What do you know are the most important barriers to ...?

Discussion Question: What do you know are the most important barriers to achieving high standards for comprehension for all students?

Table Comments:

• How do we build teachers’ capacity to remove barriers for our students; possible solution: coaches
• Shifts in the mindset of leadership; assistive technology needs to be a priority; schools aren’t using the technology; teachers haven’t been trained to use this technology; needs to come from shifts in the leadership; provide infrastructure to implement this
• Getting students to explain their thinking – what they’re doing and why they’re doing it; getting teachers to model this type of work, i.e., making their thinking transparent; leaders must explain to their teachers why they should be doing this
• Fluency in math is a barrier; we concentrate on vocabulary development, etc. then we think they’ll naturally becoming fluent – not so; have to bridge transfer from acquiring info and skills to actually using them and applying them; we concentrate only on knowledge and how students are going to access text and assume that their strategic networks are going to naturally develop – have to address this misconception
• We are exposing our students to more informational text which is extremely dense; use digitized text with kids who need it; this doesn’t mean that every child has to have a laptop and digitized text in front of her; we must be more strategic about who we target with iPads, laptops, etc.; we must get to know are students well – who needs ELL support, for example?
• It’s not enough to know the resources; we have to be strategic about using them