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Introduction to Summarize and Synthesize

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Introduction to Summarize and Synthesize

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Introduction To Summarizing And Synthesizing
What is the strategy of summarizing?
Why do we teach children to summarize?
How do we teach children to summarize?
What is the strategy of synthesizing?
Why do we teach children to synthesize?
How do we teach synthesizing?
Sample Lesson: Synthesize our Thinking in Fiction
Summarizing

What is the strategy of summarizing?

Summarizing is relating the most important points in a text (or a portion of a text) in our own words. In fiction we consider the basic story elements - main characters, setting, plot and sometimes theme in a summary. In nonfiction we pull together the most important information about a topic in a coherent way.

Why do we teach children to summarize?

Proficient readers summarize both during and after reading. During reading, we summarize to be sure we've "got it" before we continue. We may do this subconsciously in easy text, but when the text gets more complicated, we often need to step back and summarize to check our understanding. Where there are gaps, we know we have to use other strategies or other resources to address them.

After reading, we summarize for various authentic purposes. When we want to recommend a book to a friend, we summarize to explain what the book is about (without giving away the ending). When we do research on nonfiction topics, we summarize to capture what we want to remember from each source or portion of a source we use. Then we summarize what is important to learn from our work. And when we don't want to bore our teachers, friends and family with never-ending renditions of what we've read, seen, or done, we need to know how to summarize!

How do we teach children to summarize?

Teaching young children to summarize is challenging. Summarizing requires focusing on what is important, and as noted in the Determining Importance section, children often think everything is equally important. Because retelling is also important, and is often used to measure comprehension of young children's oral reading, children may get much more instruction and practice in retelling than in summarizing. On the other hand, we can ruin students' enjoyment of and motivation to read if we constantly require that they summarize after they finish.

We can, however, lay a strong foundation in the primary grades for summarizing. Most importantly is to embed our instruction in the authentic purposes for summarizing, both during and after reading, so summarizing isn't just an assignment, but helps children process their reading. We use the Gradual Release of Responsibility to provide support for them. We model how summarizing helps us to understand what we read, and we guide them to do the same.

Some instructional techniques for teaching summarizing in the primary grades are shown in the chart below.

During Reading
Model stopping at three places in the story to sum up what is important, using the traditional beginning, middle, and end graphic organizer. Students draw a picture to represent what is happening in each part of the story as it is read (aloud or independently). They can also add words or sentences as they are able.

Model noting what is important to remember by stopping at a few places in the text. Students stop and jot down on sticky notes what they think is most important in each part of a text as it is read (aloud or independently). Jigsaw pages of the text (by groups or individual children), with each group or child deciding what's important in their part of the text.

After Reading
Students assemble their pictures in the graphic organizer and share their summaries orally (or in writing).

Each group or child contributes what is important to add to the summary from their part of the text. (See photographs above from the Guided Reading module.)

Teach students to create book reviews, bulletin boards, blogs, or other ways to recommend books to others. They summarize in order to tell their readers what the book is about, and then synthesize to include their own evaluation or interpretation of the text.

Synthesizing What is the strategy of synthesizing?
The prefix "syn" means together. When we synthesize, we pull together the most important points from our reading, but we move beyond what's stated by the author. We focus on the insights that we gained from reading. We notice how our thinking changes as we read, so that when we finish, we can put our thinking and learning together in new ways. Debbie Miller says synthesizing is "the process through which readers bring together their background knowledge and their evolving understanding of the book to create a complete and original understanding of the text." (Reading with Meaning, p. 171).

We not only synthesize within a text, but across texts, especially when we are doing research or inquiry. We take what we learn from various sources and put it together in original ways.

Why do we teach children to synthesize?

We want our students to do more than parrot back what they've read. We want them to grow and change because of what they discover in texts. To do that, they need to synthesize. We have seen examples of children synthesizing throughout this Reading Comprehension module, even though they had not yet been formally introduced to the strategy:

* When first graders found answers to their questions about animals by combining information from more than one paragraph or page of text, they were synthesizing - taking ideas from different places and putting them together for their own purposes. (Ask Questions)
* When a second grader created a diagram of the stages of a volcano (see photo), she was synthesizing information she had learned throughout the text. (Build and Activate Schema)
* When her classmate came up with the analogy that the magma chamber is like the heart of the volcano, he synthesized how the chamber looked and what he knew about its function to create a new way to think about magma. (Build and Activate Schema)

Children who have been taught strategic thinking synthesize on their own initiative because they have internalized the most important part of comprehension: to combine their thinking with the content on the page in order to understand. They know the importance of their own thinking.

How do we teach children to synthesize?

In fiction, Debbie Miller recommends teaching children that synthesis is like the ripples made by throwing a stone in a pond. First there is the small circle, our initial thinking. As we read, our thinking expands, like the ripples that grow bigger. Our final thoughts are the big ideas that we reach by the end of our reading. (Reading with Meaning, p. 173). So as we read aloud to children, we model what we are thinking at the beginning, and how our thinking changes through the story. We use the language, "At first I thought...Then I read...Now I'm thinking..." The Sample Lesson for this section, "Synthesize Our Thinking in Fiction," is derived from Debbie Miller's approach.

In informational text, synthesis is often the culmination of research or inquiry. When we study a topic through multiple texts - books, articles, multimedia resources, and hands-on experiences - we want to synthesize what we've learned. As noted above, "syn" means "together," and these projects can be collaborative ones as well as individual. As children create murals, posters, or presentations to share their learning with authentic audiences, we teach them to express the big ideas about their topics in ways that are distinctly their own. For example, second graders in Ms. Whitman's class created a quilt as the culmination of their study of the Underground Railroad. Each child's individual square synthesizes what he or she found meaningful; together the quilt captures the overall spirit of the Underground Railroad.

To learn more about the strategies of Summarizing and Synthesizing, see Suggested Readings.

SAMPLE LESSON: Synthesize Our Thinking in Fiction

Second grade teacher Apryl Whitman began teaching her students to synthesize their thinking in fiction by reading fables with them. Fables are a useful genre for introducing synthesizing because of their short structure and straightforward messages. Ms. Whitman chose a pyramid-shaped graphic organizer with three parts to illustrate how our thinking grows from the smaller top of the chart to the larger base. She used Debbie Miller's approach of modeling how her thinking changed from one part of the story to the next See Introduction to Summarizing and Synthesizing and Suggested Readings.

To move from fables to longer stories with less obvious messages, Ms. Whitman chose Eve Bunting's beautiful picture book, Butterfly House, appropriate to the class' ongoing science unit about the life cycle of a butterfly. She illustrated the graphic organizer with symbols showing the metamorphosis of the butterfly, and explained to the students, "just like the caterpillar changes, our thinking changes as we read."

In addition to synthesizing the story as they read it, students also synthesized learning from fiction and nonfiction that deepened their study of butterflies. The information about creating an appropriate environment for a caterpillar and the human dimensions of caring for things in the natural world in Butterfly House added to the children's appreciation of what it means to love and respect nature.

Because this was the first time students had synthesized with more complex text than fables, the teacher chose to have children write and draw about their final thinking about the story for independent practice. She wanted to consolidate what they had learned in the lesson and assess where she needed to go in the future. She can then move into small group instruction in synthesizing, with children reading books at their own reading levels, and then to using the strategy independently as they read their self-selected books.

PLC Facilitators: Click here for Facilitator Notes.

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Introduction to Summarize and Synthesize

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Introduction To Summarizing And Synthesizing What is the strategy of summarizing? Why do we teach children to summarize? How do we teach children to summarize? What is the strategy of synthesizing? Why do we teach children to synthesize? How do we teach synthesizing? Sample Lesson: Synthesize our Thinking in Fiction Summarizing What is the strategy of summarizing?

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Introduction to Building and Activating Schema
What is schema and how does it relate to reading comprehension?
Why do we teach the strategy of Building and Activating Schema?
How do we teach the strategy of Building and Activating Schema?
The Sample Lesson: Notice New Learning

What is Schema and How Does It Relate to Reading Comprehension?
Our schema is the map we have in our minds about a topic. It's made up of our background knowledge - everything we know and think we know - about that topic. We use our schema to put new information into a meaningful context, to help us remember and understand it. When we read, "John cut his meat into small pieces," we can infer that John used a knife because our schema about meals supplies the missing information. Because he had a similar experience, a first grader better understands Trevor's worries as he listens to a read-aloud of Trevor's Wiggly-Wobbly Tooth. (See inset). Their interests and passions help young children digest complicated information. For example, most primary teachers have witnessed children who can learn from difficult texts about prehistoric creatures because they are voracious consumers of everything related to dinosaurs.

Our schema also leaves us open to misconceptions. A cautionary tale about schema is found in Leo Lionni's picture book, Fish is Fish. When Fish, who has never left the water, listens to his friend Frog's descriptions of inhabitants of land, he imagines them all as versions of fish: cows as spotted fish with udders and birds as fish with wings. Children collect all sorts of misconceptions as they navigate their worlds, and, like Fish, what they already know is always the filter through which they begin to explore new information.

We have schema for genre as well as for content. Some young children understand fiction better than nonfiction because they've been read many stories, and have formed a schema for story structure. Whether they can name story elements or not, they expect characters, setting, and events. They follow the story more easily than they navigate a nonfiction text, which might be organized through a variety of less familiar text structures.

We develop schema through our experiences in the world - who we know, where we go, what we do. We also build it through reading, listening, and viewing a variety of media. Just as each of us has a different genetic profile, we each bring different schema to our literacy pursuits in and out of school.

Why do we teach the strategy of Building and Activating Schema?

"There is a virtual consensus that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension." (Neuman, Kaefer, and Pinkham, 2014 - see Suggested Readings). Numerous studies over the past forty years have shown that our brains learn by connecting the new to the known; we always use what we bring as readers to our understanding of the text. As the research about schema began to influence pedagogy, often teachers were advised to frontload a great deal of information about the topic to children before they read. In extreme cases, the time spent building background even exceeded the amount of time spent reading, and there was little new to learn from the text when it was eventually read. In recent years, concern over this imbalance unfortunately sometimes led to denying the crucial role of background knowledge in effective reading.

Rather than subscribe to either of these extremes, we take a strategic approach. We work to teach children how to build and activate background knowledge themselves, both before and during reading. Our goals are for children to recognize that:

What we already know helps us understand as we read; as many teachers tell their students, "search through your mental filing cabinets and find anything useful."

Connecting our own life experiences to a text usually makes reading more satisfying, meaningful and pleasurable.

We aren't "bad readers" when there are gaps in our understanding as we read. We just may need to do what proficient readers do: search for and find more background knowledge to fill in the gaps.

Our thinking and understanding change as we read. We adjust misconceptions we may have had before we read and incorporate new ideas into our ever growing background knowledge.

How do we teach the strategy of Building and Activating Schema?
Teaching children to build and activate their background knowledge usually includes some or all of the following:

Making simple personal connections. We often begin by reading aloud fiction picture books about friends, families, and the ups and downs of children's daily lives. These provide many opportunities to model our own personal connections and how those connections make the stories more meaningful and pleasurable for us. Then we invite the children to turn and talk about their own connections, and eventually to jot them down in writing or drawing. (See text box.) These connections help us build empathy for characters as they go through a gamut of emotions, and relate lessons learned to our own experiences. This process is especially powerful for children who come to school without having had many hours of being read to by an adult. They quickly learn that books are not collections of strange squiggles on the page, but relate directly to their own lives.

Weeding out distracting connections. Over time, children learn to make relevant connections, but they don't all start out that way! Often we hear choruses of "I have a cousin named Alexander" or long stories that wind their way far off track (although some of these actually do have relevance we never would have suspected without following the trail!). Sometimes we can minimize these "distracting" connections simply by paying less attention to them and redirecting the conversation, while highlighting more meaningful connections to the whole class. You will see Ms. Whitman do this several times during the second grade sample lesson for this strategy. For example, as students turn and talk about volcanoes, she honors their connections of hot lava to hot wings and hot sauce, but immediately redirects them to thinking about whether the lava might be dangerous. Some teachers model making their own digressive connections, and then think aloud, "But that doesn't help me understand the story! I won't bother to write that down." In Reading with Meaning, Debbie Miller suggests a mini-lesson in which she lists all the connections made to a topic, and then with the students decides which are helpful and which are not. (See Suggested Readings.)

Celebrating background knowledge. We confirm that all of us bring important background knowledge with us to the classroom when students share topics on which they are experts, from playing soccer to brushing their teeth. This can be done through expert books (See Primary Comprehension Toolkit), how-to writing, and/or class presentations. Sometimes we kick off this exploration of students' expertise with a read-aloud about children's talents, such as Crow Boy by Taro Yashima or Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman, both of which provide excellent opportunities for a variety of personal connections as well.

Sharing what we know or think we know. We can effectively begin a unit of study about a science or social studies topic by having children turn and talk about what they already know or think they know about the topic, and then sharing and/or charting their responses. We are careful to include "what we think we know" to set up the expectation that we will read to confirm or revise our initial knowledge. We teach children what a misconception is, and model our delight when we recognize that we have had and corrected a misconception of our own. Children soon follow suit, telling us "I used to think _____, but now I know ______."

Noticing how we build schema and how it helps us understand information we read. "Today's new knowledge is tomorrow's background knowledge." We take to heart this powerful statement by P. David Pearson. When children don't know anything about the topic, we respond enthusiastically, as Ms. Whitman does in the sample lesson, "So you're going to learn a lot today, aren't you!" Click on the video clip to watch a short example of how the teacher models how what we learn each day, through books, videos, field trips, or discussion with each other, transforms into background knowledge that we use from that day forward.

Noticing new learning. All our work in teaching children about their schema culminates in helping them to learn independently. One of the most significant practices is "Merge Thinking With New Learning" from the Primary Comprehension Toolkit. We teach children to learn by noticing when something they read is new knowledge for them. This requires them to think about what they are reading, not just pronounce the words. We show them how we recognize new learning when our inner voice says, "Wow" or "Cool" or "I never knew that...." One child's new learning may already be background knowledge to another, so learning becomes personalized and relevant to every student as they determine what they are learning for themselves. We post every child's new learning on an anchor chart so that they can all learn from one another. (The Sample Lesson for this strategy explores this practice.)

Building schema about genre. As we study different genre in reading and writing, we note the characteristics of each genre so that children develop a mental map - a schema - that helps them to navigate fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. In nonfiction, we emphasize how to use text features, so that students are prepared to learn from all the sources of information in the text.

To learn more about the strategy of Building and Activating Schema, including lessons supporting many of the practices discussed above, see Suggested Readings.

The Sample Lesson: Notice New Learning

Apryl Whitman at Arden Elementary School in Columbia, SC, teaches her second graders how to notice, record, and react to their new learning as they read. The lesson is situated in the early phases of a science study of states of matter. Ms. Whitman uses a book about volcanoes for her interactive read-aloud. Then she provides a choice of appealing books for collaborative practice that also illustrate how matter changes form, such as From Milk to Ice Cream. The children have previously learned to monitor their inner conversations and record their thinking on sticky notes. They have also learned about various types of text features found in nonfiction texts.

The information in the National Geographic for Kids Volcanoes book includes dramatic photographs and useful diagrams, headings, and captions to support learning about the complex process of a volcano's eruption and its effects. Ms. Whitman models how she recognizes new learning, and how she thinks about it in order to know that she actually understands it, not just regurgitating the words on the page. She provides lots of time for the students to turn and talk, and then to jot down their own new learning. Then she sends them off to practice with books they choose.

Noticing new learning places the responsibility for learning squarely on students' shoulders. Rather than simply responding to the teacher's questions about information in the text, the children are the ones who have to figure out what they are learning. This process encourages them to think more deeply about the information in the text. Through diagrams, analogies, drawings and writing, the children express what they are learning and make it their own in many creative ways.
PLC Facilitators: Click here for Facilitator Notes.

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Introduction to Building and Activating Schema What is schema and how does it relate to reading comprehension? Why do we teach the strategy of Building and Activating Schema? How do we teach the strategy of Building and Activating Schema? The Sample Lesson: Notice New Learning What is Schema and How Does It Relate to Reading Comprehension?

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What is Monitoring Comprehension?
Why do we teach children to monitor their comprehension?
How do we teach monitoring comprehension?
The Sample Lesson: Monitor Your Thinking

What Is Monitoring Comprehension?

The dictionary defines "monitor" as "to watch, observe, listen to, or check something for a specific purpose over a period of time; to keep track of." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monitor. Being aware of how we're doing - in a sport, in our health, in relationships with other people - helps us to build on successes, or to spot trouble and do something about it. Whether we're five or fifty, when we monitor, we gain control and independence.

Monitoring our comprehension means noticing our thinking as we read. We notice our confusions. We use our background knowledge and recognize when something is new, what questions we have as we read, and what inferences we are making. We sift through what we think is important to pay attention to and notice how it all comes together into big ideas. Although monitoring is considered one of the six research-based comprehension strategies, in a sense it's really the umbrella over all of them.

Why Do We Teach Children To Monitor Their Comprehension?

Teaching children to monitor their comprehension means teaching them to notice the thinking they do as they read. First, we have to teach them that proficient readers actually do think while they read! For young children, this can be a revelation, especially if they are used to seeing reading as a game of getting the letters and sounds to match up to words - a game or a tremendous struggle, depending on their success at decoding. Children often believe that the goal is to get all the words right and do it as quickly as possible, and meaning easily gets lost in the process. Fluency of course is important to comprehension; if you read too slowly you can't keep enough information in your brain from the beginning of a sentence or paragraph to the end to make meaning at all. But we need to be sure we teach children that the real point of reading is to learn, to get ideas, to feel something, to enjoy. To accomplish those goals, we have to slow down - as Steph Harvey and Anne Goudvis say, "Stop, Think, and React." That is what we mean by monitoring.

We've placed monitoring first among the comprehension strategy sections in this module for several purposes:

Noticing our thinking is the first step towards understanding what we read, so it is essential to any other strategy.

While research shows that proficient readers use specific strategies to read well, the most important point is just to think. We set the stage for a more authentic, reader-driven use of strategies when we introduce children to noticing what is going on in their own thinking before we begin to label different kinds of thinking.

Thinking when we read is a huge key to engagement. The child who monitors does not shrug her shoulders and move on when text gets complicated, or sit frozen waiting for help, or abandon reading to start annoying others. Nor does she just read the words to be the first one finished and wonder what to do next. Children who stop, think, and react are much more fully involved with their reading.

Every child can be successful with monitoring his or her thinking. There isn't one right answer their teacher wants, and the diversity of thinking among the children is greatly valued. Children thrive when they realize there are many paths to success.

How Do We Teach Monitoring Comprehension?

We begin teaching children to monitor their comprehension through Interactive Read-Alouds. We read wonderful picture books that explore themes related to children's lives, use rich vocabulary, and have delightful illustrations. We model our own thinking as we read, and then gradually release the responsibility for thinking to the children. We give them many opportunities to turn and talk with partners to work through their developing ideas, and to draw or write their thinking.

We recommend using this practice over and over and over- with fiction, nonfiction, poetry. It will accomplish so many goals at once. We can build children's vocabulary far beyond what they will encounter in books they can read independently, expose them to all sorts of text structures and features, to characteristics of many different types of fiction and nonfiction, to literary devices and common themes. And we build a community through sharing these mentor texts - all the while teaching children to think, to monitor what is going on in their brains.

The sample lesson provided in this segment is called "Monitor Your Thinking." It is based on the first monitoring lesson in the Primary Comprehension Toolkit (Harvey and Goudvis), "Think About the Text." Through this lesson, Darlington teacher Irby DuBose teaches her kindergarten students that the most important thing to do while reading is to think and react. When she asks, "Are you really reading if you're not thinking?" they respond with a resounding, "No!"

The lesson exposes children to some of the most important types of thinking that readers use to understand - making connections, asking questions, making inferences - to encourage them to try these out themselves. We also included "having feelings" - which might be considered both making connections and making inferences - to help young children recognize that their emotional reactions are as important as their cognitive ones. We want children to know that whatever they are thinking is valid and important. We are all different and different strategies will help us at different times. By introducing multiple strategies at once, and opening the door to whatever thinking or feeling is authentically going on in our minds, we set the stage for children to use strategies flexibly, how and when they need them, rather than in a formulaic and artificial way. Later we can circle back and explore each strategy more in depth.

PLC Facilitators: Click here for Facilitator Notes.

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What is Monitoring Comprehension? Why do we teach children to monitor their comprehension? How do we teach monitoring comprehension? The Sample Lesson: Monitor Your Thinking What Is Monitoring Comprehension? The dictionary defines "monitor" as "to watch, observe, listen to, or check something for a specific purpose over a period of time; to keep track of."

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Cognitive Strategies Toolkit: All About Adolescent Literacy

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Cognitive Strategies Toolkit: All About Adolescent Literacy

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Cognitive Strategies Toolkit | Adolescent Literacy Topics A-Z | AdLit.org

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Cognitive strategies - including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, and making predictions - to help readers develop their comprehension skills.

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What Should Content-Area Teachers Know About Comprehension Instruction - Schema

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What Should Content-Area Teachers Know About Comprehension Instruction - Schema

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Page 9: Activating Prior Knowledge

Students' comprehension of new information can be improved by activating their prior knowledge, a process that helps students make connections between new information and information they already know. Students who already know something about a topic-perhaps from prior experiences at home or at school-often find it easier to understand related material and to gain new information because they can anticipate what they will encounter in their reading and relate those new ideas to what they already know. Of course, students sometimes have difficulty activating their prior knowledge independently or else they do not have the requisite background knowledge at all. To help students to activate prior or to build requisite knowledge teachers can:

Did You Know?

By having students participate in activities or discussions, content-area teachers can identify incomplete, faulty, or conflicting ideas or misconceptions that could interfere with the students' ability to successfully learn and apply new information.

Explain the topic or standard about which students will be learning

Provide an overview of requisite content or concepts (e.g., review preceding content, use media or a hands-on activity to create the necessary context for learning new material)

Preview the reading material to note headings and subheadings, words in bold or italic font, and titles and captions on graphic sources

Actively engage students in discussing and integrating information

View the video to see how Anita Archer, an educational consultant, connects the students' prior knowledge about the term depression to help them to learn about the Great Depression (time: 2:37).

Sharon Vaughn, PhD
Professor of Special Education
Director of the Vaughn Gross
Center for Reading and Language Arts
University of Texas, Austin

For those students who do not have the requisite knowledge to take full part in a lesson, teachers might need to provide additional instruction. Listen as Sharon Vaughn discusses some ways to address this issue (time:1:04).

View Transcript

Activity

List three things Anita Archer does to help students activate their prior knowledge in order to learn the term corporation (time: 3:51).
View Transcript
Video is courtesy Anita L. Archer.

Click here for feedback.

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IRIS | Page 9: Activating Prior Knowledge

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Students' comprehension of new information can be improved by activating their prior knowledge, a process that helps students make connections between new information and information they already know.

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Activating Prior Knowledge: A complete collection of resources for applying this critical reading strategy

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Activating Prior Knowledge: A complete collection of resources for applying this critical reading strategy

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Activating Prior Knowledge: Reading Method for Students (Grades K-12)

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A complete collection of resources for applying this critical reading strategy Help your students be good readers with this resource. Includes strategies to help students learn how to use prior knowledge, questions to ask, the use of graphic organizers, reading conferences, and more. Lesson plans are also included.

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What Should Content-Area Teachers Know About Comprehension Instruction - Questioning 

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What Should Content-Area Teachers Know About Comprehension Instruction - Questioning 

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Page 13: Generating Questions

There are many ways to teach students how to generate questions. One option involves an adaptation of the question-answer relationships (QAR) model discussed on the previous page. This practice instructs students to generate three levels of questions to aid comprehension.

