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THE COGNITIVE DIMENSION is…
• Getting the big picture & breaking it into its
component parts (synthesis & analysis)
• Monitoring comprehension
• Using a variety of reading strategies
independently to decrease confusion and
increase comprehension
• Setting a purpose for reading and adjusting
reading strategies accordingly
• Noticing one’s improvement—assessing one’s
performance and setting goals
2
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THE COGNITIVE DIMENSION is…
• Getting the big picture and breaking it down into
its component parts (synthesis and analysis)
• Monitoring comprehension
• Using a variety of reading strategies
independently to decrease confusion and increase
comprehension
• Setting a purpose for reading and adjusting
reading strategies accordingly
• Noticing one’s improvement—assessing one’s
performance and setting goals
The Cognitive Dimension involves developing readers’ general mental processes, including
their problem-solving strategies.1 Cognitive strategies enable the reader to organize
information, clear up misconceptions, and lift more meaning from the text.
COGNITIVE DIMENSION THEORY STOP
The following is quoted from a five-year study conducted by Dr. Judith A. Langer, director of
the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA). She and a team of
researchers investigated English programs in 44 classrooms in 25 schools in 4 states. By
comparing typical programs with those that get outstanding results, Langer and colleagues have
been able to identify the features of the more effective programs.2
Finding 4: Students Learn Strategies for Doing the Work.
In schools that beat the odds in English language arts classes students are overtly taught
strategies for thinking as well as doing. In contrast, in more typically performing schools, the
focus is on the content or skill, without overtly teaching the overarching strategies for planning,
organizing, completing, or reflecting on the content or activity.
It is important for students to learn not only subject matter content, but also how to think
about, approach, and do their work in each subject. In higher performing schools, teachers
divide new or difficult tasks into segments and provide their students with guides for
accomplishing them. However, the help they offer is not merely procedural: They guide
students through the process and overtly teach the steps necessary to do well. They provide
strategies not only for how to do the task but also how to think about it. These strategies are
1
Schoenback, R. Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C. and Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for Understanding: A Guide to
Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 22.
2
The results of this research are reported in a set of research reports and case studies including, Beating the Odds:
Teaching Middle and High School Students to Read and Write Well. Excellence in English in Middle and High School:
How Teachers’ Professional Lives Support Student Achievement examines the professional contexts that contribute
to teachers’ success. A summary of this work can be found on CELA’s web site (http:// cela.albany.edu).
3
Tab 7 - Cognitive Dimension - Page 3
discussed and modeled, and teachers develop reminder sheets for student to use. In this way,
students learn the process for completing an assignment successfully.
Most of the teachers in the higher performing schools share and discuss rubrics for evaluating
performance with their students. They also incorporate rubrics into their ongoing instruction as
a way to help students develop an understanding of the components that contribute to a higher
score. Discussion of the rubric expectations enables students to develop more complete, more
elaborate, and more highly organized responses to an assignment. Sometimes students design a
rubric with their teacher so that they clearly understand what is expected of them.
In higher performing schools, students learn and internalize ways to work through a task, and to
understand and meet its demands. Through these experiences, they not only become familiar
with strategies they can use to approach other tasks, including high stakes tests, but they also
develop ways to think and work within a specific field. Teachers scaffold students’ thinking by
developing complex activities and by asking questions that make the students look more deeply
and more critically at the content of lessons.
In more typical schools, instruction focuses on content or skills rather than on the process of
learning. Students do not develop the procedural and/or metacognitive strategies necessary to
complete tasks independently. Teachers concentrate on covering the required information,
focusing on the answer rather than on how to get to the answer. Students are not helped to
internalize the methods and strategies for accomplishing tasks.
Some Activities That Work
• Providing rubrics that students review, use, and even develop
• Designing models and guides that lead students to understand how to approach each task
• Supplying prompts that support thinking
What Doesn’t Work
• Focus only on skills and content
• Instructions that lack procedural strategies that support and extend thinking
From Seven Keys to Comprehension 3
“Sounding out or decoding words is part of the reading puzzle but falls short of real reading. If
children don’t understand what they read, they’re not really reading. If children don’t unlock
meaning as they read, the words are boring babble and they will never read well or enjoy
reading. So, how is meaning unlocked?”
“In the 1980’s, a breakthrough occurred: Researchers identified the specific thinking strategies
used by proficient readers. They found that reading is an interactive process in which good
readers…
3
From 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It! by Susan Zimmermann and Chryse
Hutchins published by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House, New York, 2003.
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1. Create mental images: Good readers create wide range of visual, auditory, and other
sensory images as they read, and they become emotionally involved with what they read.
2. Use background knowledge: Good readers use their relevant prior knowledge before,
during, and after reading to enhance their understanding of what they’re reading.
3. Ask questions: Good readers generate questions before, during, and after reading to
clarify meaning, make predictions, and focus their attention on what’s important.
4. Make inferences: Good readers use their prior knowledge and information from what
they read to make predictions, seek answers to questions, draw conclusions, and create
interpretations that deepen their understanding of the text.
5. Determine the most important ideas or themes: Good readers identify key ideas or
themes as they read, and they can distinguish between important and unimportant
information.
6. Synthesize information: To get the overall meaning, good readers track their thinking as
it evolves during reading.
7. Use “fix-up” strategies: Good readers are aware of when they understand and when
they don’t. If they have trouble understanding specific words, phrases, or longer
passages, they use a wide range of problem-solving strategies including skipping ahead,
rereading, asking questions, using a dictionary, and reading the passage aloud.”
From Helping At-Risk Students Meet Standards: A Synthesis of Evidence-Based Classroom
Practices4
To summarize, in reading, research evidence indicates that effective cognitively oriented
instruction has the following characteristics:
1. Combinations of metacognitive and cognitive strategies are taught (e.g., planning ahead
and summarizing).
2. Multiple instructional practices are used (e.g., modeling and explicit explanation of
strategies, instructional conversations about strategy use, and peer-guided and
independent practice).
The evidence also suggests that practitioners should take care when addressing the needs of
low achieving students not to ignore the needs of students who are proficient. To accommodate
diverse needs, practitioners should teach multiple types of strategies and use multiple texts.
A FINAL WORD TO PRACTITIONERS
Cognitively oriented instruction is designed to help students improve the quality of their
thinking, become more independent learners, and become proficient in complex, higher order
academic tasks. The results of research suggest that effective cognitively oriented instruction
in classrooms is characterized as follows:
4
Created by staff at McRel (the Mid Continental Regional Educational Lab) and can be found at
<http://www.mcrel.org/zoom/search.asp?zoom_query=Helping+AtRisk+Students+Meet+Standards&zoom_per_page=10&zoom_cat%5B%5D=-1&zoom_and=0&zoom_sort=0>.
5
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

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
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Tab 7 - Cognitive Dimension - Page 5
Teachers are modeling, explaining, prompting, and discussing combinations of metacognitive
and cognitive strategies.
Students are modeling, explaining, prompting, practicing, and discussing combinations of
metacognitive and cognitive strategies.
The content of instruction includes strategies for analyzing and preparing to meet task
demands (e.g., problem or genre identification and identification of text structure
elements).
The content of instruction includes “how-to” or formulaic, step-by-step solutions,
procedures, and aids to comprehension.
Activity materials include a variety of text types and problem types.
Activity materials include texts and problems that are meaningful and/or relevant to
students.
Teachers and students, and students and students, are engaged in two-way interactions in
which preliminary products or solutions are discussed or shared and feedback on
effectiveness is provided.
Students successfully perform complex, higher order academic tasks.
Students achieve at or above proficiency levels on tests involving complex, higher order
academic tasks.
Research suggests that when these indicators of effective cognitively oriented instruction are
met, students benefit. Many students become interested in academic content and tasks, are
engaged, and successfully perform complex, higher order academic tasks. Readers are referred
to Pressley et al. (1995) for practical guidance in how to implement cognitively oriented
instruction. Effective implementation of cognitively oriented instruction, however, may require
certain resources and organizational capacities, including (1) materials and technical know-how
for creating authentic problem environments inside the classroom, and (2) ongoing professional
development with external technical assistance providers or researchers that gives teachers
opportunity to share and discuss student work and thinking and classroom implementation issues.
Further research is needed that systematically examines the processes for securing such
resources and their impact on classroom practices and student achievement.
Finally, research also suggests that there are trade-offs or potential negative consequences to
the implementation of cognitively oriented instruction for low-achieving or at-risk students.
Teachers and education leaders need to be aware of and guard against focusing too narrowly on
remediating strategic deficits to the exclusion of acknowledging, representing, and honoring the
intellectual depth and breadth of content-area knowledge and skills (Ketter & Pool, 20015;
O’Malley et al., 19856).
5
Ketter, J., & Pool, J. (2001). Exploring the impact of a high-stakes direct writing assessment in two high
school classrooms. Research in the Teaching of English, 35, 344–393.
6
O’Malley, J. M., Chamot, A. U., Stewner-Manzanares, G., Russo, R. P., & Kupper, L. (1985). Learning strategy
applications with students of English as a second language. TESOL Quarterly, 19(3), 557–584.
6
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QUESTIONING
Resources to Supplement
Reading for Understanding
Strategic Literacy Initiative
www.wested.org/stratlit
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Questioning
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Supplementary Resources Overview...............................ii
The Reading Apprenticeship™ Framework .................. iii
Introduction ..................................................................................................1
Classroom Applications
ReQuest (Reciprocal Questioning) ........................................................... 3
Introducing Question-Answer
Relationship (QAR): Room as Text.......................................................... 5
The Four Types of Questions (handout) ................................... 10
QAR (handout).................................................................................. 11
Stump the Teacher .................................................................................... 12
Hot Seat ....................................................................................................... 15
Questioning Seminar.................................................................................. 17
Lessons to Learn from the Classroom
Challenges You Might Expect and How to Handle Them ...................23
How It Might Look in Your Classroom ...................................................24
Additional Resources ..........................................................................26
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Questioning
Supplementary Resources Overview
Reading Apprenticeship™ is an approach to secondary literacy instruction designed to deepen
students’ engagement and thinking about text, and to expand their identities to encompass
themselves as readers. This packet of resources is designed to support teachers in constructing a
Reading Apprenticeship™ classroom. It is a supplement to the book, Reading for
Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms.
Supplementary Resources are Deliberately Economical
Secondary, content-area reading instruction must center on high-leverage strategies. For this
reason, supplementary resource materials contain a small number of research-based reading
strategies that yield a high return in increased reading achievement and engagement. In this
packet, you will find:
• an introduction to questioning;
• guidelines for implementing questioning;
• classroom applications designed to help students question the text as a cognitive strategy,
and to give them more control over their learning;
• a preview of challenges you might expect as you implement questioning in your classroom,
and suggestions for how to handle them; and
• a list of additional resources.
Supplementary Resources are Grounded in the Reading Apprenticeship™
Framework and an Inquiry Approach to Professional Development
To effectively apprentice students to the reading craft, teachers must deepen their understanding
of the reading process and gain an appreciation for the difficulties students face and the
resources they bring to the reading task. For this reason, the resources in this packet are
designed to be embedded in a long term program of inquiry-based Reading Apprenticeship™
professional development, in which teachers consider how to embed these instructional
strategies into their content-area teaching, make instructional decisions based on their students’
needs, explore these strategies in their classrooms, and share and reflect on these experiences
with colleagues. Teachers are invited to explore and adapt the classroom applications in
supplementary resource materials – to exercise professional judgment rather than merely
replicate practices.
A Request
These supplementary resource materials were developed to support teachers in translating and
extending what they learn in professional development settings into classroom practice—not as
a substitute for such inquiry. We ask for your support in using this set of materials to invite
teacher inquiry and support instructional decision-making. We also ask that should you use
these resources with teachers, you keep these materials intact, so that practical classroom
applications can be seen in the context of the bigger Reading Apprenticeship™ picture.
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Questioning
The Reading Apprenticeship™ Framework
Reading Apprenticeship™ is an approach to reading instruction that helps young people
develop the knowledge, strategies, and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers.
It is at heart a partnership of expertise, drawing on what teachers know and do as disciplinebased readers, and on adolescents’ unique and often underestimated strengths as learners.
