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cooperative learning

4 Reading Comprehension Strategies of CSR: Preview, Click & Clunk, Get the Gist, and Wrap up. Adaptable for any grade level.

The Four Reading Comprehension Strategies of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)

by Emily Horn November 2, 2023

written by Emily Horn

What is CSR?

CSR is a cooperative learning approach that can be used in any grade level and with students of varied reading levels and abilities. It’s meant to primarily boost reading comprehension when it comes to expository and nonfiction texts, like for science and social studies. However, it can be used for narrative texts as well. CSR is an evidence-based approach where students work through the text together in small groups using four reading comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading:

Preview (before reading)
Click and Clunk (during reading)
Get the Gist (during reading)
Wrap It Up (after reading)

Explanations of 4 Reading Strategies of CSR from IRIS Center — Screenshot by the author: The Iris Center, **Overview of the CSR Reading Strategies**

Getting Started with CSR

It’s important to note that before students begin using the CSR process in a group, they will need to learn and practice the four strategies on their own. Using a Gradual Release of Responsibility approach, you can introduce each reading comprehension strategy in a separate mini-lesson, modeling it for the class. Then, students can practice the strategy with a partner or in a small group. Once they’ve got the strategy with guided support, they can begin to practice it on their own until they are ready to use the strategy cooperatively.

Materials Needed for CSR:

Learning Log: A graphic organizer where students make notes throughout the process.
Cue Cards: Prompts for the different roles in the groups to use.
Clunk Cards: Four “fix-up” strategies for students to use if they reach a roadblock.
Timer (optional)

Here are some great free CSR materials, complete with cue cards, clunk cards, and a learning log, available for download from IRIS Center at Vanderbilt University. Also, they provide role cards with explanations for each student’s role in the group.

IRIS Center Leader Cue Card for CSR tasks — Screenshot by the author: Example Leader Cue Cards from IRIS Center’s Free **Materials for CSR**

Student Roles:

Each group member is given a specific role, so all students in the group are responsible for a task. Potential student roles (depending on group sizes) are:

Leader
Gist Expert
Announcer
Timekeeper
Clunk Expert
Encourager
Reporter

Let’s take a more in-depth look at the four reading comprehension strategies that make up this approach!

The Four Reading Comprehension Strategies

1. Preview

Example Preview section of the CSR Learning Log created by the author (provided at the end of the article).

During the text preview, students work together for a short period to look at important text features like headings, subheadings, bolded words, charts, graphs, images, etc. The purpose of the preview is to activate students’ prior knowledge and get them to ask questions, make predictions, and boost their curiosity on the topic. During this time, the teacher can walk around and ask each group about their observations, predictions, and questions regarding the text. Helpful prompts for students (that can be included in a learning log graphic organizer) might be:

What knowledge do you already have on this topic?
What do you expect or hope to learn?
What questions do you have on this topic?

IRIS Center suggests giving students 12 minutes for this reading comprehension strategy. Once they’ve shared with the group and completed the “Preview” section of the learning log, it’s time to share with the class.

2. Click and Clunk

CSR Clunks & Gists Strategy - Learning Log — Example Clunks and Gists section of the CSR Learning Log created by the author (provided at the end of the article).

During this part of CSR, students begin reading a section of the text and monitoring their comprehension. This means students are using metacognition (thinking about thinking) to check their understanding as they move through the text. “Clicks” are parts of the text that the readers understand. “Clunks” are aspects of the text that readers find to be roadblocks to understanding, like unknown words or concepts.

Monitoring comprehension builds confidence and independence when it comes to reading. Working on this in a group can push students who may not usually stop to explore “clunks” to do so, resulting in increased reading comprehension. After reading a pre-determined section (a paragraph, a few paragraphs, or a page, for example), the students go over clicks and clunks. After identifying the “clunks”, the Clunk Expert can guide the group in the following reading comprehension strategies:

Reread the sentence with the clunk and look for key ideas to help you figure out the word. Think about what makes sense.

Reread the sentences before and after the clunk, looking for clues.

Look for a prefix, root word, or suffix that might help.

