To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension » (1st Edition)

Ellin Oliver Keene is the author of To Understand (2008) and coauthor of Mosaic of Thought, Second Edition (2007), both published by Heinemann. She has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, and adjunct professor of reading and writing. For sixteen years she directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition. She served as Deputy Director of the Cornerstone Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania for 4 years, where she oversaw literacy and professional learning for teachers in high-poverty schools throughout the nation. She lives with her husband, David, and daughter, Elizabeth, in Denver and works with schools and districts around the country. Ellin Oliver Keene is a Heinemann Professional Development provider. She now provides long-term professional development residencies in partnership with Heinemann Professional Development. Click for an overview of the Keene Residency or to learn more about Heinemann residencies as a long-term literacy action plan.

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"This is a work of incredible scope: adventurous, ingratiating, challenging, genuinely groundbreaking, and gorgeously written. It will knock the socks off this profession."

-Harvey Daniels

Author of Subjects Matter and Content-Area Writing

The renaissance in comprehension instruction launched by Mosaic of Thought has led to changes in hundreds of thousands of classrooms, where teachers now model reading strategies, and students probe meaning more deeply. But no book in the field has satisfactorily answered the question: What does it really mean to comprehend? In To Understand, Ellin Oliver Keene not only explores this important question, but reveals what teachers can do to encourage all students to engage in deep understanding far more consistently than before.

In discovering what's really behind comprehension, To Understand goes well beyond comprehension strategy instruction. Keene identifies specific Dimensions and Outcomes of Understanding-characteristics identified in readers with a highly developed ability to make sense of text-to help you rethink what comprehension is. She demonstrates how to leverage the Dimensions and Outcomes into relevant, provocative, memorable instruction.

To Understand proposes a model that incorporates all aspects of literacy instruction-word learning and comprehension-and describes how teachers can focus on what matters most in literacy content. Keene shows that when teachers target the most essential content, they have the time to help every student engage more deeply with texts and discover a passion for reading and learning. The model is founded on four simple, but powerful concepts:

• Focus on what's important by teaching vital concepts in depth rather than skimming over nonessential skills
• Use research-based teaching and learning strategies, including proven-effective comprehension and language-based strategies, then taking them further by showing students how the strategies lead them to a fuller understand of a text
• Teach the essential concepts over a long period of time so that children have an opportunity to learn not only a comprehension strategy, but to explore where that strategy leads in their understanding
• Give students numerous opportunities to apply the concepts in a variety of texts and contexts.

With To Understand in hand, you'll find new ways to draw out the innate intellectual interest in every student and spark dramatic improvements in literacy learning and comprehension, even among students who struggle. You'll see that by rethinking what it means to understand-by teaching children the Outcomes and Dimensions of understanding-you can help students exceed expectations while broadening your vision of their abilities, their capacity, and their energy for learning.

There's still more-much more-to learn about comprehension. Read To Understand, join Ellin Oliver Keene, and discover that what's at the very core of comprehension can not only reinvigorate your teaching but take your students to new, uncharted levels of learning.

Foreword     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Prelude     xv
Rethinking Understanding     1
Seeking Understanding in Our Minds, in Our Lives     20
Driven to Understand     41
Dwelling in Ideas     71
To Savor the Struggle     99
A Renaissance of Understanding     131
Nothing as Certain as Change     160
The Great Conversations     195
To Feel, to Remember, to Understand     226
Comprehension Strategies Defined     246
What's Essential? Literacy Content K-12     253
Conditions for Success in Reader's and Writer's Workshops     259
Conference Record     261
Beyond Reporting on the Book: How Children Can Record Their Thinking About Books     263
Thinking Strategies Proficient Learners Use     265
Tactics for Teaching Comprehension: Effective Strategies for Teaching Deep Structure Systems     274
Best Practices in Oral Language Teaching and Learning     277
Bibliography     288
Index     292