Reading Apprenticeship™ helps students become better readers by:
♦
making the teacher’s discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students;
♦
making students’ reading processes, motivations, strategies, knowledge, and understandings
visible to the teacher and to one another;
♦
helping students gain insight into their own reading processes; and
♦
helping them develop a repertoire of problem-solving strategies for overcoming obstacles
and deepening comprehension of texts from various academic disciplines.
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Questioning
In other words, in a Reading Apprenticeship™ classroom, the curriculum expands to
include how we read and why we read in the ways we do, as well as what we read in
content area classes.
Reading Apprenticeship™ involves teachers in orchestrating and integrating four interacting
dimensions of classroom life that support reading development. These dimensions are woven
into subject-area teaching through metacognitive conversations—conversations about the
thinking processes students and teachers engage in as they read.
♦
Social: The social dimension draws on adolescents’ interests in larger social, political,
economic, and cultural issues. A safe environment is created for students to share their
confusion and difficulties with texts, and to recognize the diverse perspectives and resources
brought by each member.
♦
Personal: This dimension draws on strategic skills used by students in out-of-school
settings; their interest in exploring new aspects of their own identities and self-awareness as
readers; and their purposes for reading and goals for reading improvement.
♦
Cognitive: The cognitive dimension involves developing readers’ mental processes,
including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies.
Importantly, the work of generating cognitive strategies that support reading comprehension
is carried out through classroom inquiry.
♦
Knowledge-Building: This dimension includes identifying and expanding the knowledge
readers bring to a text and further develop through personal and social interaction with that
text, including knowledge about word construction, vocabulary, text structure, genre,
language, topics and content embedded in the text.
In metacognitive conversations, these four dimensions are integrated as teachers and students
work collaboratively to make sense of texts, while simultaneously engaging in a conversation
about what constitutes reading and how they are going about it. This metacognitive
conversation is carried on both internally, as teacher and students reflect on their own mental
processes, and externally, as they share their reading processes, strategies, knowledge resources,
motivations, and interactions with and affective responses to texts.
(For more information about Reading Apprenticeship™ see Reading for Understanding: A
Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms, by Ruth Schoenbach,
Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz; Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco,
CA, ©1999. Also, visit the Strategic Literacy Initiative website at
http://www.wested.org/stratlit).
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QUESTIONING
Introduction
What is it?
We know that proficient readers continuously ask questions during
the act of reading. For example, good readers question a sentence
or concept not understood, attempt to recall information from an
earlier passage, predict the next event, question the author’s intent,
or possibly, wonder how the information in the text relates to
larger universal themes. Proficient readers know how to use
questions to illuminate a text’s meaning.
In a Reading Apprenticeship™ classroom, working with
questioning helps students become active readers who use
questions both to engage with text and better comprehend it.
Reading for
Understanding, page
80.
Why use it?
Questions are often thought of as a way for the teacher to assess
student understanding; in fact, teaching students to ask questions
while reading is a powerful strategy for placing the meaningmaking process directly into their hands. Students’ critical thinking
and comprehension abilities are bolstered by interacting with the
text, developing their own questions, and discussing their
perceptions with peers. Through this dialogue of questioning and
answering, students are able to redefine and deepen their own
understanding of the text. When students share the metacognitive
process of how they found their answers, they learn from each
other. To this end, questioning is a personal, cognitive, and social
strategy.
When to use it?
Students can use questioning before, during and after reading a
text. Before reading, questioning helps set a purpose for reading;
during reading, questioning the text assists students in making
meaning; after reading, students can use questioning to discuss the
text and gain a deeper understanding of the material.
How to use it?
Within the framework of Reading Apprenticeship™, the teacher
begins by initially providing explicit instruction in questioning and
offering continuous modeling of how questions are constructed and
discussed. Gradually, the scaffolding is removed and assistance
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Questioning
Notes
from the teacher “fades,” creating space and opportunity for
students to interact with the text through their own questioning.
The classroom applications in this section make visible to students
the use of questioning as a strategic, cognitive tool for reading.
The order in which they appear suggests a sequence for
introducing and scaffolding questioning in the classroom; however,
teachers should feel free to modify the extent of scaffolding to
match the needs and previous experience of the students.
♦
ReQuest
♦
Introduction to Question-Answer Relationships (QAR):
Room as Text
♦
Stump the Teacher
♦
Hot Seat
♦
Questioning Seminar
Other Questioning classroom applications that can be found in
Reading for Understanding include ReQuest (modified), Question
Around, and Categorizing Questions.
© WestEd 2002 All rights reserved.
2
Reading for
Understanding,
pages 80-86.
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Questioning
CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
Notes
ReQuest (Reciprocal Questioning)
Adapted from Anthony Manzo1
Purpose
Students’ first exposure to questioning—that is, empowering
students to ask questions about the text—can be achieved with
ReQuest. Through ReQuest, students are introduced to the idea of
being active readers by asking questions while they read as
opposed to being passive readers who answer end-of-the-chapter
questions written by an anonymous textbook writer or teacher.
When students generate their own questions, they make meaning in
the process of questioning the text.
As an introductory application, ReQuest provides extensive
opportunities for the teacher to model good questioning skills for
the students: it allows for teacher and students to alternate asking
and answering each others’ questions after reading very short
passages. Although ReQuest was designed for reciprocal
questioning between a teacher and a single student, it can easily be
modified for whole class application where the teacher alternates
between different students. In this way, ReQuest becomes an early
scaffold as students have the opportunity to practice developing
and asking questions about the text they read. This step is
especially beneficial for middle school students, who may still be
learning how to communicate socially while they are being asked
to interact with the text from a new perspective.
An additional
ReQuest application
appears in Reading for
Understanding, page 81.
Materials
An excerpt or section of a text, non-fiction or fiction, from
the core or supplemental curriculum.
Process
1. Introduce ReQuest as an activity the class will be doing to
practice asking questions about the reading. During this time
students will get the opportunity to hear different types of
questions posed by both their peers and the teacher.
2. Provide any necessary context students will need to start
reading, and then have them read a short section (1 or 2
1
Manzo, A.V. (1969). The ReQuest Procedure. Journal of Reading, 13, pp. 123-126.
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Questioning
paragraphs or a subsection of a textbook chapter) silently.
(Preferably, when choosing the text passage for introducing
ReQuest, select from the course textbook, novel, or
supplemental reading already in use.)
Notes
3. When everyone has finished reading, explain that you will
invite them to ask you questions about the reading. When
applicable, “think aloud” about your thought process when
answering questions to model your thinking for students. After
answering a few questions posed by students, direct them to
continue reading the next section of the text silently.
4. Explain that the roles will now switch so that the teacher will
ask questions and the students will answer them. Since the
purpose of the teacher’s questions is to model questioning, you
should ask interpretive level questions (i.e. “Why” questions)
rather than just literal level questions. Encourage students to
problem-solve to answer difficult questions, and discuss why
some questions are more challenging than others.
5. Continue alternating the reciprocal questioning and answering
process until students reach a point where they demonstrate
understanding of the main ideas of the reading.
6. At this point, ask them to make predictions about what will
happen next in the text. Model for students how to turn their
statements into questions and encourage students to state their
predictions in the form of a question. Receive and record all
responses, periodically asking students to explain their
predictions.
7. Have students complete the reading, and then return to the their
predictions recorded earlier.
8. Discuss which questions were answered and probe for the
reasons why some questions were answered and others
weren’t. You might ask, How did knowing the purpose of the
section help them to make predictions?
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Questioning
Introducing Question-Answer Relationships (QAR):
Room as Text
Adapted from Caro Pemberton, Humanities teacher at
Oceana High School in Pacifica, CA
Notes
Purpose
Through Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), students learn
that questions have different levels of complexity and that
understanding how to identify a type of question assists greatly in
answering the question strategically. QAR acts as both a reading
strategy for deepening comprehension and as a classroom tool for
having meaningful and rich text-based discussions, in which
students direct the focus. Question-Answer Relationships as
developed by Taffy Raphael2 encompass four types of questions—
Right There, Pulling It Together3, Author and Me, and On My
Own. Using text from either the core curriculum or supplemental
curriculum, students develop all four types of questions, then pose
their questions to their peers, who in turn answer the questions and
identify their type.
High school Humanities teacher Caro Pemberton wanted her
students to see that the four types of questions were relevant to
their lives in and out of the classroom. So Caro and her students
applied the Question-Answer Relationships to how they interpreted
paintings, films, and even their own classroom. Caro was
convinced that this connection between the text and the real world
made a significant difference in how quickly her students
internalized the concept of QAR. She also wanted her students to
be metacognitive, to explain what they had to do to get the answer
to the question. Through QAR, Caro discovered that students were
asking better questions than she ever would have asked and that
the quality of their questions was a clear indicator of their
comprehension.
Materials
Practice text (included in this packet)
Visual access to things in the room
2
3
T. Raphael, “Questioning-Answering Strategies for Children,” The Reading Teacher, 1982, 36, 186-190
Raphael uses the label Putting it Together; SLI teachers have changed it to Pulling it Together.
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Questioning
Process
Notes
1. Explain to students that the class is going to learn how to talk
about things they read using four different types of questions.
To introduce the four types of questions, they’re going to use
the room as if it were text—they’re going to ask and answer
questions about the room.
2. Introduce the labels for the questions:
Four Types of Questions
Right There
Pulling It Together
Author and Me
On My Own
and make a list where everyone can read them.
3. Right There Using the room as a text, ask a literal question in
which the answer can be found by looking and pointing
directly at a single item. For example,
What time does the clock say?
What color is the trash can?
After students have answered each simple question, ask them
what they had to do to answer it. Make the point that the
answer was “right there” in the room, and reference the Right
There category already on your list. You also could write the
sample questions directly below the Right There category.
4. Pulling It Together Next, ask a different type of literal
question in which the answer is gathered from pulling together
information from various locations. Pulling It Together
questions might sound like
How many people are wearing glasses?
Where are books stored in the room?
After students have answered and explained how they found
their answer, emphasize the fact that the answer to a Pulling It
Together question is literal like a Right There question, but that
it requires one to look in more than one location to find the
answer.
5. Author and Me In keeping with the theme of reading the room
as if it were a text, pose questions to the class that require
students to combine their own background knowledge with
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Questioning
information gathered from the room. These Author and Me
type of questions might be
Notes
What is the best way to arrange the desks in this
classroom for finals?
How can you tell when your regular desk has been
moved?
Continue to ask students what they needed to do to answer the
question. Point out the fact that in order to answer the
questions, they needed to integrate their prior knowledge about
being students with what they know from being in that
particular class. Tell them that in texts, Author and Me
questions are often the most challenging to answer.
6. On My Own Finally, pose questions in which students need
only to draw from their prior experience to answer the
question, but are topic-related, such as
What’s the best way to arrange desks in a classroom?
Is it destruction of property or art when students draw
on desks?
Once a short discussion has taken place, let students know
that these are On My Own questions, which are openended, opinion-oriented questions. When making the shift
to asking questions about printed text, the objective is for
students to identify themes, universal truths, or “big
picture” ideas from the text and consider how these larger
themes, truths, or ideas apply to their own world.
Four Types of Questions
In the Text
◆ Right There
◆ Pulling it Together
In My Mind
◆ Author and Me
◆ On My Own
7. Immediately following the Room as Text exercise, assign a
short, easy text for the class to read and work with to practice
developing the four types of questions. A simple text and
examples of questions for practicing the four types of questions
have been excerpted from Reading for Understanding and
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Questioning
follow this section. Also, a fable or short children’s story works
well for this initial foray.
Scaffolding
Reading for
Understanding, page
82.
Introduce QAR once students (and teacher) are comfortable
with asking and answering each others’ questions in a whole
group setting, such as in ReQuest. Make sure a safe
environment has been established for asking additional
clarifying questions and for making mistakes.
The Room as Text exercise is, in itself, a scaffolding device for
supporting students in their learning of the four types of
questions. The exercise introduces students to the cognitive
concepts with the use of the concrete items of a classroom
environment before asking them to apply the same concepts to
text, which is a more challenging task.
If additional modeling is required for the students, participate
in asking and answering questions with the students as
described earlier in ReQuest. In answering the question,
remember to also identify the type of question and explain how
you found your answer.
As noted above in step 7 under Process, scaffold the transition
to text by giving students multiple opportunities to practice
with a text that is very accessible to them before presenting
them with a questioning task on which they will be assessed.
