a break down in comprehension, they had no idea of what to do to better understand the text.   I taught mini-lessons to explicitly teach appropriate strategies.  Through shared reading experiences I was able to model how I monitored my own comprehension as well as modeling strategies to “repair” my comprehension. Shared reading has given me many opportunities to make reading strategies more visible and concrete to my students.