Level 1: Right There

Answers are explicitly stated in the text

Read the passage.

Locate a fact that is a "who," "what," "when," "where," "why," or "how."

Turn the fact into a question.

Check the answer to make sure it is found in one place, word-for-word, in the text.

Level 2: Putting It Together

Answers require the reader to put information together from different parts of the text

Read the passage.

Locate related facts from at least two different places in the text.

Combine the facts into a question (e.g., why, describe, how).

Put information together to answer the question in one or more sentences.

Level 3: Making Connections

Answers require more than searching the text; also require students to think about what they have just read, what they already know, and how these ideas relate

Read the passage.

Relate something in the passage to something you have read, studied, or experienced.

Use the stem to make a question: How is _____similar to/ different from/ related to _____?

Combine information in the passage with what is already known to answer the question.

Teachers should directly teach and model for students how to use their textbooks and other materials to generate and answer a particular level of question. Next, they should provide opportunities for guided practice: encouraging students to explain their thinking, reminding them to use the steps, and having them check their work against the text. Students should practice one level at a time until they are able to generate questions from all three levels. When transitioning students to generate questions independently, it may be necessary to provide scaffolded instruction by:

Breaking the text into smaller sections at first then gradually increasing the length

Providing passages with some facts already underlined

Offering a suggested number of questions to generate for each section

Indicating what types of prior knowledge would be helpful in making a connection to the passage

Regularly sharing students' questions and providing feedback

A student log can be helpful for students to record their self-generated questions, their responses, and supporting documentation.

Click here or on the graphic for a pdf of a student log for self-generated questions.

In this video, students practice generating a Level 2 question. Notice that they are using cards as a scaffold to help them remember the steps for doing so (time: 3:11).
View Transcript
For Your Information

Even when students are able to generate all three levels of questions on their own, they still benefit from opportunities to share their questions with each other. Doing so fosters discussion about the concepts to which the questions pertain, as well as the quality of those questions. Moreover, it encourages students to return multiple times to their texts to look for the answers to questions written by their peers.

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There are many ways to teach students how to generate questions. One option involves an adaptation of the question-answer relationships (QAR) model discussed on the previous page. This practice instructs students to generate three levels of questions to aid comprehension. Answers are explicitly stated in the text Read the passage.

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Language Arts

The Question-Answer Relationship strategy helps students understand the different types of questions. By learning that the answers to some questions are "Right There" in the text, that some answers require a reader to "Think and Search," and that some answers can only be answered "On My Own," students recognize that they must first consider the question before developing an answer.

Into the Book has an interactive activity that helps young children learn about inferring. In the interactive, students try to infer meaning in letters from virtual pen pals. They try to answer two questions: "WHERE is your pen pal?" (inferences about location) and "WHO is your pen pal?" (inferences about personality). Students search for clues in the text, then choose from three possible inferences for each clue.

Riddles are one way to practice inferential thinking skills because successful readers make guesses based on what they read and what they already know. The object of this online riddle game is to infer what is being described by the clues you read. See riddle game >

BrainPop offers several activities for teaching inference, and they offer resources for teachers and parents. See inference activities >

Because so many stories contain lessons that the main character learns and grows from, it is important for students to not only recognize these transformations but also understand how the story's events affected the characters. This lesson from ReadWriteThink uses a think-aloud procedure to model how to infer character traits and recognize a character's growth across a text. Students also consider the underlying reasons of why the character changed, supporting their ideas and inferences with evidence from the text. See lesson plan >

Math

The Math Standards from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) identify standards for PreK-12 students that include developing and evaluating inferences and predictions that are based on data. For young students, the standards specifically state the following:

Pre-K-2 Expectations: In pre-K through grade 2, all students should discuss events related to students' experiences as "likely" or "unlikely."

Grades 3-5 Expectations: In grades 3-5, all students should propose and justify conclusions and predictions that are based on data and design studies to further investigate the conclusions or predictions.

Science

Science teachers spend time helping students develop their observation skills. Inferring and observing are closely related, but they are not identical. Observation is what one sees, inference is an assumption of what one has seen. Observation can be said to be a factual description, and inference is an explanation to the collected data. It's not a guess. If an observation can be termed as a close watch of the world around you through the senses, then inference can be termed as an interpretation of facts that has been observed.

Teachers can start out providing simple observations:

As you're working to develop these skills, encourage your students to incorporate their scientific vocabulary into their statements. "From what I observe on the grass, I infer that..."

Learn more about how to use inference, and other science process skills, to help students understand our water resources. More on science process skills >

This strategy guide from Seeds of Science introduces an approach for teaching about how scientists use evidence to make inferences. The guide includes an introductory section about how scientists use evidence to make inferences, a general overview of how to use this strategy with many science texts, and a plan for teaching how scientists gather evidence to make inferences. See teaching inference strategy guide >

This lesson from ReadWriteThink uses science to engage students in the process of making inferences. First, students work through a series of activities about making inferences. Then they read a booklet of descriptions of a series of mystery objects that are placed under a microscope. Finally, they look through each microscope and use the formula of schema + text clues = inference to make their own inferences about the identity of each mystery object. See science lesson plan >

Social Studies

In this Teacher Guide from the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, students use clues in a portrait to infer things about George Washington and his life. They work to identify visual clues the artist used, they compare various portraits of George Washington, and discuss the importance of the different portraits as visual records. See teacher guide >

Often, inferring is introduced to students by using familiar symbols, activities, and environments from which they automatically draw inferences or make predictions (an inference about the future). For example, suppose you are about to begin a unit on the Great Depression. You might have students view a picture of the exterior of a mansion and then of a soup line. Then, through questioning, students focus on details, making inferences about the people who live in both places, their socioeconomic status, the kinds of food they eat, the kinds of activities they pursue.

Parents can help to build these skills at home. For ideas to share with parents, see our Growing Readers tip sheet, Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions (in English and Spanish).

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Inference | Classroom Strategy | Reading Rockets

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Observations occur when we can see something happening. In contrast, inferences are what we figure out based on an experience. Helping students understand when information is implied, or not directly stated, will improve their skill in drawing conclusions and making inferences. These skills will be needed for all sorts of school assignments, including reading, science and social studies.

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Are your students struggling with the concept of making inferences in their reading? Show your students that they already know how to make inferences with these videos!

To those of us who love reading, making inferences from text seems easy enough. But to students who struggle with reading because of a learning disability, or who just dislike reading, making inferences from text can be like trying to find clues in a dark room. That said, I have learned that those same students who don't "get" an inference from text will make that mental leap in a flash if you show them a video. What a boost to their confidence! So I always introduce my students to making inferences with videos, like the one above. I play the video for the students, then ask them: "What happened?" Invariably, they will call out: "The dog ate the bird!" This is where I play devil's advocate. "What do you mean?" I'll ask. "I didn't see the dog eat the bird. Did you see the dog eat the bird?" The kids will acknowledge that they didn't see him eat the bird. "Then how do you know he ate the bird?" I ask. That's when they share the clues.

We see the bird.

We see the dog.

Then we hear the squawk.

The lady screams.

We see the feathers fly.

The bird is gone and the dog is licking his lips.

My students absolutely know how to make an inference. What they have trouble doing, is envisioning what they read so that they can make the same inference from what they see in their heads. So I build them up, show them that they are smart and that they can make an inference in a snap. Then we work on transferring that skill to reading text.

Students struggling with inferences? Show them they already know how to make inferences with these videos! Click To Tweet

Ideas for using commercials to teach inferences

Note: One of my readers, Nancy de Arrigunaga, made this amazing infographic of the ideas below. Feel free to use this in your classrooms, particularly if you are at a 1:1 school:

The commercial above is just one that you can use. I like to show a few commercials, make the project fun for them, help them to understand that they really are good at making inferences. I suggest you try some of these other commercials with your classes: Don't tell 'em about the cat:

What did the dog do?

How do you know the dog killed the cat?

Why did the dog give the man a bag of chips?

Graduate makes an assumption:

What does the graduate think his gift is?

What is his actual gift?

This is some serious cheese:

What happened to the mouse?

How did the mouse get so strong?

What happened to the mosquito?

What caused the mosquito to explode

Download the associated Teaching Inferences With Commercials Graphic Organizer. We'll also send you a PowerPoint presentation with seven commercial videos for you to display on your interactive whiteboard and links to additional resources for teaching inference skills.

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Are your students struggling with the concept of making inferences in their reading? Show your students that they already know how to make inferences with these videos! To those of us who love reading, making inferences from text seems easy enough.

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All About Adolescent Literacy

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Inferential Reading | Classroom Strategies | AdLit.org

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AdLit.org offers resources (articles, research, teaching strategies, book recommendations) for parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers.

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Introduction To Determining Importance
What is the strategy of determining importance?
Why do we teach determining importance?
How do we teach determining importance?
The Sample Lesson: Find Important Information

What is the Strategy of Determining Importance?

What is the picture (at left) mainly about? We might answer, "Children in a classroom talking with each other," or "Children turning and talking." But we wouldn't say, "It's about hands and ears and an orange striped shirt and a rug and a number chart." We know how to take all of those details and make sense out of them to get "the bigger picture."

Determining Importance in reading means focusing on what is important in the text. We decide, from among everything on the page, what is most important to attend to and remember. As proficient readers, we engage in that process continually while reading. We filter information and organize our thinking around the big ideas. Determining importance allows us to move through a text coherently, developing a line of thinking that helps our reading make sense.

Why do we teach Determining Importance?

Young children tend to think that everything is important! They are learning information for the first time, and all of it is equally fascinating. They lack the years of experience that helps adults tune out the little details and focus on the big ideas. We don't want to squash children's curiosity and wonder, but we also know they can't read effectively if they try to hold everything equally in their minds. So our task is to teach children to recognize the big ideas and to organize their thinking around them, while we still encourage the joy and creativity involved in unusual and tangential thinking.

While we start thinking and talking about big ideas from our first read-alouds of the school year, we often specifically teach determining importance later in the year, because this strategy is dependent on many other reading strategies as well. We have to monitor our thinking to notice whether something is important or not. We use what we already know - our schema about the topic - to help us decide what is important. And determining importance involves making inferences about the author's intent and about what is useful to us. In this module, we have discussed thinking about big ideas in literature through inferring (with poetry) and synthesizing (for themes in fiction). In this section, we will focus on determining importance in informational texts.

Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of high-stakes multiple choice testing, the strategy of determining importance is sometimes reduced to finding one and only one main idea in a text. A multiple choice test item has to have one right answer, but that doesn't mean that a text has to have only one main idea. In the classroom photograph discussed above, the main idea could be expressed as children helping one another, or listening to each other, or even about beneficial instructional practices or the role of social interaction in learning. All of these are different and justifiable ways of looking at what's important in the picture.

In reading, understanding also grows richer when we consider multiple layers of meaning. Therefore we teach children that there are often different interpretations of what is important, and it is the thinking behind their responses that is most significant.

How do we teach Determining Importance?

* In support of a research unit or inquiry. Often young children have difficulty determining importance as they read because they lack the background knowledge to understand whether something is important or not. Therefore determining importance is most effectively taught within a unit of study or inquiry focused on a science or social studies topic. As the children accumulate knowledge about the topic, they are much better able to decide what's important. They are excited as they find the same information in different sources - a sure clue that this information is important! We give authentic purpose to the strategy of determining importance as children use it to sort through their research and decide what to remember and share from what they have learned.

* Identifying the difference between details and big ideas. One of our first tasks is to teach children what a detail is and the difference between a detail and a big idea. Visual examples are helpful. Children can identify a picture of an elephant or another familiar topic, and then pick out the details - the eyes, the trunk, the legs, etc. They can also create their own drawings with details that add up to a big idea. We then transfer this concept to text. As in the sample lesson, biography is a good place to start. The important information in a biography is generally easier to identify because it relates to why a person is famous.

* Understanding how details support a big idea. We can also use pictures to show the relationship between a big idea and supporting details. We use sticky notes to cover most of a picture and let students guess what it is about, gradually revealing more and more details until they can figure it out. Then we transfer to text that is very clearly organized by main idea and supporting detail, using text features such as headings, illustrations, and a Table of Contents to help plant this structure in children's minds.

* Taking notes. Having written and drawn hundreds of sticky notes over the course of the year helps children in the process of determining importance. As they study a nonfiction topic, they are already accustomed to jotting down their new learning and their questions (See Schema and Questioning Sections). If we haven't already, we can emphasize putting the information in their own words so that they know they understand it. We teach students to organize their notes into big ideas, for example, about the effects of different types of weather, or how animals adapt to their environments. Determining importance leads to summarizing and synthesizing so that they can share their learning with others.

To learn more about the strategy of Determining Importance, see Suggested Readings.

The Sample Lesson

The video-taped sample lesson is "Find Important Information." This is the first lesson on the strategy of Determining Importance that Melody Blackwell has taught to her first graders. She uses this strategy to help students organize their thinking as they explore a unit on Famous Americans. As she explains in the teacher commentary, "This was an excellent lesson to teach, because at first they thought that everything they read about the person we were studying was important!" The teacher first reads aloud the entire short biography of George Washington Carver so that the children will have some background knowledge about him. Then she rereads sections of the text, pausing to show how she considers which information is important to remember, which facts are just interesting details, and recording her thinking on a two-column anchor chart. After guiding the children to mark important information in the text with sticky notes, the teacher sends them off to draw and write about what they thought was important about George Washington Carver.

The idea of teaching this lesson with a biography originated from "Figure Out What's Important" in the Primary Comprehension Toolkit (Harvey and Goudvis). The teacher in that lesson used a large poster about Helen Keller to help kindergarten students begin to distinguish important information from interesting details. In Ms. Blackwell's class, children already have something of a schema for biography from what they have studied in the unit. They know that biographies are written about famous people, and therefore the teacher can tie what's important to what made the subject famous. As children gravitate towards basic facts such as when the person was born or died, the teacher cues them, "Was being born what made him famous? Or is what he did for other people what was important about him?" These types of questions can help children begin to make distinctions between important and interesting.

Children need many experiences with different texts in order to weigh what is important and what is not. In this first lesson, a major goal is simply for children to realize that informational text includes both big ideas and smaller details, and it helps us as readers to recognize the difference. Some children quickly make the distinctions while others are thoroughly confused. Ms. Blackwell plans a small group lesson for the following day, in which she pulls together a group of children who had the most difficulty finding important information in the initial lesson. She uses the small group to provide them with closer attention and to gain more understanding of where each of them needs further support.

PLC Facilitators: Click here for Facilitator Notes.

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Introduction To Determining Importance What is the strategy of determining importance? Why do we teach determining importance? How do we teach determining importance? The Sample Lesson: Find Important Information What is the Strategy of Determining Importance? What is the picture (at left) mainly about?

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THINK LITERACY: Cross-Curricular Approaches, Grades 7 - 12

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THINK LITERACY: Cross-Curricular Approaches, Grades 7 - 12

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Use Popular Music to Improve Reading and Inspire Writing

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Use Popular Music to Improve Reading and Inspire Writing

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Use Popular Music to Improve Reading and Inspire Writing | Scholastic

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Music can be the tool that ignites a spark in your reluctant readers or inspires a budding writer. Learn ways to incorporate well-known songs into your reading and writin

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Generating an image while reading requires that the reader be actively engaged with the text.

Creating mental images while reading can improve comprehension.

How to use visual imagery

Follow these few simple steps to provide practice developing students' mental images:

Begin reading. Pause after a few sentences or paragraphs that contain good descriptive information.

Share the image you've created in your mind, and talk about which words from the book helped you "draw" your picture. Your picture can relate to the setting, the characters, or the actions. By doing this, you are modeling the kind of picture making you want your child to do.

Talk about how these pictures help you understand what's happening in the story.

Continue reading. Pause again and share the new image you created. Then ask your child to share what he sees, hears, tastes, smells and feels. Ask what words helped him create the mental image and emotions. By doing this, you are providing your child with practice with this new skill.

Are your images identical? Probably not! This is a great time to talk about why your images might be different. Perhaps your child went on a school field trip or had a school assembly that changed the way they created the picture in their mind. Perhaps experiences you've had as an adult influenced what you "drew." These differences are important to understand and respect.

Read a longer portion of text and continue the sharing process.

Once this is a familiar skill, encourage your child to use mental imagery when she is reading by herself. You can feel confident that these mental pictures will help your child understand the story in an important way.

Resources

Into the Book: lesson plans that help students learn to visualize:

Article from Reading Rockets:

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Visual Imagery | Classroom Strategy | Reading Rockets

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Generating an image while reading requires that the reader be actively engaged with the text. Creating mental images while reading can improve comprehension. Follow these few simple steps to provide practice developing students' mental images: Begin reading. Pause after a few sentences or paragraphs that contain good descriptive information.

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My students couldn't get past the language, the sizes of the different numbers, or the science concepts addressed in the question. In short, I had effectively shut them down, and I needed a new approach to bring them back to their learning. So I started drawing on the whiteboard and created something with a little whimsy, a cartoon photon asking how much energy a photon has.

Immediately, students started yelling out, "2.48 × 10⁻¹⁹ joules," and they could even cite the text where they had learned the information. I knew I was on to something, so the next thing I drew was a series of boxes with our friend the photon.

If all of the photons in the image below were to hit in one second, how much energy is represented in the drawing?

Students realized that we were just adding up all the individual energy from each photon and then quickly realized that this was multiplication. And then they knew that the question we were trying to answer was just figuring out the number of photons, and since we knew the total energy in one second, we could compute the number of photons by division.

The point being, we reached a place where my students were able to process the learning. The power of the visual representation made all the difference for these students, and being able to sequence through the problem using the visual supports completely changed the interactions they were having with the problem.

If you're like me, you're thinking, "So the visual representations worked with this problem, but what about other types of problems? Surely there isn't a visual model for every problem!"

The power of this moment, the change in the learning environment, and the excitement of my fifth graders as they could not only understand but explain to others what the problem was about convinced me it was worth the effort to pursue visualization and try to answer these questions: Is there a process to unlock visualizations in math? And are there resources already available to help make mathematics visual?

I realized that the first step in unlocking visualization as a scaffold for students was to change the kind of question I was asking myself. A powerful question to start with is: "How might I represent this learning target in a visual way?" This reframing opens a world of possible representations that we might not otherwise have considered. Thinking about many possible visual representations is the first step in creating a good one for students.

The Progressions published in tandem with the Common Core State Standards for mathematics are one resource for finding specific visual models based on grade level and standard. In my fifth-grade example, what I constructed was a sequenced process to develop a tape diagram-a type of visual model that uses rectangles to represent the parts of a ratio. I didn't realize it, but to unlock my thinking I had to commit to finding a way to represent the problem in a visual way. Asking yourself a very simple series of questions leads you down a variety of learning paths, and primes you for the next step in the sequence-finding the right resources to complete your visualization journey.

Posing the question of visualization readies your brain to identify the right tool for the desired learning target and your students. That is, you'll more readily know when you've identified the right tool for the job for your students. There are many, many resources available to help make this process even easier, and I've created a matrix of clickable tools, articles, and resources.

The process to visualize your math instruction is summarized at the top of my Visualizing Math graphic; below that is a mix of visualization strategies and resources you can use tomorrow in your classroom.

Our job as educators is to set a stage that maximizes the amount of learning done by our students, and teaching students mathematics in this visual way provides a powerful pathway for us to do our job well. The process of visualizing mathematics tests your abilities at first, and you'll find that it makes both you and your students learn.

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The Power of Visualization in Math | Edutopia

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My students couldn't get past the language, the sizes of the different numbers, or the science concepts addressed in the question. In short, I had effectively shut them down, and I needed a new approach to bring them back to their learning.

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A Conversation with Former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera
"When I came to school, if I hadn't found writing, if the teacher hadn't acknowledged me, if I hadn't found my voice, I wouldn't be here."
This Giant Classroom That Is America

Celebrating Marilyn Singer
"I always tell aspiring poets to read, read, read, and write, write, write. I also tell them to observe the world around them, using all of their senses, and to do so with wonder and humor."
A Poet of Many Interests

An Interview with Former US Poet Laureate Charles Wright
"Poetry's hard work, it really is. You don't just lay down a couple of feelings and let it rest at that. A lot of people do, but that doesn't make it very strong."
"Ground Zero" for Poetry

NCTE Verse

#NationalPoetryMonth kicks off on April 1, and you're invited to join NCTE members from across the country in NCTE Verse, a member-exclusive FREE professional learning opportunity aimed at providing ideas and inspiration around poets and poetry!

Learn More

In Getting the Knack, authors Stephen Dunning and William Stafford offer 20 exercises covering different types or phases of poetry writing. The authors' humor and nonacademic style will appeal to experienced and novice poets of all ages.

Read the chapter "Found & Headline Poems."

William Stafford's son Kim Stafford shares memories of his father's life and work and talks about his own journey to becoming a poet and educator in the Council Chronicle article " His Poetry Was a Way of Teaching."

2018 NCTE Notable Poetry Books

Here are 27 outstanding poetry books to offer children and teens-not just this month, but throughout the year and across the curriculum. Use these books, and create connections with books from previous Notable Lists ( 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011) to create even more poetry joy!

2018 List

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A Conversation with Former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera "When I came to school, if I hadn't found writing, if the teacher hadn't acknowledged me, if I hadn't found my voice, I wouldn't be here." This Giant Classroom That Is America Celebrating Marilyn Singer "I always tell aspiring poets to read, read, read, and write, write, write.

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Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. Teaching students to summarize improves their memory for what is read. Summarization strategies can be used in almost every content area.

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Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. Teaching students to summarize improves their memory for what is read. Summarization strategies can be used in almost every content area.

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Teach the Strategies of Highly Effective Readers 

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Teach the Strategies of Highly Effective Readers 

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All About Adolescent Literacy

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To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. Such rote applications of these procedures represents, in essence, a true oxymoron-non-strategic strategic processing.
- Alexander and Murphy (1998, p. 33)

If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when "reading" content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers. Cognitive strategies are the mental processes used by skilled readers to extract and construct meaning from text and to create knowledge structures in long-term memory. When these strategies are directly taught to and modeled for struggling readers, their comprehension and retention improve.

Struggling students often mistakenly believe they are reading when they are actually engaged in what researchers call mindless reading (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004), zoning out while staring at the printed page. The opposite of mindless reading is the processing of text by highly effective readers using cognitive strategies. These strategies are described in a fascinating qualitative study that asked expert readers to think aloud regarding what was happening in their minds while they were reading. The lengthy scripts recording these spoken thoughts (i.e., think-alouds) are called verbal protocols (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). These protocols were categorized and analyzed by researchers to answer specific questions, such as, What is the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers' strategies as they determine the main idea of a text? (Afflerbach, 1990b).

The protocols provide accurate "snapshots" and even "videos" of the ever-changing mental landscape that expert readers construct during reading. Researchers have concluded that reading is "constructively responsive-that is, good readers are always changing their processing in response to the text they are reading" (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995, p. 2). Instructional Aid 1.1 defines the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers, and Instructional Aid 1.2 provides a lesson plan template for teaching a cognitive strategy.

