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Strategy Instruction And Lessons Learned In Teaching Higher Level Thinking Skills In An Urban Middle School Classroom, Karen C. Waters

Education Faculty Publications

Through a compilation of standards-based lesson plans for small- and whole-group instruction, this chapter offers a humorous and heartbreaking perspective of the author's experiences during a yearlong university partnership “Book Bistro” in a 7th grade classroom with urban adolescent struggling readers. Using a combination of leveled, fictional, nonfictional, and culturally relevant text, the chapter is written as a personal narrative to address higher level thinking through systematic instruction in comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and structural analysis. A step-by-step implementation procedure for each of the research-based strategies is presented, including concept of definition, discussion web, probable passage, pointed reading, semantic feature analysis, …