Break the word apart and look for smaller words that you know.

“Toward a Humanistic Instruction: Collaborative Strategic Reading Approach and EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension”

3. Get the Gist

After previewing the text, identifying clicks and clunks, and working through clunks, students begin to identify the main ideas of the predetermined sections of text together to demonstrate reading comprehension. This is a summarizing activity that gets students to restate what they read in their own words (IRIS Center suggests 10 or fewer words) without getting too detailed. CALIReads suggests students follow three steps:

Name the who or the what.
Tell the most important thing about the who or the what.
Say it in about 10 words.

Get the Gist is a great retelling reading comprehension strategy that allows students to recall important information from the text and summarize it, which solidifies their learning.

4. Wrap Up

Example Wrap Up section of the CSR Learning Log created by the author (provided at the end of the article).

In this final step, students work with their group to come up with questions and correlating answers about the reading. They can think about “who, what, where, when, why, and how,” and they can speculate as to what questions a teacher might ask about the text. If needed, question stems can help prompt students to form deeper questions. After noting questions in their learning logs, they share them with their group and answer the questions together, writing down and reviewing what they learned.

CSR Learning Log Editable Template — Created by the author: Access the **editable template**.

This cooperative learning approach to content-based reading can boost comprehension of everything from textbook chapters to nonfiction articles and more. Can you picture using CSR in your classroom? If you introduce these strategies to your students, let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear about your results.

November 2, 2023 0 comment

Good Teaching

The Power of the Jigsaw

by Lori Gracey September 4, 2019

written by Lori Gracey

As educators, we are always looking for the best ways to help our students learn. Whether it’s a different instructional strategy or a new tech tool, we want to know that what we are spending our time on is worthwhile and will accelerate learning and retention. If you’ve been following TCEA for the past year, you’ll know that we have embraced the work of John Hattie to help us determine what truly works in education. In this blog, we’ll look at one of the most powerful (and easy to implement) strategies that his research shows we should be using: the jigsaw method.

Why the Jigsaw Method Matters

Hattie’s research is based on 25 years of work and more than 1,500 meta-analyses of 90,000 studies involving more than 300 million students. That’s true validity. He examined all of the instructional practices that we use in education and rank ordered them based on their effect size. “Hattie found that the average effect size of all the interventions he studied was 0.40.” (Source)

So we know that an effect size of 0.4 means an average year of growth/learning for a student. The jigsaw method, however, has an effect size of 1.20, which means that if it’s done correctly and regularly, students will grow three years in the space of that one year. That’s powerful!

The method also has other benefits, including (source):

Direct engagement by the students with the material to be learned instead of having material presented to them, which fosters depth of understanding
Practice in self-teaching, which is one of the most valuable skills we can help them learn
Practice in peer teaching, which requires them to understand the material at a deeper level than students typically do when simply asked to produce on an exam
Improvement in social-emotional learning, including increased feelings of autonomy, competence, and intrinsic motivation (Hänze & Berger, 2007)
Speaking the language of the discipline and thus becoming more fluent in the use of discipline-based terminology
Contributing to the group
Encouraging cooperation and active learning and promoting the valuing of all students’ contributions

How to Jigsaw

The jigsaw method is based on the idea that students learn best when they have to teach others. Before the process can begin, the teacher must first examine the content that the students are to learn and divide it up into manageable chunks. In an ideal situation, there would be four, five, or six sections of material that must be studied. The number of sections determines the size of the groups for the rest of the work as each student in a group takes responsibility for teaching one chunk to the rest of the group.

