I. Struggling Readers 1. Searching for Answers to the Why and How of Struggling Readers 2. Introduction to Benchmark's Interactive Learning Model and Person Variables 3. Exploring the Strengths and Challenges of Struggling Readers: Personality, Temperament, Emotion, Motivation, and Volition 4. Exploring the Strengths and Challenges of Struggling Readers: Intelligence, Physical Development, and Health II. Context and Theories of Learning 5. The Context for Learning: Teacher Knowledge, Classroom Culture, and Instruction 6. The Context for Learning: Sociocultural, Task, and Text Variables 7. Learning Principles about the Interaction of Variables, Explicit Instruction, and Social Activity 8. Learning Principles That Guide Instruction: Developmental, Motivational, and Accountability Issues 9. Learning Principles to Share with Students III. Classroom Implementation 10. Strategies for Reading Words: Teaching Phonemic Awareness, Decoding, and Fluency 11. Activities That Reinforce Word Detective Practices 12. Comprehension Strategies 13. Explicit Explanations of Comprehension Strategies for Grades 1-8 14. Rationale for Teaching Concepts, Essential Understandings, and Knowledge Structures Afterword: Five Major Insights from 45 Years of Teaching Struggling Readers
From the founder of the internationally known Benchmark School, this unique book presents a proven approach for helping struggling students become fully engaged readers, learners, thinkers, and problem solvers. Benchmark's research-based Interactive Learning Model is clearly explained and illustrated with teacher-friendly, step-by-step examples. Gaskins demonstrates ways to teach effective strategies for decoding words and understanding concepts, and gives students the skills to apply these strategies across the curriculum, based on their own learning styles and the specific demands of the task at hand. Comprehensive yet highly readable, this book includes quick-reference charts and reproducible figures and activities that can be used in all subject areas from kindergarten to grade 12.