Learning to Predict and Predicting to Learn: Cognitive Strategies and Instructional Routines

Featuring practical instructional routines that are clearly linked to cognitive strategies students need to make sense of text, this book combines a rationale written from the perspective of current research that supports the use of the strategy or instructional routine with clear step-by-step directions and multiple examples from the classroom experiences of teachers across the United States.  These experiences appear as boxed features that are easily identifiable by the reader.  The text is written in such a way that readers may start on page one and work through the end of the book or use the book as a reference for their own practice or as an inservice tool.  Each cognitive strategy is linked via convenient matrices to the instructional routines that promote precision thinking on the part of students.

Features:

• Differentiation between cognitive strategies for students and instructional routines teachers might use.
  • Provides teachers and preservice teachers with a means to think about the tools they use to promote cognitive proficiency on the part of students.  Often, strategies are used a catch-all term that does not clarify the difference between what teachers do and how students incorporate learn from those routines.
• Boxed features: Real teachers’ explain how they have used the tools discussed in the book.
  • Provides teachers with examples to which they may be able to relate.  Instead of an isolated example, the voices of classroom teachers will explain how they have implemented instructional routines or promoted cognitive strategies for their students.
• Sound rationale coupled with step-by-step procedures.
  • Teachers often like to know what works, but many texts ignore their need and desire to know why a strategy or routine works.  This text links rationale with tools so that readers will be able to explain why they are using a routine or assisting students to use cognitive tools to understand how they might think more precisely about the books they read.
• Theme: Prediction.
  • Prediction is a popular request teachers make of their students, but often teachers lack sufficient experience or rationale to know how students might use prediction to increase precision in thinking about books and other texts they read.
• Approach: Combination of both theoretical and research with useful tools students and teachers can implement tomorrow.
  • Many books take either a theoretical approach with little classroom application provided or a practical approach that does not help teachers understand why a given tool is useful and under what circumstances.  This book combines the best of both approaches to help teacher-readers understand why a strategy or routine is worth the instructional time that might be devoted to it.   

Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at San Diego State University and the Director of Professional Development for the City Heights Educational Collaborative. He is the recipient of an International Reading Association Celebrate Literacy Award as well as a Christa McAuliffe award for excellence in teacher education. He has published numerous articles on reading and literacy, differentiated instruction, and curriculum design as well as books, such as Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work and Responsive Curriculum Design in Secondary Schools: Meeting the Diverse Needs of Students. He has taught a variety of courses in SDSU¹s teacher-credentialing program as well as graduate-level courses on English language development and literacy. He has also taught classes in English, writing, and literacy development to secondary school students.