Bringing Back Old Strategies

“Let’s Get Higher Scores on These New Assessments” by Timothy Shanahan in The Reading Teacher, March 2015 (Vol. 68, #6, p. 459-463), available for purchase at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1329/pdf

Timothy Shanahan in The Reading Teacher identifies three things that we need to teach well in order to prepare students for standardized assessments:

Strategies for figuring out unknown words
Making sense of sentences
Silent reading for understanding

There are old strategies connected to these that have been out of fashion but with the intense demand for higher order thinking skills with Common Core, perhaps it's time to dust off those techniques that I used to use for preparing my AP language students: study of latin root words (etymology) - MUGS (mechanics, usage and grammar) bell ringers and time for reading for understanding and critique.

What needs to be let go in order to allow this? What can never be forgotten?

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