Doug is the Director for Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis (OEDS) of CompSustNet. Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher agreed to answer a few questions about the new book they co-authored with John Hattie, "Visible Learning for Literacy, … This passage will be particularly helpful as you begin to bring close reading into your classroom, because Dr. Fisher provides tangible and clear strategies, such as discussing the text with peers, annotating or taking notes during reading, and selecting short passages for students to practice and apply these strategies.This portion of the paper is a complex one, but extremely useful once you begin to understand what Dr. Fisher is explaining. Work with them on topics like academic vocabulary, close reading, gradual release of responsibility, and other practices that directly increase teacher effectiveness in the classroom. He works to create classrooms and schools that ensure all students develop literacy and critical-thinking skills as they prepare for careers.Dr. Work with them to unpack standards and align instruction and assessment practices to the Common Core standards across content areas.He earned a bachelor’s degree in communication, a master’s degree in public health education, an executive master’s degree in business, and a doctoral degree in multicultural education. Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University and a leader at Health Sciences High & Middle College.
See his experience at NSF summarized at: http://www.cccblog.org/2011/08/24/first-person-life-as-a-nsf-program-director/ . Doug has also worked in the online learning space, and was the founding Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning. Journal of Developmental Education, 27(2), 36–37, 39.In the paper, you’ll find a deeper dive into the types of valuable information students can glean from determining the author’s purpose, and a specific framework for guiding elementary school students through this determination process.Next, Dr. Fisher explores the complexities of developing schema during reading. Douglas Fisher, PhD, is professor of educational leadership at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College in California. Harnessing the insights and experience of renowned educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie, The Distance Learning Playbook applies the wisdom and evidence of VISIBLE LEARNING® research to understand what works best with distance learning. Dr. Fisher explains that while some of the cognitive exercises required to engage in such an analysis might seem complex for early learners, students are actually quite capable, and, according to research, determining the author’s purpose is a key element of reading comprehension (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002).In the final section of the paper, Dr. Fisher delves into key clarifications around the nuances of close reading for elementary students. His research has spanned unsupervised and supervised machine learning for prediction and problem solving, cognitive modeling, and more recently computational creativity. Nonfiction texts frequently contain unfamiliar vocabulary and assume a schema is already in place to understand complex topics.In the paper, Dr. Fisher contextualizes this concept to the practical experiences of students in this age group, discusses the research around motivation and purpose for reading, and outlines practices teachers can use to help students identify a purpose for reading.The first step in the close reading process for elementary school students, according to Dr. Fisher, is to identify their own purpose for reading. He teaches courses on instructional improvement, lesson design and delivery, policy, research, and literacy. For example, a science text will function very differently than a fictional narrative story. Nonfiction texts frequently contain unfamiliar vocabulary and assume a schema is already in place to understand complex topics.In the paper, Dr. Fisher contextualizes this concept to the practical experiences of students in this age group, discusses the research around motivation and purpose for reading, and outlines practices teachers can use to help students identify a purpose for reading.The first step in the close reading process for elementary school students, according to Dr. Fisher, is to identify their own purpose for reading. If a student’s schema (or structure of knowledge about a topic) has gaps, then we know that the student will have to work harder to comprehend what he or she reads (Kinstch & van Dijk, 1978).In the paper, you’ll also get an understanding of how to structure direct instruction in the practices of close reading so that it becomes more automatic for elementary students as they begin to monitor their own understanding of readings.
As a classroom teacher, Dr. Fisher focuses on English language arts instruction.