Improving Student Learning Capacity: One Way To Retain & Advance More At-Risk Students

Featuring Learning Facilitators

Carolyn J. Carter, Ed. D.
Eastern Michigan University

Raahul Reddy, M. Ed.
Washtenaw/Oakland Community Colleges

Intelligent novices are learners able to control and monitor their thought processes and as such, they have expanded capability to learn. They are more aware of the difference between understanding and memorizing material, have knowledge of which mental strategies to use in different learning situations, and recognize which parts of a text were difficult to read and which dictated where to start reading and how much time they should allot to reading. They are in a word, learners with highly developed meta-cognition, a necessary, but oftenmissing, ingredient learners need for reading and learning competence. In this session, the importance of developing students' meta-cognitive abilities is underscored and a meta-cognitive reading and learning improvement strategy, Reciprocal Teaching, is described and reviewed with participants. Reciprocal Teaching provides an integrated approach to student learning that is group oriented and based on cognitive science research.

Skills/Strategies Taught

• Text Features Development: Paragraph Structures & Skills: elements, purposes, audience, purpose, rhetoric, unity, & cohesion
• Reciprocal Teaching: Comprehension fostering and comprehension monitoring cooperative learning activity that engages all language arts skills in act of learning and that improves reading performance of poor comprehenders

Critical Understandings That Are Enhanced

• English Language Arts Skills and Role of All Teachers & Role of English Teacher
• How to launch and sustain a Reciprocal Teaching Dialogue
• How to advance student learning via their enhanced understanding
  of text features

For More Information
Contact:

Carter, Reddy & Associates
866-903-READ(7323), 248-233-6370