Instructional aids

Instructional Aid 1.1: Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers

Activating

"Priming the cognitive pump" in order to recall relevent prior knowledge and experiences from long-term memory in order to extract and construct meaning from text

Inferring

Bringing together what is spoken (written) in the text, what is unspoken (unwritten) in the text, and what is already known by the reader in order to extract and construct meaning from the text

Monitoring-Clarifying

Thinking about how and what one is reading, both during and after the act of reading, for purposes of determining if one is comprehending the text combined with the ability to clarify and fix up any mix-ups

Questioning

Engaging in learning dialogues with text (authors), peers, and teachers through self-questioning, question generation, and question answering

Searching-Selecting

Searching a variety of sources in order to select appropriate information to answer questions, define words and terms, clarify misunderstandings, solve problems, or gather information

Summarizing

Restating the meaning of text in one's own words - different words from those used in the original text

Visualizing-Organizing

Constructing a mental image or graphic organizer for the purpose of extracting and constructing meaning from the text

Instructional Aid 1.2: A Lesson Template for Teaching Cognitive Strategies

1. Provide direct instruction regarding the cognitive strategy

a. Define and explain the strategy

b. Explain the purpose the strategy serves during reading

c. Describe the critical attributes of the strategy

d. Provide concrete examples/nonexamples of the strategy

2. Model the strategy by thinking aloud

3. Facilitate guided practice with students

Instructional Aid 1.3: A Lesson Template for Teaching Summarizing

Lesson Template for Teaching Cognitive Strategies Lesson Plan for Teaching Summarizing

1. Provide direct instruction regarding the cognitive strategy

a. Define and explain the strategy.

Summarizing is restating in your own words the meaning of what you have read-using different words from those used in the original text-either in written form or a graphic representation (picture of graphic organizer).

b. Explain the purpose the strategy serves during reading

Summarizing enables a reader to determine what is most imporant to remember once the reading is completed. Many things we read have only one or two bid ideas, and it's important to identify them and restate them for purposed of retention.

c. Describe the critical attributes of the strategy.

A summary has the following characteristics. It: -Is short -Is to the point, containing the big idea of the text -Omits trivial information and collapses lists into a word or phrase -Is not a retelling or a "photocopy" of the text

d. Provide concrete examples/nonexamples of the strategy.

Examples of good summaries might inlude the one-sentence book summaries from The New York Times Bestsellers List, an obituary of a famous person, or a report of a basketball or football game that captures the highlights. The mistakes that students commonly make when writing summaries can be more readily avoided by showing students excellent nonexamples (e.g., a paragraph that is too long, has far too many details, or is a complete retelling of the text rather than a statement of the main idea.

2. Model the strategy by thinking aloud.

Thinking aloud is a metacognitive activity in which teachers reflect on their behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes regarding what they have read and then speak their thoughts aloud for students. Choose a section of relatively easy text from your discipline and think aloud as you read it, and then also think aloud about how you would go about summarizing it - then do it.

3. Facilitate guided practice with students.

Using easy-to-read content text, read aloud and generate a summary together with the whole class. Using easy-to-read content text, ask students to read with partners and create a summary together. One students are writing good summaries as partners, assign text and expect students to read it and generate summaries independently.

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teach the seven strategies of highly effective readers

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Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers

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To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. Such rote applications of these procedures represents, in essence, a true oxymoron-non-strategic strategic processing. - Alexander and Murphy (1998, p.

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Ways to Use Song Lyrics to Improve Comprehension

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Ways to Use Song Lyrics to Improve Comprehension

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Song lyrics are great for developing broad comprehension skills
Teachers often use songs in the language classroom for comprehension exercises like 'gap-fills' (finding the right word to fill a gap in a sentence), re-ordering words so they make sense, or matching related words. In these exercises, students have to listen for words or phrases connected to a specific grammatical focus or semantic field. This approach involves working with individual sounds, words and phrases, rather than the text as a whole.

But you can also use songs to develop broader comprehension and critical thinking skills. Rather than focusing on individual words or sounds, students can make predictions about meaning, and then confirm or reject these predictions as they read or listen to the lyrics.

The focus is on the students: how they interact with the text, and what they bring to the reading or listening process.
Why song lyrics work so well for comprehension tasks
Instead of having students simply recognise facts, we want them to delve more deeply into a text. They can compare information, make connections with other parts of the text and their knowledge of the world, or use the information to create something new (such as a letter to the singer, or rewriting the story from a different point of view.)

There are four reasons songs are so useful for improving higher-order comprehension and critical thinking skills:

1. Lyrics are short - songs are very short texts, yet they can express a lot. This short length makes song lyrics ideal to develop specific skills intensively, or to zoom in on a particular learning approach.

2. Lyrics usually follow a similar structure - songs are often predictable in their structure, especially pop songs, which are most often used in the language classroom. They may raise questions and give background context first, before building up to a chorus that might answer those questions and express how the singer feels. Because students are often familiar with the structure of song lyrics, it allows them to concentrate on meaning and overall comprehension.

3. Lyrics may express emotion - students can identify with the singer's feelings or relate to their situation, which often encourages meaningful discussion in class.

4. Lyrics are often vague - the language in song lyrics is often open to interpretation. Mysterious references are perfect for critical thinking skills, since they generate a lot of discussion and place students at the centre of the learning process, by making the content personal. And when the text can be understood differently by different people, the number of creative follow-up tasks is not only higher, but always much more engaging.
Examples of ways to use song lyrics in class
These qualities make song lyrics perfect for comprehension tasks that promote critical thinking. Don't just ask your class to simply recall information from a song, or listen for a specific set of words. Instead, get them to analyse the meaning of the song lyrics, compare the lyrics with other similar texts, such as poems or short stories, or make personal connections. There are lots of creative possibilities.

In the examples below, we will look at some ways to help students develop their reading, listening, speaking and writing skills, using the 1995 song by the German band, Fool's Garden. The song is about a person who is bored and alone, waiting for someone's help. It begins:

'I'm sitting here in the boring room
It's just another rainy Sunday afternoon
I'm wasting my time
I got nothing to do
I'm hanging around
I'm waiting for you
But nothing ever happens and I wonder'
Receptive skills: reading and listening
Here are a few ways students can develop reading and listening comprehension skills, such as inferring or deducing the meaning of unknown words:

Students can use song lyrics to identify the main idea of the text, then find the words that helped them to reach that conclusion. In Lemon Tree, for example, words such as 'boring', 'nothing', 'lonely' and 'tired' support the singer's expression of sadness.

Inferring, or reading between the lines, is a skill that works particularly well with songs due to their often-vague language. When making inferences, students usually have several options, so long as they can say why they have come up with each interpretation. For example, who is the 'you' in the line 'I'm waiting for you'?

'I'm waiting for you
But nothing ever happens and I wonder'

In the chorus, the singer sings:

'I'm turning my head up and down
I'm turning turning turning turning turning around
And all that I can see is just another lemon tree'

Why is the singer turning his head up and down? Is the lemon tree something positive or negative? Students can often deduce the meaning of unknown words by using context clues. These clues will help students deal with new vocabulary in any type of text. By looking at the words, phrases or sentences around an unknown word, it is often possible to get an idea of what the word means.

Consider the line: 'Isolation is not good for me'.

Is 'isolation' a positive or a negative word? Look at the sentences before and after the word ('nothing ever happens', 'not good'.) Are there any other words in the text with a related meaning? (e.g. 'lonely', 'nothing to do', 'nothing ever happens'.) Students could also deduce the meaning of 'waste' in the line 'I'm wasting my time' by looking at the surrounding words and phrases ('boring', 'rainy', 'nothing to do'.)
Productive skills: speaking and writing
Ask students to write a story based on a few words from the song lyrics, and then compare it with the actual story in the song. What type of story do you think students could come up with using the title of the song Lemon Tree, and a few other words?

Ask students to make connections between the song and their own experiences. Can your class think of times when they felt the same way as the singer in Lemon Tree? What was the reason? How did they solve the problem?

These personal responses to song lyrics can produce meaningful classroom debates and creative writing. Students could write a letter to the narrator of Lemon Tree, giving advice on how to solve his problem. They could continue the story, or even write a piece from the point of view of a friend who is trying to help.

Engaging students in critical thinking skills helps students understand texts better and improves language learning by making the texts their own. Songs are a perfect way to teach many of these skills.
Miguel is a teacher of English at a state bilingual secondary school in Madrid, Spain. He regularly shares lesson plans and ideas on his blog. Find out about the selection process for the TeachingEnglish blog award, and visit our TeachingEnglish website for more lesson plans and activities.

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Ways to use song lyrics to improve comprehension

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Song lyrics are great for developing broad comprehension skills Teachers often use songs in the language classroom for comprehension exercises like 'gap-fills' (finding the right word to fill a gap in a sentence), re-ordering words so they make sense, or matching related words.

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Managing the ART Room: The Art of Reading

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Managing the ART Room: The Art of Reading

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Teaching Reading Through Art Analysis | Scholastic

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After discovering a new set of lesson plans on Scholastic's "Open a World of Possible" page, I'm inspired to shift art analysis from a once-in-a-while activity to a regul

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10 Content-Area Literacy Strategies for Art, Mathematics, Music, and Physical Education

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10 Content-Area Literacy Strategies for Art, Mathematics, Music, and Physical Education

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10 Content-Area Literacy Strategies for Art, Mathematics, Music, and Physical Education

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10 Content-Area Literacy Strategies for Art, Mathematics, Music, and Physical Education.pdf

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Visual Thinking Strategies for Improved Comprehension - ELL

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Visual Thinking Strategies for Improved Comprehension - ELL

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I had a black and white picture of a poor miner's room on the overhead projector. In the picture the walls were covered with cardboard and the room was sparsely furnished. I was doing professional development for teachers and I did not give them any background information about the picture. I asked for some opinions about what they saw, then I asked the teachers, "Do you think a man or a woman lives here?" In unison they responded, "A man!" That was very interesting to me so I asked a follow-up question, "What makes you say that?" Although the response had been unanimous, the reasoning was varied. One teacher said, "You can tell it's a man's room because there aren't any decorations - a woman would put something nice in there even if she were poor." Another teacher said, "That rocking chair doesn't look very feminine." When I asked for more detail she said, "It looks big, and there is no cushion or anything on it." Yet another teacher answered, "I think if it were a woman's room there would be something to remind her of family - either a picture or there would be children's items in the room." The teachers had noticed details that I hadn't and had also drawn on their own beliefs to bring a deeper perspective to the picture.

This is the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method. It is a very simple activity designed to build students' background knowledge and develop thinking skills that use detail to enhance understanding. Many educators have used this method as a precursor to working on a literary passage because the thinking skills used to analyze artwork can be transferred to literature as well. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method was created by Abigail Housen, a cognitive psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. VTS is targeted at developing creativity and thinking skills. It also presents a very effective method for tapping into students' background knowledge.

Method

1. The teacher selects an interesting picture or painting, one that relates to the topic of the story to be read, in this case the picture above.

2. A copy of this picture is placed on the overhead projector. There are many sources of pictures on the Internet, including museum and library websites. (See the Hot Links section).

3. The students are asked, "Please look at the picture silently for a minute and think about what you see. What's going on in the picture?"

4. After a minute the teacher opens up the question to the room, "What do you see in the picture?" The students' responses often start out with the obvious - "There's a man walking a dog and another man riding a bike. The picture looks old. I think it was taken in a city."

5. When a student offers a qualitative statement, the teacher asks for more information. "You said the picture looks old. What makes you say that?"

The students justify their answers by providing evidence from the picture. They may say, "It's in black and white, and the cars in the back all look like they were made a long time ago."

6. Next the teacher asks students to share differing opinions and provide justification. One student may say, "The man on the bike is wearing a suit. I think he is going to work on his bike because he doesn't have a car." The teacher then asks, "Does everyone agree? Is that why this man is riding his bike in a suit?" Another student might say, "I don't think so. I think he just likes riding his bike. Maybe they didn't make clothes for riding a bike then."

7. The discussion goes on until students have shared all they can about the picture.

8. The teacher summarizes what the students said. "So, after looking at this picture we think that, maybe relatives - who lived a long time ago. We can tell this because of what they are wearing and because the picture is black and white."

9. For the next activity, the teacher can either have the students write a few sentences about what they discovered, or read a text related to the picture.

Reading

Let's say students are reading about New York in the 1900s. The teacher points out that the same creativity and way of thinking that the students used to look at the picture will be used to understand the reading.

When students share about their reading, the teacher asks the same kind of VTS questions about the text. "What is happening? How do you know that?" The teacher makes a point of showing the students how sharing their ideas about the story are the same as when they discussed the picture earlier.

Writing

A variation of VTS was offered as a Bright Idea from Gemma De Vita, a teacher from Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, Georgia. In her Picture Description activity, she makes copies of an interesting picture and has the students glue it to a page in their notebook. The students write three to six sentences or questions about the picture and then share them. This allows the students to have a picture book with their own notes to remind them of what they are learning and thinking. Gemma says she likes to use the Picture Description activity in her classroom because, "Once I thought maybe I would try another strategy to introduce a selection, and my students asked where the picture was. They said they love doing Picture Preview and would I please do it more. They said, 'It's fun!' It also helps with all Language Arts domains: Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading. Students can also work at their own levels and challenge themselves as they hear higher level questions that they can use as models after their next reading selection. It also helps them compose questions, which they often need practice with."

The Visual Thinking Strategies method offers an easy, interactive and non-threatening way to get students thinking. There are no right or wrong answers, and anything that students believe can be justified by details in the picture. This opens up students' minds to the fact that, even in reading, people come away with different impressions and thoughts. These should be shared and discussed to further develop understanding for everyone. To me - this is the richest lesson of all!
Picture Description
Here you can find a short picture description lesson that highlights relevant grammar structures and provides lists of words that are useful for talking and writing about pictures.
National Geographic Photography
This site offers many intriguing photos, including a photo of the day, news photos, photo gallery, and short video clips. These can be useful for supporting content instruction, fostering dialogue with emerging English speakers, and creating writing prompts.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts: Art Adventures
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts' Art Adventure program is an example of a collaborative effort between the museum and the public schools. The program's volunteers visit classrooms with art posters related to a specific theme, such as animals or celebrations. The site offers samples of some of the posters used.

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Visual Thinking Strategies for Improved Comprehension

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I had a black and white picture of a poor miner's room on the overhead projector. In the picture the walls were covered with cardboard and the room was sparsely furnished. I was doing professional development for teachers and I did not give them any background information about the picture.

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Tell Me About the Story: Comprehension Strategies for Students with Autism

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Tell Me About the Story: Comprehension Strategies for Students with Autism

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Tell Me About the Story: Comprehension Strategies for Students with Autism

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Reading comprehension is often a concern for the teachers of students with autism. Many teachers tell me that their students with autism can read but that "they don't understand anything." It is always tricky to respond to such statements as many students with autism do understand what they read but cannot effectively express what they know.

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Reading Comprehension and Autism in the General Education Classroom 

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Reading Comprehension and Autism in the General Education Classroom 

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References

Click the "References" link above to hide these references.

American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders 5th ed.. Washington, DC: Author.

Booth, R., & Happé, F. (2011). "Hunting with a knife and..fork": Examining central coherence in autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and typical development with a linguistic task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107(4), 377-393.

Carnahan, C.R., Williamson, P.S., & Christman, J. (2011). Linking cognition and literacy in students with autism spectrum disorder. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 43(6), 54-62.

Chiang, H., & Lin, Y.-H. (2007). Reading comprehension instruction for students with autism spectrum disorders: A review of the literature. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 22(4), 259-267.

Coyne, M.D., Kame'enui, E., Simmons, D. (2004). Improving beginning reading instruction and intervention for students with LD: Reconciling "all" with "each". Journal of Learning Disabilities, 37(3), 231-239.

Diehl, J.J., Bennetto, L., & Young, E.C. (2006). Story recall and narrative coherence of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 34(1), 87-102.

Frith, U. (2012). Why we need cognitive explanations of autism. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(11), 2073-2092.

Foorman, B. (2007). Primary prevention in classroom reading instruction. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 39(5), 24-30.

Fossett, B., & Mirenda, P. (2006). Sight word reading in students with developmental disabilities: A comparison of paired associate and picture-to-text matching instruction. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 27(4), 411-429.

Gately, S.E. (2008). Facilitating reading comprehension for students on the autism spectrum. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 40(3), 40-45.

Happé, F., & Frith, U. (2006). The weak coherence account: Detail-focused cognitive style in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(1), 5-25.

Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2013). Comprehension at the core. The Reading Teacher, 66(6), 432-439.

Helfeldt, J.P., & Henk, W.A. (1990). Reciprocal question-answer relationships: An instructional technique for at-risk readers. Journal of Reading, 33(7), 509-514.

Hume, K. (2013). Visual supports fact sheet. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, The National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders.<

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King, A. (1995). Designing the instructional process to enhance critical thinking across the curriculum. Teaching of Psychology, 22(1), 13-17.

Knight, V.F., Spooner, F., & Browder, D.M. (2013). Using systematic instruction and graphic organizers to teach science concepts to students with autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disability. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 28(2), 115-126.

Koppenhaver, D.A. (2010). Reading comprehension. In C. Carnahan, & P. Williamson (Eds.), Quality literacy instruction for students with autism spectrum disorders, pp. 355-385). Shawnee Mission, KS: AAPC Textbooks.

Lonigan, C. (2006). Development, assessment, and promotion of preliteracy skills. Early Education and Development, 17(1), 91-114.

May, T., Rinehart, N., Wilding, J., & Cornish, K. (2013). The role of attention in the academic attainment of students with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43(9), 2147-2158.

Nation, K., Clarke, P., Wright, B.J., & Williams, C. (2006). Patterns of reading ability in students with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(7), 911-919.

National Reading Panel (2000). Report of the national reading panel: Teaching students to read (No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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Newman, T.M., Macomber, D., Naples, A.J., Babitz, T., Volkmar, F., & Grigorenko, E.L. (2007). Hyperlexia in children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(4), 760-774.

Nguyen, N.V. (2013). First grade teachers' perceptions of the five strands of effective reading instruction and their possible influence on daily instructional practices (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Accession No. 1869)

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Oakhill, J., & Cain, K. (2007). Introduction to comprehension development. In K. Cain, & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Children's comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective, pp. 3-40). New York, NY: Guilford.

O'Connor, I.M., & Klein, P.D. (2004). Exploration of strategies for facilitating the reading comprehension of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2), 115-127.

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Whalon, K., & Hanline, M.F. (2008). Effects of a reciprocal questioning intervention on the question generation and responding of children with autism spectrum disorder. Education and Training in Developmental Disabilities, 43(3), 367-387.

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Williamson, P., & Carnahan, C. (2010). Reading fluency. In C. Carnahan, & P. Williamson (Eds.), Quality literacy instruction for students with autism spectrum disorders, pp. 287-314). Shawnee Mission, KS: AAPC Textbooks.

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Zimmerman, S., & Hutchins, C. (2003). 7 keys to comprehension: How to help your kids read it and get it! New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.

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Reading Comprehension and Autism in the Primary General Education Classroom

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Click the "References" link above to hide these references. American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders 5th ed.. Washington, DC: Author. Booth, R., & Happé, F. (2011). "Hunting with a knife and..fork": Examining central coherence in autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and typical development with a linguistic task.

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Integrating the National Standards for K - 12 Physical Education

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Integrating the National Standards for K - 12 Physical Education

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Health and Physical Education for Elementary Classroom Teachers: Integrating the National Standards for K-12 Physical Education

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In 2013, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance - now named SHAPE America - Society of Health and Physical Educators - revised the National Standards for K-12 Physical Education. The standards now specifically address the concern for physical literacy across the nation by adding

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What it is...

Question Generation is a strategy that assists students with their comprehension of text. Students learn to formulate and respond to questions about situations, facts, and ideas while engaged in understanding a text. During this process, there are several different types of questions that may be derived (see chart below).

Why it's so great...

Question Generation helps to improve critical and creative thinking skills as students learn to ask questions about an assigned text. This technique encourages students to develop life-long learning skills. Question Generation is flexible and may be tailored to fit various types of information, and different skill-levels. Students may use this strategy with the help of a facilitator or they may generate questions on their own.

This strategy assists teachers as they engage in the following processes:

planning whole class, small group, or individual activities

matching objectives with assignment components

checking for comprehension

gaining insight about students' interests

designing homework assignments, and

writing exams

How to create them...

Pre-select and introduce the text to be used for generating questions. Decide whether to have students use this strategy within one section, on one page, or with an entire book. Then, choose the type(s) of questions you wish students to ask (see chart above). Develop an activity based upon the type(s) of questions you choose (see examples below). Model the process while providing your students with ample time and opportunities to practice.

How to use it...

1. Begin by reading OR have students listen to the text selection.

2. Engage students in the questioning activity and monitor comprehension, tailoring the activity to individual students' needs.

3. Guide students throughout the questioning process and encourage involvement of passive learners.

4. Provide students with feedback and allow for discussion.

What it looks like...

Here are some activities teachers can use for the Question Generation strategy:

References

Muskingum College - Center for Advancement and Learning (CAL). (n.d.). Retrieved 2008, January 25, from http://www.muskingum.edu/~cal/database/general/questioning.html

Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2000). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension to enhance understanding. Stenhouse Publishers: Portland, Maine.

ReadingLady.com. (n.d.). Retrieved 2008, January 25, from http://www.readinglady.com/Comprehension/Questioning/questioning.html

Wisconsin Literacy Education and Reading Network Source. (n.d.). Retrieved 2008, January 25, from http://wilearns.state.wi.us/apps/Default.asp?cid=780

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Question Generation is a strategy that assists students with their comprehension of text. Students learn to formulate and respond to questions about situations, facts, and ideas while engaged in understanding a text. During this process, there are several different types of questions that may be derived (see chart below).

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Questioning the author is a strategy that engages students actively with a text. Rather than reading and taking information from a text, the QtA strategy encourages students to ask questions of the author and the text. Through forming their questions, students learn more about the text. Students learn to ask questions such as: What is the author's message? Does the author explain this clearly? How does this connect to what the author said earlier?

This website shows and example of using the question the author strategy with a common health-related sign that might be read by students.
See example >
Language Arts

Here's a simple, clear description of how students can learn to think, "If I were the author..."
See example >
Social Studies

Here's a short paper that describes how teachers can use the question the author strategy to help students make sense of social studies. Examples are given for elementary age students.

Beck, I.L., & McKeown, M.G., Hamilton, R.L., & Kugan, L. (1997). Questioning the author: An approach for enhancing student engagement with text. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

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Question the Author | Classroom Strategy | Reading Rockets

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Questioning the author is a strategy that engages students actively with a text. Rather than reading and taking information from a text, the QtA strategy encourages students to ask questions of the author and the text. Through forming their questions, students learn more about the text.

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Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When  Reading Digitally

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Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When  Reading Digitally

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"There is that danger of silencing that discourse, to the degree that teachers were using it anyway," Hess said. He acknowledges that too few teachers know how to effectively facilitate academic discussions in classrooms, and that often "turn and talk to a partner" devolves into "turn and gossip." But those issues have always existed in classrooms and aren't the fault of technology. In fact, Hess maintains that to be a good teacher who uses technology, a person must first be a good teacher. Technology won't repair those gaps.
READING ON PAPER VS. READING DIGITALLY
Reading print media is undeniably different from reading digital content. Researchers have been trying to understand how and why people interact differently with the two media and have shown that when students read online they comprehend less. But there isn't enough longitudinal data to know if those deficits can be remediated by learning strategies specific to digital content.

Those who prefer reading in print talk about the ability to flip pages, write in the margins and that they remember a scene based on where it was located on the page. It's more of a linear experience and readers interact with it in specific ways.

In contrast, digital reading takes place on a flat screen and the ability to hyperlink to related content makes the experience feel more like stream of consciousness than like a linear reading experience. It takes more self-control to stay focused when reading digitally, a challenge for many students used to quickly navigating around the Web. "It's an amazing thing, but it also causes a lot of fragmentation," Hess said.

The key to getting kids to read deeply in any format is to have them engage with the text in meaningful ways. In the digital space, that means disrupting a pattern of skipping around, writing short chats and getting lost down the rabbit hole of the internet. It means teaching kids ways to break down a complex text, find key ideas, organize them and defend them. Practicing those skills in class can be time-consuming, but it also builds good digital reading habits that hopefully become second nature.