Continue to have metacognitive discussions about their
learning, in this case, about what makes one type of question
more difficult or easier than another.
Other QAR Ideas
Other examples of how some teachers have creatively
introduced the levels of questioning to students in their
classrooms can be found in Reading for Understanding.
Reading for
Understanding,
pages 81-84.
Sample Text – David Getting Ready for School
Question Around
Categorizing Questions
At Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, Tim
Coleman’s students analyzed a sample standardized test to
determine the proportion of the types of questions asked in the
Comprehension section and to look for patterns in how
questions of the same type were designed.
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One high school teacher in Contra Costa introduced QAR to
her students using a transparency of a painting. Students
learned the four types of questions while interpreting art!
Notes
A description of QAR is included in the California Department
of Education’s Strategic Teaching and Learning on pages 74–
76.
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handout
The Four Types of Questions
Excerpted from Reading for Understanding
Here is a simple piece of text to read:
David woke up fifteen minutes late. As soon as he saw the clock, he jumped
out of bed and headed for the shower, afraid he’d miss the bus again. He
looked in the dryer for his favorite jeans, but they were actually still in the
washing machine. “Dang! I told my sister to put my stuff in the dryer! Now
what am I gonna wear today?” After settling for a pair of baggy shorts and
a Hilfiger rugby shirt, he grabbed a bag of chips and a soda from the
kitchen, and searched frantically for his history book. When he found it, he
put it in his backpack, along with his breakfast, his hat, and his lucky deck
of cards. As he ran to the bus stop, he told himself, “I will not stay up late
watching wrestling anymore!”
- - - - -
Right There question: A question whose answer is right in the text—all you have to do
is locate it and copy it down.
• What did David do as soon as he saw the clock?
• What did he tell himself as he ran to the bus stop?
Pulling It Together question: A question whose answer is in the text, but you have to
pull it together from different parts of the text—you can’t simply copy it down from one
place.
• How did David get ready to leave the house?
• What did David look for before he left the house?
Author and Me question: A question whose answer is not in the text itself. The reader
has to use the information provided in the text and his/her own schema to figure out the
answer. In other words, the author provides information that can help answer the
question, but does not provide the answer itself.
Where was David going that morning?
At what time of day was David getting ready to go?
On My Own question: A question whose answer is not in the text itself. The reader
does not have to have read the text to answer the question, but reading the text will likely
inform his/her answer to the question.
• Should teenagers be able to watch television on school nights?
• Should parents always wake their kids up in the morning?
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handout
Name: ________________________________________ Date: __________________
QUESTION-ANSWER RELATIONSHIPS (QAR)
Directions: After you have read (or while you are reading) _______________________________,
(title of text)
write one of each type of question about the text.
4 Types of Questions
• Right There
What did you have to do to answer this question? Where did you get the answer?
•
Pulling It Together
What did you have to do to answer this question? Where did you get the answer?
•
Author and Me
What did you have to do to answer this question? Where did you get the answer?
•
On My Own
What did you have to do to answer this question? Where did you get the answer?
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Notes
Stump the Teacher
Purpose
This game, based on Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest) and
Question-Answer Relationships (QAR), can be used to review and
practice QAR. The teacher and students take turns posing,
answering and identifying the four types of questions in QAR
while at the same time practicing turn-taking, listening and
responding. Through the reciprocity, the teacher is able to model
strong questions and positive social behavior for the students.
Gradually the modeling (and teacher-student turn-taking) is
reduced so that students have more turn-taking opportunities.
Stump the Teacher adds a “play-like” aspect to the way students
can practice QAR as well as practice the social interaction of
asking and answering questions. Middle school teachers note how
the game can be a backdrop for providing learning opportunities
appropriate to middle school students—resolving disagreements,
constructing thoughtful and relevant questions, and listening and
responding to others in an effective way.
Materials
Texts to read, at first something fairly simple, gradually
increasing in difficulty over time as students have had
opportunities to practice and gain capacity with questioning
Paper (or the QAR Types of Questions handouts)
Overhead, chalkboard or butcher paper to record scores on
Process
1. Arrange students into heterogeneous teams of no more than
four students each.
2. Everyone reads a passage together.
3. Teams collaborate to create at least one of each type of
question based on the passage that they just read.
4. The teacher creates questions also (this can be done ahead of
time).
5. The teams are allowed to use their books as references during
the game. The teacher is not, except to resolve disputes over
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answers and types of questions. (This gives the students a
possible competitive advantage, but more likely levels the
playing field, and adds excitement to the game.)
Notes
6. The first team then asks a question of the teacher, and identifies
the type of question that was asked.
7. The teacher answers the question. If the teacher's answer is
incorrect (it happens!) the group posing the question calls on
another team to answer. If the teacher's answer is accepted as
correct, the teacher poses a new (of his or her own) question to
another team, and identifies the type of question.
8. The new group answers the question, and then poses a new
question to the teacher, identifying the type of question.
9. Rounds of questioning continue with the teacher and students
taking turns until all the questions are asked or the game is
exhausted or the bell rings, whichever comes first! In later
games, the teacher may take fewer turns and eventually no
turns at all as it becomes clear that students are asking good
questions and understand the relationships between questions
and answers.
10. Record points as the game is played. Points are earned as
follows:
The team or teacher posing a question earns one point for
each correctly identified type of question.
The team or teacher earns one point for each correct answer
to a question.
An incorrectly identified type of question results in no
point for the team posing the question and one point earned
by the answering team or teacher.
An incorrectly answered question results in no point for the
team posing the incorrect answer, and one point earned by
the correctly answering team or teacher.
11. All disputes are resolved through the following process:
The class re-reads the passage in question.
The team that posed the question identifies evidence from
the text that supports their answer or defends the type of
question.
The class discusses the text-based evidence and decides (by
consensus) whether the answer the team sought actually
answered the question as asked, or whether the question
was actually the type of question the team thought it was.
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Notes
The point is assigned to the winner.
The teacher is the final arbiter.
Scaffolding
Very competitive teams may want to develop tricky or nitpicky questions. Explain the purpose of the game (e.g. to
practice good questions, to have fun, to think critically) and ask
if they like being asked these types of questions themselves on
quizzes or for homework. If that does not change the tone of
the game, the teacher might pose a few ringers to the offending
team or teams to put the shoe on the other foot, so to speak. A
final solution that usually ends this type of bullying play is to
suggest that these types of questions be collected and added to
the next quiz.
Students often want prizes for the points (no surprise!).
Teachers may want to consider prizes, as well as using this as
an assessment, and offering some grade incentive based on
points earned to underscore the academic nature of the task.
Occasionally, students become involved in heated discussions
about answers or types of questions in the quest to earn points.
Two classic arguments surround the multiple possible answers
that might be acceptable for Text and Me questions and
confusions between types of questions. These discussions can
be valuable, but it is important to bring them to a close.
~ Ask students to support possible answers with evidence
from the text (a great skill to work on at any time!) and rule
out answers based on how convincing they are. Explain that
more than one answer might be accepted, choose which
ones are and move on.
~ Questions that can help clarify the differences between the
four types of questions are these: “What did you have to do
to answer that question?” and “How could you rephrase
that (Pulling It Together) question so that it was really an
(Author and Me) question?” Come to an agreement about
the type of question based on the relationship between the
question and what the reader has to do with the text and/or
their background knowledge to answer the question.
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Notes
Hot Seat
(Using Question-Answer Relationships)
Purpose
After students have had a chance to practice QAR and the four
types of questions (Right There, Pulling It Together, Author and
Me, and On My Own), Hot Seat offers another opportunity for
students to apply these skills. It can be used in the context of
reviewing text, rereading, or preparing for an analytical essay, as
well as with both narrative and expository text. It is best used
toward the middle or end of a unit, because students will likely be
able to ask more productive questions about a character or concept
with which they are already somewhat familiar.
Hot Seat involves students in the collaborative development of the
four types of questions, which they then direct to a student playing
the role of a character in the text. The process hones their
questioning skills, emphasizes question-answer relationships, and
encourages students to delve into characters and ideas in a text in a
highly interactive way. When reading expository text, students can
take on the characteristics of a key concept such as carbon 14 or
the U.S. Constitution.
Materials
Any text that students are reading that involves characters,
historical figures, or topics or concepts that can be personified.
Process
1. Ask students to silently read the text you have selected,
providing any necessary context before they read.
2. Introduce Hot Seat as an activity that uses questioning to
review a reading and delve more deeply into events,
motivations, and details related to a character, historical figure
or concept in the reading.
3. Choose a character, historical figure or concept in the reading
to be the focus of the Hot Seat. Ask for a volunteer from the
class who is willing to sit in the Hot Seat and answer questions
about the reading. If the text has several characters, it works
well to have more than one person in the Hot Seat. While
groups are developing questions, the student(s) in the Hot Seat
should review the reading.
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4. Divide the class into heterogeneous groups of four. Each group
develops two of each of the four types of questions that will be
directed to the person sitting in the Hot Seat. These questions
may refer to factual information, characters' motivations,
causes and effects, or big ideas that extend beyond the text.
They must be plausible and be related to the text in some way.
Notes
5. Each group takes turns asking the person in the Hot Seat a
question until all groups have had an opportunity to ask at least
two questions. During questioning, the person in the Hot Seat
should be encouraged to take on the persona of the character or
concept, speaking in that person's voice and using information
and ideas from the text to answer the questions.
6. While groups are developing and asking questions, the teacher
can play the role of observer, making notes about whether
groups are on task and tallying the types of questions each
group asks.
7. Conclude the Hot Seat with either a brief reflection or wholeclass discussion on the process of questioning and what it
contributed to students' understanding of and engagement with
the reading.
8. To ensure group accountability, a recorder should write down
each group's questions and categorize them. Ask each group to
turn in their questions for review at the end of the Hot Seat
activity. A selection of these questions can be used as the basis
for a test on the reading.
Variations
If a student feels that an answer from the student in the Hot
Seat is “out of character” or inappropriate to the character (or
key concept), a challenge can be made. If the challenging
student is able to convince the class that the Hot Seat answer is
inaccurate, the challenging student can oust the other student
from the Hot Seat and take the position.
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Notes
Questioning Seminar
Purpose
Once students demonstrate proficiency with Question-Answer
Relationships and small group discussions, the Questioning
Seminar is designed to provide students with the opportunity to
discuss the text in-depth, using the questions that they design to
guide the group conversation. It’s a chance for students to exhibit
their understanding of the text as well as gain access to each
others’ knowledge about the text, thus deepening their own
understanding through discussion. The student-centered discussion
puts students in charge of their own learning, with QAR simply
becoming the tool for how they talk about the text, while the
teacher steps back and plays the role of listener, scorekeeper, or
facilitator.
Middle and high school teachers want to see students talk about the
text beyond the literal level and to go beyond making personal
connections. They want students to be able to convey their
understanding of the text in purposeful discussions, interpreting the
text and habitually providing text-based evidence in their analysis.
The Questioning Seminar, with an emphasis on the Author and Me
questions, can become the forum in which medium-size groups of
students came together to “talk the talk” of the discipline for an
extended time. By the end of the year, the nature of the seminar
conversations often reach a point where identifying the type of
question no longer becomes necessary, and the heart of the
Questioning Seminar is simply a student-directed conversation
about the text.
Materials
Any piece of text—an article, a chapter, a short story, a novel,
a poem—that can be read by students independently
Students’ prepared questions and answers
A separate exercise for students when they are not participating
in the seminar
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Notes
Process
Preparation.
Preparing for Questioning Seminars requires some very
specific planning—determining the length of time (minutes and
days) for the seminar, selecting the text, grouping students, and
providing an activity students can complete independently
when not participating in the seminar. At the rate of one 40-60
minute seminar per day, plan for spending two or three class
periods devoted to conducting seminars. A group size of about
8 – 13 students allows for a variety of voices to be heard, so a
class size of 35 students will take three consecutive days for
Questioning Seminars. It’s also possible that different groups
of students engage in the seminar with different texts over a
period of several weeks. While the time given up may feel like
a sacrifice, the end result of students discussing the text
independently of the teacher is time well spent. A seminar
session lasting the full period (50 - 80 minutes) allows for rich
discussions and debates to unfold, as well as for each student to
have ample opportunities to speak. Finally, plan carefully how
students will spend their time for the day or two they are not in
the seminar. Suggestions for orchestrating this are listed in the
“Scaffolding” and “Other Questioning Seminar Ideas” sections
that follow.
