Maximizing Your Impact:Classroom Collaboration for Teaching Information Literacy and reading Comprehension Skills

I attended a program given by Judi Moreillon, author of Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension: Maximizing Your Impact, and Debra LaPlante Teacher Librarian.

The basic premise of the program was two fold, integrating reading comprehension skill building into the library, and building collaborative relationships with teachers. The first part of the program focused on building students' comprehension skills. Activiating and building Background Knowledge, Visualizing,Questioning, Making Predictions and Inferences, Determining the Main Idea, Using fix up options, and sythesizing. As a group activity we matched the comprehension strategies with the new AASL standards. Most of the material can be found in Judi's book.

The second part of the program showed various types of teaching collaborations. One book Judi models her practice on is Marzanno's Class Instruction that Works. In one example of team teaching, the librarian and teacher brought a class in to the library and the teacher read a story to the students while the librarian modeled questioning aloud, something they wanted the students to learn to do.

This program was valuable,and having the resources available for the future will certainly help.