"The goal in almost all the strategies is to slow the kids down so they are focusing on this text," Hess said. "Number two is to engage them in an active way with the text, and number three you want to encourage oral discourse. And number four you want them to do some reflection." Those steps should sound familiar to teachers because they are important for any kind of reading for comprehension and analysis. The trick for teachers is to learn how to transfer these processes into the digital space and push them even further.
"HEADINGS AND HIGHLIGHT" STRATEGY
Most of Hess' tricks are easy to do in Google Docs, a free tool many schools are adopting because it's easy for students to access their work anywhere. In this strategy, students have an excerpt of a difficult article open in Google Docs. First, the teacher asks students to read through on their own and highlight words they don't know. This is basic decoding work.

After everyone is on the same page with the vocabulary, teachers can ask pairs of students to read a paragraph together and highlight key ideas. As they do this, they'll have to discuss why they believe those parts are important. After they have a few minutes to do this activity, the teacher can ask them to individually devise a four-word heading for that portion of the text based on the main ideas they've highlighted. They can type their heading into the Google Doc and then compare the headings each created.

"If you came up with something different, you have to now justify why yours is better," Hess said. Once again, students have to defend their thinking using text. "Making that heading has forced us to dig into the text," Hess said.

The teacher can then ask for all the agreed-upon headings and pair different groups together so that four students have to discuss their headings and come to consensus on the single best representation of the main ideas. "When you walk around and listen, what the kids are talking about is the text," Hess said. At the end, the teacher might have groups present or even have the whole class vote on their favorite heading. And individually students can reflect on the process they went through, how the heading helps them understand the reading, and how it helps them answer the driving question of the unit.

Hess is the first to admit that this strategy could easily be done with paper and pencil. The only real affordance of the technology is the ability to change the heading multiple times in a clean way. But it does help teachers see how to bring dialogue and discussion into the classroom, even when students are reading on the computer, and it has achieved the goal of slowing down reading. When students practice this method they may internalize it as well and start looking for the main idea in each paragraph as they read.

"Part of it is getting kids to be thinking about why they are reading something," Hess said. Often kids will read an entire paragraph, understand all the words in it, but never slow down to make meaning or look for main ideas. This basic reading strategy forces them to do so. Once students can identify the main idea of a reading, the next task is to understand the flow of the ideas and to connect concepts.

The "Document outline" tool in Google Docs can be an easy and effective way to ask students to pick out evidence that supports the main ideas they've found. When this tool is turned on, students can write a heading for the paragraph or group of paragraphs and select "Heading 1" from the drop-down menu. When they come across a sentence or phrase that represents evidence supporting that main idea, they summarize it and label it "Heading 2."

Meanwhile, along the side of the Google Doc an outline will automatically populate with main ideas in Heading 1 and supporting evidence nested below in Heading 2. At the end, the whole essay is outlined and can be "exported to table of contents," which will put it at the top of the document, where it can be used as a jumping-off point for writing.

The technology didn't do any of the thinking for students, but in this case the software helped build an outline as students discuss and winnow down their evidence, and their work has been conveniently saved in an easy-to-review manner. That makes initiating writing -- often hard for students -- much easier. And the headings in the outline are links that automatically skip to the part of the text where students inserted that heading. "You've created an active document," Hess said.

Even better in Hess' mind, when a teacher sees an outline like this he or she can easily tell if the student understood the reading. To create the outline students have to comprehend the text; decoding isn't enough. Hess says he uses this strategy all the time when reading documents for his own work because it's useful, not just a tedious exercise to force kids to slow down.

If a school or teacher isn't using Google Docs, a similar type of "talking to the text" can be achieved using Diigo, which also allows users to share marked-up documents with one another that include comments or highlights.
HIGHLIGHTING STRATEGY
Students have been highlighting print texts for a long time, but anyone who has picked up an old copy of a high school text knows that sometimes the various highlights can get confusing. Teachers sometimes try to organize students by having them highlight different concepts in different colors, but the text can end up quite messy and hard to read after all that highlighting.

Hess worked with a student to improve on a "highlighter tool," Google Doc add-on that the student created in his computer science class. The tool lets users create individualized highlighters in different colors. So, for example, all the text that supports "Argument #1" might be in red, while the evidence in "Argument #2" might be in green, and so on. The highlights can be exported by color, which creates a table with all the ideas. Hess often suggests that students then add another column to the highlighter table, where they can write summaries of everything in that highlighted category.

"It helps them discern between different things, and secondly, you've asked them to summarize what they've done," Hess said. That provides good reflection and consolidation of the information they just picked out. Since some kids have difficulty prioritizing what to highlight, a teacher could limit the number of items for each color.

In this case, the highlighting strategy is made much easier and more effective because it is digital. The various colors are labeled so the student doesn't need a key to decipher highlights and all the information can be exported in one table, rather than having to sift back through the entire article.

Hess warns that many of these strategies should first be taught using a text that isn't a difficult cognitive lift for students so they can learn the reading strategy and the digital tools without also having to puzzle their way through a difficult text. A new tech tool and a new learning challenge at the same time are a recipe for frustration.

While these strategies take time, they also get students deeply engaged with texts that may be difficult for them. Digital tools that modify articles for different reading levels, like Newsela, have a time and a place -- like getting students on the same page about a topic so they can debate -- but there are drawbacks to offering students only texts at their level.

"If you are constantly bringing it down, you lose some of the richness," Hess said. And challenging texts that force students to struggle also help them grow. "You can have someone reading a very complex text if you can scaffold it," Hess said.
TEACHER REACTIONS
Evelyn Cervantes is an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose, California. Although located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the school only has a few laptop carts that all the teachers share. Cervantes knows many of her students are online at home a lot and she wants to make sure the lower-income students the school also serves are learning good digital skills when at school. In the past she experimented with showing videos in class and using a polling app, but wasn't very impressed with how those tools impacted learning for her students.

"I felt like it was very much about giving information to the kids, so more delivery of information, and not much beyond that," Cervantes said. She has been pushing herself to use some of the strategies Hess taught her and likes the way they require students to engage deeply with text. She's tired of students copying and pasting text without doing any analysis.

"The strategies make it so that students have to slow down and analyze what they're reading," Cervantes said. She also noticed that when kids had their own computers they often didn't really engage in dialogue when they were asked to share with a partner. Instead, they would merely share their screens. In response she halved the number of computers in the room, so pairs of students would have to share. After that modification she started to see much more robust dialogue.

Cervantes says although many of the strategies Hess taught her could be done on paper, she likes using Google Docs because the outlines and annotations students create during class can easily become their notes. She can review them and return them quickly, touching on common themes or helping to point out holes in the thinking of the class.

Hess emphasizes that all these digital reading tools must be used within the context of bigger, interesting questions, or else the strategies just become a list of steps. While Socratic seminars can take a lot of preparation, students are identifying main ideas, categorizing evidence and highlighting important passages in the service of an argument that they care about, which makes the whole process more meaningful.

A New Yorker article dedicated to the question of whether students read as deeply on digital devices as in print focuses on the work of Maryanne Wolf, as well as others studying the space. Several studies found the decrease in comprehension on digital devices was more due to distractions on the internet than to the medium itself. Perhaps self-control is among the key skills to teach students expected to read more online.

In the article, Maria Konnikova ends on a hopeful note:

"Wolf is optimistic that we can learn to navigate online reading just as deeply as we once did print-if we go about it with the necessary thoughtfulness. In a new study, the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped improve comprehension and reading strategy use in a group of fifth graders. It turns out that they could read deeply. They just had to be taught how."

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Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When Reading Digitally | KQED

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"There is that danger of silencing that discourse, to the degree that teachers were using it anyway," Hess said. He acknowledges that too few teachers know how to effectively facilitate academic discussions in classrooms, and that often "turn and talk to a partner" devolves into "turn and gossip."

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Using the Arts to Synthesize Student Understanding 

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Using the Arts to Synthesize Student Understanding 

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Sharma partnered with Leah Quinter, an elementary visual arts teacher, to teach the physics of flight. Their final product: a large, whole-class acrylic painting that shows the four forces of flight-thrust, lift, gravity, and drag. The painting will be displayed at Reagan National Airport to solve their problem in science: teaching people at the airport how airplanes stay in the sky.

"Particularly in the elementary school, we have a heavy focus on arts integration as it relates to our expeditions-[in depth, content-specific, problem-based learning explorations that are a part of expeditionary learning]," explains Tonia Vines, a dramatic arts teacher. "Twice a year, we integrate social studies or science content with drama or visual arts." Students have 45-minute visual arts classes twice a week for half the year, and then take drama classes for the rest of the year.

"Arts integration is about reaching as many students as you can," explains Sharma. "Being able to have that tactile experience of flinging paint at the paper, or pouring paint down a paper to see how gravity works, it connects what they've learned in art to their everyday experiences, instead of just that one classroom experience."

How It's Done

Start With Research

If you're uncomfortable with your partner's academic or arts subject, try studying the content. "Through researching, you can start to think about ways to integrate," explains Quinter. She suggests that you ask yourself:

Where does this match my subject?

Where does this match my content areas?

What are my goals for my students, and how can we reach those in both subjects?

Plan Together

Share with each other what your standards and learning targets are, look for common goals, and brainstorm topics, guiding questions, and a final art product that can both deepen the academic learning and teach the art content. At Two Rivers Public Charter School, during the three-week orientation each summer, teachers have two 2-hour sessions to co-plan, and when school starts, they have two or three 1-hour sessions during professional development. They continue to plan after school, over email, and via Google Docs. Here is the visual art unit map (PDF) Sharma and Quinter created connecting the four forces of flight to art.

Test Your Plan

Once you've decided on a final art product, make a model. "We believe in testing it first ourselves," says Sharma. "If we're having fun and learning from it, then it might work with our kids. If we're bored, then we go back and start again." Creating a model not only gives you experience with the process but also shows your students an example of what great work looks like and what they're striving for.

Build on Your Strengths and Weaknesses

If you discover a product that resonates with your students, repeat it. "Sharanya and I would discuss the content and what was strong about what we've done in the past, and then where we'd like to push that thinking further," remembers Quinter. "What we were missing was cementing the two classes together and a lot of debrief time." With shorter visual art classes, students spent more time on making art and less time discussing the connection to their science. To reinforce what the students have just learned in art or academics, Sharma and Quinter:

Use common vocabulary.

Use the same reference materials.

Ask their students what they learned that day in the other class.

"She's asking them what they did in art, and I'm asking them what they did in science. That's been helpful," reflects Quinter.

Outside of reflecting with each other, Sharma and Quinter also get feedback on their instructional planning from a group of teachers who analyze their students' work-discussing where their students are in their understanding, what's being assessed, and what next steps Sharma and Quinter can take to better reach their learning targets. (See Analyze Student Work to Inform Instruction and The Power of Vulnerability in Professional Development.)

Integrate the Arts Through Experiments

A common challenge with arts integration is ensuring that you're meeting your arts standards. "It's not just an add-on or something fun at the end," emphasizes Quinter. "It's something that truly deepens their understanding of that content, and also the arts."

"This year, they used the forces themselves to make the art," says Sharma, "where in past years they would draw a picture of that force at work and incorporate that into their final product, which was a booklet incorporating illustrations of the physics."

Along with their collaborative acrylic painting this year, Quinter's class did three experiments:

Three Experiment Ideas

Marble Experiment: Quinter's students started with a copier paper box lid. They put paper, two to three drops of tempera paint, and a marble inside. Students grouped into pairs, moved the lid around, and watched how the marble interacted with the paint.

"We rolled the marble around, and it made the lines of thrust to go forward because thrust means to go forward," explains Paz.

Salad Spinner Experiment: "They placed circle-shaped paper at the bottom of the salad spinner," explains Quinter. "Dripped six to eight drops of liquid watercolor inside, closed the lid, and spun it-their arms demonstrating thrust to power the spinner, and the paper conveying drag lines visible as the paint was pulled. They could go fast. They could go slow. When they opened the lid, they observed what happened."

Waterfall Experiment: In pairs, Quinter's students poured watered-down tempera paint onto paper attached to a clipboard. "They would manipulate the board to see if it would change the reaction of the paint," says Quinter. "What they would often discover is that it did not, that gravity was always pulling the paint down, no matter how they spun the board."

During your experiments, ask your students guiding questions. Ask them what they're seeing and have them explain why. Challenge them -- say, "Is it this? Is it not that?" advises Quinter.

"Before they start doing this in art, they just think, 'Physics has to do with planes,'" explains Sharma. "It doesn't occur to them that physics is actually all around us, and science is all around us. Anyone can be a scientist. It's not just someone who studies science."

Use Artist Statements for Assessment

Have your students show their understanding through an artist statement. "Artist statements are a great way for artists to share what they've done in their artwork, why they've done it, the materials they've used, and how it has changed their thinking or deepened their understanding," explains Quinter. "It's a way for students to present their artwork and their understanding through the artwork."

To create an artist statement:

Step One: Begin by showing your students real artists statements. Have them analyze what does and does not make a good artist statement, and ask them what they should include in theirs.

Step Two: Have your students critique each other's artist statements: What word choices did they use? How did they make their artist statement come alive? In what ways did they describe their artwork?

"The whole point is for the teachers to facilitate rather than direct," says Sharma. "It would be easy for us to say, 'A good artist statement has three sentences that describe the art, and they say something like this....' But in order for them to have ownership over their own learning, we say, 'What makes this artist statement good? What do you think?'"

For each art experiment, every student writes their own artist statement, and they use those critiques to inform their collaborative artist statement for their final product.

"The learning objectives for the artist statement are twofold," explains Sharma. "The first one is a content-based learning target, explaining how the the forces work together to make an airplane fly. And the second is our literacy learning target, using descriptive words and strong adjectives to describe their art."

Jessica Wodatch, Two Rivers' executive director, believes, "It's exciting to see kids who have been stuck on a concept, and all of a sudden they get it. The arts are another avenue to help kids understand something, and they make the classroom much richer."

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Using the Arts to Synthesize Student Understanding | Edutopia

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Sharma partnered with Leah Quinter, an elementary visual arts teacher, to teach the physics of flight. Their final product: a large, whole-class acrylic painting that shows the four forces of flight-thrust, lift, gravity, and drag. The painting will be displayed at Reagan National Airport to solve their problem in science: teaching people at the airport how airplanes stay in the sky.

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Literacy Instruction with Digital and Media Technologies

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Literacy Instruction with Digital and Media Technologies

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As new literacies that include digital and media technologies evolve, preparing students to understand and adjust to these literacy demands is critical to current and future expectations for pleasure and work (International Reading Association, 2001; Leu, Mallette, Karchmer, & Kara-Soteriou, 2005). For instance, teachers may identify with past models of literacy that are paper and pencil bound; however, new conceptions involve continually changing views of reading and writing, particularly with the advent of the Internet (Leu et al., 2004; Warschauer, 2006). These new literacies include innovative text formats (multiple media or hybrid texts; Lemke, 1998), new reader expectations (reading nonlinearly; Warschauer, 2006), and new activities (website publication; Leu et al., 2004). They extend traditional literacy experiences with comprehension of information on the Internet; effective use of search engines to locate information; evaluation of Internet sources; communication using e-mail, texts, and chats; and the use of word processing programs (International Society for Technology in Education, 2007).

The Internet has caused educators to confront issues related to new technologies, as previous technological innovations have never been adopted so rapidly and in so many places simultaneously. The Internet allows for immediate dissemination of information through the click of a single link, for instance (Warschauer, 2006). Moreover, Internet access has become common in schools. In 2005, approximately 95% of K-12 classrooms in the United States had Internet access (Parsad & Jones, 2005). Additionally, 80% of kindergartners use computers and over 50% of children younger than 9 years old use the Internet (Goldberg, Russell, & Cook, 2003). However, the average of U.S. students' use of computers in school was 12 minutes per week (Wells & Lewis, 2006). This descriptive data points out that computers and Internet access are available to students, but most students do not have sufficient time in school with this technology to develop new literacies.

Bringing new literacies into a classroom is not an easy task for a teacher, especially when two thirds of teachers feel underprepared to use technology (Kajder, 2005). Teachers face additional challenges as well. These include problems with resources (lack of technology, time, or technical support), teacher knowledge and skills (inadequate technological and pedagogical knowledge), school leadership (lack of school planning or scheduling), teachers' attitudes and beliefs (not valuing or being fearful of the use of new technologies), and assessments (traditional rather than matching new literacies' expectations; Hew & Brush, 2007). Additionally, Leu et al. (2005) identified the following three important points to ponder before bringing new literacies to classrooms:

1. Simply using software programs on computers does not prepare students for new literacies' expectations.

2. New literacies are deictic in that they constantly change and require teachers to embrace these changes.

3. New literacies are essential in classrooms so that equal opportunities are offered to all students.

Although educators may assume that bringing new literacies into the classroom, especially through the use of a laptop for each child (one-to-one laptops), is a new technological innovation in education, the reality is that these structures have been in existence for almost 20 years (Dunleavy, Dexter, & Heinecke, 2007). The first documented use of one-to-one laptops was in Melbourne at a private girls' school in 1990 (Johnstone, 2003). In the late 1990s, Microsoft's initiative, Anytime Anywhere Learning Program, brought laptop learning to 1,000 schools. By 2005, 55% of U.S. schools had instructional laptops, although not necessarily one-to-one laptop classrooms (Warschauer, 2006). Many schools used carts with laptops with wireless access to support instruction as a substitution or transition to one-to-one laptop classrooms.

Warschauer's (2006) research found that laptops and connections to the Internet provided scaffolding for many classroom topics, thus building background knowledge. He noted increased student engagement in wireless classrooms as students participated in more diverse writing activities, analysis of reading, and use of media-production software. Finally, he observed how students gained control of reading on the page as well as the screen. The students realized that there was more to a computer than games or chatting and gained practice in reading for a variety of purposes, such as interpreting the textual and visual elements in a document and knowing how to navigate and find information.

As more classrooms and schools adopt one-to-one laptop instruction, the need to document the work of teachers and students in such settings is important (Dunleavy et al., 2007). The descriptions found in this article provide the pragmatic details of making such a transition in instruction and can serve as roadmaps for teachers considering such a shift in their instructional practice. We have responded to the need for rich description of exemplary new literacies instruction by sharing Todd Wright's journey in bringing laptops and new literacies into his school and classroom. Todd (second author) teaches at Fernley Elementary, a rural Nevada elementary school with about 565 students. The majority of students are white (68%) with the largest minority group being Hispanic (24%). Approximately 45% of students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch.

Todd's classroom through the experiences of Michael

In most schools, the opening day is spent with students coming to know their new teacher and classmates, getting materials, and learning the new rules and expectations. Imagine the excitement on fourth-grade students' faces when, in addition to meeting their teacher, Mr. Wright, and their classmates, they are issued their own laptops for the year, which they will use in and out of school.

To gain an understanding of what learning is like in this classroom, we share a narrative centered on the literacy instruction of Michael-a collective identity of several students. This example brings the use of technology as a tool to life as it showcases how a laptop complements and extends traditional literacy learning and supports student engagement. We provide a photograph of students working in Todd's class (see Figure 1) so that readers can get a sense of the classroom. To see additional visuals of students and their classwork, visit www.fes.lyon.k12.nv.us. The descriptions shared in this article only target explicit literacy instruction and learning; however, technology is integrated with all subject areas including math, science, and social studies.

Figure 1. Students in Todd's classroom

Routines in Michael's Literacy Instruction

As soon as Michael enters his classroom, he takes out his laptop to pick up any files from the school server that his teacher has put there for the day and checks the class webpage (see Figure 2 for the layout of the class webpage). These files may include learning centers, writing prompts, graphic organizers, digital worksheets, URLs, media files (pictures, audio, or video), or corrected work. By bringing these files to his computer, Michael is ready for the teaching and learning expectations of the day. Michael then synchronizes his class calendar with the teacher's so he has the up-to-date homework and event schedule.

Figure 2. The class webpage

Once these activities are complete, he checks to see what the morning sponge is (an activity to keep students engaged as Todd checks in with individual students). Today the sponge is centered on vocabulary, so Michael uses the thesaurus on his laptop for the word launched so that he can gain an idea of what this word means and learn about related words. He then uses his word processing application to write a sentence using this word, thereby demonstrating his understanding of its definition. Complementing the sentence is a nonlinguistic representation of the word that he creates by using a drawing application (see Figure 3). This activity and the class webpage demonstrate the hybridity evident in new literacies documents (Lemke, 1998), where students use word processing, drawing, or music in a single document.

Figure 3. Visual representation of vocabulary words

Shifting to More Formal Literacy Instruction During the Reading Block

Most days, Michael's teacher leads the class through a short minilesson on a reading comprehension or vocabulary strategy before engaging in differentiated instruction. Today they read Just a Dream by Chris Van Allsburg from their basal reader. Before they start reading, students open up a timeline graphic organizer on their computers, which supports the week's reading comprehension strategy-sequence of events. Students use instant messaging (IM) to pair-share during the reading of the story with their 8 o'clock buddy. (Todd has a clock for each student with a different person's name near each time. When he says a time, students know their partner.) Todd begins reading and stops the class periodically for discussion and to add events to their timeline graphic organizer. They also pause when prompted by the teacher to use IM to share their thoughts and answers to questions with their partner. Most of this instructional process is familiar to teachers; what is novel is completing a timeline on a computer screen and having students use IM to deepen comprehension and foster engagement.

When the story is completed, Michael and his classmates spend a substantial part of their literacy block arranged in a Seat-Center-Circle organizational structure. Technology is integrated throughout the Seat and Center parts (those parts where students work independently), but not Circle. Circle is when small groups of students meet with the teacher and read and study leveled reading books. During Circle time, the teacher most often works on traditional literacy expectations grounded in print. However, during independent times, students engage in new literacies through the use of technology.

When working independently, Michael does one of three things. The first is to respond to a writing prompt on his computer that is directly related to the story or informational text read that day. Michael also completes a digital practice sheet or worksheet, a more traditional use of technology. The third activity is a book study. Students are offered multiple titles that are related to the theme of the core program from which to choose. As Michael is reading his book, he may use a Venn diagram (see Figure 4) or a comparison map to relate his chosen book to stories from the theme. Michael also joins a blog where other students reading the same book contribute and comment on each other's postings (see Figure 5). Michael participates in center activities that are Internet-based and related to the week's story and reading skills. The links that Michael uses are all on the class website so that he doesn't have to spend time locating them.

Figure 4. Venn Diagram Comparing Maniac Magee to Other Characters

Figure 5. Example of a Book Blog for Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater

Breaks in Instruction

During recess breaks throughout the day, students are free to stay in the room and engage in noninstructional activities. Michael engages in sending IMs, checking and sending e-mail, and going online to enter kid-friendly virtual worlds like Club Penguin (www.miniclip.com/games/club-penguin/en/). Students, particularly those who do not have Internet access at home, enjoy engaging in these activities during breaks in instruction.

Differentiated Literacy Instruction

After recess Michael logs on to KidBiz Achieve3000 (www.kidbiz3000.com), a web-based, individualized reading and writing instruction program. First, he checks his KidBiz e-mail and replies to a question meant to stimulate background information for a current events article. After he finishes replying, he reads the article. This article is written at his reading level, so the whole class is reading similar articles but at different reading levels.

Similar to other teachers, Todd is expected to prepare his students for high-stakes assessment. He has Michael complete the thought questions from the KidBiz website. Thought questions are questions or writing prompts related to the article that call for students to use information from what they read to write a constructed response-a response that clearly answers the question. This is very similar to criterion-referenced test (CRT) constructed response questions and provides students experience with this expectation. For instance, the question that Michael responded to was, "National Basketball Association players are honoring soldiers during basketball games. Is this a good idea? Use ideas from the story in your answer." After the class has finished their assigned KidBiz tasks, there is either a whole-class or small-group discussion of the article to extend meaning and explore answers.

