Students fill out the seed discussion organizer after reading the text (but they should also be prompted to fill it out as they read if that feels better to them). The teacher prompts students to look for "seeds" as they read through the text the first time, and after finishing a second reading of the text they put those "seeds" into the graphic organizer. The seed discussion organizer focuses on the following four areas: things that the students don't understand, things that the students want to know, things that are surprising or interesting to the students, and things that are reminding students of other things that they have learned.

Students are given the beginning of sentences to help direct them toward higher level thinking and analysis of the text. Examples of sentence stems include "The main idea of this text is" and "The most important details are." Students fill out their sentence stems after reading the text. Teachers can model for their students by filling out their own sentence stems.

Reading guides help students navigate complex texts through answering content-specific prompts and questions. Reading guides also serve as a comprehension check of sorts and promote active reading on the students' ends. The reading guide that the teacher provides must include relevant aspects/themes of the text as well as important vocabulary. The reading guide should be read over before starting the reading, and then during and after the reading the guide should be filled out.

The Frayer Model helps students unpack and learn the vocabulary in the text that is unknown or unfamiliar to them. The model is to be filled out by students after reading the text (but they should also be prompted to fill it out as they read if that feels better to them). Students must come up with a definition of the word, facts about the word, examples of the word in real life, and things that are opposite to the word. The teacher helps students work through this activity if they get stuck, but otherwise this is a really good small group activity.

A concept map allows students to create a visual model of their thinking during the reading process. Upon completing the first reading of a text, students should write down the biggest ideas that stick out to them. From there they should draw lines that connect to other words/ideas. By the end, students can find various connections between all of the words. There is not a rigid set of instructions for concept maps; students should instead be told that the most important part about concept maps is making connections between big, overarching themes.

An exit slip can be as simple as having students write down one big thing that happened in the reading from class that day. The slip could be more specific though, such as asking students to write down the names of the main characters from the text that were discussed that day. There are a variety of different questions that the teacher can ask, but the ultimate goal is to make sure students are staying engaged and understand the plot.

Students are asked to highlight the most important words or phrases from the text. The highlighted words must be ones that are central to a person's understanding of the text as a whole, such as specific years, locations, or names of characters that are mentioned. This strategy is best used during reading. Teachers should model what effective highlighting looks like, as some students may think that everything needs to be highlighted.

Story maps are similar to concept maps, but they focus more specifically on the "not so higher level" ideas. For example, a story map asks readers to keep track of and write down the main characters and their personalities/appearances, the various settings in the story, and the major problems and their solutions, just to name a few. Story maps should be filled out as students read; it should not be saved until the very end.

RAFT stands for role of the writer, audience, format, and topic. An example of something that students could use the RAFT strategy on could be a document from a Congressperson demanding that a certain organization pays higher taxes. In this situation the role of the writer is to pass legislation as a member of Congress, the audience is made up of other Congress members, the format is a letter, and the topic is taxation. RAFT helps students identify the various roles involved in a certain piece of writing, including author and audience. This strategy is done best after reading the text.

Small groups are assigned a certain text or section of a text that they must become "experts" on. Then groups are mixed up so that in each new group at least one person is an expert on a different text. These new groups then have a discussion together and go around explaining what individual peoples' texts are about. The jigsaw strategy is great because it makes students fully grasp a piece of text through close reading and analysis, but it also pushes students to go talk about it with others and learn new things from others about other texts that they haven't read quite yet.