Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment at RNESU

The complex syntax of written language is often a stumbling block. Reprinted, with permission, from Natalie Wexler’s blog -  Minding the Gap!   When students can’t understand what they’re reading, it may be because they’re unfamiliar with the complex syntax of written sentences. Teaching them how to  write  complex sentences about what they’re learning can help. As reading researcher Timothy Shanahan  has pointed out , there’s lots of research on how students learn to decipher individual written words, and lots on how they comprehend whole texts—but comparatively little on “the seemingly unloved sentence.” And yet, difficulty understanding the sentence can be a major obstacle to comprehension. More recently, Shanahan  has zeroed in  on what research there is. It may be, as Shanahan says, that there’s been an explosion of research on sentences in the last couple of years, but some of the studies he cites go back to the 1980s. While the data isn’t defin...

Regardless of grade level or content specialty, educators rely on students’ ability to listen; we observe students who seem to do it consistently well, as well as students who don’t. But while we observe a range of listening comprehension behaviors, how do we explicitly teach the skills needed to develop these behaviors? How do we instructionally respond to the range of listening proficiency? Additionally, can improving students’ listening skills address the current knowledge gap crisis and alarming concerns about student engagement?  Enter the work of former award-winning educational reporter Monica Brady-Myerov, the Founder/CEO of the new website Listenwise , and author of  Listen Wise: Teach Students To Be Better Listeners (April 2021, Jossey-Bass, ISBN‎ 978-1119755494).  It was Brady-Myerov’s experiences of parenting a struggling reader that spurred her inquiry into listening and its role in the learner experience. Her website and well-researched text dig into key re...