Following this reading and responding, Michael opens the Internet browser and clicks on a link that takes him to a webpage with all of the stories his class is reading this year. He finds Just a Dream and clicks on Vocabulary from the pull-down menu. With this click, he is taken to a site called Flashcard Exchange, where his teacher has already entered vocabulary words for him to practice.

Writing Instruction

After this independent practice, Todd shifts to writing instruction. He begins by posing the question, "Have you or anyone you've known ever had an imaginary friend? Instant message your 3 o'clock buddy and tell him or her about this imaginary friend." Then he leads a discussion about the writing trait, Ideas and Content, and tells the class to listen for good examples of this writing trait as he reads a picture book, Ted by Tony DiTerlizzi, about a boy with an imaginary friend. Although Todd wants them to do a Quick Write (first draft writing) on their laptops about an imaginary friend, he does not feel they are ready for this writing, so he has them return to the Internet to an interactive writing prompt found at www.writingfix.com. This particular prompt encourages Michael to describe his imaginary friend's color, size, and amazing features. With this preparation in place, Michael and his classmates start the Quick Write. While everyone is writing, Todd confers with three to four students about their individual writing and ways to improve it. This activity demonstrates once again the seamless movement from traditional literacy practices, like reading a book, to new literacies through using IM and writing at a website.

As Michael's class completes more Quick Writes, they are saved electronically into a folder to revisit later. Every two weeks or so, Michael is instructed to go back through his Quick Writes and pick one that he would like to take through the writing process. Michael then uses the software program Inspiration (www.inspiration.com) to organize and brainstorm his story or informational text. Following his first-draft writing, he revises using the built-in thesaurus to help with word choice and the built-in spelling and grammar check to edit his piece. Michael has learned that he has to be careful when doing these checks as he can't just assume the computer is always correct. The next step in this process is peer review, where a fellow student reads and evaluates Michael's writing electronically. Finally, after several revisions and edits, he is ready to print out and post his writing on the writing bulletin board in his class.

End of the Day Routines

Before leaving school, Michael picks up his homework from the server. Tonight's homework is a graphic organizer that is to be filled out from a webpage. Todd saved a copy of the webpage for pickup because not all of Michael's classmates have Internet access at home. Michael leaves school with his laptop tucked into his backpack, ready for out-of-school learning.

Getting there

In Todd's words,

What makes today's kids really sit up and fires their neural fibers? Technology. Kids don't see laptops, MP3 players, cell phones, PDAs, DVD players, and video games as technology, it's just life. Schools need to connect education to their students' lives with technology.

That is exactly the path that Fernley Elementary School took. Following are some of the important details of this process.

Teacher and Principal Initiative

Todd shares this transformation to new literacies through his personal journey as an educator who wants to upgrade to a 21st-century model for teaching. He says,

I feel passionately that my job as a teacher is to prepare my students for their future. I started this journey 10 years ago when I began exposing my students to as much technology as possible. At the beginning, it was one Internet-connected desktop computer.

Fernley Elementary School was very much like any other public elementary school 10 years ago, one where teachers solely relied on books and paper for teaching. Todd began his quest to bring technology to his classroom with one computer with Internet access. The turning point came when Fernley received a new administrator, Alan Reeder, who had the desire and drive to improve student achievement through an infusion of technology and who was willing to provide leadership and support. The school targeted a goal that 80% of instruction in each content area would be supported with technology in fourth and fifth grades-an ambitious one for a rural Nevada school.

The first step was to start a computer lab (a classroom equipped with multiple computers with Internet access for teachers to use with their students) and purchase two mobile, wireless, laptop labs. Todd took over the teaching of the lab, where every class, K-5, visited once a week. He taught students to use technology as a tool to help them accomplish grade level expectations and to meet the essential learning outcomes required by district and state standards. At this time at Fernley, technology-supported instruction occurred most often in the lab with Todd, but teachers were also bringing technological innovations into their classrooms through the mobile laptop labs. They were encouraged in these first tentative endeavors by Todd, who nudged them to try and supported them as they did.

After three years teaching with the lab and mobile labs, the principal wrote a grant for 2 one-to-one laptop classrooms and received funding. Todd left the computer lab and took over in the fourth-grade one-to-one classroom. His transition to this classroom was supported by his three years in the computer lab, where he taught students digital and media technologies, and his previous teaching in fourth grade. As he began his new position, he brought a strong knowledge base of new technologies to his students (see Table 1 for many of the technologies to which students have access) and a current knowledge base of exemplary literacy instruction. His students brought their technological experiences from the computer lab setting as the foundation for their in-class extended experiences with laptops in the fourth grade.

Table 1. Applications and web support available to students at fernley elementary

Web support

Flashcard Exchange: Teachers can input information for flashcards and students access them online.

Gaggle.net: This website allows students to e-mail and blog.

Google Earth: We use this so they see where everything is in the world.

Inspiration graphic organizer/outline software: We use Inspiration as a graphic organizer before we write or as we read a story. We use it for note taking in science or social studies.

KidBiz: This website integrates technology and routine classroom curriculum

netTrekker: This is a search engine made especially for schools. Sites have all been previewed by educators. Sites are rated by reading level and they have a speech function built in. Also, sites can be searched by state standard.

QuizStar: Teachers enter in quizzes for students to take online. The site gives a breakdown of each question so teachers can see how many students got a question right or wrong.

Thesaurus.com: This site provides information about a word of the day, a dictionary, and thesaurus support.

Unitedstreaming: Teachers use this to access educational videos.

WritingFix: We use this to teach writing traits, and students really like the interactive prompts.

Teaching in a One-to-One Classroom

What has each student's access to a laptop meant for Todd's teaching? It has made Todd rethink how he teaches everything, and it has made him a better teacher. He says,

Every week when I am lesson planning, I consider how I can best integrate the technology. I don't use the technology just for the sake of using it. I want to use it in a way that enhances learning and best motivates students. I find myself borrowing ideas from colleagues, the Internet, and educational publications. I am a better teacher because I am making my students' learning relevant to them and their times.

In listening to Todd, it is evident that the challenges of bringing technology to his classroom are also sources of creativity and enthusiasm. At first, Todd says that time management was an issue. It took him longer to plan, as he explains. "I had to think about all of the kids having laptops and infusing technology in real ways." Coming from a lab offered Todd background in technological applications, but the sessions in the lab were typically for a half hour to an hour per week per class. Now he had to plan for full-day instruction with technology infused into all subject areas over the course of an academic year. Even with the initial time demands for planning and preparation, Todd finds himself, after three years of teaching with new literacies, still excited by the possibilities for student engagement and learning.

Preparation and Professional Support

Todd was not working alone through this major learning and teaching shift at his school. He received support from Apple when he became an Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE). For more information on what the ADE program is, visit Apple's edcommunity. For Todd, the greatest benefit of being an ADE was attending their Institute to learn cutting-edge techniques for integrating technology and joining a worldwide community of educators who understood the importance of teaching students with today's technology.

Apple didn't just prepare Todd to teach with digital and media technologies, they came to Fernley and provided professional development for all the school's teachers. The training involved a mixture of learning applications and ways to integrate laptop instruction with lessons and standards already being taught. With Apple's support, Todd became responsible for continuous, on site, professional development. Each summer he offers a 20-hour technology-related workshop for teachers. In these workshops, he introduces teachers to learning with a laptop and shows them how to use its potential in daily instruction.

Simultaneous with this support, Todd created a group of students known as Wright's Techies, students from his fourth-grade class who had moved up to fifth grade. Their responsibilities are to be tech-savvy enough to assist their fifth-grade teachers and classmates. They are expected to help with everything concerning the laptops, including knowing the operation of all applications and troubleshooting problems.

The training of Wright's Techies is twofold. The majority of their training comes during their fourth-grade year, where they are exposed to how laptops and applications work. The second part occurs in the summer, a few weeks before school starts. Todd brings Wright's Techies in for a day to review any changes to the laptops for the upcoming year. They also learn how to assist their new fifth-grade teachers and classmates, who will not be as familiar with the technology. Teachers are pleased with the resources brought to them through the support of the Wright's Techies. They value the help with troubleshooting and teaching other students the technology so they can focus on content.

Preparing Students for New Literacies

When viewing a typical day for Michael, readers may wonder how a student came to be so proficient with new literacies. Fernley has carefully scaffolded new literacies for all students. New literacies instruction begins in kindergarten when students visit the computer lab or work on a laptop in their classroom. Students learn how to visit, explore, and learn from material shared on websites. They learn to write using word-processing programs. They also become familiar with multimedia projects, like those created with PowerPoint.

In third grade, students' classrooms have eight laptops in addition to two student desktop stations. When visiting third-grade classrooms, it is common to see students investigating ideas using the Internet and reporting on their discoveries. Third grade serves as the transitional year where students continue to visit the lab and also have laptops available in their classrooms, thus becoming better prepared for fourth-grade instruction. In fourth and fifth grades, students work solely in their one-to-one laptop classrooms. Their teachers, with the guidance of Todd, extend students' earlier experiences with new literacies and bridge intermittent laptop use to consistent use in fourth grade.

During these early explorations with technology, keyboarding techniques are shared with students and practiced somewhat. Todd observed that "keyboarding slows students down, and often their hands are not large enough for proper keyboarding." Most students have some practice with keyboarding but are allowed to develop their own style. As Todd has worked closely with fourth- and fifth-grade students in one-to-one classrooms, he noted that, "their speed triples by the end of one year through their constant use of the keyboard."

As seen in these entries into technology in the primary grades, students are prepared for its more extensive use when they enter fourth grade. During this year, their everyday use of digital and media technologies expands as they routinely create multimedia projects using various software programs. They create music, voice recordings, and podcasts. They create books and graphic organizers using Internet links and graphics. Finally, they become comfortable using blogs, e-mail, and instant messaging for sharing ideas.

When asked about his classroom and the changes to his students brought about by the use of new technologies, Todd says,

The number one thing laptops have done is motivation. Kids are sitting up and leaning into their learning. As a teacher, this is the one thing I want from my students. If I have them engaged and motivated, the sky's the limit.

Students leave Fernley better equipped with the skills required in their futures. They know how to expertly search for information on the Internet, how to evaluate the reliability of different websites, how to find information on a website, and how to take notes from the Internet. Moreover, they know how to use word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software (International Society for Technology in Education, 2007).

Do new technologies result in student learning?

What effects are seen on student learning is the big question for many educators who want answers before bringing new technologies to classrooms. This question is not an easy one to answer. Coiro (2005) indicated that there were improvements noted in comprehension when teachers were given instruction in new technology use. Teachers learned how to support students in comprehending Internet text that is not linear or fixed and, as a result, became more effective at facilitating comprehension on the page or screen. Warschauer (2006) also documented gains in motivation, writing competency, and critical thinking when laptops were used in the classroom.

However, the biggest hurdle when considering new technologies and student learning is that most assessments evaluate traditional literacy and content knowledge. For instance, in current assessments students read on the page and answer questions, or they write on paper to document writing proficiency. A better question related to assessment is, What can students do with new literacies that is not measured by current assessments (Leu et al., 2005)? For example, when thinking about writing assessment, although students are asked to handwrite a composition, the majority of writing today occurs on computers, and this type of writing is typical in one-to-one classrooms. So students in one-to-one classrooms are not able to demonstrate writing competency using familiar technological support because they must rely on traditional expectations. How much more sophisticated would their writing be if they could use the technological tools with which they are familiar?

To answer the important achievement question at Fernley, teachers routinely examine the assessments that students complete, both formative and outcome. Teachers use classroom-based assessment to refine instruction, and they use quarterly benchmark assessments tied to the district's and state's standards. Within this repertoire of formative assessments, classroom-based assessments are the only ones that target new literacies. The biggest challenge for Fernley is to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) as measured by the state criterion-referenced test (CRT) and writing test administered to fifth graders. Since 2002, Fernley has made AYP each year. During the 2006-2007 year, they qualified as a high achieving school for the growth in students who reached benchmark criteria. The most current CRT results indicated the following about the school's fourth graders:

72% met or exceeded the benchmark criteria for English language arts

65% of those qualifying for free or reduced-cost lunches met or exceeded the benchmark criteria for English language arts

67% of Hispanic students met or exceeded the benchmark criteria for English language arts

When considering CRT scores, it is important to note that students were not asked to evaluate a website, read a website, or gain information from a website. Neither of the assessments, formative or outcome, asked students even to use a word processor. Neither of these assessments quantify students' engagement as they learn. So until assessments include at least the first two components, it will be difficult to more precisely measure the additional knowledge students gain from using digital and media literacies. However, as shown by the data from this school, students did not regress on outcome assessments because of the inclusion of new literacies.

Essential Elements for Successful Implementation of New Literacies

The journey to new literacies through the use of technology happened at Fernley and can happen at other schools. Schools must consider their preparation for and response to several key elements before embarking on this journey (Hew & Brush, 2007). Fundamental to any implementation are resources that include access to sufficient technology, time for teachers and students to learn the technological applications, and technological support. At Fernley, the principal acquired the funding through grants and had a leader in place in Todd Wright. Moreover, Fernley carefully planned its initial support with Apple and continuing support and professional development with Todd for success.

A second issue is teacher knowledge and attitude about new literacies (Hew & Brush, 2007). Fernley presents a case study of working with teacher knowledge and attitude through a gradual model of moving to new literacies. Primary teachers are carefully supported with the lab and the gradual introduction of classroom laptops. In third grade, there are higher expectations for teachers to bring digital and media technologies to their classrooms. These efforts are carefully supported with Todd's leadership, ongoing professional development, and student experts. By fourth grade, teachers are aware of the extended expectations for laptop learning and instruction, and students are prepared for this more consistent use of digital and media literacies. To bring new teachers to new literacies and to provide support for returning teachers, there are summer workshops to refine teachers' knowledge about technology and explore ways to use it in learning. Todd similarly provides summer workshop support for student technology leaders.

A final issue is centered on assessment. The question of how students achieve on traditional assessments will affect those who make decisions about moving to new literacies. This question, although important, is losing its power as major assessments like the National Assessment of Educational Progress move to the use of computers (Olson, 2007).

Final encouragement

When Todd was asked why a teacher would want to take on learning about and using new literacies, especially with the additional work, time, and thinking required, he replied,

Teachers take on this challenge because it is their job to prepare students for the future. There is a steep learning curve at the beginning, but after the first year, most teachers won't spend any more time preparing lessons. Once teachers have training in using laptops and how to integrate technology with state standards there is greater student engagement in learning. Teachers will see that giving a laptop to a student results in greater engagement. Greater engagement equals higher achievement. End of story.

About the authors

Barone teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA; e-mail [email protected]

Wright teaches at Fernley Elementary School, Fernley, Nevada; e-mail [email protected]

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Literacy Instruction with Digital and Media Technologies

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As new literacies that include digital and media technologies evolve, preparing students to understand and adjust to these literacy demands is critical to current and future expectations for pleasure and work (International Reading Association, 2001; Leu, Mallette, Karchmer, & Kara-Soteriou, 2005).

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Many elite athletes routinely use visualization techniques as part of training and competition. There are many stories of athletes who have used these techniques to cultivate not only a competitive edge but also to create renewed mental awareness, a heightened sense of well-being, and confidence. All of these factors have been shown to contribute to an athlete's sports success.

Visualization Techniques for Better Sports Performance

Visualization has also been called guided imagery, mental rehearsal, mediation, and a variety of other things - no matter the term, the basic techniques and concepts are the same. Generally speaking, visualization is the process of creating a mental image or intention of what you want to happen or feel in reality.

An athlete can use this technique to 'intend' an outcome of a race or training session, or simply to rest in a relaxed feeling of calm and well-being. By imagining a scene, complete with images of a previous best performance or a future desired outcome, the athlete is instructed to simply 'step into' that feeling. While imagining these scenarios, the athlete should try to imagine the detail and the way it feels to perform in the desired way.

These scenarios can include any of the senses. They can be visual (images and pictures), kinesthetic (how the body feels), or auditory (the roar of the crowd). Using the mind, an athlete can call up these images over and over, enhancing the skill through repetition or rehearsal, similar to physical practice.

With mental rehearsal, minds and bodies become trained to actually perform the skill imagined.

Research is finding that both physical and psychological reactions in certain situations can be improved with visualization. Such repeated imagery can build both experience and confidence in an athlete's ability to perform certain skills under pressure, or in a variety of possible situations. The most effective visualization techniques result in a very vivid sports experience in which the athlete has complete control over a successful performance and a belief in this new 'self.'

Guided imagery, visualization, mental rehearsal or other such techniques can maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your training. In a world where sports performance and success is measured in seconds, most athletes will use every possible training technique at hand. Visualization might be one way to gain that very slim margin.

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Article Sources

Brouziyne M, Molinaro C. "Mental imagery combined with physical practice of approach shots for golf beginners." Perceptual and Motor Skills. 2005 Aug;101(1):203-11.

Isaac, A. R. (1992). "Mental Practice- Does it Work in the Field?" The Sport Psychologist, 6, 192-198.

Martin, K.A., Hall, C. R. (1995). "Using Mental Imagery to Enhance Intrinsic Motivation." Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 17(1), 54-69.

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Visualization and Mental Rehearsal Can Improve Athletic Performance

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Many elite athletes routinely use visualization techniques as part of training and competition. There are many stories of athletes who have used these techniques to cultivate not only a competitive edge but also to create renewed mental awareness, a heightened sense of well-being, and confidence.

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Monitoring/Clarifying: All About Adolescent Literacy 

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Monitoring/Clarifying: All About Adolescent Literacy 

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Monitoring/Clarifying | Classroom Strategies | AdLit.org

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AdLit.org offers resources (articles, research, teaching strategies, book recommendations) for parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers.

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Think Literacy: Monitor for Meaning, Grades 7 - 12

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Think Literacy: Monitor for Meaning, Grades 7 - 12

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Guided Comprehension: Monitoring Using the INSERT Technique

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Guided Comprehension: Monitoring Using the INSERT Technique

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Grades

4 - 6

Lesson Plan Type

Recurring Lesson

Estimated Time

Three 60-minute sessions

Lesson Author

Publisher

Student Objectives Extensions Student Assessment/Reflections
STUDENT OBJECTIVES

Students will

Define and understand the INSERT technique

Monitor their comprehension of various text passages using the INSERT coding technique

Work cooperatively and then independently to apply the INSERT technique when reading

Reflect on the monitoring strategy and how it helps to extend their understanding of texts

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NOTE: This lesson is intended as an introduction to the monitoring strategy. With continued practice, students should be able to apply the monitoring and INSERT strategy independently to other texts.

Stage 1---Teacher-directed whole-group instruction (40 minutes)

1.

Explain the strategy. Ask students if they have ever been reading something and realize they have no understanding of what they just read. Explain that you are going to teach them a strategy to help them monitor their reading and better understand texts.

Display the INSERT poster and distribute individual copies to students as well. Show students each of the symbols and discuss what each symbol represents. Explain how students can write the symbols in the margins of a text to symbolize their thinking during the reading. Also emphasize that before reading, students should think about what they already know about the topic. That way, they will be able to mark the sections that confirm or refute what they thought.

You may want to have students practice writing each of the symbols and discuss why each one was chosen to represent the particular thought process (e.g., why a + would represent something that they did not previously know).

2.

Demonstrate the strategy. Display the "Mummies" passage for students (either on an overhead or on chart paper). Ask them to watch and listen as you read the passage and mark it with the INSERT symbols. Model the process for students. Make sure that you "think aloud" so that students can witness the entire thought process. You may also want to refer back to the INSERT poster to reinforce the meanings of the symbols.

Begin by brainstorming aloud what you already know about mummies. You can either brainstorm aloud or write out a list on chart paper. For example, you might say, "I don't know a lot about mummies. I do know that the Egyptians wrapped their dead in cloth and they were called mummies. I also think the mummies were housed in pyramids."

Next, begin reading the "Mummies" passage. Stop every few sentences and mark the appropriate INSERT symbol in the margin, discussing your reasoning as you go. For example, after reading, "Mummies were first found in 1798," you might put a + sign in the margin to show that you didn't know that, and say something aloud such as, "I didn't know that the mummies weren't discovered until 1798. I thought it was sooner than that."

Continue in this way through the passage. You may want to also answer the questions at the bottom or you can just skip them.

3.

Guide students to apply the strategy. Pass out a copy of "The Great Pyramid" passage to students. Ask them to begin by taking a minute to think about the things they already know about pyramids or the Great Pyramid in particular. You may want to write their thoughts down on chart paper or just discuss them aloud. Review the INSERT symbols again with students. Read the first paragraph or two of the passage together and mark the margins with the INSERT symbols. Have students discuss their reasoning throughout the reading of this passage and talk about how each of the symbols can be used.

4.

Practice individually or in small groups. Divide students into groups of three. Ask them to work together to finish reading "The Great Pyramid" passage and marking the INSERT symbols as they read.

5.

Reflect. Gather students as a whole class to discuss how using the INSERT technique helped them monitor their thinking. Was it easier to understand the passage using the INSERT symbols than if they had just read the passage silently?

Stage 2---Teacher-guided small groups and student-facilitated independent practice (40 minutes)

Before beginning Stage 2, students must be divided into three instructional-level groups. Students with similar instructional needs should be grouped together. This does not necessarily mean that students in each group are on the same reading level. Instead, they may have similar needs for comprehension instruction (e.g., students who have trouble making inferences or students who need extra practice making connections between texts).

Students are working in three different areas during this stage:

Teacher-guided small-group instruction

Student-facilitated comprehension centers

Student-facilitated comprehension routines

Classroom management is at the discretion of each individual teacher. You may want to assign students to small groups and set up a rotation schedule, or you may want to allow groups of students to choose their own activities. Regardless, each group of students needs to visit the three areas at least once in the three-day period.
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1.

Teacher-guided small-group instruction. Choose one group to begin with you as follows:

Review the INSERT technique using the poster from Stage 1.

Guide students to read a nonfiction text at their instructional level using the INSERT technique and symbols (see Suggested Book List for Egypt).

Have students reflect on using the INSERT technique and how it helps them monitor their own comprehension.

2.

Student-facilitated comprehension centers. Students may be assigned to centers or choose activities on their own.

Poetry center. Have students write an acrostic poem that cleverly describes how to use the INSERT strategy. Using the letters in the word INSERT, students write words or phrases that begin with each letter to describe the technique. Students can find more information about how to write an acrostic poem by visiting the interactive Acrostic Poems tool.

Writing center. Have students write a story using the interactive Stapleless Book that describes what they learned about Ancient Egypt and their reactions to the passages they read. Students can then trade stories and code their partners' stories using the INSERT symbols.

Internet center. Have students take a virtual tour through the pyramids of Egypt at NOVA Online: Pyramids or read about Egyptians at The Pyramids and Temples of Egypt. They can take notes on what they learn and code them with the INSERT symbols.

3.

Student-facilitated comprehension routines. Working in small groups, students engage in three different literacy strategies. Students should already be familiar with each of the strategies and have practiced them over time. For more information, review the Summary Sheet or refer to the text Guided Comprehension: A Teaching Model for Grades 3–8 by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen.

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For Days 2 and 3, pick up where you left off the previous day. The suggested time for each session is 60 minutes, however, since the group on the first day only had 20 minutes in small groups, you may want to meet with them for another 20 minutes and then switch groups for the last 40 minutes. The rotation should continue until all three groups have visited all three areas. On Day 3, students will spend 40 minutes in small groups, leaving 20 minutes for whole-group reflection and discussion (see Stage 3).

Stage 3---Whole-group reflection (20 minutes)
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1.

Talk to students about the monitoring comprehension strategy that they have been learning. Ask students to tell why and how the INSERT symbols helped them monitor their own thinking as they read.

2.

Give students time to share the activities they completed in the student-facilitated comprehension centers.

