Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a research-based instructional practice in teaching reading comprehension to students to enhance content area learning. CSR teaches students reading comprehension while working in small cooperative groups. It is mostly used with expository text, but can also be used with narrative text. CSR consists of four reading comprehension strategies that are applied before, during, and after reading. CSR strategies are: (1) preview the text, (2) click and clunk, (3) get the gist, and (4) wrap up. In this article, I will describe the CSR instructional approaches: reading comprehension strategies and cooperative learning groups.
Before reading:
Preview the text
Students preview the whole passage before reading its sections. Previewing the text activates prior knowledge, stimulates students’ interest about the topic, and facilitates making predictions. During this step, students look at headings, key words, pictures, and charts in a short period of time. The teacher asks students some questions to engage them in a classroom discussion about what they learned from the previews. Also, the teacher encourages students to predict what they think they will learn from reading.
During reading:
Click and clunk (I get it - I do not get it)
Students monitor their understanding and decide if they really understand what they read or not during reading. When students read a passage with understanding, they proceed smoothly through the text. When students find a word, concept, or idea hard to understand, it is a clunk. Clunks break down reading comprehension and make it hard to understand the whole text. In this case, students need to identify the clunks then figure them out using fix- up strategies, written on clunk cards, to understand the text.
Fix-up strategies may include but are not limited to:
Students learn to identify the most important idea(s) in the text during reading. This strategy teaches students to use their own words to explain the main ideas of every paragraph or two using a few words to check for understanding.
After reading:
After reading, students identify the most important ideas from the entire section they have read. They generate questions and answers about the information in the text. Encourage students to create high order thinking questions and write down the most important information in the text.
CSR learning logs
Students track their understanding during the CSR process by using learning logs. Students complete learning logs before, during, and after reading. CSR learning logs used as a reference for follow-up activities, a study guide, and for evaluation.