Putting it Into Action

Lesson Designs for Text Comprehension

All lessons and units should be designed to ensure student comprehension.  I sometimes get caught up in the planning part of teaching, and not always because I am focused on student learning, but instead, because I am excited by the multiple texts and forms of information I can connect to a unit (songs, movies, pictures, magazine articles).  I am realizing, though, that I must be more purposeful in my unit design, especially since my sequencing of assignments does not always allow for enough focus on pre-reading, during-reading, or post-reading comprehension checks (which this blog post will focus on, although there are many other helpful topics included in Chapter Eight, including determining daily content objectives, designing units around a main idea in the content area, designing units using thematic organization, mapping key terms and key concepts, and learning vocabulary through pre-reading, during-reading, and postreading lessons).

Pre-Reading

Pre-reading preparation can set the tone for the whole day or an entire unit, and it involves a teacher's ability to link students' prior knowledge to the new material.  A quick pre-reading assessment, pre-test, or inventory can help to determine a student's current level of knowledge, and an Anticipation Guide, which contains ten to fifteen statements that reflect one narrow aspect of the material, can help students to challenge commonly held beliefs or begin to make connections to the text itself.  An example of an Anticipation Guide for Of Mice and Men is found here.

Another way of assessing students' prior knowledge is to do a K-W-L chart.  Other ideas include the following:

• Outlining key vocabulary with a semantic map that illustrates the relationships among content words
• Identifying a problem to be solved
• Discussing related concepts in small or whole-class groups
• Showing a film
• Doing a gallery walk using related primary documents, pictures, or short texts to activate prior knowledge about a historical time period or scientific concept
• Setting up situations that require ethical choices

During Reading

Throughout the reading of a text, a teacher should be concerned with extending comprehension by exploring the implications of the unit's main idea, maintaining the level of interest, checking sutdent understanding, and monitoring vocabulary and organization of the passages.  This can be done by asking students questions from all three levels of comprehension and encouraging multiple responses.  To help students to work through a difficult text, Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) can be used as a strategy for "guiding interpretation, fostering prediction, and teaching students how to break material into chunks."  Teachers can also create Selective Reading Guides, which walks students through a text to be read on his or her own, or Text Pattern Guides, which focus on a text's structure and organizational pattern.  Other strategies recommended include the Three-Level Statement Guide, which exposes students to complexities in the material, or summary writing.  The authors are careful to clarify, however, that a good summary follows the following strict guidelines:

1. Must cover only main points
2. Must not include examples, specifics, or arguments
3. Must not use direct quotations, except for an irreplaceable phrase
4. Must use a parallel structure to that of the original
5. Must not allow undue space to a minor point
6. Must add not material to the original and must not contain the opinion of the student
7. Must be concise (rarely more than a page)

Postreading

After completing a text, a unit should focus on extending and refining new knowledge learned through a rich assortment of activities, from field trips to movies to student discussion.  Great ideas for post reading activities include classroom debates, mock trials or television presentations or talk shows, student writing about what they read (reports, rewrites of a chapter, persuasive essays, dialogues or interviews, how-to manuals, book reviews, journal entries), creating graphic organizers of new information (charts, graphs, outlines, maps, List-Group-Label), tests, quizzes, and the list goes on and on.  The goal here should be to evaluate what students have learned and to extend that learning beyond the text and into the upcoming course material.