Rethinking Strategy Instruction: Four Teachers' Development and Their Low Achievers' Understandings

Abstract

This article uses observations of 4 second- and third-grade teachers who had volunteered to participate in a 5-year staff development program designed to help teachers develop strategic readers to illustrate the difficulty teachers have (1) focusing low achievers on the process of being strategic rather than on the labels for various strategies, (2) helping low achievers understand the mental processing involved in being strategic, and (3) using authentic literacy tasks to teach strategy instruction. The guiding question was why instruction designed to produce strategic readers resulted in low achievers' post-lesson interview responses that were inconsistent with the Pressley, Goodchild, Fleet, Zajchowski, and Evans concept of a "global good strategy user." The 4 teachers' strategy lessons were studied during 1 year, and, following each observed lesson, the lowest achievers in each classroom were interviewed to determine their understanding of what they were supposed to learn. The lesson observations and 19 students' interview responses suggest a need to reexamine assumptions about the nature of strategy instruction and about how to prepare teachers to engage in such instruction.