Decide on the text students will read and discuss for the
Questioning Seminar. In choosing appropriate text, consider
whether the text will be accessible to students, what the
purpose is for wanting students to discuss that particular text
extensively. Is the purpose for students to practice the
Question Seminar? Will students be asked to demonstrate their
understanding in a follow-up activity such as an essay, a
project, or a presentation? Is the text a stand-alone piece or
part of a book or larger unit?
Day 1
1. Assign the reading to the students one or two days prior to the
seminar for either in-class reading or homework, letting them
know that they will be participating in a Questioning Seminar
in the next few days.
2. Determine the quantity of questions students need to develop
for the seminar and assign it for homework. For example,
students might prepare the following set of QAR questions:
two Right There, two Pulling it Together, three Author and Me,
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and one On My Own. Tell students that everyone’s questions
and answers are due the next day, whether or not they are in the
first seminar.
Notes
3. Explain ahead of time the activity that students will work on
for the next few days when they are not participating in the
seminar. On the actual day of the seminar, only a quick review
of the assignment will be necessary for students not
participating in the seminar, thus saving most of the class time
for the seminar itself.
Day 2
1. Remind students who aren’t in the seminar of their in-class
assignment and answer any clarifying questions.
2. List the students’ names on the board according to their
seminar group and day. Heterogeneous groups are ideal.
3. To be fair to all of the students, especially those who are in the
first seminar, the seminar questions and answers are due on the
same day for everyone. Before the first seminar, either collect
all students’ questions and answers prepared the night before,
which will be returned at the seminar table, or stamp the last
question on each student’s page.
4. Designate a certain side of the room for the seminar, pulling
together enough tables and chairs or desks for the group. Try
to arrange the seating so that all students sitting around the
seminar table can see one another’s face. Over time, students
will automatically know how to arrange the tables, and set-up
will become very quick.
5. Students need to bring the text and their prepared questions and
answers to the seminar table if the teacher hasn’t collected
them already.
6. The seminar begins with a quick explanation to the students of
the expectations and procedures of the seminar. A student then
poses the first question to the group and calls on a peer with a
hand up. The questioner verifies if the response is what the
student had in mind, including the evidence from the text and
the identification of the type of question asked. Other students
may continue to develop the answer with additional evidence
or disagree entirely. A discussion might ensue about different
interpretations of the text or of the question. New questions are
posed to the group as the role of questioner goes clockwise
around the table. There are no rules about answering more
than one question before everyone has had a chance, but
questioners are reminded to look around the table for
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classmates who haven’t spoken a lot before selecting someone
to answer.
Notes
7. When it comes to assessing students, it’s best to evaluate
holistically, maybe evaluating the quality of questions and
answers on a check (✓), plus (+ ), minus (−) system. The main
objective of the seminar should be for the students to have an
opportunity to discuss the text in-depth and thus deepen their
understanding of it.
8. Note: Ultimately, the purpose of Questioning Seminars is not
for students to accurately identify and answer every question,
but to offer a classroom structure for students to have a
constructive discussion about the text they read.
9. Seminars 2 and 3 are conducted with new groups of students
and the questions and answers they prepared.
Scaffolding
When introducing the Questioning Seminar to the class,
consider conducting the first seminar in a fishbowl, in which
the seminar is held in the center of the class while the other
students sit around the group, observing the seminar and taking
observation notes. Following the seminar, students in the outer
circle offer their observations of the process and/or the content
of the discussion. For additional information on conducting a
fishbowl, see page 96 in Reading for Understanding and the
Reciprocal Teaching packet
Reading for
Understanding,
pages 96.
During the first half of the year when students are still
familiarizing themselves with the different types of questions,
students can ask questions in any order, so long as the question
hasn’t been asked already. This will provide students with
continuous opportunities to practice identifying the types of
questions. As it becomes clear that students have mastered the
distinctions between the types of questions, you will want to
place a greater emphasis on the discussion of the text and less
on the process of identifying the question. At this point, the
seminar time can be structured, perhaps allowing for one goaround of the Right There and Pulling It Together questions,
two to three go-arounds of the Author and Me questions, and
one go-around of the On My Own questions.
For most of the seminars, the teacher monitors the seminar by
sitting in and offering limited coaching suggestions to move
the discussion forward or remind students to “distribute the
wealth” when calling on their peers to participate. By the end
of the year, it may be possible that students become self-
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sufficient enough to run the seminars themselves. In this way,
several seminars can be conducted simultaneously, with the
teacher floating among them.
Notes
Pitfalls to look out for:
Because the Questioning Seminar sustains itself once it gets
going, one challenge of a successful seminar is planning for the
students who aren’t in the seminar. Usually, SSR isn’t a viable
option because students complain that they can’t concentrate
on their reading while others are talking. Based on experience,
the successful assignments include tasks that are worth doing
(not just time-killers), involve a partner possibly, are complex
as opposed to tedious, result in credit for work done in class,
and require more than a day to complete. These assignments
will differ depending on the context of the classroom.
Students who don’t have their questions prepared at the
beginning of class have a second chance to prepare them so
that they can still participate in the next day’s seminar; credit is
given for participation in the seminar, but not for completion of
the written assignment.
Questioning Seminar, like most complex activities, requires
students to demonstrate their understanding of both the
cognitive concept as well as the expectation for conducting
themselves as a collaborative group. Be sure that students are
comfortable with Question-Answer Relationships and group
work before introducing Questioning Seminar.
Other Questioning Seminar Ideas
As described earlier, introducing Questioning Seminar in a
fishbowl format provides a useful scaffold for students. The
fishbowl approach could also be helpful in moving the class
forward through successive chapters of a book or through a
variety of texts related to a single theme. Groups of students
rotate out of the fishbowl into the outer circle, benefiting from
listening to the discussion on a text related to the one they
discussed or will discuss in the fishbowl.
The labels for the questions suggested in QAR—Right There,
Pulling It Together, and Author and Me and On My Own—can
become useful classroom terminology for teaching students
how to write complex papers that require different levels of
conceptual understanding. For example, a thesis statement
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often is based on Author and Me questions and evidence
supporting a thesis will be drawn on Right There and Pulling It
Together questions. Universal truths, thematic statements,
inquiry questions, and hypotheses have an On My Own quality.
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Lessons from the Classroom
Notes
Challenges You Might Expect and How to Handle Them
Because most students find questioning to be engaging and useful
for comprehending text in this new way, many of the challenges
surrounding implementation of questioning have to do with teacher
preparation. The following suggestions may help you as you
prepare to introduce questioning to your students:
Some teachers are learning to lead these questioning processes
and conversations at the same time as their students.
Therefore, it might be helpful to practice explaining “QAR:
Room as Text,” for example, to a colleague in order to
anticipate clarifying questions that may come up from the class
or to refine rough areas of explanation. The clearer the
explanation, the quicker the learning will be for the students.
During class discussions or Questioning Seminar, students may
get bogged down with identifying the type of question.
Explain to students that some questions, depending on how
they are crafted, can actually fall under more than one
category. Ask the questioner which type was intended and
continue the conversation—answering the question and
discussing what needed to be done to get the answer as well as
where the answer came from.
The dilemma of how a question might be both a Pulling It
Together and an Author and Me type of question creates an
opportune moment to have a mini-lesson on how the question
could be re-designed to prevent the confusion. This helps
students in the ability to recognize types of questions when
they see them on standardized and teacher-designed tests.
Allow plenty of opportunities for students to practice designing
questions, identifying the type, and answering questions in
pairs and small groups before asking them to “perform” or
exhibit their knowledge in a riskier forum such as the
Questioning Seminar.
Ultimately, the goal of questioning is to support students in
becoming independent readers and conversationalists, who
decide what in the text is important enough to talk about. For
some teachers, the student-centered approach and studentdirected conversation that are at the heart of the Questioning
Seminar may feel new or uncomfortable. Think of ways to
integrate the seminar into every unit so that over time and
through many opportunities, students and teacher become
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comfortable with shifting the responsibility and power from the
teacher to the students.
Notes
How It Might Look in Your Classroom
In a classroom in which questioning is in the beginning stage,
students become accustomed to initiating questions based on their
reading, as opposed to being in the passive position of only
answering questions. This new approach to reading text is often
fun for students, as they have the opportunity to pose questions to
which they already know the answer. During this stage, the teacher
frequently models how to ask, answer, and problem-solve
questions, perhaps using the ReQuest approach. In a short period
of time, questions and answers from the students improve as a
result of the exposure to teacher modeling and the numerous
opportunities to practice. The duration of this beginning stage will
vary in length from a day to several weeks, depending on the grade
level and experience of the students.
In a classroom in which questioning is in a developing stage,
students are learning to design a range of questions based on
Question-Answer Relationships. When QAR is first introduced,
some students (and even teachers) might have difficulty
distinguishing between Pulling It Together and Author and Me
questions, for instance, and may require multiple and varied
explanations as well as many opportunities to practice designing,
asking, answering, and identifying questions. Students may need
prompting to answer “What did you have to do to answer this?”
and redirecting to the text for identifying evidence. Not all students
will catch on to the types of questions right away, so keep working
on them, encouraging classmates to offer to each other their
explanations, providing a variety of ways for students to
understand the different types of questions. Students often will
correct and clarify for one another the type of question being
asked; these “learning moments” are perfect opportunities for
having whole class metacognitive discussions about what makes
some questions more difficult than others or why some are trickier
to identify. Explicit conversations about QAR are beneficial for
helping solidify the concept at this developing stage.
In a classroom in which questioning is well developed, groups of
students are able to discuss the text independently, demonstrating
mastery of the Four Types of Questions and using them simply as a
template for exploring the text together. Practicing re-reading to
gather evidence in the developing stage facilitates this move
toward independence. Analyzing the text at multiple levels moves
to the forefront of the conversation, while identifying the type of
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question moves into the background. As a result of the shift
towards analyzing the text, extra time opens up for students to
discuss the text more extensively and to probe more deeply than
before. Wanting to offer insight to the conversation, students craft
more sophisticated and complex questions—in essence, revealing
their deep understanding of the text through their questions.
Classroom conversation around the text becomes more student
centered and student driven, allowing the teacher to take on the
role of coach right alongside the increasingly independent students.
At this point, the teacher is listening and observing, interjecting
only when necessary.
© WestEd 2002 All rights reserved.
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Additional Resources
Notes
Beck, I., M. McKeown, R. Hamilton, L. Kucan. Questioning the
Author: An Approach for Enhancing Student Engagement with
Text. International Reading Association, 1997.
California Department of Education. Strategic Teaching and
Learning: Standards-Based Instruction to Promote Content
Literacy in Grades Four through Twelve. California Department of
Education, 2000. ISBN 0-8011-1472
Keene, E. and S. Zimmermann. Mosaic of Thought: Teaching
Comprehension in a Reader’s Workshop. p. 97- 121. Heinemann,
1997.
Schoenbach, R., C. Greenleaf, C. Cziko, and L. Hurwitz. Reading
for Understanding: Improving Reading in Middle and High
School Classrooms. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers,
1999.
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COGNITION
Resources to Supplement
Reading for Understanding
PERSONAL
SOCIAL
METACOGNITIVE
CONVERSATION
(Internal & External)
KNOWLEDGE
BUILDING
COGNITIVE
Strategic Literacy Initiative
www.wested.org/stratlit
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES OVERVIEW..................... ii
THE READING APPRENTICESHIP® FRAMEWORK ............ iii
INTRODUCTION
What is it?.................................................................................................................... 1
Why use it? .................................................................................................................. 1
When to use it?...........................................................................................................2
How to use it?..............................................................................................................2
CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
Summarizing ...................................................................................................4
This is About................................................................................................................5
Creating a 25-Word Abstract .................................................................................9
Clarifying....................................................................................................... 13
Revising the Good Readers’ Strategies List.......................................................14
Predicting...................................................................................................... 17
Guess and Check........................................................................................................18
Visualizing ..................................................................................................... 21
Sketching Characters and Historical Figures................................................... 22
Illustrated Passages ............................................................................................... 26
Using Words, Pictures and Numbers in Mathematics..................................... 28
INTEGRATED GUIDED PRACTICE OF COGNITIVE
STRATEGIES
Question/Predict/Clarify Reading Response .....................................................31
Comic Books: An Adaptation of Story Boards .................................................. 35
WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT ............................................................... 38
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES .................................................................. 40
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Supplementary Resources Overview
Reading Apprenticeship® is an approach to secondary literacy instruction designed to deepen
students’ engagement and thinking about text, and to expand their identities to encompass
themselves as readers. This packet of resources is designed to support teachers in constructing a
Reading Apprenticeship classroom. It is a supplement to the book, Reading for Understanding:
A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms.