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EXTENSIONS

Adapt this lesson and have students practice the monitoring strategy with other texts. With continued practice using the INSERT technique, students should be able to apply the strategy independently when reading.

Access and use other lessons based on the Guided Comprehension Model to teach additional comprehension strategies:

To extend the activities in this lesson, students may want to learn more about Egypt or the Egyptian culture. They can visit the following websites:

STUDENT ASSESSMENT/REFLECTIONS

Assessment can be done informally through anecdotal notes and observations.

Students' understanding of the INSERT technique can be assessed using "The Great Pyramid" passage they coded with the INSERT symbols in Stage 1 and any of the other activities completed during Stage 2.

Did students accurately use the INSERT coding symbols?

Did they make valid reactions and connections to texts?

You can also ask students to reflect in their comprehension journals about monitoring and their experience using the INSERT technique.

How does using the INSERT technique help you monitor your thinking as you read?

How do you think you will use the INSERT technique in the future?

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Guided Comprehension: Monitoring Using the INSERT Technique - ReadWriteThink

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Grades 4 - 6 Lesson Plan Type Recurring Lesson Estimated Time Three 60-minute sessions Lesson Author Publisher Student Objectives Extensions Student Assessment/Reflections Students will Define and understand the INSERT technique Monitor their comprehension of various text passages using the INSERT coding technique Work cooperatively and then independently to apply the INSERT technique when reading Reflect on the monitoring strategy and how it helps to extend their understanding of texts back to top NOTE: This lesson is intended as an introduction to the monitoring strategy.

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Reading Movies and TV: Learning the "Language" of Moving-Image Texts, Grades 5 - 12

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Reading Movies and TV: Learning the "Language" of Moving-Image Texts, Grades 5 - 12

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Five Ways to Help Students Build Prior Knowledge

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Five Ways to Help Students Build Prior Knowledge

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Teachers are continually looking for ways to improve their students' reading skills. We teach reading strategies such as decoding. We use graphic and semantic organizers. We "color code," highlight, and annotate. But while students may eventually be able to decode and decipher words, they cannot always comprehend everything they read; that comprehension requires prior knowledge.

If a student is reading a passage about baseball but has no knowledge about the sport, no amount of decoding will help that student fully understand the reading. Prior knowledge is necessary to help students process and integrate new information.

It is of paramount importance that we as teachers of English and literacy use reading materials that teach students about the world, but we must also provide them with a variety of opportunities and experiences that will build background knowledge and enable them to become better readers, writers, and learners.

Here are five ways to achieve that goal:
1. Read across the curriculum.
Teaching reading is not solely the English teacher's job-it must be done across the curriculum in science, math, art, music, and social studies classes. Teachers need to provide their students with a variety of reading materials that advance and enhance the curriculum while also increasing a student's academic vocabulary.

For example, this year I am teaching an elective on the TV series "The Walking Dead." Students not only read critical reviews of the show, but they also explore readings on psychology, sociology, ethics, business, and international relations, and then apply that knowledge to the series. "The Walking Dead"-a show much beloved by teenagers-has proven to be an excellent platform to increase student knowledge on a variety of topics.
2. Use a variety of reading materials from different sources.
When I was growing up, I remember how much I loved to read the Weekly Reader and Highlights magazines. I even read my brother's Boys' Life and my parents' Reader's Digests. Those magazines taught me a great deal about the world, and they opened my eyes to different cultures and experiences. One source I use now in the classroom is Scholastic's Upfront magazine. This resource includes stories about the world, including articles which focus on politics, the environment, culture, and science. If funding is an issue, Scholastic and other magazines are available through DonorsChoose.
3. Stock school and classroom libraries.
A 2005 study by Library Research Service, Colorado State Library, and University of Denver noted that increased library spending correlates with higher test scores. Students who read more become better readers. Stocking school and classroom libraries with a wide variety of books and providing students with time to read will also go a long way toward increasing a student's knowledge. There are many grants to help build school and classroom libraries.
4. Plan field trips.
I am adamant about learning that takes place outside the classroom walls. I like to take my students on field trips to museums, ballets, lectures, plays, and other performances. These experiences have provided my students with a wealth of knowledge about the world and a vocabulary that can assist them in their reading. For example, at least twice a year, I take my students to the event One Day University-which provides free tickets for students-where they have the opportunity to listen to a variety of college professors speak on topics from political science to art history.

I've also taken my students to see plays at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where they've seen performances of "Prometheus," "Porgy and Bess," and "Pippin." These opportunities have opened up a whole new world for my students. Most theaters and museums will provide free or low-cost tickets for students.
5. Organize community service and other activities.
Community service opportunities can also help build student knowledge. About four times a year, the nonprofit Honor Flight transports World War II veterans to Washington D.C. to visit and reflect at their memorials. Each time they do, my students meet me at the airport to cheer and express their gratitude to local veterans for their service. For my students, who were born in 2000 or later, World War II seems far away. But after the students meet the veterans, speak to them, and shake their hands, their knowledge increases. The experience provides a context for them which activates their prior knowledge and inspires them to seek out more information.

Each year I also arrange for my students to take part in a pen pal project. One year, the students shared letters with Tibetan students studying in India. I know my students will gain new perspectives about culture in another part of the globe. Providing students with historical, cultural, and social activities can help them gain important knowledge about the world they live in.

With the dawn of a new year and in light of the changing educational climate, helping students build their knowledge base is essential. Strengthening students' skills for learning new things will enable them not only to become better readers, writers, and learners, but also ensure that they become knowledgeable citizens.

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Five Ways to Help Students Build Prior Knowledge

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Teachers are continually looking for ways to improve their students' reading skills. We teach reading strategies such as decoding. We use graphic and semantic organizers. We "color code," highlight, and annotate. But while students may eventually be able to decode and decipher words, they cannot always comprehend everything they read; that comprehension requires prior knowledge.

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Background Knowledge: The Glue That Makes Learning Stick

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Background Knowledge: The Glue That Makes Learning Stick

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We create practical, timely, affordable professional learning to help educators and instructional leaders provide students with a modern, equitable, and quality education.

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Guided Comprehension: Previewing Using an Anticipation Guide

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Guided Comprehension: Previewing Using an Anticipation Guide

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stealing home the story of jackie robinson

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Guided Comprehension: Previewing Using an Anticipation Guide - ReadWriteThink

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Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of previewing.

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Guided Comprehension: Making Connections Using a Double-Entry Journal

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Guided Comprehension: Making Connections Using a Double-Entry Journal

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Grades

4 - 6

Lesson Plan Type

Standard Lesson

Estimated Time

Three 60-minute sessions

Lesson Author

Publisher

Featured Resources From Theory to Practice
OVERVIEW

A majority of students in grades 4 to 6 are beyond decoding instruction and need more assistance with comprehension to help them become successful, independent readers. Strategic reading allows students to monitor their own thinking and make connections between texts and their own experiences. Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of making connections. Students learn the three types of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world) using a double-entry journal. They also learn about the life of Cesar Chavez and his work to promote civil rights.
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FEATURED RESOURCES
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Letter Generator: This online interactive tool allows your students to write letters to Cesar Chavez, describing the connections they made to his life and their reactions to the book Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull.

Double-Entry Journal: This handout will help your students record ideas and situations from texts in one column, and their reactions in the second, thus making a connection between the text and themselves, another text, or the world.

Guided Comprehension is a context in which students learn comprehension strategies in a variety of settings using multiple levels and types of text. It is a three-stage process focused on direct instruction, application, and reflection.

The Guided Comprehension Model progresses from explicit teaching to independent practice and transfer.

Making connections occurs when students think about the text in relation to connections they can make to self, to texts, and to others (Keene & Zimmerman, 1997).

Current studies demonstrate that when students experience explicit instruction of comprehension strategies, it improves their comprehension of new texts and topics (Hiebert et al., 1998).

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

McLaughlin, M., & Allen, M.B. (2009). Guided comprehension in grades 3-8 . Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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Hiebert, E.H., Pearson, P.D., Taylor, B.M., Richardson, V., & Paris, S.G. (1998). Every child a reader. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA).

Keene, E.L., & Zimmermann, S. (1997). Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Guided Comprehension: Making Connections Using a Double-Entry Journal - ReadWriteThink

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Grades 4 - 6 Lesson Plan Type Standard Lesson Estimated Time Three 60-minute sessions Lesson Author Publisher Featured Resources From Theory to Practice A majority of students in grades 4 to 6 are beyond decoding instruction and need more assistance with comprehension to help them become successful, independent readers.

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Think Literacy: Getting Ready to Read - Anticipation Guide, Grades 7 - 12

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Think Literacy: Getting Ready to Read - Anticipation Guide, Grades 7 - 12

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If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

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All About Adolescent Literacy

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Background

Question-Answer relationship (QAR) is a strategy to be used after students have read. QAR teaches students how to decipher what types of questions they are being asked and where to find the answers to them. Four types of questions are examined in the QAR.

They include:

Right There Questions: Literal questions whose answers can be found in the text. Often the words used in the question are the same words found in the text.

Think and Search Questions: Answers are gathered from several parts of the text and put together to make meaning.

Author and You: These questions are based on information provided in the text but the student is required to relate it to their own experience. Although the answer does not lie directly in the text, the student must have read it in order to answer the question.

On My Own: These questions do not require the student to have read the passage but he/she must use their background or prior knowledge to answer the question.

Benefits

QAR empowers students to think about the text they are reading and beyond it, too. It inspires them to think creatively and work cooperatively while challenging them to use literal and higher-level thinking skills.

Create and use the strategy

QAR is a simple strategy to teach students as long as you model, model, model.

1. Depending on your students, you may choose to teach each type of question individually or as a group. Explain to students that there are four types of questions they will encounter. Define each type of question and give an example.

2. Read a short passage aloud to your students.

3. Have predetermined questions you will ask after you stop reading. When you have finished reading, read the questions aloud to students and model how you decide which type of question you have been asked to answer.

4. Next, show your students how find information to answer your question (i.e., in the text, from your own experiences, etc.).

5. After you have modeled your thinking process for each type of question, invite students to read another passage on their own, using a partner to determine the type of question and how to find the answer.

6. After students have practiced this process for several types of questions and over several lessons, you may invite students to read passages and try to create different types of questions for the reading.

Notes:

Students may work by themselves, in pairs or small groups. Remind students that they should be prepared to discuss and debate their reactions to the questions and how they figured out their answers.

QARs require students to activate both literal and critical thinking skills. For students who have a hard time thinking beyond the text, this will be a challenging task and will require a lot of time to apply to their own readings. These students will need consistent practice in determining the type of thinking the text is requiring them to do.

References

Fisher, D., and Frey, N, (2004). Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Raphael, T.E., & Au, K.H. (2005). QAR: Enhancing comprehension and test taking across grades and content areas. The Reading Teacher, 59, 206-221.

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Question-Answer relationship (QAR) is a strategy to be used after students have read. QAR teaches students how to decipher what types of questions they are being asked and where to find the answers to them. Four types of questions are examined in the QAR.

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Primary/Intermediate Resource

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Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) | Classroom Strategy | Reading Rockets

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The question-answer relationship (QAR) strategy helps students understand the different types of questions. By learning that the answers to some questions are "Right There" in the text, that some answers require a reader to "Think and Search," and that some answers can only be answered "On My Own," students recognize that they must first consider the question before developing an answer.

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Effective questioning sessions in classroom require advance preparation. While some instructors may be skilled in extemporaneous questioning, many find that such questions have phrasing problems, are not organized in a logical sequence, or do not require students to use the desired thinking skills.
Levels and types of questions
Questioning should be used to achieve well-defined goals. An instructor should ask questions that will require students to use the thinking skills that he or she is trying to develop. Bloom's Taxonomy is a hierarchical system for ordering thinking skills from lower to higher, where each level requires a student's mastery of the skills below it. It is not essential that an instructor be able to classify each question at a specific level. The taxonomy is introduced as a tool which is helpful for defining the kinds of thinking skills instructors expect from students and for helping to establish congruence between the instructor's goals and the questions he or she asks.

People often refer to "lower-level" and "higher-level" questions or behaviors, rather than assigning a specific level to those questions or behaviors. Lower-level questions are typically at the remember, understand, and apply levels of the taxonomy and are most appropriate for:

evaluating students' preparation and comprehension

diagnosing students' strengths and weaknesses

reviewing and/or summarizing content

Higher-level questions involve the ability to analyze, evaluate, or create, and are most appropriate for:

encouraging students to think more deeply and critically

problem solving

encouraging discussions

stimulating students to seek information on their own

Typically, an instructor would vary the level of questions within a single class period. For example, an instructor might ask the higher-level question, "How can style of writing and the thesis of a given essay be related?" If she gets inadequate or incorrect student response to that question, she might ask lower-questions to check whether students know and understand the material. For example, she might then ask, "What is the definition of thesis statement?" or "What are some characteristics of different writing styles?"

In addition to asking questions at various levels of the taxonomy, an instructor might consider whether he is asking closed or open questions. A closed question is one for which there are a limited number of acceptable answers, most of which will usually be anticipated by the instructor. For example, "What is the definition of an adjective?" An open question is one for which there are many acceptable answers, most of which will not be anticipated by the instructor. For example, "What is an example of an adjective?"

Both open and closed questions may be used at any level of the taxonomy:

What are the stages of cell division?

Given the medical data before you, would you say this patient is intoxicated or suffering from a diabetic reaction?

What is an example of an adjective?

What are some ways we might solve the energy crisis?

Steps for planning questions

Decide on your goal or purpose for asking questions. Your goal should help you determine what levels of questions you will ask.

Select the content for questioning. Choose material which you consider important rather than trivial. Students will study and learn based on the questions you ask. Do not mislead them by emphasizing less important material.

Ask questions that require an extended response or at least a "content" answer. Avoid questions that can be answered "yes" or "no" unless you are going to follow with more questions to explore reasoning.

Until you are quite skilled at classroom questioning you should write your main questions in advance. This is called "scripting." Arrange your list in some logical sequence (specific to general, lower level to higher level, a sequence related to content). Should you think of additional or better questions during the questioning process, you can be flexible and add those or substitute them for some of your planned questions. However, having a prepared list of questions will help to assure that you ask questions appropriate for your goals and representative of the important material.

Phrase your questions so that the task is clear to students. Questions such as "What about foreign affairs?" do not often lead to productive answers and discussion. "What did we say about chemical bonding?" is too general unless you are only seeking a review of any material the students remember.

Your questions should not contain the answers. Avoid implied response questions when you are genuinely seeking an answer from the class. A question such as "Don't we all agree that the author of the article exaggerated the dangers of agent orange to strengthen his viewpoint?" will not encourage student response.

When planning your questions, try to anticipate possible student responses. Anticipating student responses should help in your planning by forcing you to consider whether the phrasing is accurate, whether questions focus on the goal you have in mind, and whether you have enough flexibility to allow students to express ideas in their own words. You might consider the following:

What are some typical misconceptions that might lead students to incorrect answers?

Am I asking an open or closed question?

What type of response do I expect from students, a definition? Example? Solution?

Will I accept the answer in the students' language or am I expecting the textbooks' words or my own terms?

What will my strategy be for handling incorrect answers?

What will I do if students do not answer?

Handling student responses to questions
An important aspect of classroom interaction is the manner in which the instructor handles student responses. When an instructor asks a question, students can either respond, ask a question, or give no response.

Handling student responses to questions

An important aspect of classroom interaction is the manner in which the instructor handles student responses. When an instructor asks a question, students can either respond, ask a question, or give no response.
Strategies to use when students respond

Reinforcement: The instructor should reinforce student responses and questions in a positive way in order to encourage future participation. The instructor can reinforce by making positive statements and using positive nonverbal communication. Proper nonverbal responses include smiling, nodding and maintaining eye contact, while improper nonverbal responses included looking at notes while students speak, looking at the board, or ruffling papers. The type of reinforcement will be determined by:

Probing: The initial response of students may be superficial. The instructor needs to use a questioning strategy called probing to make students explore initial comments. Probes are useful in getting students more involved in critical analysis of their own and other students' ideas. Probes can be used to:

Analyze a student's statement, make a student aware of underlying assumptions, or justify or evaluate a statement. Instructor: What are some ways we might solve the energy crisis? : I would like to see a greater movement to peak-load pricing by utility companies. Instructor: What assumptions are you making about consumer behavior when you suggest that solution?

Help students deduce relationships. Instructors may ask students to judge the implications of their statements or to compare and contrast concepts. Instructor: What are some advantages and disadvantages of having grades given in courses? : Grades can be a motivator for people to learn. : Too much pressure on grades causes some students to stop learning, freeze, go blank. Instructor: If both of those statements are true, what generalizations can you make about the relationship between motivation and learning?

Have students clarify or elaborate on their comments by asking for more information. Instructor: Could you please develop your ideas further? Can you provide an example of that concept? It was obvious that the crew had gone insane. Instructor: What is the legal definition of insane? : It was a violation of due process. Instructor: Can you explain why?

Adjust/Refocus: When a student provides a response that appears out of context, the instructor can refocus to encourage the student to tie her response to the content being discussed. This technique is also used to shift attention to a new topic. Instructor: What does it mean to devalue the dollar? Um-I'm not really sure, but doesn't it mean that, um, a dollar doesn't go as far as it used to? Does that mean it's devalued? Instructor: Well, let's talk a little bit about another concept, and that is inflation. How does inflation affect your dollar?

Strategies for responding to student questions
There are many ways in which an instructor can respond to questions from students. However, all strategies begin with this important step: Listen to the student's question. After you are certain that you understand the question, be sure that other students have heard and understood the question. Then proceed with one of the following strategies:

Answer the question yourself. This strategy is best when you have little time remaining in class. The disadvantage of this approach is that you do not encourage student-to-student interaction or independent learning.

Redirect the question to the class. This strategy helps to encourage student-to-student interaction and to lessen reliance on the instructor for all information.

Attempt to help the student answer his own question. This may require prompting through reminders of pertinent previously learned information. Or this strategy may require you to ask the student a lower-level question or a related question to begin his thought process. The advantage of this strategy, as in redirecting, is that the student may learn the process of searching for answers to his own questions rather than relying on the teacher. The risk is that the process can be embarrassing or so threatening that the student will be too intimidated to ask questions in the future. Obviously some human compassion is called for when using this strategy.

Ask the student to stop after class to discuss the question. This strategy is most appropriate when a student raises complicated, tangential questions or when a student is obviously the only one who does not understand a point and a simple answer does not clarify it for the student. Even in these situations there are risks in using this strategy. Students may be intimidated from raising questions in class. The instructor may think that only the questioning student does not understand when actually a number of students are having the same problem.

Refer the student to a resource where she can find the answer.

Defer the question until a more appropriate time if the question is not connected to the material you're covering. Be sure to note the question and the student, and to return to the question at a more appropriate time.

No matter which strategy you use you should return to the student after addressing the question and determine whether the response has satisfied the student.

If you don't know the answer to a student question never fake an answer. Admit that you cannot answer the question and then select one of these strategies or others you find appropriate:

Ask whether someone in the class can answer the question. Most times after class you should follow this with an attempt to determine whether the information provided was accurate or based on sound reasoning and credible sources.

Either propose a plan for obtaining evidence for answering the question or ask the students to suggest how the question could be investigated.

If possible, suggest a resource where the student can find information. The resource may be written material, another faculty or staff member, a student, or someone from the community.

Volunteer to find the answer yourself and report back to the class. Make sure you actually do return with the answer if you choose this option.

Strategies to use when students don't respond

Redirect: When a student responds to a question, the instructor can ask another student to comment on his statement. One purpose of using this technique is to enable more students to participate. This strategy can also be used to allow a student to correct another student's incorrect statement or respond to another student's question. Instructor: Ali, do you agree with Mark's comment? Instructor: From your experience, Aisha, does what Vito said seem true? Instructor: Li, can you give me an example of the concept that Pat mentioned?

Rephrasing: This technique is used when a student provides an incorrect response or no response. Instead of telling the student she is incorrect or calling upon another student, the instructor can try one of three strategies:

The instructor can try to reword the question to make it clearer. The question may have been poorly phrased.What is neurosis? (No response) Instructor What are the identifying characteristics of a neurotic person?

The instructor can provide some information to help students come up with the answer. Instructor: How far has the ball fallen after 3 seconds? Student: I have no idea. Instructor: Let's break down the question, Ann. How do we measure distance?

Using "wait time": One factor that can have powerful effects on student participation is the amount of time an instructor pauses between asking a question and doing something else (calling on a student or rewording the question). Research on classroom questioning and information processing indicates that students need at least three seconds to comprehend a question, consider the available information, formulate an answer, and begin to respond. In contrast, the same research established that, on average, a classroom teacher allows less than one second of wait-time. After teachers were trained to allow three to five seconds of wait-time the following significant changes in their classrooms occurred (from Rowe, 1974):

The number of students who failed to respond when called on decreased.

The number of unsolicited but appropriate responses increased.

The length of student responses increased.

The number of student statements where evidence was used to make inferences increased.

The number of responses from students identified by the teacher as less able increased.

The number of student-to-student interactions increased.

The number of student questions increased.

Allowing wait-time after a student response or question also produced significant changes in classroom interaction. The most notable change was that the instructor made fewer teaching errors characterized by responding illogically or inappropriately to a student comment.

On the other hand, too much wait-time can also be detrimental to student interaction. When no one seems to be able to answer a question, more wait-time will not necessarily solve the problem. Experts say that waiting more than 20-30 seconds is perceived as punishing by students. The amount of wait-time needed in part depends upon the level of question the instructor asks and student characteristics such as familiarity with content and past experience with the thought process required.

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Effective questioning sessions in classroom require advance preparation. While some instructors may be skilled in extemporaneous questioning, many find that such questions have phrasing problems, are not organized in a logical sequence, or do not require students to use the desired thinking skills. Levels and types of questions Questioning should be used to achieve well-defined goals.

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Skills and Strategies | Making Inferences

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In every Skills and Strategies post, we’ll focus on either a skill that students need or a strategy teachers can use across the curriculum. We’ll describe why and how to practice it, and then we’ll make a few suggestions for matching it to Times content.

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Using Literacy to Teach Inferring Across the Curriculum 

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Using Literacy to Teach Inferring Across the Curriculum 

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Making Inferences with Jokes and Comics: Prezi

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Making Inferences with Jokes and Comics: Prezi

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Understanding Inferences Using Jokes and Comics

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A lesson for 6th-8th graders to teach the importance of understanding implied meanings and inferential statements.

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Inferences | Reading Comprehension Exercise

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As you may have inferred...this is a critical reading skill! Making an inference involves using what you know to make a guess about what you don't know, or reading between the lines. Teaching your students to use this technique will encourage more critical reading and better understanding and enjoyment of the text.

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Determining Importance: Helping Students Recognize Important Points in Content Text

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Determining Importance: Helping Students Recognize Important Points in Content Text

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Determining importance is a strategy that readers use to distinguish between what information in a text is most important versus what information is interesting but not necessary for understanding. This practical reading strategy enables students to distinguish between the most and least important information presented in textbooks and nonfiction reading.

Although teachers find this strategy difficult for many students to accurately execute, it is essential to comprehending complicated nonfiction text. As teachers we need to explicitly and systematically teach our students how to extract the most important information they read.

To help students make connections with the strategy of determining importance, we bring a bag filled with camping items to the classroom. We tell the students that they must choose five of the most important items needed for an imaginary camping trip and list a compelling reason for each item chosen. Once the students have had the opportunity to select and think about their chosen supplies, they turn to a partner and discuss their decisions.

When students are given the opportunity to combine facts and ideas together in order to solve a given problem, higher-order thinking and reasoning skills are utilized.

When we teach this strategy to students in grades 2-5, we tell them they need to become detectives and search for the most important points of the text. We remind them that along the way there will be distractors, or less important information, given to make the selection more interesting or clearer to the reader. This information, however, is not essential to understanding the point of the nonfiction text.