Divide students into groups. These will be the Home Groups. Groups should be diverse and set by the teacher, at least while students are learning the process. Jigsaw works best if there are the same number of students in each group.
Assign one chunk of content to each person in the Home Group. You can do this by having them count off or by drawing straws or even, once they’re familiar with the process, by letting the students pick the chunk they want to be responsible for.
Provide the content to the students (more on what that can look like later) and allow them time to individually and silently study it.
Have the students now move to meet with their Expert Groups. This is where all of the students with the same chunk of material gather together to better master the content. They compare their ideas about the content and then, as an Expert Group, prepare a visual aid to use when they return to their Home Groups to teach. The visual aid can be notes, a graphic organizer, a drawing, a presentation, or anything they want. But they all work on it together to ensure that critical information about the content is included and is clear.
Students now return to their original Home Groups where each student takes a turn presenting his/her chunk. The other students listen carefully and should take notes or use a graphic organizer to jot down ideas. Questions are encouraged.
To ensure that metacognition about the whole, and not just individual, expert learning, students meet one more time in their Expert Groups to discuss the whole content in light of their specific chunk of material.
Students are now individually assessed on all of the chunks to see if there are any gaps or misconceptions in the content learned. This can be for a grade or just for the teacher’s knowledge.

Adding Technology

Technology offers a powerful way to provide chunked content in this method. Here’s an example I use when I am teaching people how to do the jigsaw (by jigsawing, of course). I have four chunks of content for them to learn and so there are four people per group. In their Home Groups, each person draws an emoji from laminated examples I set out and each emoji then corresponds to one chunk of the material. (I don’t show them the corresponding emojis until after they’ve drawn their own.) All of the content is posted on a Google Site for them to access, including text, websites, and video clips. They can then work through their content as they need to. If I see that there is confusion about an idea, I can add clarifying content to the Site that they can access as we work.

You can also encourage students to use technology to create their Expert presentation/notes. Some Expert Groups might want to create a paper slide or a screencast or quick video, as well as the more common Google Drawing, PowerPoint, or graphic organizer. Allow them to choose how they will share their learning; it’s more powerful that way.

Other Jigsaw Tips

If you don’t have the right number of students to evenly divide the groups, you can assign two students in one group to the same chunk of content to be learned. This may also help when you have a weak or struggling student who could use a little help.

If you have a student who doesn’t seem to want to take ownership of his/her content, you can use the Jigsaw II method. It’s exactly the same as the Jigsaw I method listed above, but does add one step at the end regarding the assessment. In Jigsaw I, students are assessed individually and receive just one score. In Jigsaw II, they still receive an individual score. But they also receive a second score that is the average of the group’s score. This builds in competition between groups and individual group peer pressure to perform at their highest level.

There’s also a Jigsaw III with time given for the Home Groups to review each other before the assessment and a Jigsaw IV where the teacher begins the unit of study by introducing the material (but not teaching all of it!).

Interested in learning more about the jigsaw method and how it can accelerate student learning in your classroom? Join us for a free-to-members webinar on January 15, 2020 at 11:45 a.m.

The jigsaw method is one of the most powerful learning strategies you can use as a classroom teacher or professional development provider. I would recommend you try it once a week in your classroom. And please feel free to contact me with any questions about it or if you would like more information. Remember, with TCEA, you’ve got this!

September 4, 2019 0 comment

Good Teaching Professional Learning

Group Work Roles for Modern Learners

by Lori Gracey February 16, 2017

written by Lori Gracey

When I was teaching a thousand years ago, I remember attending a professional development workshop on using cooperative learning techniques with students. During the workshop, the presenter emphasized the need for assigning roles to each student so that he/she could contribute to the group work. There were only four or five job roles mentioned at the time, including things like leader, materials manager, time keeper, and note taker. I agreed with the concept of assigning group tasks, but my students didn’t seem too excited about them. It seemed like the materials manager, for example, often didn’t have much to do in the group other than at the beginning and end of class. And no one ever wanted to be the note taker — how boring!

Fast forward to today. As I work with educators doing group work in cooperative learning situations, I am still convinced of the benefit of each person having specific jobs to do that contribute to everyone’s learning and the success of the team. But I believe that the jobs themselves have changed based on the way we now work. So I would like to propose a new set of group work roles as follows. These will work with students as well as with adult learners. I’ve included a brief job description and possible problems that might crop up.

The Coordinator

Duties: The coordinator, formerly the leader role, is the person who manages the work (but not the workers!). He/She ensures that the goals to be accomplished are clear, delegates responsibility based on each person’s abilities and interests, and checks on everyone’s progress. This means that the coordinator must really know the members of the team, which may require doing some team building activities before starting to work.

