Today's Meeting

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Our three team members met today. We carried out these activities:

First, we went online to set up our IPDPs. We chose items that related to our PLC Group Study, "Best Practices."

Secondly, we searched the web for information that indicated the research basis of the Think Aloud program.We found several well done sites that prescribed the use of this method and showed positive outcomes. We made preparations to examine our own Think Aloud results with Poe's "The Black Cat."

Finally, we agreed to investigate other "Best Practices" including Criss Strategies and a technique that uses physical exercise to prepare to read.

Think Aloud

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Our group has decided to begin our study of various successful reading strategies with "Think Aloud". an umbrella method for many specific skills. This method has a history of success.

"As the title implies, a think aloud is a great strategy to use to slow down the reading process and let students get a good look at how skilled readers construct meaning from a text. Many of us developed our skills as readers implicitly, by simply doing a lot of reading of all sorts of texts; after all, reading is a passion for us. Therefore, when we teach reading at the secondary level, we need to keep in mind that we must take what we know and do implicitly and make it explicit for our students, especially for our struggling readers."

Mr.Corwin and Ms.Alcantara have recently had some good results using Think Aloud activities with Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat". Mr. Hudson will will be teaching this story next week to his Junior Class (with some extra emphasis on Poe's difficult vocabulary).

Opening Post

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This posting is meant to present our account of our PLC group's investigation of successful reading strategies. As suggested by Ms. Dyer, we will call all our examinations "Best Practices." I suppose we may try some tasks that don't supply good results, so I don't think everything we try will actually earn the title "Best Practices", but that's how we'll learn.

Our group is Ms. Alcantara, Mr. Corwin, and Mr. Hudson. Our first efforts will employ several strategies applied with Thinking Aloud techniques.