Supplementary Resources are Deliberately Economical
Secondary, content-area reading instruction must center on high-leverage strategies. For this
reason, supplementary resource materials contain a small number of research-based reading
strategies that yield a high return in increased reading achievement and engagement. In this
packet, you will find:
•
an introduction to cognition;
•
guidelines for implementing cognitive strategies;
•
classroom applications designed to help students acquire a range of cognitive tools, and to
give them more control over their learning;
•
a preview of challenges you might expect as you implement cognitive strategies in your
classroom, and suggestions for how to handle them; and
•
a list of additional resources.
Supplementary Resources are Grounded in the Reading Apprenticeship
Framework and an Inquiry Approach to Professional Development
To effectively apprentice students to the reading craft, teachers must deepen their understanding
of the reading process and gain an appreciation for the difficulties students face and the resources
they bring to the reading task. For this reason, the resources in this packet are designed to be
embedded in a long term program of inquiry-based Reading Apprenticeship professional
development, in which teachers consider how to embed these instructional strategies into their
content-area teaching, make instructional decisions based on their students’ needs, explore these
strategies in their classrooms, and share and reflect on these experiences with colleagues.
Teachers are invited to explore and adapt the classroom applications in supplementary resource
materials – to exercise professional judgment rather than merely replicate practices.
A Request
Supplementary resource materials were developed to support teachers in translating and
extending what they learn in professional development settings into classroom practice—not as a
substitute for such inquiry. We ask for your support in using this set of materials to invite teacher
inquiry and support instructional decision-making. We also ask that should you use these
resources with teachers, you keep these materials intact, so that practical classroom applications
can be seen in the context of the bigger Reading Apprenticeship picture.
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The Reading Apprenticeship® Framework
Reading Apprenticeship® is an approach to reading instruction that helps young people develop
the knowledge, strategies, and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers. It is at
heart a partnership of expertise, drawing on what teachers know and do as discipline-based
readers, and on adolescents’ unique and often underestimated strengths as learners. Reading
Apprenticeship® helps students become better readers by:
•
making the teacher’s discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to students;
•
making students’ reading processes, motivations, strategies, knowledge, and understandings
visible to the teacher and to one another;
•
helping students gain insight into their own reading processes; and
•
helping them develop a repertoire of problem-solving strategies for overcoming obstacles
and deepening comprehension of texts from various academic disciplines.
Dimensions of Classroom Life
Supporting Reading Apprenticeship
PERSONAL DIMENSION
Developing reader identity
Developing metacognition
Developing reader fluency and
stamina
Developing reader confidence and
range
Assessing performance and setting
goals
SOCIAL DIMENSION
Creating safety
Investigating relationships
between literacy and power
Sharing book talk
Sharing reading processes,
problems, and solutions
Noticing and appropriating
others’ ways of reading
METACOGNITIVE
CONVERSATION
(Internal & External)
COGNITIVE DIMENSION
Getting the big picture
Breaking it down
Monitoring comprehension
Using problem-solving
strategies to assist and
restore comprehension
Setting reading purposes and
adjusting reading processes
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iii
KNOWLEDGE-BUILDING
DIMENSION
Mobilizing and building knowledge
structures (schemata)
Developing content or topic
knowledge
Developing knowledge of word
construction and vocabulary
Developing knowledge and use of
text structures
Developing discipline- and
discourse-specific knowledge
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In other words, in a Reading Apprenticeship classroom, the curriculum expands to include
how we read and why we read in the ways we do, as well as what we read in content area
classes.
Reading Apprenticeship® involves teachers in orchestrating and integrating four interacting
dimensions of classroom life that support reading development. These dimensions are woven
into subject-area teaching through metacognitive conversations—conversations about the
thinking processes students and teachers engage in as they read.
•
Social: The social dimension draws on adolescents’ interests in larger social, political,
economic, and cultural issues. A safe environment is created for students to share their
confusion and difficulties with texts, and to recognize the diverse perspectives and resources
brought by each member.
•
Personal: This dimension draws on strategic skills used by students in out-of-school settings;
their interest in exploring new aspects of their own identities and self-awareness as readers;
and their purposes for reading and goals for reading improvement.
•
Cognitive: The cognitive dimension involves developing readers’ mental processes,
including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies.
Importantly, the work of generating cognitive strategies that support reading comprehension
is carried out through classroom inquiry.
•
Knowledge-Building: This dimension includes identifying and expanding the knowledge
readers bring to a text and further develop through personal and social interaction with that
text, including knowledge about word construction, vocabulary, text structure, genre,
language, topics and content embedded in the text.
In Metacognitive Conversation, these four dimensions are integrated as teachers and students
work collaboratively to make sense of texts, while simultaneously engaging in a conversation
about what constitutes reading and how they are going about it. This metacognitive conversation
is carried on both internally, as teacher and students reflect on their own mental processes, and
externally, as they share their reading processes, strategies, knowledge resources, motivations,
and interactions with and affective responses to texts.
(For more information about Reading Apprenticeship® see Reading for Understanding: A Gude
to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia
Greenleaf, Christine Cziko and Lori Hurwitz; Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA,
©1999. Also, visit the Strategic Literacy Initiative website at http://www.wested.org/stratlit).
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COGNITION
INTRODUCTION
What is it?
Cognition is thinking. Cognitive reading strategies include a vast
array of thinking and problem solving tools that readers use to
make sense of text as they read. These include, but are not limited
to, monitoring comprehension, adjusting reading speed and
attention for various reading purposes, asking questions, clarifying
and problem solving to restore comprehension, summarizing,
predicting and visualizing.
The Cognitive Dimension is a huge area. Volumes have been
written on instructional strategies in this area; a few are cited in the
resources section at the end of this packet. This packet does not
attempt to replicate the vast work that has already been done in the
area of cognition. Together with the Questioning Packet, it instead
covers a variety of classroom applications, many developed or
adapted by network teachers, that teach five high leverage
cognitive reading strategies that effective readers use. These
applications were chosen because they exemplify explicit strategy
instruction in an Apprenticeship framework in the areas of:
•
summarizing,
•
clarifying or restoring comprehension as needed,
•
predicting,
•
visualizing, and
•
questioning, which is covered in the Questioning packet.
Many teachers will recognize that four of these strategies together
form the core of Reciprocal Teaching, a classroom application that
improves students’ ability to use these strategies through classroom
dialogue. Reciprocal Teaching is discussed extensively in the
Reciprocal Teaching packet. A wealth of other strategies such as
skimming, chunking, monitoring comprehension, and setting
purposes for reading are discussed in Reading for Understanding.
For more on the
Cognitive Dimension,
see Reading for
Understanding, pages
30-34.
See Reading
for Understanding,
pages 30-34.
Why use it?
The Cognitive Dimension of Reading Apprenticeship focuses on
explicitly teaching students to use cognitive reading strategies
flexibly and independently as they read to make sense of text.
Learning to monitor comprehension, to adjust reading processes
for a wide variety of purposes, and to use a broad range of
cognitive tools strategically helps students to become stronger,
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more independent readers. As students gain confidence in their
reading, they are often motivated to tackle more challenging textbased tasks. While explicit instruction in cognitive reading
strategies takes time, this investment early in the year yields rich
rewards later as students become more able to negotiate meaning
from texts independently and manage a broad range of text-based
tasks with increasing flexibility, success and comfort.
Notes
When to use it?
The question of when to teach which cognitive strategies is a
vexing one as readers need to be able to use many strategies
simultaneously. Decisions about instructional sequence are best
made by individual teachers in the context of:
•
the texts that they use,
•
what their students now know and are able to do, and
•
what students will need to know and be able to do in order to
read those texts.
How to use it?
Within the framework of Reading Apprenticeship, explicit
instruction in cognitive strategies is carefully embedded in
meaningful reading tasks, as well as supported by social activities
and metacognitive conversation, so that reading strategies become
visible and accessible to all readers.
For more on choosing
Metacognitive Conversation is a critical resource for cognitive
strategy instruction. It surfaces places where comprehension breaks
down and helps identify both the demands of the text being read
and students’ strengths and needs in the reading process. Students
can then be apprenticed to new cognitive reading strategies.
For more on the
and evaluating instructional
strategies see Reading for
Understanding, pages 128 129.
Metacognitive Conversation,
see Reading for Understanding, page 30 and 74 - 76.
Because much of what is learned in an Apprenticeship classroom is
learned through the Social Dimension, it is essential that students
have access to each other’s varied expertise. Managing a large
class of heterogeneous groups can be complicated, but we know
that all students benefit from learning and practicing cognitive
skills in flexible, mixed groups.
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Notes
A Note about Small Group Management in
Heterogeneous Classrooms:
Some students will be ready to work independently before the last
few are ready to demonstrate a new strategy. In spite of the reality
that some students are generally strong readers, the nature of
reading is complex enough that even strong readers struggle at
times when faced with certain texts and with learning particular
strategies. All readers, whether they are perceived to be strong or
struggling, benefit from opportunities to work in heterogeneous
groups where students work together and share their expertise. It is
essential to provide substantial opportunities for this on a regular
basis.
It may also be useful, though, to provide times for those who are
ready to work independently (or independent of the teacher in
small groups) to do so, while students who still need help in a
particular area work with additional support provided from the
teacher. It is very important when grouping students in this way
that the groups remain flexible. Students should not be
permanently assigned to “skill level” groups, but rather
temporarily assigned to groups to work on specific instructional
strategies. Over the course of a unit or marking period, students
may end up working in many different group configurations.
The following Classroom Applications, lessons developed by
teachers in the network, explicitly teach a cognitive strategy
through the course curriculum. The last section of this packet,
“Integrated Guided Practice of Cognitive Strategies,” describes
how several strategies can be integrated into instruction to broaden
students’ awareness and flexible use of reading strategies while
learning the course content.
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Notes
CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS
Summarizing
Summarizing involves describing the main idea of the text,
whether the main idea is stated or implied. A summary is shorter
than the original text, and does not usually include detail. Also, it
is typically constructed, rather than found, and is expressed in the
reader’s own words. Summarizing often involves analysis and
synthesis and requires comprehension of the text. The process of
summarizing therefore requires the reader to form interpretations
of the text. This section contains two classroom activities on
summarizing: This Is About and Creating a Twenty-five Word
Abstract.
For more on
Summarizing, see Reading
for Understanding, pages
86-89 and 126-127.
In spite of the fact that students often practice summarizing from
the very earliest grades, it remains for many secondary students an
elusive strategy. Yet it is a critical strategy that readers use to
check comprehension and to chunk large pieces of text into
smaller, more comprehensible bytes of information. Summarizing
helps readers commit information to memory. Also, it is an
important skill for students to be able to demonstrate; it is
guaranteed that almost every reading selection on every
standardized test will require students to identify the “best”
summary, or the sentence that best captures the passage’s meaning.
Summarizing becomes more difficult as students encounter more
complex and sophisticated text. The fact that so many students
struggle with summarization points to a need for greater
instructional support in this area.
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THIS IS ABOUT
Adapted from a lesson by
Christine Cziko, English Teacher
Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco
Notes
Purpose
This Is About uses group work to teach students how to infer the
main idea about a text when it is implied but not stated and to
construct summaries from these main ideas. The activity was
originally designed to help older students learn to construct
sophisticated summaries of big ideas or themes in a text. This Is
About can be modified to help younger students gain practice
distinguishing between main ideas and details. Teachers should
begin at the stage that best matches their students’ needs.