Possible problems: If not careful, the coordinator may be perceived as bossy or lazy. So care must be taken that he/she does an equal part of the work and allows others the freedom to work as they wish as long as the goals are being met. It is important to remind the coordinator that he/she is not the boss, just someone who helps others do their very best.

The Divergent

Duties: The divergent is the group member charged with constantly thinking outside the box while looking for more effective ways to accomplish the goals. He/She must use creativity while brainstorming new solutions to the given problem, different ways of presenting the final product, and ideas for helping the team to work better together. All aspects of the group work are within his/her responsibility.

Possible problems: If not careful, the divergent can spend a lot of time in la-la land and not be grounded in the reality of what can and must be accomplished. Time can sometimes be his/her enemy, as can a lack of communication with the rest of the group. It is helpful if the coordinator checks in routinely with the divergent to see what he/she is currently working on.

Resource Specialist

Duties: Similar to the long-ago materials manager, the resource specialist’s job is to gather and curate all of the materials, whether physical or digital, that the group will need to accomplish the goals. This may include anything from getting markers and chart paper to doing research for the project. Once gathered, the materials must be collated and organized in a way that makes it easy for the rest of the team to find and use what they need. And the research process does not end until the completed product is turned in, which means that a good resource specialist is busy throughout the entire project, gathering data on each phase of the work from beginning inquiry to determining what form the final product might be in.

This is the only group role, by the way, that is encouraged to visit with other teams and see what they are doing. This is not so that others’ work can be copied, but so that all of the groups can learn from each other.

Possible Problems: This position may be perceived as a “boring” one by students. After all, who wants to spend all of their time doing research? By stressing the curation and organization of resources to ensure that all possibilities are covered and that the team members can easily find what they need when they need it, the teacher can ensure that the importance of this role is understood by everyone. The resource specialist must work with every member of the group, which can also sometimes lead to off-task behavior.

Tech Support

Duties: If the assignment has a technology component to it, then one member of the group should provide tech support as needed. While we may believe that all students are inherently gifted with technical knowledge, that is not really the case. The tech support person is there to help solve any problems that may come up with a device, an app, or a website. In addition, this position may also assume the recordkeeping duties by creating a Google Doc or other collaborative workspace that can be shared with the group. Having this role frees the teacher or workshop leader from having to stop facilitating and worry about “fixing” things.

Possible problems: Because this person is a techie, he/she will want very much to DO all of the technical work. But that is not the function of this position. Encourage him/her to take a “hands-off” approach to supporting the others in the group and letting them solve problems under his/her tutelage. Think “call support center” help instead of “me doing this for you” assistance.

The Finisher

Duties: The finisher has excellent attention to detail and is perfect at checking the final product. He/She ensures that the stated goals have been achieved and searches out errors, polishing and perfecting. This position does not mitigate the need for all other group members to check their own work, nor should its duties happen only at the end of the project. A good finisher is constantly checking in with the other members of the group to see if they need help.

Possible problems: Meticulous and detailed, the Finisher may be perceived as a nit-picker. So it’s important for this person to explain why changes need to be made.

Recommendations for Use

While students with certain talents may naturally fall into one particular role most readily, I do believe that it is important that roles be rotated throughout the year, allowing everyone to develop skills in each of these area. Whether this is done through a rotation schedule or by random drawing doesn’t matter as long as everyone knows that the jobs will change. This will require a certain delicacy on the teacher’s part in motivating those learners who are not comfortable with a particular role to be successful at it. And training in what the duties of each role look like is definitely required before the teams begin meeting. This training may even include role playing in how the coordinator, for example, can help to keep the divergent on track.

It may also be helpful to bring all of the individuals filling a particular role together at various times throughout the year so that they can share ideas on how they are working in that job and learn from each other. The teacher or workshop leader will need to scaffold these discussions with pre-determined questions for them to answer.

What do you think about these new group work roles? How do you assign roles for your students or adult learners?

February 16, 2017 1 comment