Embracing Literacy 2024

Session Objectives: 1) Participants will be able to provide explicit note-taking instruction and facilitate oral practice strategies to help students comprehend grade-level materials. 2) Participants will be able to articulate one way they can incorporate these strategies into reading and writing instruction. 3) Participants will explain why the combination of note-taking and oral practice may be more beneficial for students than one of these strategies alone.
Detailed Description: This presentation will explain a note-taking and oral practice strategy intervention, Sketch and Speak, that has preliminary evidence of effectiveness to improve comprehension of informational texts for students who have language-related learning disabilities in later grades (i.e., grades 4-9). Studies of this intervention have been conducted with speech-language pathologists as the interventionists, primarily in 1-1 settings, though clinically this has been used with small groups of students with positive results. The goal of this session is to provide educators with an alternate strategy intervention for their toolbelt that could be useful for students who are adverse to writing notes in traditional forms. The note-taking strategies include pictography and bulleted note forms to decrease some demands of academic writing for struggling students. The addition of oral generation and practice of complete sentences to note-taking in this intervention also helps students who have difficulty with language to remember important information, including key vocabulary words, main ideas, and supporting details. By the end of this session, attendees will be able to explain the importance of this strategy combination in improving comprehension, implement the strategies on a variety of expository text types after hands-on practice, and apply this strategy intervention across the curriculum.

Reflection Questions: 1) What are the potential benefits of using pictography as a note-taking tool? 2) Why do you think teaching note-taking is hard and how could you enhance your practice with strategies you learned in this session? 3) What is one way you could use note-taking and oral practice together to improve comprehension of material?