Materials
•
A text to read. These will vary by content area. In history it
may be a chapter or a current events article; in science it may
be an article from a newspaper or journal; in math it may be a
problem set; and in English it may be a short story, poem or
chapter. The text should:
- be accessible and manageable for students
- be of sufficient length and detail to allow for sorting of
details and main ideas
- allow for some interpretation if the main idea is not stated
but rather implied
•
butcher paper
•
markers
•
notebooks and pencils
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Notes
Process
1. Tell students that they will read a passage and then be asked to
tell what the passage is about. Ask everyone to read the
passage silently.
2. As students finish reading, ask them to orally brainstorm a list
of what the passage or chapter is about. As needed, prompt
students to come up with both details and main ideas. Receive
all responses and record them on butcher paper.
3. Ask the class to compare and contrast main ideas and details
until it is clear that they understand that main ideas capture the
big-picture idea. At this point the main ideas can be separated
from the details on a t-chart or by circling them on the poster.
Explain that students may have to make an inference about the
main idea. The need for this prompting will depend on the text,
and whether the main idea(s) is stated or implied.
Brainstorming List
Julie of the Wolves, Chapter 1 is about:
•
•
•
•
•
•
a girl who runs away
a girl who is lost on the Alaskan tundra
an Eskimo girl
a girl who tries to escape a traditional arranged
marriage
surviving Alaskan elements during the winter
a girl who is unhappy about decisions being made
for her
4. Ask students individually to identify statements from the poster
which capture all or part of the main idea. Ask students to get in
pairs or trios and share these ideas and to agree about which
ones express the main idea of the passage. The goal of this part
of the activity is to negotiate meaning by agreeing on and
perhaps synthesizing ideas to come up with an idea that really
captures a larger meaning for the text.
5. Ask the groups to share out their lists to the whole class.
Explain that the goal is to discuss the ideas and to agree about
those that encompass the big idea or theme. Again, how much
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prompting and probing for interpretive thinking will depend on
the nature of the text and how explicitly the main idea is stated.
Edit the butcher paper list as you go, facilitating a discussion
among students about why they think certain things are or are
not main ideas.
Notes
6. As students become better at recognizing and inferring main
ideas, the teacher can continue to prompt students to think on a
more interpretive level, going beyond the surface level to
capture larger ideas or themes in the summaries by continuing
to ask, “This is about that, but what is it really about?” The goal
here is to continue to extend from a surface level statement of
the main idea into a summary that expresses larger, more
thematic ideas. (Emphasize that summaries are usually formed,
not found. Students will probably have to do some substantial
revision to create a strong summary that answers the question
“What is this really about?”)
Older students may be able to construct a list of 5-10 “This Is
About” ideas for homework independently. The next day, small
groups of students can meet to share their ideas, identify main
ideas, and discuss what the chapter (or passage) is really about.
From the discussion, students construct a summary about the
chapter or reading. For example:
Sample Group Work
Julie of the Wolves, Chapter 1 is about:
• a girl who runs away and is lost on the Alaskan tundra
over a winter.
• an Eskimo girl who tries to escape a traditional
arranged marriage.
Julie of the Wolves, Chapter 1 is really about:
• a girl struggling with cultural identity
• a girl learning to confront difficult choices
• a girl struggling with traditional gender roles
Summary of Chapter 1
Julie is a girl of Eskimo ancestry who is learning to
confront difficult choices about her two cultures. To avoid
the Eskimo tradition of an arranged marriage, Julie runs
away into the vast Alaskan tundra.
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7. Initially, with younger students, it may help to begin
brainstorming summary ideas together, modeling the process of
forming a summary. Ask students to break into pairs to create
individual or paired summaries.
Notes
8. Ask students to share out their summaries. Point out the
elements that make a strong summary and make a poster that
defines a good summary. Keep the poster defining good
summaries up for future reference.
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CREATING A TWENTY-FIVE WORD ABSTRACT
Tim Tindol, Science Teacher
Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, CA
Notes
Purpose
This activity was developed by Tim Tindol, a science teacher who
wanted his students to use summarizing to better access the
classroom texts. He also wanted his students to understand the
concept of an abstract, a formal structured summary, as used in
academic research papers. Although this activity was developed in
science, it can apply to any content area.
Tim repeats this application many times with different texts. In the
beginning the activity takes several days, but as students practice
and become more familiar with the process, it goes much more
quickly. (The application is described very succinctly below; see
the Scaffolding section that follows for ideas on how to break this
into simpler chunks for introductory lessons.) Creating a 25-Word
Abstract can be used as an introductory lesson for a new unit or as
a way to prepare students for discussion of complex texts or
current events.
Materials
•
An expository piece of text such as an article or passage that is
compelling and that students can read independently. (e.g. a
newspaper article on a subject that the class has been studying).
Tim uses science articles from the San Francisco Chronicle,
which often contain technical terms and helpful subtitles.
•
notebooks, pencils or pens
•
highlighters
•
poster paper and markers
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Notes
Process
•
Before the lesson, carefully read the article and highlight those
points that are essential to a summary, and those that contain
new vocabulary for students. A text that contains 12-15
unknown words is too difficult; 8-10 unknown words in a
single text is manageable to students without feeling
overwhelmed.
1. Distribute the text. Ask students to highlight in one color what
they think are the main ideas of the article, and to highlight
with a second color unknown words or terms. It’s important
that students understand that there are no right or wrong
answers, that each student will have a different interaction with
the text. Also, explain that they will use this later in a group
activity. The highlighted ideas are their entry ticket to
participate in the activity. (This step may be assigned for
homework the day before.)
2. Assign students to heterogeneous groups. Check to see that
student work is completed before allowing groups to begin.
Provide a separate space for students who have not completed
the assignment to complete the work before they join their
assigned group.
3. Vocabulary: Ask students to listen in their groups while
members take turns sharing terms that they highlighted. They
begin by clarifying vocabulary, using each other’s thinking and
whatever reference materials are available to them in the room.
Groups move onto the next step at their own pace. (Initially
this pace may be more controlled; see the scaffolding section
below.)
4. Main ideas: Ask small groups to discuss similarities and
differences in their choices of main ideas, as well as how they
chose what things to highlight. Once all students have had a
chance to share, prompt the groups to reach a consensus about
which things are the key points. They can take notes by
underlining things others selected that are different from their
own.
5. Ask students to write a twenty-five word abstract (summary) of
the passage that includes the key ideas selected by their group.
Each student constructs one abstract.
6. Ask students to listen in their groups while members take turns
sharing their abstracts. They can take notes on content in
others’ summaries that are different from their own. Ask
groups to discuss similarities and differences in their abstracts.
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7. Groups then create a collaborative abstract of no more than 25
words. Explain that all groups will be rating the abstracts based
on a clear, complete and succinct summary of the main idea.
Notes
8. Provide time for groups to complete their abstracts and to copy
the final version on poster paper to post in the classroom.
Students can write their names on the back of the posters to
protect their anonymity for the next phase, which is rating the
abstracts. Post the abstracts.
9. Provide time for groups to read the abstracts posted in the
room. Ask groups to rate the abstracts as either good, better, or
best based on these criteria: clear, complete and succinct
statement of the main idea. Have them create a written
rationale for their ratings which they will turn in to you. Ask
groups to share out their ratings and explain their rationales.
Clarify as the discussion unfolds what features of an abstract
generate a clear concise summary for a reader.
For more on analyzing
summaries see Reading for
Understanding, page 89.
Scaffolding
Pacing the lesson: In the beginning, this lesson may take a full
week to teach. Later, as students have had practice with the
different phases of the lesson, they may be able to complete the
entire activity in a day or two, with groups operating at their own
pace. (Give a deadline for posting the abstract so that they all
finish at the same time.) Much of the reading and writing is done at
home for homework. The lesson can be broken down into the
following sections at first:
Day 1: Step one combined with modeling highlighting if
needed.
Day 2: Steps two through four, possibly stopping at the end of
three to allow groups to help each other with
vocabulary.
Day 3: Steps five and six, combined with This is About, if
necessary.
Day 4: Steps seven through nine.
As students become able to do parts of this independently, begin
assigning parts of the activity for homework. Each day when
students return to their group, be sure to check their work to make
sure it is complete before groups begin. Provide a separate space
for students who have not completed the assignment to complete
the work before they join the group. Eventually, students will be
able to do all of the reading and highlighting for homework, return
to their group for discussion, go home and write their first draft of
an abstract for homework, and return to their group on the second
day to create a collaborative group abstract.
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Highlighting main ideas: Many students, when asked to highlight
main ideas, will highlight everything on the page except the words
and and the, indicating that they have no idea how to identify main
ideas. More often than not, through the process of sharing their
work, students learn how to better recognize and isolate main
ideas. After some practice, students can complete the highlighting
for independent work. Initially however, the teacher may want to
model this on an overhead of the article and have students do the
highlighting in class for guided practice. If students are struggling
with finding main ideas, try This is About, above. As they have
more practice with identifying vocabulary and summarizing,
students will be able to do this part of the activity for homework.
Notes
Vocabulary: If a group is unable to clarify a term, they may hold
their question until the end of the small group discussion time and
then ask the whole class for help. If no one can clarify the word,
the class can attempt to define and clarify the term by using
context clues, each other and resources in the room. As a last
resort, the teacher may help the class and model clarifying terms
by thinking aloud using context clues.
Forming a summary or abstract: Students may be able to do this
work independently after some practice, but initially, they may
need to see the process modeled on the overhead and to practice in
their group with help from their peers. (See This is About for more
ideas on modeling summaries.)
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Notes
Clarifying
Clarifying is a process of clearing up confusion or misunderstanding in the act of reading. While actively monitoring the reading
process, readers know when comprehension is breaking down and
thus apply fix-up strategies to raise and answer questions, clarify
confusion or misunderstandings.
When students are practicing metacognition and are interacting
with the text (for example, through Think-Alouds, Talking to the
Text, or Reading Process Analysis), it is very likely that they are
already asking clarifying questions, or at least identifying areas of
confusion. It is helpful to make these cognitive moves explicit and
visible to students in a very deliberate way—discussing with
students the ways in which they are already clarifying and labeling
it as such. Also helpful to students is discussing the outcome of
what happens to comprehension when a reader doesn’t stop to
clarify.
For more on
Clarifying see Reading
for Understanding, pages
93-94.
This section discusses
•
Revising the Good Readers’ Strategy List.
The Good Readers’ Strategy List was introduced in the
Metacognitive Packet. It can be used as a way to integrate
clarifying into the ongoing classroom discussion of text.
© WestEd 2001 All rights reserved.
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For more on Fix-Up
Strategies, see Reading for
Understanding, pages 3134.
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REVISING THE GOOD READERS’ STRATEGY LIST
Notes
Purpose
Revising the Good Readers’ Strategy (GRS) List is an on-going
and continuous classroom practice to deepen students’
understanding about reading. At the same time that this activity
clarifies reading strategies, it also adds to students’ tool box of
cognitive skills. Whenever students are practicing metacognition
and sharing their reading process with others, revisit the GRS List
and revise it. In this way, the list becomes a tool that is always in
the state of refinement, allowing students to continue deepening
their knowledge of the varied cognitive strategies they bring to
bear on the complex task of reading.
If the list is a static document, students may believe that the GRS
List is exhaustive—that there is a fixed set of strategies that is used
in any reading situation and that readers don’t develop new reading
strategies as they become more proficient or as text becomes more
challenging. Revising the list is an effective way to unpack the
complexity of very generalized strategies which students first
discover in the beginning stages of metacognition, and to show that
comprehension challenges can be approached with a variety of
sophisticated strategies.
Materials
•
The classroom poster of the Good Readers’ Strategy List
(created at an earlier date by the students through a Reading
Process Analysis)
•
Markers
•
Any text-based assignment in which students are asked to be
metacognitive about their reading process
Process
1. The key to success with this application is that the strategies
that end up on the Good Readers’ Strategy List come from
students’ own inquiry into their reading and discovery of their
reading process. A pre-fabricated list is simply ineffective in
this context. This application presumes that the class has
already constructed a poster of the Good Readers’ Strategy List
and that the poster hangs visibly in the class. In classrooms
where hanging a poster isn’t possible, students might have this
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list on a handout within their own materials. They can revise
the list on their handouts as the teacher works on the overhead.
Notes
2. Whenever the class is working on a text-based assignment in
which students need to be metacognitive about their reading
process, take the opportunity to revisit the Good Readers
Strategies List. (on the poster or on a transparency)
3. As students share out their reading process in small groups or
through a whole class discussion, listen for new types of
confusion that lead to fix-up strategies. Add these strategies to
the list, and/or refine or clarify strategies already on the list.
