TBE in Our Classroom

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We use a fabulous reading comprehension technique called TBE in our classroom. TBE stands for Text Based Evidence. A few months ago I noticed that quite a few of our students were very high in reading accuracy but unable to answer comprehension questions. Even when prompted, they found it difficult to search through the text and locate the clues. This then greatly impacted on their reading results.

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I have been following Jennifer Jones from Hello Literacy for a few years now. She is an amazing educator from America who truly has a passion for teaching. She develops literacy resources for schools that work. I contacted Jennifer via Twitter and asked for some advice on what I could do to lift these students. She recommended TBE to me. We started our trial in the classroom with two of my students and they worked with our beautiful teacher aide for about four weeks. The improvement in their results was amazing. Both students lifted two PROBE levels. TBE had given them the tools necessary to find the answers within the text.

After our trial, we ran a Skype session with Jennifer and staff from two local schools. This session really cemented the need for this program. Jennifer raised some very interesting points which we all could see happening in our classrooms. From there, TBE has now become a whole school approach. As you visit classrooms you can hear the same language used from years 1 to 7. Our students enjoy the challenge of the TBE graphs and it only took one session for them to understand the format.

TBE at Teachers Pay Teachers

Short Texts by Jennifer Jones that can be used with TBE – two volumes available

I also use texts from C2C and Reading A to Z books.