Read Aloud Explorations

Our discussion in class today led us to the topic of reading aloud and the benefits of doing so even with older children and adolescents. In my experience teaching in high school we did not have enough books and were forced to do all reading aloud as a class. I worked with Freshman and Seniors and felt frustrated by this, mostly because I was worried that they were not active participants in the reading, and rather just listening to my presentation. I was worried that I would give too much away with my readings (admittedly, I took advantage of the opportunity to perform a bit). Would they be missing out on important interpretive reading skills by just hearing my version of dialogue, or my interpretation of how the text should be read?

However, Beers (2003) answered a lot of my questions by explaining that when combined with silent reading, reading aloud can be quite beneficial. She further states "if students need to read a text that is far above their instructional level, hearing the story aloud, either from the teacher or on tape, will provide a way to improve reading skills and give them access to content" (p.199).
As I have thought about reading aloud more I can see that there are a lot of useful strategies I can use with reading aloud. One strategy could be planning out points during the read aloud in which I want to stop and think about what we've read. This could function to break up the reading as well as model good strategies for reading comprehension. During these breaks in the reading students could do a variety of things, such as; write about a connection they have to the text, write about a question they have, they could turn to a partner and make a prediction about the text, they could draw a picture of the scene depicted thus far, etc.

I wonder how this strategy looks over time, and how I could transition my students from read aloud activities to independent reading, or if that is possible to accomplish in one period a day over a year. It seems that this would be most effective if teachers within a grade-level were all on board with this strategy and incorporated varying levels of reading aloud in their classrooms as well.