This is also a good time to add new understandings that might
counter previous beliefs about what readers do to make sense
of text. For example, when students realize that they have to
slow down their reading of a difficult passage of text, it may
upset their initial idea that good readers read fast. That item
could be crossed off the list, and replaced with a more accurate
statement, such as “vary reading speed with the difficulty of
the text.”
4. It may be useful to create new lists that deal specifically with
common challenges that have a variety of solutions. For
example, create a Good Readers’ Strategy List for clarifying
vocabulary (see the Metacognition packet). Another example is
when students are dealing with a difficult or boring text, ask
them how they get through it. Collect their ideas on a GRS List
specifically for engaging with boring or difficult text. These
might include:
When Good Readers read difficult or boring text,
they often:
• make a graphic organizer
• illustrate the text with pictures that help them
understand
• ask questions, argue with the author
• read and work in twenty minute bursts, take short
breaks
• set a goal or purpose
• make comprehension into a personal challenge, give
themselves a reward
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5. Repeat the process of revisiting the GRS List throughout the
year, inviting students to recognize new reading strategies that
they are acquiring. Teachers should feel free to offer strategies
as part of the discussion, but the real richness of this process is
that students create the list from their collective experience. A
static list is a dead list. Keep it alive!
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Notes
Predicting
Predicting requires readers to access their own background
knowledge, or schema, on a topic and prepares them to organize
new information in their minds. Predicting can also serve to build
engagement with text. As readers predict, they set their own
purposes for reading: to see if their predictions bear out.
Predicting is closely related to three other cognitive strategies:
summarizing, questioning, and clarifying. For readers to be able to
predict the type of information that will follow, they must first
identify the flow of the main ideas or the thrust of a plot,
essentially summarizing, and then select details or structures that
logically follow based on their own knowledge and experience.
Predicting is also related to questioning since each prediction
begins with a question, “What do I think will logically follow?”
Clarifying can follow predicting when predictions do not bear out.
What is most important is not the accuracy of the initial prediction,
but rather recognition when predictions make sense, and when
predictions lead to confusion. Clarifying this type of confusion
might start with learning to use prediction in the way that
mathematicians use “guess and check” as an on-going process of
making, checking, and revising hypotheses. (See below.)
Predicting is closely tied to the Knowledge Dimension. As subject
knowledge increases, so does the ability to predict and follow the
course of a text. Learning to recognize text features such as signal
words and headings and to predict what will follow based on these
text clues falls in both Cognitive and Knowledge Dimensions.
This section contains one classroom application that involves
students in predicting:
•
Knowledge Dimension, see
Reading for Understanding,
pages 129-133.
For more on using text
signals see Reading for
Understanding, pages 90-91.
For more applications
on Predicting see Reading
for Understanding, pages
89-93 and 129-135.
Guess and Check
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GUESS AND CHECK
Notes
Purpose
“Guess and Check” is a phrase that may be familiar to many
students from math. Guess and Check is a simple way of
reminding students to check their predictions, to look in the text for
evidence to support their predictions, and to check this evidence
against their own background knowledge. In this process, they may
see the need to revise their on-going predictions.
This classroom application has proven to be especially effective in
many ESL, resource, and middle school classrooms.
Materials
•
Guess and Check handout or directions (Two versions are
included below, one for math and one for other content areas.)
•
Reading material chunked at points allowing for predicting.
Process
1. At the beginning of each reading, ask students to make a
prediction, an educated guess or a hypothesis, about what will
follow in the text.
2. At the end of the reading, or before the next reading, ask
students to check to see if their predictions made sense. (This
works best if students are reading chunks of text that naturally
call for predicting, such as the beginning of a chapter in
English or a chunk from subheading to subheading in science
or history. In math a logical chunk may be from the point
where they begin solving a problem to the point where they
check and answer as in the example below.)
3. The logs below can be used for narrative or expository texts in
any content area, although teachers may want to adapt them for
their own specific purposes. A sampling of prompts for math
follow. Many other possibilities exist; feel free to create others
that fit your texts and content. The following Guess and Check
directions could be replicated for use in history, science or
English classes:
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Notes
Guess and Check
Name:
Date:
Text:
Pages:
1. Re-read your prediction from the last entry.
Was your prediction correct?
9 If yes, what clues helped you guess?
9 If not, are there any clues that you missed?
Why did you make the prediction that you made?
2. What predictions do you have for the next
section of the text?
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The following Guess and Check directions are designed
specifically for problem solving in math. Students should repeat
the Guess and Check process until they are satisfied with their
solution.
Name:
Notes
Date:
DIRECTIONS: Read the problem that you are
about to solve, and make a prediction before
you begin to solve the problem. Choose from
the following prompts.
•
•
•
•
I think I can solve this problem by ______.
Estimate a range of possible answers. (I think the
answer will be less than ____ and greater than
______.)
Two possible ways of solving this that might lead to
a correct answer are:
If I tried the same problem with different numbers
_____, the answer would be ______ (greater,
lesser, impossible. . . )
Problem:
Prediction: (Choose a prompt from above.)
Solution:
Check your prediction:
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Visualizing
Notes
Readers often activate background knowledge, or schema, by
visualizing as they read. The visual images may be prompted by
the text but are called up from prior knowledge or experience. The
visual images that readers create subtly shift focus and purpose
with the subject matter read; used strategically the images help the
sense-making process by helping readers build interpretations of
what they are reading.
Readers of science and math often need to visualize concrete
analogies to represent very abstract concepts or complex processes
such as steps in a lab. Classic examples of analogous images are
models of an atom made from TinkerToys, or pie charts to
represent proportional numbers. Readers of history may construct
sensory images of place, time and culture when reading. These
contextualize historical information. Readers of literature often
use mental images to construct the world that the author is creating
with words. These images also may come in the form of personal
connections. This is done in much the same way that readers of
literature form images of setting and character, except that the
images may be based on evidence more strictly tied to historical
time and place. The construction of these images requires
background knowledge and schema built through experience of
visual media such as magazines, film and primary source
materials.
See Reading for
Understanding, page 127
for more on visualization
in science.
In each of the following examples, the reader is constructing
mental images that assist in making meaning, but the types of
image shift, depending on the nature of the material the reader is
trying to understand. In helping students to visualize, it is
important to consider what types of images are most useful given
the content and context of the text. Some readers visualize as they
read naturally. Others may need practice constructing and
clarifying images to build stronger understanding of the text. Since
images are often drawn from background knowledge and
experience, much of the work that is done to help visualize and
build images has to do with building schema. This packet contains
three applications for teaching visualizing:
•
Character/Historical Figure Sketches
•
Illustrated Passages
•
Using Words, Pictures, and Numbers in Math
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SKETCHING CHARACTERS AND
HISTORICAL FIGURES
Purpose
This application, which may be used with both fiction and
exposition in history, literature, math or science classes, requires
students to reference the text to create visual images of the people
they are reading about. Students search the text for several (seven
to ten) quotes that describe the historical figures or characters.
They then create a drawing of the person that illustrates the quotes
and annotate the illustration with the quotes from the text.
Notes
As it is described, this lesson is used early in the reading to
establish the literal character context. This literal understanding is
an important step in building comprehension, but may not be the
final step. This lesson can easily be extended later in the reading
by creating interpretive representations of characters that are less
literal and more symbolic. This lesson is particularly helpful for
historical reading, or fictional novels that have characters set in
contexts that may be unfamiliar to students. Follow-up extension
assignments that are more interpretive in nature are suggested at
the end.
Materials
•
notebooks, pens or pencils
•
fictional or narrative text, biographies or autobiographies
•
art supplies (colored pencils, art paper, markers, rulers etc.
Colored paper for “matting” finished products, glue.)
Process
Note: Many of the typical “Into” lessons (e.g. video clips, slides,
magazine pictures, etc.) that give students access to visual images,
thus helping them to imagine setting and period and to inform their
sense of character, are helpful for building schema before
beginning this lesson.
For more on
building schema, see
Reading for Understanding, pages 114-115.
1. Begin with a class discussion. In an English class, teachers
might ask students which character or historical figure really
grabbed their attention, whether it is one they like or dislike. In
a history class, teachers may have a historical figure (e.g.
Ghandi, Churchill, Mansa Munsa) or historical people (e.g.
Carpet Baggers, Robber Barons, nobles, serfs) that they want
students to focus on. Help to seed this conversation as
necessary by pulling up exciting details from the text. For
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example, in a 7th grade language arts class, Unferth (a
loathsome villain in Robert Nye’s version of Beowulf) is
described as picking at his boil and licking his finger
compulsively because he loved to hate the taste of himself.
This quote is enough to get a good conversation going about
characters readers love to hate, and how the author helps
readers create vivid (if not always pleasing) images of them.
Notes
2. Teachers also may want to help students visualize the lives of
the people in the text in a more realistic historical context than
the fictional image students may know from children’s books
and movies. In this case, teachers can select quotes that
describe the setting. As a collection, the quotes can help the
reader infer what a character or historical figure’s life may
have been like.
For example, these quotes, taken from Houghton Mifflin’s
7th grade history text, Across The Centuries, give some
insight into the life of nobles living in a castle:
•
•
•
•
“The Norman castle was built for security, not for
comfort. The walls were three feet thick. They were
built to withstand the blows from battering rams and
flaming missiles launched from enemy catapults.”
“The lord and lady of the castle usually slept behind a
curtain in the main dining hall. Also sleeping in the
hall might be a small mob of knights, guests, servants
and dogs.”
“The floor was covered with herbs to keep down the
smell of bones and other refuse.”
“On a winter morning, the inhabitants would wash by
plunging their arms through ice-crusted water in a
bucket. . . Life was far from glamorous.”
3. Once students have identified characters or historical figures,
and understand how to find relevant information or quotes, ask
them to find and copy 7-10 juicy quotes that describe the
character or figure. (Teachers may want to introduce the idea
of indirect and direct description here and require that students
find some of each type of description.) It may be helpful to
model this part of the process on the overhead before students
do it alone for the first time.
4. Ask students to get in groups of no more than four (arranged by
character, so that students who have chosen a common
character are sitting together.) Explain that they are going to
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work together for a while to share information, but that they
will each complete their own project, and that the projects may
look different from each other.
Notes
5. Ask students to share their quotes or information with each
other, and add to their notes until everyone in the group has
written all of the quotes on their personal lists.
6. Ask them to discuss how this character or figure might look
based on the author’s descriptions. Remind students that their
character images may look different in some details, and that is
just fine as long as the substance of the quotes is represented in
their illustrations.
7. Once students have shared their quotes and discussed the
character or figure, ask them to individually choose the 7-10
quotes they want to include in their illustration (these may or
may not be the same seven to ten they found individually.) Ask
students to draw a picture of their character that includes
images to support each of the quotes, and annotate each image
with the quotes. Explain that the pictures turn out better if
students illustrate the character or figures in some action or
setting that indirectly describes their character. (This is a great
opportunity to discuss how plot, character and setting work
interactively to support character development or how time and
place define historical figures.) For example, a portrait of Kino
from The Pearl is less revealing than an illustration of Kino
smashing his fist on the gate of the doctor’s house or grinding
into paste the scorpion that bit Coyotito. A portrait of King
John of England is less revealing than an illustration of King
John being forced to sign the Magna Carta at sword point.
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Possible Extensions
Notes
After establishing the literal context of the character, this
assignment can be modified to take on an interpretive quality. For
middle school students, these types of extensions are pushing the
limits of their developing abstract thinking. Doing the concrete
character sketch lesson above can help prepare them for this work.
For high school students, more symbolic or interpretive work is
closer to grade level expectations. These students can be briefly
supported with the more concrete lesson and move quickly into
interpretive work such as:
•
illustrated editorial columns discussing an historical figure’s
actions from two points of view
•
political cartoons (perhaps more than one from different points
of view)
•
classified ads for jobs or homes (especially useful for
comparing standards of living)
•
political posters urging the public to join/fight a cause
•
a storyboard made up of a symbol and metaphor that illustrate
key quotes about a character or significant event
Writing Extensions
•
•
Find a point in the plot or historical event during which the
character is in conflict over a course of action. Describe how
the character resolves the conflict. Explain how this resolution
is in keeping with the character or how an event shows the
character changing or developing in some way.
