Instructional Suggestions and Guidlines for Reading/Viewing/Listening

Children read/listen/watch literature for many reasons to dream, learn, laugh, enjoy the familiar, and explore the unknown. They are motivated for pleasure and engage the literature at their developmental level discovering ideas that match or challenge their present understandings and values. A balance between the familiar and unknown must create, sustain, or increase anticipation and expectations to motivate a reader/listener/viewer to continue their involvement.

There have been numerous studies done on students' interests with regards to their age. While a few of them suggest similar interests more suggest a wide diverse interest for most readers.

What this information suggests to me is; that the teacher's role to faciliate literacy is to first of all guide childrens' selection to different kinds of literature that matches their developmental level and abilities. Second, is to find a balance of support and challenge to sustain the child's motivation and cultivate literacy. By generously asking questions and cautiously providing suggestions students will construct literacy proportionally to their immersion in it. This will result in a class or discussion that invites students to share their opinions and different views about the story and support their thinking logically with evidence. Students need encouragement and others to model how to do this. The result being a serious discussion where students recognize each other as knowledgeable thinking people. Where disagreement is recognized as good and often times necessary to establish alternative perspectives and new ideas.

Guidelines for Questioning and Discussion to Achieve this

1. Confront ambiguities and uncertainties.
2. Heighten anticipation and expectation.
3. Heighten awareness for problems to be solved, difficulty to be faced, gap in information to be filled.
4. Build on existing information or skills.
5. Raise concern about a problem.
6. Stimulate curiosity and desire to know.
7. Make the familiar strange or strange familiar by analogy.
8. Beware of inhibiting actions.
9. Look at the same material from several different psychological or sociological viewpoints.
10. Ask provocative questions requiring the learner to examine information in different ways and in greater depth.
11. Make predictions, even from very limited information.
12. Provide only enough structure to give clues and direction.
13. Encourage thinking beyond what is known.
14. Provide warm-up (easy to difficult, familiar to unfamiliar, bodily involvement...).

Reading/Viewing/Listening Interactions

1. Raise the awareness of problems and difficulties as the activity progresses.
2. Encourage creative thinking about character's personality, characteristics, or predisposition.
3. Encourage inquiry and search for possible problems and solutions.
4. Encourage creative thinking.
5. Require deliberate and systematic exploration of a variety of literary elements.
6. Ask questions for students to question completeness of information when information is incomplete.
7. Encourage comparing and contrasting a varity of elements even ones that seem or prove to be irrelevant.
8. Explore and examine mysteries.
9. Maintain open-endedness.
10. Maintain story outcomes as not being completely predictable.
11. Require students to make predictions from limited information.
12. Encourage reading with imagination. Make it sound like the real thing happening. Develop the sounds, sights, smells...
13. Facilitate the search for honest and real understanding.
14. Encouraged the use of inquiry skills and have students or the teacher model the use if needed.
15. Encourage deferring judgments until enough data has been produced to make a judgment.
16. Heighten anticipation and use surprise.
17. Encourage visualization.

Post Reading/Viewing/Listening Interactions

1. Keep using ambiguities.
2. Use awareness of problem, difficulty, gap in information.
3. Beware and acknowledge pupils of their potentialities based on responses and encourage students to do the same for themselves.
4. Raise concern about problems.
5. Participate in a constructive response for the problem.
6. Provide continuity with previously learned skills, information, ...
7. Encourage constructive, rather than cynical, acceptance of limitations.
8. Dig more deeply, go beyond the obvious.
9. Make divergent thinking legitimate.
10. Encourage elaborating upon what is read.
11. Encourage elegant solutions.
12. Create an empathetic metaphor to give new feeling or facilitate understanding of object, person, or state.
13. Experiment.
14. Make the familiar strange or strange familiar by analogy.
15. Use fantasy to find solutions to realistic problems.
16. Encourage projection into the futures.
17. Go beyond the text.
18. Think about the impossible.
19. Make the irrelevant relevant.
20. Examine how the knowledge from one field relates to another.
21. Look at material from several different viewpoints.
22. Encourage manipulation of ideas, objects, information.
23. Encourage multiple hypotheses.
24. Try to let one thing lead to another
25. Examine paradoxes.
26. Encourage pushing a fundamental law to its limit.
27. Discuss possible causes and consequences.
28. Ask provocative questions.
29. Discover and test potentialities .
30. Reorganize information.
31. Returning to previously acquired skill and information to see new relationships.
32. Encourage self-initiated learning.
33. Practice inquiry.
34. Facilitate synthesis of different and apparently irrelevant elements.
35. Encourage systematic testing of hypotheses.
36. Facilitate thinking beyond what is known.
37. Provide for testing and revision of predictions.
38. Encourage transformation and rearrangement of materials.