In order to help students build their skill and confidence in this strategy, we must provide explicit instruction and ample opportunities for guided practice. This systematic instruction will give students many opportunities to practice before they are required to use the strategy independently. The following templates, What's It All About?, Interesting vs. Important, and Strategy Focus Steps can be used to practice the determining importance strategy with the article " Reader of the Rocks."

Templates

The following templates can be used to help support students' understanding of " Reader of the Rocks " article by using the reading strategy, determining importance. The templates are designed to give students the opportunity to read, think, and talk about how they have prioritized the information given in the text. Depending on the academic needs in your classroom, the templates can be used to differentiate the comprehension activities for your students.

Strategy Focus Steps (To be used during reading)
This template is an instructional tool we use to explicitly guide our students through this particular reading strategy. The systematic steps make this difficult reading strategy manageable for all learners.

What's It All About? (To be used after reading)

This template is designed for students to use after they have read the text. The goal of this template is to provide students with the opportunity to distinguish between the main ideas and the interesting details given in the text.

Interesting vs. Important (To be used during or after reading)
We use Interesting vs. Important to give students a purpose for rereading the text. This activity gives students practice in recognizing what information is important in the text and what is interesting but not essential to understanding it.

Determining Importance Literacy Set
This Content Clips set includes all of the materials you need to teach the strategy of Determining Importance: this article (pdf document), printable and electronic book versions of "Reader of the Rocks" for grades K-1, 2-3, and 4-5, and the student templates.

ONLINE RESOURCES

Determining Importance in Nonfiction
This link gives a list of key points to share with students when working with determining importance.

Determine Importance
This site gives ideas for additional opportunities to practice the strategy.

Books

Mosaic of Thought. Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmerman. 2007. Heinemann.

This book focuses on the seven core strategies that successful readers use to engage with text. Mosaic of Thought is grounded in the latest research and offers many classroom examples of teaching comprehension.

Strategies That Work. Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. 2000. Stenhouse Publishers.

The authors of Strategies That Work present a variety of practical ways to promote thinking while reading through authentic response options. This book includes examples of student work and instructional reading strategies.

Spotlight on Comprehension. Linda Hoyt. 2005. Heinemann.

Spotlight on Comprehension is packed full of ready-to-use strategies for reading comprehension and assessing understanding. The book contains ideas from many of the top researchers in the field. Teachers will find useful tools such as rubrics, sample lessons, book lists, and strategy lists.
This article was written by Tracey Allen and Clarissa Reeson. Tracey is a literacy coach and Clarissa currently teaches third grade in Yuba City, CA. Both are educational consultants for REAL Educators (www.realeducators.net). For more information, see the Contributors page. Email Kimberly Lightle, Principal Investigator, lightle.16@osu.edu, with any questions about the content of this site. The links on this page were updated on March 15, 2015.
Copyright September 2008 - The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0733024. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license.

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Determining Importance: Helping Students Recognize Important Points in Content Text - Rocks and Minerals - Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears

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Determining importance is a strategy that readers use to distinguish between what information in a text is most important versus what information is interesting but not necessary for understanding. This practical reading strategy enables students to distinguish between the most and least important information presented in textbooks and nonfiction reading.

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Florida Center Resources

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This Close Reading collection focuses on helping readers with the skill of determining importance in text. FREE from The Curriculum Corner.

This is a part of our series on Close Reading. If you are looking for additional free resources, please visit our Getting Started With Close Reading post (you will find the link at the very bottom of this post.)

Informational text is becoming an increasingly important piece of our day to day curriculum. Students are expected to read grade level texts and pull important information as they read. This is a skill that does not often come naturally and should be carefully taught. Nothing will replace guided readings of a text with modeling in the classroom. The materials below are created to use as you are modeling reading informational texts. There are also additional pieces that can be used in interactive reading notebooks. We highly suggest that guided readings include modeling of notetaking and usage of post-it notes in appropriate places.

(Note: Unlike our newer posts, this post contains materials provided as individual downloads. You will need to click on each of the links below to view and download each piece of this collection.)
Anchor Charts

1. Important Places to Stop and Take Notes This anchor chart should be used as you are beginning to model how to find important information in the text.

2. Writing a Summary This anchor chart is designed to be used as you are introducing summary writing.

Graphic Organizers

1. I Can Read Informational Text Organizer

2. Writing a Summary Graphic Organizer

3. Using Hashtags Today many children are on Facebook or Instagram sharing their experiences. Often a part of sharing a picture or thought is adding a hashtag. Have children use our Facebook or Instagram printables to share an important part of their text. They should not only draw a picture and write a caption, they should also include three or four appropriate hashtags.

4. Interactive Notebook Printables These half page organizers are designed to be used in students' interactive notebooks. Or, they can be used as exit tickets to assess student understanding.

You might also be interested in our Think Marks for Reading

Looking for additional Close Reading resources? You will find organizational materials plus links to our other posts on Close Reading here: Getting Started with Close Reading.

Have great ideas for helping your students with determining importance in text? Please share below to help other teachers!

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Close Reading: Determining Importance in Text - The Curriculum Corner 4-5-6

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This Close Reading collection focuses on helping readers with the skill of determining importance in text. FREE from The Curriculum Corner. This is a part of our series on Close Reading. If you are looking for additional free resources, please visit our Getting Started With Close Reading post (you will find the link at the very bottom of this post.)

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Strategies for Determining Importance in Nonfiction Text

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Strategies for Determining Importance in Nonfiction Text

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The skill of determining importance in a nonfiction text is an area in which students of all ages often struggle. For emerging readers, it can require so much attention to merely get through reading a nonfiction text, that it's easy not to process what the text actually says, much less pull out the important details and overall meaning. And for older students, increasingly complex texts can be dense with information and difficult to digest. Here are four strategies for determining importance in nonfiction texts - and they're usable in any grade.

Determining importance

Determining importance is the process of determining what is important in a text and what is not. "We decide, from among everything on the page, what is most important to attend to and remember," according to The Reading Recovery Training Center at Clemson University. "As proficient readers, we engage in that process continually while reading. We filter information and organize our thinking around the big ideas. Determining importance allows us to move through a text coherently, developing a line of thinking that helps our reading make sense."

Tanny McGregor, author of Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading, once explained determining importance to a class by providing a memorable visual. The premise is that our brain can't possibly remember everything we read, nor should it. Our job is to keep the really important stuff we read in our mind and strain out the rest. She demonstrated this using a literal kitchen strainer full of water and spaghetti, pouring out the water to leave just the pasta. "Your brain is like the strainer and the words are like the noodles. The spaghetti water is not important, so you don't have to keep it. When you read something, it's like it's pouring in through your eyes and then it goes through your brain."

"In nonfiction, readers need to learn to determine importance by identifying a text's main idea(s). Once they do, they are better able to sort through the details to figure out which are important and which may be interesting, but less important," says Jennifer Serravallo, author of The Reading Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers. "As texts become more dense and filled with information, sorting through facts and information that are important to the central idea(s), versus those that are just interesting, becomes more challenging. Sometimes students have a hard time determining importance because they believe everything is important-the author put it all in there, after all!"

Nonfiction strategy: five-sentence summaries

When reading a whole text, it's easy for students to lose focus and get lost in what they're reading. Creating five-sentence summaries can help students stay active while reading, as well as pull out and sum up the most critical information.

How to do it: Students should use a pen to number sections of the text as they read them. Summaries are written in order. They can chunk the text and pull out the important points from the beginning, a little way in, the middle, almost the end, and the end of the text. Then, they can sum up each section in one sentence, finishing with a five-sentence summary!

For young readers: For learners who aren't ready to write sentence-based summaries, the strategy can be done by drawing pictures, arranging pictures, or even participating verbally ("First, the text said this. Then, the text said this..."). Readers can also break the summary down into three parts: beginning, middle, and end.

Nonfiction strategy: noticing patterns, numbers, and facts

Teach students to pick up on patterns in a text. If a text mentions photosynthesis a bunch of times, chances are that's an important topic of the piece. Students can get into the habit of noticing and highlighting words and concepts that repeat. Additionally, teach students to notice and make note of numbers, statistics, and facts in nonfiction. See a number? Make a note! See a fact? Circle it!

How to do it: Determine a system of symbols for annotation and students can use these symbols to quickly make note of patterns, numbers/statistics, and facts they find in a text.

For young readers: Ask students to find what repeats and explore why. For example: If the text uses the word triangle a lot, it's logical that triangles are important in the text.

Strategy: Funneling topics

Once students know how to look for patterns, they can learn how to funnel down topics. This strategy teaches students to find the larger topic, the subtopics, and the supporting details in a nonfiction text.

How to do it: This can be done by simply writing notes on paper or you can provide students with a graphic organizer with an image of a funnel. Tell students to look for word patterns and clues within the title, captions, and display text. For example, a text uses the term NBA draft a lot, so it is likely that the overarching topic is basketball. Then, it's time to zoom in and look for subtopics and the supporting details in the text.

Main topic: Basketball

Subtopic 1: NBA Draft Rules

Supporting details: New salary rules will influence the NBA draft this year as they pick players.

For young readers: Teach students to pull out the big topic and then shrink it down to a detail or two. This can be done visually, in writing, verbally, or kinesthetically by using manipulatives. Gradually increase the level of detail the students look for.

Big idea: Koalas

Shrink it down: Koalas are from Australia

Shrink it down even more: Koalas only eat plants.

Strategy: Pile it on

How to do it: This idea comes from Serravallo's incredibly useful reading strategies book. Using sticky notes, readers jot down notes as they read. One sticky note per jot. After they're done, they "collect all the jots that have to do with one idea. Look across them, to pile the ideas together." This helps readers categorize what they've read, organize important topics, and pull out ideas as they're reading.

For young readers: Have students draw pictures on sticky notes, copying important words and phrases from the text or visually looking at and discussing this together as a class.

Continuing education and professional development

There are many ways to help your students - whether they are beginning their journey as readers or are independent teen readers. Continuing to advance your practice will benefit both them and you. One way to do that is by earning a MEd with a concentration in adolescent literacy or choosing a concentration that focuses on reading intervention strategies. "My MEd with a Reading Interventionist concentration helped me focus on the reading process of my students, especially my homeless students," says educator and Concordia graduate Casmore Shaw. "[My students] understand: if they can't read, they can't do the math. If they can't read, they can't understand anything about literature. If they can't read, they will not be able to progress."
Jennifer L.M. Gunn spent 10 years in newspaper and magazine publishing before moving to public education. She is a curriculum designer, a teaching coach, and high school educator in New York City. She is also co-founder of the annual EDxEDNYC Education Conference for teacher-led innovation and regularly presents at conferences on the topics of adolescent literacy, leadership, and education innovation.
Tags: Adolescent Literacy, Language Arts, Literacy, Reading Interventionist

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Help Students Determine Importance in Non-Fiction Reading Passages

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The skill of determining importance in a nonfiction text is an area in which students of all ages often struggle. For emerging readers, it can require so much attention to merely get through reading a nonfiction text, that it's easy not to process what the text actually says, much less pull out the important details and overall meaning.

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Reading Comprehension Strategy 5: Determining Importance

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Reading Comprehension Strategy 5: Determining Importance

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College students frequently are required to purchase the books they will be reading for their classes, and as a result, they are able to employ one of the most useful comprehension strategies for determining importance: they mark their texts.

However, even college students struggle with this vital reading strategy; many of them wield their marking highlighters haphazardly. They color massive portions of their texts yellow, and when they are done and it's time to study, they discover that they have marked too much. They did not do a good job "sifting the wheat from the chaff."

The strategy of determining importance helps a reader make decisions as to what parts of a text deserve the most attention. Not all information presented by an author is of equal importance. Some of the details are secondary and flesh out the background of a passage.

Other details are vital for truly understanding. Strategies such as inferring, visualizing, and synthesizing are all predicated on the assumption that a reader is capable of differentiating between what is significant and what is secondary in a text.

Determining importance is also necessary for memory. Obviously, we do not remember everything from a selection. Instead, we fix on major ideas or themes and the key information related to them. Readers who try to remember everything in a passage soon overload their short-term memories and are usually left with a very hazy notion of what they read. They may only recall a mass of details and miss the whole point of the text.

Determining importance is especially critical when reading nonfictional materials, materials that emphasize learning information. To become adept at using this strategy, students need to be taught how to "scout" out a selection to look for textual clues that signal items and ideas of central importance.

Features such as headings, bold or italic print, objectives statements, summaries, pull-quotes, and marginal notes can all guide a reader toward transcendent information and ideas. However, students do not automatically make effective use of these text features. Sometimes, students may skip right over them as they read along and get lost in a maze of information as they read one fact after another.

Determining importance is also related to the reader's purpose. We can read a text for a variety of purposes-for entertainment, to look for a specific piece of information, to enhance our general knowledge of a topic, or to obtain directions. Children beginning to learn to read, and struggling readers, may wade directly into a passage without a clear idea of what their purpose for reading should be. As a result, they are not able to determine what is important and what is not.

The following teaching/learning activities can help children learn the reading strategy of determining importance:

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Reading Comprehension Strategy 5: Determining Importance | Aqueduto

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College students frequently are required to purchase the books they will be reading for their classes, and as a result, they are able to employ one of the most useful comprehension strategies for determining importance: they mark their texts. However, even college students struggle with this vital reading strategy; many of them wield their marking highlighters haphazardly.

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Opening the Door: Teaching Students to Use Visualization to Improve Comprehension

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Opening the Door: Teaching Students to Use Visualization to Improve Comprehension

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Visualizing text is a proven way to improve reading comprehension. It is a technique that can be taught using this simple, step-by-step strategy from literacy consultant Cathy Puett Miller. Included: Tips and resources for developing students' comprehension skills.

"Proficient readers spontaneously and purposely create mental images while and after they read. The images emerge from all five senses as well as the emotions and are anchored in a reader's prior knowledge."
-- Keene and Zimmerman, Mosaic of Thought

Each day, our students are bombarded with the visual images of TV and video games. In contrast, most students view reading as a passive activity. But a simple technique -- visualization -- can transform students of all ages from passive to active readers; visualization can help students cross the boundary to improved comprehension.

Your students will be able to grasp the visualization technique by following a simple, step-by-step plan:

Modeling the Technique

Direct modeling of the active thought processes involved in visualizing text is the first step. Begin with a familiar fiction read-aloud. As you read a short passage, describe images you see in your mind. For example, you might use the following quote from Where the Wild Things Are:

"That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around."

After reading that quote, share with students the images you visualized as you read it.

As I read that passage, I thought about the words and I imagined what the characters looked like, what they were doing, and what their surroundings were like. I shared with students that I imagined a window with a moon shining through it. Saplings began to sprout and quickly grew leaves and stems. (The scene was like those time-lapse photography images you see on the Discovery Channel.) I saw little vines spreading their tendrils down the walls and across the ceiling. Before I knew it, the entire room was green and leafy, and much darker than before.

Students Practice Visualizing

When you finish sharing your thoughts, let students try the same technique on their own. Share a highly descriptive reading selection appropriate for students' listening vocabulary level (up to two years above their reading vocabulary). If necessary, before reading share a vocabulary mini-lesson to introduce unfamiliar terms. Depending on the ages of your students, you might choose from the following titles or use a title of your choice that provides excellent descriptive passages.

Danny Schnitzlein's The Monster Who Ate My Peas (ages 4-8, Peachtree Publishers, 2001)

Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (ages 9-12, Puffin, 1998)

Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (ages 12-18, Dover Publications, 1999)

Before reading aloud to students, offer the suggestions below.

While I read, close your eyes and listen carefully. Stay alert and think about what happens in the story. See if you can imagine the scene the words describe. Pretend you are making a movie; what would you see from behind the camera?
As you listen, when you hear describing words (adjectives) -- such as hot, red, musty, or quiet -- use those words to help paint pictures in your head.

For students identified as "at-risk", you might discuss what it feels like to be hot, or what shade of red a tomato might be, or how musty gym socks smell when they've been in a locker for three days. Give them concrete ideas and connect to prior knowledge. In other words, turn on the thought processes and you will prime students to do the same when they read. Remind them to think about what characters smell, taste, feel, hear, and think. Good readers do that. Also, point out to students that this technique will help them remember what the story is about.

Sharing Visualizations

After reading the selection, direct a class discussion in which students share their images. Emphasize that everyone's visualizations will differ. Be sure to acknowledge and value all students' ideas.

If students create images that do not fit the words, help them question their images and adjust them. (This is another effective comprehension strategy.)

If they create images that reflect the words, praise them and encourage comparison/contrast discussions.

If students have difficulty creating an image, try another short read-aloud session and practice modeling again. Ask questions to lead them to create images on their own -- questions such as Does this remind you of anything in your life? or What do you think the dog looked like? or Do you have a dog? How do you think this dog is the same as yours? Different?

Using Drawing to Help Students Visualize

Next, use a different selection from the same or another text. Tell students you will share part of a story (show no illustrations). Ask them to draw their own illustrations as they listen. The physical act of creating a picture can help students grasp the concept of visualization.

To connect this image building with comprehension and to reinforce the concept of visualization, make time to share and discuss students' images. That might be done in small groups first, then as a class.

Integrating Visualization Into Everyday Learning

After students begin to grasp the concept of visualization, be sure to reinforce it frequently. Make visualization a part of class every day. Those who have more difficulty with the concept will learn from peers' expressions imagination. Encourage those who struggle to ask other students how they came up with their ideas and to learn from one another.

Integrate this exercise into daily class read-alouds and silent reading. Incorporate not only physical images, but also ideas about feelings the characters might experience. (That will exercise students' critical thinking skills, especially their skill at making inferences.) Use the combination of drawings and mental image-making that works best for your students. As you progress, you can move from descriptive texts into expository texts.

By using visualization, you open the door for life-long reading. Most of all, you help develop in students the habit of actively thinking about what they read -- which leads to greater retention and understanding.

Encourage students to practice the ideas outlined in this article as they read at home.
Assign homework that includes a reading from an assigned text. Ask parents to read the selection -- or part of it -- with their children and discuss the possible images. You might need to provide some direction for parents, because some adults don't have the skill either.

Have students read a pre-printed passage and use the visualization strategies taught in class.
Before duplicating the passage, insert a dot or asterisk every 3-4 sentences. Each mark represents a "pause-for-reflection" point -- a point at which students should stop and think about the words they have just read (and reread as necessary). Before they proceed, ask students to create a mental picture (think about what they read) and circle the words that helped them create their images. Have them select one "pause" and draw an illustration or use a visual organizer to hone in on the ideas and images the author describes.

When reading in a content area, encourage students to use these visualization techniques to understand more of what they read.
Expository text is full of images -- maps, charts, text boxes, sidebars, and more -- that aid in comprehension.

Mosaic of Thought: Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop by Susan Zimmerman and Ellin Oliver Keene (Heinemann, 1997).

Cathy Puett Miller is a passionate advocate for early literacy. Known widely as "The Literacy Ambassador," Miller connects children, families, and teachers with resources to create positive early reading experiences.

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Teaching Students to Use Visualization to Improve Comprehension

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Visualizing text is a proven way to improve reading comprehension. It is a technique that can be taught using this simple, step-by-step strategy from literacy consultant Cathy Puett Miller. Included: Tips and resources for developing students' comprehension skills. "Proficient readers spontaneously and purposely create mental images while and after they read.

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Guided Comprehension: Visualizing Using the Sketch-to-Stretch Strategy

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Guided Comprehension: Visualizing Using the Sketch-to-Stretch Strategy

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ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you.

Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

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Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans

Lesson Plan

Grades

4 - 6

Lesson Plan Type

Recurring Lesson

Estimated Time

Three 60-minute sessions on consecutive days

Lesson Author

Publisher

Featured Resources From Theory to Practice
OVERVIEW

A majority of students in grades 4 to 6 are beyond decoding instruction. Strategic reading allows students to monitor their own thinking and make connections between texts and their own experiences. Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy sketch-to-stretch, which involves visualizing a passage of text and interpreting it through drawing. The strategy encourages diverse perspectives and fosters open discussion of various interpretations. Sketch-to-stretch is first introduced, demonstrated, and applied in a whole-group session. Students are then placed in groups with similar instructional needs to practice the strategy through teacher-guided small-group instruction and student-run comprehension centers. At the end of the third session the class gathers to reflect on how the visualizing strategy can help them understand texts.

NOTE: This lesson is intended as an introduction to the visualizing strategy. With continued practice, students should be able to apply the visualizing and sketch-to-stretch strategy independently to other texts.
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FEATURED RESOURCES
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Teacher Tool: Sketch to Stretch: This tool provides teachers with suggestions on using the sketch-to-stretch strategy in the classroom.

Guided Comprehension is a context in which students learn comprehension strategies in a variety of settings using multiple levels and types of text. It is a three-stage process focused on direct instruction, application, and reflection.

The Guided Comprehension Model progresses from explicit teaching to independent practice and transfer.

Visualizing involves picturing in your mind what is happening in the text.

Current studies demonstrate that when students experience explicit instruction of comprehension strategies, it improves their comprehension of new texts and topics (Hiebert et al., 1998).

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
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McLaughlin, M., & Allen, M.B. (2002). Guided Comprehension: A teaching model for grades 3–8. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Hiebert, E.H., Pearson, P.D., Taylor, B.M., Richardson, V., & Paris, S.G. (1998). Every child a reader. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA).

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the adventures of captain underpants: an epic no

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Guided Comprehension: Visualizing Using the Sketch-to-Stretch Strategy - ReadWriteThink

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ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

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Visualize! Teaching Readers to Create Pictures in Their Minds

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Visualize! Teaching Readers to Create Pictures in Their Minds

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Visualize! Teaching Readers to Create Pictures in Their Minds | Scholastic

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Teacher advisor Danielle Mahoney describes how she has transformed the concept of visualizing as you read into a lesson plan that helps students share the pictures they c

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EL Reading Comprehension Strategy: Visualization

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EL Reading Comprehension Strategy: Visualization

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Many years ago, teachers in my school started exploring Reading Workshop to teach reading to children in Grades K-5. We attended workshops given at Columbia University and received staff development by members of Lucy Calkins' Reading and Writing Project. Although English learners (ELs) were not specifically mentioned in early publications about Reading Workshop, I immediately saw the benefit of using it to teaching reading comprehension strategies to ELs. I liked the format of short mini-lessons about comprehension strategies followed by partner or group practice using books that are on the student's reading level.

The mini-lesson is directed to the whole class, but the practice is individualized. Teachers are able to differentiate instruction by holding extra conferences and guided reading lessons with ELs. Since the advent of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Lucy Calkins has created curricular plans for Reading Workshop tied to the CCSS. Free samples of these plans can be downloaded for free.

From my experience as a K-6 ESL teacher and as a professional development provider, I find that Reading Workshop is the very best method for teaching reading comprehension strategies to ELs. The fact that each student in the class uses a book that they have chosen and that is on their reading level helps ELs, because they don't feel left out or different. I believe that these strategies can be used by ESL teachers to support the reading instruction of ELs, even if their school district is using other reading methodologies. In order to strengthen reading comprehension strategies, teachers need to show their students what good readers do.

Over the next few weeks, I will be talking about teaching various reading comprehension strategies to ELs.
Visualization
One of the first reading comprehension strategies that teachers should model is visualization. This strategy can be taught to any grade level. Visualizing helps students learn the link between the words on a page and the pictures in their head. According to Goudvais & Harvey in Strategies That Work (2007), students who visualize as they read have a richer reading experience and can better remember what they have read for longer periods of time.

Here is an example of visualization that I used with my 2nd grade ELs using The Doorbell Rang (Hutchins, 1989). If you haven't read the book, follow the link to YouTube to familiarize yourself with it.

I wanted to teach my students the reading comprehension strategy of visualizing what was happening as I read to them. I explained to students that visualizing is like seeing a movie in your head. Here are the steps I used:

1. At the end of the first page, I asked my ELs to close their eyes and imagine what is happening in the story. I then asked them to draw the picture of what they had imagined.

2. After students made their drawings, we examined the picture of the 12 chocolate chip cookies that appeared on the next page of the book. One of my students showed me her picture of twelve sugar cookies with red sprinkles. I explained to students that the "movie" in their minds could change when they got new information. I then demonstrated how a new page of text provided them with this additional information. This is important to teach to students from other cultures, because they are often product-oriented and focus on the "right" response.

3. Using visualization techniques for The Doorbell Rang helps students understand how the 12 cookies are divided first by two children, then four children, and then by six children. Eventually, 12 friends are sharing the cookies.

4. We want ELs to use visualization as a means of understanding the story structure. As the story progressed, students were asked to visualize the 12 children who were now sharing 12 cookies and draw a picture of what one child would have on his or her plate. If students didn't draw a plate with one chocolate chip cookies at the end of the story, I would have the class get in groups and assemble plates to represent when 2, 4, 6, and 12 children sharing a plate of 12 cookies. This can be done by using paper plates and cut-outs of chocolate chip cookies.

How do you teach reading comprehension strategies in your classroom? Please share your expertise.

About Judie Haynes

Judie Haynes taught elementary ESL for 28 years and is the author and coauthor of eight books for teachers of ELs , the most recent being "Teaching to Strengths: Supporting Students Living with Trauma, Violence and Chronic Stress" with Debbie Zacarian and Lourdes Alvarez-Ortiz. She was a columnist for the TESOL publication "Essential Teacher" and is also cofounder and comoderator of the Twitter Chat for teachers of English learners #ELLCHAT.

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| EL Reading Comprehension Strategy: Visualization

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Many years ago, teachers in my school started exploring Reading Workshop to teach reading to children in Grades K-5. We attended workshops given at Columbia University and received staff development by members of Lucy Calkins' Reading and Writing Project.

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Of Paint and Poetry: Strengthening Literacy Through Art, National Writing Project

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Of Paint and Poetry: Strengthening Literacy Through Art, National Writing Project

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Of Paint and Poetry: Strengthening Literacy Through Art - National Writing Project

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When I originally designed the project, my objective was to strengthen my students' commitment to battling intolerance with improving their reading and writing as secondary concerns. Even though Ray never wrote the text of the story, both these purposes were met. His artwork revealed improved focus and detail over work he had completed earlier in the year.

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Promoting Reading Comprehension in Secondary Students with LD

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Promoting Reading Comprehension in Secondary Students with LD

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Prepared by Marcia Kosanovich,Ph.D.
Network of Educators, LLC
(Revised August 2013)

Reading comprehension is "the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language" (Snow, 2002, p.11). Extracting meaning from text is to understand what the author has explicitly or implicitly stated. Constructing meaning is to interpret what the author has written based on the reader's background knowledge, experiences, capabilities, and abilities.
Why is reading comprehension important for secondary struggling readers?
Students in Grades 4-12 spend the majority of their days in content-area classes. As students advance in school, researchers suggest reading instruction should become more disciplinary (tied to content areas), reinforcing and supporting students' academic performance (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). All content-area instruction (e.g., English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies) utilizes literary or informational text in some manner, so students must comprehend specific texts and grasp the concepts being communicated in them. This is a particular concern as the texts students are asked to read become increasingly complex with unique linguistic and cognitive features that are not necessarily shared across disciplines.
What is the goal of reading comprehension instruction for secondary students with learning disabilities?
The goal of reading comprehension instruction is to help students understand written language. Students who comprehend well monitor their understanding as they read and use fix-up strategies, such as re-reading or summarizing, when understanding breaks down. Self-monitoring also helps students relate new information to their prior knowledge, fostering better understanding. However, many adolescents struggle to comprehend text due to a lack of background knowledge, an inability to relate content to prior knowledge, an inability to read text fluently, difficulty decoding words, an inability to attend to meaning while reading, an inability to use comprehension strategies, deficits in metacognition (often not aware they are not comprehending), or difficulty understanding the meanings of words (Boardman et al., 2008; Pressley, 2006; Reed & Vaughn, 2010).

We teach comprehension so that all students "can read a variety of materials with ease and interest, can read for varying purposes, and can read with comprehension even when the material is neither easy to understand nor intrinsically interesting" (Snow, 2002, p. xiii). This is particularly true for adolescent readers who increasingly need to gain meaning from conceptually dense texts, as well as to remember and use the information (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005).
What are comprehension research-based guidelines and strategies to implement with secondary students with learning disabilities?
In Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices (Kamil et al., 2008), the panel describes elements important for those adolescents who need more support in reading comprehension. Students' learning needs should be identified through the use of an initial screening test or a threshold score on a required reading test and subsequent use of a diagnostic reading test administered, scored, and interpreted by a specialist. Then, the selection of a supplemental, intensive, and individualized reading intervention needs to be made. The intervention program or approach should provide an explicit instructional focus targeted to meet the learners' needs. The intervention should be provided by a reading specialist or teacher who has participated in thorough training in the use of the program or approach. Teachers or reading specialists should also have professional development to increase their understanding of adolescent struggling readers. Other elements for effective interventions noted by the panel include:

Word level interventions (e.g., systematic training in metacognitive decoding skills, such as subsyllabic segmentation)

Explicit instruction, with scaffolding and feedback, of approaches that help students become more active, strategic readers

Student collaboration in comprehension strategies (relies on teacher guidance)

Reciprocal Teaching

Graphic organizers to assist in understanding relationships among key concepts represented in texts

Specific instruction on text structures, organizational patterns, and linguistic conventions commonly found in expository text

Work in small groups or individually to increase intensity.

Increased amount of time and frequency working with students who are struggling.

Progress monitoring to determine if interventions are effective and to make instructional adjustments.

Most students demonstrate improved reading achievement when their teachers incorporate the following components of effective comprehension instruction before, during, and after reading (Edmonds et al., 2009; Snow, 2002):

purposeful and explicit teaching,

classroom interactions that support the understanding of content area texts,

instruction in the skills and strategies used by expert readers, and

content-area texts that are appropriately matched to students' abilities and the specific strategy being implemented.

These instructional practices usually can be implemented class-wide in any content area. In fact, comprehension strategies work best when taught and practiced in meaningful contexts, so using authentic material in core academic classes makes sense.
Before Reading

Teach students how to activate their background knowledge in connection with the topic to be read. Students better understand, think about, and retain new information when they are familiar with or taught background knowledge of a topic before reading. Activate prior knowledge by previewing text before reading:,

1. Use specific strategies to activate prior knowledge, such as previewing headings or key concepts, or making a prediction and confirmation chart.

2. Prepare and guide previewing activities to support and focus the connections students make.

3. Use graphic organizers to introduce important information, to solicit prior knowledge from students, and to make predictions.

4. Avoid soliciting guesses from students without guidance or feedback.

5. Keep it short. Previewing should not take longer than 5 minutes, especially if a teacher has limited time with students.

6. Revisit after reading to assist in reviewing, confirming or refuting predictions, summarizing, and making connections.

Explicitly teach key specialized vocabulary related to the topic.

Teach and have students practice how to set a purpose for reading.

Use an anticipation-reaction guide to help students link new and prior knowledge and activate students' interest and curiosity for the topic, promoting motivation and engagement.

During Reading

Explicitly teach students to ask and answer questions about text.

1. Teach students to ask and answer specific types of questions, such as questions whose answers are explicitly stated in the text and those that require students to make inferences based on what they have read (e.g., Question-Answer Relationship).

2. Use question generation on its own or as part of multi-strategy (e.g., Reciprocal Teaching) instruction.

3. Provide students with strategies to evaluate teacher-generated questions. For example, it is important to know if the answer will be found in the text or if it should be inferred.

Use graphic organizers which are visual representations that help students identify, organize, and remember important ideas from what they read. Adapt graphic organizers to text type (e.g., Venn diagram for compare/contrast informational text; story grammar map for literary text). Explicitly teach the use of graphic organizers to

1. represent and discuss connections,

2. confirm or refute predictions, and

3. record important information.

Explicitly teach comprehension monitoring strategies, or fix-up strategies when comprehension breaks down such as

1. Re-reading,

2. Asking someone questions about the text,

3. Considering relevant background knowledge, and

4. Examining the graphics more carefully

After Reading

Teach students how to use self-questioning strategies to reflect on what they have read.

Explicitly teach students to summarize the main ideas of what they read:

1. Teach students to summarize small amounts of text such as a short paragraph before summarizing longer sections.

2. Provide modeling, feedback, and many opportunities to practice summarization rules such as:

1. Selecting a topic sentence or inventing a topic sentence if one is not explicitly stated;

2. Using one word to replace a list of related items;

3. Deleting trivial and redundant information; and

4. Re-reading to make sure your summary makes sense.

3. Teach students how to use graphic organizers to write summaries.

4. Provide examples and non-examples of summaries to help students recognize and produce summaries that contain only key ideas.

Explicitly teach the use of graphic organizers to

1. write summaries,

2. review information, and

3. make connections

What are some guidelines for English-language learners (ELL)?
Francis et al., (2007) outline recommendations to guide the planning and implementation of any instructional approach or academic intervention to promote ELLs' reading ability:

ELLs need early, explicit, and intensive instruction in phonological awareness and phonics in order to build decoding skills.

K-12 classrooms across the nation must increase opportunities for ELLs to develop sophisticated vocabulary knowledge.

Reading instruction in K-12 classrooms must equip ELLs with strategies and knowledge to comprehend and analyze challenging narrative and expository texts.

Instruction and intervention to promote ELLs' reading fluency must focus on vocabulary and increased exposure to print.

In all K-12 classrooms across the U.S., ELLs need significant opportunities to engage in structured, academic talk.

Independent reading is only beneficial when it is structured and purposeful, and there is a good reader-text match.

What materials can be used to teach reading comprehension to struggling secondary students?

Any other text such as magazines, newspaper articles, Internet sources, library books, all of which can supplement content area learning. These sources need to be of high interest to and appropriate for secondary students.

Ways for students to monitor their reading such as graphic organizers, study guides, note-taking charts, reading logs, timelines, checklists, cloze activities, journals.

Sticky notes, index cards, or any type of paper for students to write summaries, predictions, questions, and unknown words as they read sections of text.

Informative posters, definitions, charts, maps, and graphs on the walls in the classroom to reinforce concepts and vocabulary.

References
Biancarosa, G., & Snow, C. E. (2004). Reading next-A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Boardman, A. G., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., Wexler, J., Murray, C. S., & Kosanovich, M. (2008). Effective instruction for adolescent struggling readers: A practice brief. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction. http://www.centeroninstruction.org/files/Practice%20Brief%2DStruggling%20Readers%2Epdf

Edmonds, M. S., Vaughn, S., Wexler, J., Reutebuch, C., Cable, A., Tackett, K. K., & Schnakenberg, J. W. (2009). A synthesis of reading interventions and effects on reading comprehension outcomes for older struggling readers. Review of Educational Research, 79, 262-300.doi: 10.3102/0034654308325998

Francis, D. J., Rivera, M., Lesaux, N., Kieffer, M., & Rivera, H. (2006). Practical guidelines for the education of English language learners: Research-based recommendations for instruction and academic interventions. Portsmouth, NH: Center on Instruction, RMC Research Cooperation.

Kamil, M. L., Borman, G. D., Dole, J., Kral, C. C., Salinger, T., and Torgesen, J. (2008). Improving adolescent literacy: Effective classroom and intervention practices: A Practice Guide (NCEE #2008-4027). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc.

Perfetti, C. A., Landi, N., & Oakhill, J. (2005). The acquisition of reading comprehension skill. In M. J. Snowling& C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 227-247). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Pressley, M. (2006). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford.

Reed, D. K., & Vaughn, S. (2010). Reading interventions for older students. In T. A.Glover & S. Vaughn (Eds.), Response to intervention: Empowering all students to learn, a critical account of the science and practice (pp. 143-186). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Adolescent Literacy, 78(1), 40-59.

Snow, C. E. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R & D program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.
Recommend Readings
Alfassi, M. (2004). Reading to learn: Effects of combined strategy instruction on high school students. The Journal of Educational Research, 97(4), 171-184.doi: 10.3200/JOER.97.4.171-185

Almasi, J. F. (2003). Teaching strategic processes in reading. New York, NY:Guilford.

Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., & Osborn, J. (2001). Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read. Jessup, MD: National Institute forLiteracy.

Blanchowicz, C., & Ogle, D. (2001). Reading comprehension: Strategies for independent learners. New York, NY: Guilford.

Brown, A. L., & Palinscar, A. S. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension: Fostering and monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1, 117-175.

Bryant, D. P., Vaughn, S., Linan-Thompson, S., Ugel, N., Hamff, A., & Hougen, M. (2000). Reading outcomes for students with and without reading disabilities in general education middle school content area classes. Learning Disability Quarterly, 23, 24-38.doi: 10.2307/1511347

Chin, C. (2007). Teacher questioning in science classrooms: Approaches that stimulate productive thinking. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(6),815-843.doi: 10.1002/tea.20171

DiCecco, V.M.,& Gleason, M.M. (2002). Using graphic organizers to attain relational knowledge from expository text. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(4), 306-320.doi:10.1177/00222194020350040201

Flick, L. B., & Lederman, N. G. (2002).The value of teaching reading in the context of science and mathematics. School Science and Mathematics, 102(3),105-106.

Gersten, R., Fuchs, L. S., Williams, J. P., & Baker, S. (2001). Teaching reading comprehension strategies to students with learning disabilities. Review of Educational Research, 71, 279-320.doi: 10.3102/00346543071002279

Gersten, R., & Jimenez, R. (1998). Promoting learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Jitendra, A. K., Hoppes, M. K., & Xin, Y. P. (2000). Enhancing main idea comprehension for students with learning problems: The role of a summarization strategy and self-monitoring instruction. The Journal of Special Education, 34(3), 127-139.doi: 10.1177/002246690003400302

Kosanovich, M. L., Reed, D. K., & Miller, D. H. (2010). Bringing literacy strategies into content instruction: Professional learning for secondary-level teachers. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction. Retrieved from http://www.centeroninstruction.org/files/Bringing%20Literacy%20Strategies%20into%20Content%20Instruction%2Epdf

Klingner, J. K., Vaughn, S., & Boardman, A. (2007). Teaching reading comprehension to students with learning difficulties. New York, NY: Guilford.doi: 10.1177/002246690003400302

Lovett, M.,& Steinbach, K. (1997). The effectiveness of remedial programs for reading disabled children of different ages: Does the benefit decrease for older children? Learning Disability Quarterly, 20(3), 189-210.doi: 10.2307/1511308

Mastropieri, M. A., Scruggs, T. E., Spencer, V., & Fontana, J. (2003). Promoting success in high school world history: Peer tutoring versus guided notes. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 18(1), 52-65.doi: 10.1111/1540-5826.00057

McKeown, M.B., Beck,I.L., & Blake, R.G.K. (2009). Rethinking reading comprehension instruction: A comparison of instruction for strategies and content approaches. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3) pp. 218-253. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.44.3.1

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups. (NIH Publication No. 00-4754).Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Raphael, T. E., & Au, K. H. (2005). QAR: Enhancing comprehension and test taking across grades and content areas. Reading Teacher, 59, 206-221.doi: 10.1598/RT.59.3.1

Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3rd grade: A practice guide(NCEE 2010-4038). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from whatworks.ed.gov/publications/practiceguides.

Spencer, V. G., Scruggs, T. E., & Mastropieri, M. A. (2003). Content area learning in middle school social studies classrooms and student with emotional orbehavioral disorders: A comparison of strategies. Behavioral Disorders, 28(2),77-93.

Taylor, B. M., Pearson, P. D., Peterson, D. S., & Rodriguez, M. C. (2005). The CIERA school change framework: An evidence-based approach to professional development and school reading improvement. Reading Research Quarterly,40(1), 40-69.doi: 10.1598/RRQ.40.1.3

Taboada, A., & Guthrie, J. (2006). Contributions of student questioning and prior knowledge to construction of knowledge from reading information text. Journal of Literacy Research, 38(1), 1-35.doi: 10.1207/s15548430jlr3801_1

Torgesen, J. K., Houston, D. D., Rissman, L. M., Decker, S. M., Roberts, G.,Vaughn, S., & Lesaux, N. (2007). Academic literacy instruction for adolescents: A guidance document from the Center on Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: RMCCorporation, Center on Instruction.

Trabasso, T., & Bouchard, E. (2002). Teaching readers how to comprehend text strategically. In C. C. Pressley & M. Pressley (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices (pp. 176-200). New York, NY: Guilford.

Van Garderen, D. (2004). Reciprocal teaching as a comprehension strategy for understanding mathematical word problems. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 20,225-229.doi: 10.1080/10573560490272702

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Suggested Resources
Kosanovich M. L., Logan, T., Magill, K., & Weinstein, C. (2007). Fourth and Fifth Grade Student Center Activities. Florida Center for Reading Research. http://www.fcrr.org/curriculum/studentCenterActivities45.shtm

Kosanovich, M. L.,& MaGill, K. (2007). Teacher Resource Guide (with professional development DVD) to accompany the Fourth and Fifth Student Center Activities. Florida Center for Reading Research. http://www.fcrr.org/curriculum/studentCenterActivities45.shtm

Murray, C. S., Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., Tackett. K. K., & Kosanovich, M. (2008). Effective instruction for adolescent struggling readers: Professional development module. Facilitator's guide. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction. http://www.centeroninstruction.org/files/EIASR%20FG%202nd%20Ed%2Epdf
Note: The first edition of this InfoSheet was prepared by Diane Pedrotty Bryant, Judy Englehard, and Linda Reetz.
For a downloadable PDF copy Click here

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Promoting Reading Comprehension in Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities | Council for Learning Disabilities

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Prepared by Marcia Kosanovich,Ph.D. Network of Educators, LLC (Revised August 2013) Reading comprehension is "the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language" (Snow, 2002, p.11). Extracting meaning from text is to understand what the author has explicitly or implicitly stated.

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Visualization in Secondary Math and Science

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Visualization in Secondary Math and Science

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Students create videos to visualize science and math concepts while highlighting their knowledge of the subject.

As a former physics teacher, I found that certain topics were difficult for students to grasp without some sort of visualization process. This includes a range of topics, from fundamental math skills like solving equations and graphing functions on a coordinate plane to advanced topics such as the integration of multivariable functions in three-dimensional spaces. In high school science, the opportunities for helping students visualize concepts grow exponentially. In biology, you can illustrate the process of mitosis; in chemistry, you can depict different types of atomic bonding structures; and in physics, you can graph the parabolic path of a projectile.

Creating animations, regardless of the math or science topic you choose, is a fantastic way to create a visual representation of a complex process. Animations can be re-used (and improved) as often as necessary. They are very effective as part of a review exercise and are beneficial for students who were absent when the material was originally introduced in class.

Because Frames is so easy to learn, both teachers and students can create projects that teach skills, review concepts and demonstrate complicated processes using stop-motion animation. I like to begin by having teachers create an animation on a particular topic and then use the animation to teach the concept to their class. Next, the teacher directs their students in a mini-lesson in Frames where they explore the general process of creating a frame animation. Finally, the teacher challenges students to create their own animation on a specific topic from the curriculum they're learning.

The first few animations you create should be on topics that you are very familiar with and cover concepts your students already have some background knowledge on. As you skills grow and your students become more familiar with the process, you can advance to the more difficult topics and skills in your content area.

Keeping students involved in the entire process is essential, as both consumers of your animations and developers of their own. Research shows that students who internalize information are far more likely to retain it and be able to apply it in a meaningful and relevant way. What better way to provide your students the opportunity to invest in their own instruction than by creating their own meaningful, relevant animations?

Brad Smrstick is a former high school math and science teacher with more than 20 years of experience in the classroom teaching physics across all levels from conceptual to A.P. He has participated in summer research programs at the FermiLab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Florida, and the University of South Florida. He now applies his craft as team lead for Technology Training at Staff Development in Hillsborough County, Florida.

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TVisualization in Secondary Math and Science

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As a former physics teacher, I found that certain topics were difficult for students to grasp without some sort of visualization process. This includes a range of topics, from fundamental math skills like solving equations and graphing functions on a coordinate plane to advanced topics such as the integration of multivariable functions in three-dimensional spaces.

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Summarize what you read. A typical reading task, right? Yes. But it is so much more than that! Summarizing is a powerful thinking strategy that spans all academic areas and even work-related life skills. It is the ability to make decisions about information in efficient ways. More than ever, summarizing is a needed skill for the information age! Here are two ways that summarizing can benefit every classroom as a thinking strategy, not just a reading comprehension skill.

Summarizing involves thinking about information. To summarize, a student must rethink and reprocess what was experienced. This makes summarizing a skill for thinking. During reading, a student will summarize by using four distinct cognitive skills:

1. We must pause and retell what we read.

2. Then the student must decide what was important about the text.

3. These decisions are paraphrased into the student's own words.

4. Finally, the paraphrased thoughts are logically sequenced into a summary.

That's complex! No wonder students struggle with summarizing. It's a skill that promotes learning. Maybe more importantly, it's a skill that increases our ability to learn...much like exercise.

How can summarizing be used in a variety of settings? How can this thinking strategy promote learning in all classroom?

In a science class, students can be asked after each step of an investigation to paraphrase the steps in the process. At the end of the investigation, students can read their paraphrasing and create three sentences to summarize the scientific process. It's more than simply a quiz or exit ticket. It's a task that promotes processing and learning.

In a math class, a teacher can meet with small groups to review errors made on last week's test. After analyzing and discussing each error, students write down the "gist" of the mistake. After this 10-15 minute small group lesson, they read aloud what they wrote and discuss the common thread in all of the mistakes. This discussion is a summary of the students' learning.

Summarizing Strategy for Reading Comprehension

We usually think of summarizing in the context of a reading skill. But a skill is different than a strategy. A skill is a part of the reading process such as decoding words, reading fluently, analyzing a text, etc... Skills make the whole process possible.

Reading skills are the building blocks to fully independent reading. They are the staple of reading instruction. However, the strategy should be embedded across content areas.

Strategies are bigger than skills. Seasoned readers don't just pick up a text and start going at it. They think about the text, what it is, why they are reading it, and how they are going to experience the text. These are strategies. They give the reader control of comprehension.

Summarizing is one strategy a reader can use...if they have been appropriately taught how to summarize. When readers use summarizing as a strategy, the reader will pause during reading and paraphrase the meaning of a segment of text. As the reader continues to read, they continue to create a summary of what they are reading in their mind. It's an ongoing thinking skill that is used by readers to understand texts.

As a thinking strategy, summarizing is a powerful thinking ability that allows students to process information and make sense of it. Isn't that what we are doing in education? Making sense of the world around us? Summarizing is one strategy to help our students get there! Related Teaching Strategies: Visible Learning Makes 200% Growth in 9 Weeks

[thrive_text_block color="blue" headline="Read More on How to Teach Summarizing."] Teaching Summaries, Getting Detailed Part 1

Click to Read [/thrive_text_block]

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Summarizing as a Thinking Strategy - TeamTom Education

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Summarize what you read. A typical reading task, right? Yes. But it is so much more than that! Summarizing is a powerful thinking strategy that spans all academic areas and even work-related life skills. It is the ability to make decisions about information in efficient ways.

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Quick Summarizing Strategies to Use in the Classroom 

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Quick Summarizing Strategies to Use in the Classroom 

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AVID Strategy - Summarizing Information One Pager

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AVID Strategy - Summarizing Information One Pager.pdf

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AVID Strategy 10- Summarizing the Text.pdf