Craft an extended metaphor that reflects the development of a
character and write an interpretive essay proving the metaphor
true. Include key quotes or passages as supporting evidence.
© WestEd 2001 All rights reserved.
25
See the Teachers'
Curriculum Institute website
in the Additional Resources
section of this packet for
more extension activities.
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Notes
ILLUSTRATED PASSAGES
This application is similar to the Sketching Characters and
Historical Figures, except that rather than focusing on people, the
Illustrated Passages focuses on helping students build
understanding of important complex graphics or images in math
and science, and critical elements of setting or imagery in history
and English. Students read a text and then work in groups to create
an illustration or storyboard that:
•
creates a concrete image of an abstract concept (such as a
diagram explaining the Laws of Thermodynamics) or
•
illustrates a complex process
•
re-tells a story using powerful images from the text.
In cases where a complex concept is illustrated in a text, teachers
may want students to illustrate additional examples, counter
examples or analogous examples.
See “Directions for
Student Labs” on page
124 in Reading for
Understanding for an
outstanding example of
illustrating a complex
process.
In history, the teacher may want to give students opportunities to
reflect on certain events and their consequences, using information
from the text to create a more personal connection to remote
events. For example, in order to build understanding about the
historical events of WWI after reading about it, teachers may want
students to use information from the text to create fictional
accounts of trench warfare. These might take the form of front
page newspaper reports with illustrations and maps, or illustrated
scrap books that perhaps include “photos” (illustrations), pictures
of keepsakes or good luck charms, souvenirs, as well as poems,
letters home, or journal entries of soldiers or medical personnel at
the front.
In math, the teacher may want students to show as many ways as
they can to represent a concept such as Pi using words, pictures
and numbers to develop a more complex notion of a difficult
concept that is not fully expressed in a single symbol.
In science, the author may have provided an abstract example of a
concept such as how the equation for the force of gravity can
predict how far an object will travel when propelled, and the
teacher may see the need for students to access more background
knowledge. The assignment could be to illustrate several real life
examples such as a line drive to center field, and to show how the
illustrations relate to the equation.
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Notes
Teachers can follow the same group process as in Sketching
Character and Historical Figures above, leading the discussion and
providing or looking for quotes around graphic images or imagery
instead of character.
1. Assign each student a selected passage, a chapter or a set of
chapters to re-read. (For selected expository passages, as in
science or math, students will illustrate the passage one chunk
at a time. For narrative chapters or sets of chapters, explain that
students are to find a quote that contains vivid imagery and
illustrate it.)
2. Explain that part of the assignment is to work with their group
to find quotes that will make sense when ordered sequentially
and that will construct an image that makes the concept clear or
re-tells the story in some visual (and probably abstract) way.
3. Assemble the final product into a display on a bulletin board or
a bound book and display in the classroom.
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USING WORDS, PICTURES, AND NUMBERS IN
MATHEMATICS
Adapted from the work of Marilyn Burns’
Math Solutions and Teachers’ Curriculum Institute
Notes
Purpose
In math and science reading, Numeracy, the ability to “decode”
numbers by making meaning of the number sign system, is
essential. Visualization is a key strategy that makes this abstract
symbol system concrete. Metacognition and the ability to verbalize
the problem solving process is another critical tool. These
strategies can be developed by teaching students to think and
record their thought processes in three forms: words, pictures and
numbers.
In order to develop numeracy and problem solving skills, students
need to experience a wide variety of problem solving situations in
which they develop successful solutions (prior to finding answers)
through the application of their own thinking. A sample lesson
exemplifying this idea follows. This is a simple example from a
sixth grade math class; other grade level examples might include
explorations of geometric proofs, the concept of the limit, or the
historical development of Pi as a construct.
© WestEd 2001 All rights reserved.
28
For information on using
Interactive Notebooks in
Mathematics" and websites
for Math Solutions and TCI,
see Additional Resources at
the end of this packet.
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Notes
Unit: Fractions
Concepts: proportion, division, common denominators
1. Students enter to find a warm up problem on the board:
“On the next left hand page of your notebook, describe a
solution to ¼ + ½ = __. Remember to use words, pictures and
numbers.”
2. Students work silently and individually for a few minutes. As
they finish, they are asked to share their work with a partner,
and discuss similarities and differences in their approaches, as
well as the validity of their solutions. Two students’ sample
pages might look like this:
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Notes
Integrated Guided Practice of Cognitive
Strategies
The following classroom applications are examples of how
cognitive strategies are deeply embedded in curriculum as an ongoing or long-term project. These applications are different from
the applications in preceding sections in that they are not meant to
serve as “How To...” descriptions. Rather, they are examples of
how some teachers saw ways to embed and integrate strategy
instruction into their curriculum, both to broaden their students
awareness and control of their reading process and to deepen their
comprehension of the text. Through these examples of more
developed, complex, and long term curriculum-based projects,
teachers might begin to answer for themselves “What am I already
doing in my classroom that would really benefit from and support
integration of explicit cognitive strategy instruction?”
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QUESTION/PREDICT/CLARIFY
READING RESPONSE
Amy Masuda, Martin Luther King Middle School
Jordona Elderts, John Muir Middle School
Notes
Purpose
This notetaker prompts students to respond to text using three of
the strategies from Reciprocal Teaching. Students respond to the
text on the attached notetaking sheet while they read.
Amy Masuda, a middle school teacher, developed this reading
response notetaker to engage her students in interactions with the
text, which would support metacognition and improve
comprehension. She modeled the notetaking process using think
aloud and taking notes on an overhead transparency of the
notetaking sheet before asking students to do the work
independently. She found that over time, all the students were able
to use all three types of responses.
Jordona Elderts gave the reading response notetaker to her seventh
graders without modeling the process so that she could see how
they would respond without any assistance. She found that her
students were able to make predictions and ask questions, but that
few students responded with clarifying comments or questions.
She decided that students probably were not clarifying because
clarifying was difficult for them. Clarifying then became a new
instructional focus based on this assessment.
This reading response can be used over time to assess students’ use
of these strategies.
Materials
•
texts for the initial modeling, perhaps a short story, a poem, a
newspaper article. (Later for independent work the texts may
vary. Originally this was done with Extensive Reading texts,
but any text would work, including core texts.)
•
Question/Predict/Clarify (QPC) reading response pages
•
pens or pencils
Process
Teachers may choose to use this as Jordona Elderts did in the
purpose described above, in which case the students would simply
use the notetaker without the modeling described below.
1. Select a piece of text and make copies for students to follow
along as the teacher reads aloud.
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2. Read aloud some of the text while thinking aloud, and records
responses in the “Question/ Predict/ Clarify” column. For each
response, also record the quote that triggered the response in
the “Quote” column, and the page number in the page number
column.
Notes
3. For each response, invite the students to help figure out
whether the response was a question, a prediction, or a
clarification. Label each response on the overhead as one of
these three.
4. Invite the students to share their responses in other places to
demonstrate that there are no right or wrong responses, but
rather many individual responses to the text.
5. As students become familiar with responding to the text in this
way, ask them to finish reading the rest of the text and finish
the notetaker on their own.
6. Share out at the end.
7. Continue using Q/P/C response notetaker for independent
reading assignments. Assess progress over time and model or
re-teach strategies as necessary.
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Question/Prediction/Clarification Notetaker
Name: _______________________
Title: ________________________
Author: ______________________
Date:________________
Time: _____ to _____
Pages read: ___ to _____
Q - Question: Ask for information that can be found in the text or for answers that are not
actually in the text, but from the reader’s thoughts or experiences.
P – Predict: Make guesses based on evidence from the text about what you can expect to
be presented next.
C – Clarify: Make the meaning of the text clear.
page #
Quote from the text
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Student Sample
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Comic Books:
An Adaptation Of Story Boards
Purpose
While reading a novel students create a short comic book of the
important events of the novel. Each chapter of the comic book
illustrates and summarizes a segment of the novel, (usually a
chapter or several chapters) and re-interprets the story in the form
of a comic book hero story.
Notes
This application was designed for middle school students to create
personal connections between a classic but remote epic tale (an
adaptation of Beowulf retold by Robert Nye), and their own
experiences of hero stories as told in modern comic books. The
project encouraged students to interpret aspects of the novel such
as character and historical setting, as well as to explore elements of
plot.
The project was challenging for seventh graders. However, it
became a student favorite from year to year, and was frequently
chosen as a portfolio demonstration piece. It took seventh graders
four to six weeks to complete, but through this project, students
learned and practiced
•
summarizing,
•
finding imagery, visualizing and illustrating,
•
peer editing using Think Aloud,
•
Extensive Reading (Thematic Reading)
•
paired and small group work.
•
work standards (using rubrics to assess “good enough work”)
Note: The following “Into” activities (steps 1-3) are designed to
build motivation and schema around the book. The activities will
vary according to the book or genre.
1. Students bring in favorite comic books to share. These are
supplemented by the teacher’s collection. In partners, students
read the comic books together and identify heroes and villains.
The class discusses how the authors and illustrators represent
heroes and villains in this genre, and develop a definition of
hyperbole for describing larger than life characters.
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2. Students each create their own Ultimate Super-hero and Supermonster pictures and a paragraph describing each. Each student
creates one of each and they are displayed side by side. (See
Character Sketches in the visualizing section of this packet.)
The purpose is for students to realize and compare the
differentiating features of heroes versus villains.
Notes
3. Students view short clips of various movies and documentaries
and read extensively about the topic from a wide variety of
sources. Possible texts may include National Geographic,
Illustrated Encyclopedias, and the Usborne series (illustrated
history books). The teacher also might read a compelling and
descriptive excerpt from the book as a teaser. Students collect
visual notes, keeping annotated sketches of settings and
characters in their notebooks .
Getting “through” the text
4. The teacher reads chapter one aloud to the class. Younger
students listen and color in a photocopied model of the
illustrated page for the first chapter (drawn by the teacher). The
pre-drawn illustration serves as a model for students. Older
students could draft visual images that come to mind as they
listen to the teacher reading aloud.
5. The class reads chapter two aloud. The teacher models creating
a summary using “This is About…” (see the Summarizing
section of this packet.) Students create a rough draft of their
own summary for homework.
6. Students create a rough draft of a cartoon of chapter two based
on the chapter summary written earlier. Tell students that the
illustration should be a key representation of the chapter and
support the summary.
7. Students work in pairs to peer-edit each other’s summaries and
illustrations using Think Aloud to show each other what may
need to be clarified and what is strong or positive in each piece
of work. (Students have already been practicing Think Aloud
for four to six weeks.) They compare each other’s work to the
rubric provided to them, and offer suggestions on how to revise
the work for a final draft.
8. Students create a final draft of chapter two’s summary and
cartoon and turn it in. The teacher grades these according to the
rubric and returns them before continuing with subsequent
chapters. From this assessment, the teacher can identify areas
to re-teach.
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9. Within the first few chapters, the teacher will need to model
new aspects of the project. For example, an early chapter of
most novels will probably describe setting, at which point the
teacher may want to lead the class through a visualization
exercise for imagining setting. In addition, it may be
impractical to do a comic book chapter for each chapter of a
novel. Students may need help initially with synthesizing
chapters.
Notes
Scaffolding
•
As the project continues, students do more and more of the
work independently. For example, students read chapters
independently or in pairs, students write their own summaries
without modeling and create their own illustrations, and
students decide which chapters from the novel to combine into
one comic book chapter. This is necessary if students are
limited to designing a ten-chapter comic book for a novel that
contains more than ten chapters.
•
Group work can be integrated into this application by having
students design only drafts of their illustrations and summaries.
Then small groups of 3-4 students could work collaboratively
to create a group comic book. Brainstorm ways with the class
to involve every member in the creation process, especially
giving consideration to those who may not be artistically
inclined.
•
High school students can design a symbol to best represent the
theme or big idea of each chapter and accompany it with both a
metaphor and a chapter summary.
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Notes
What You Might Expect
In the beginning: The goal of strategy instruction is to see
students flexibly and independently using of strategies and to see
students integrating them into their reading process; however, in
the beginning, strategy instruction can seem slow and unrewarding
work at times. Students often use new strategies only when
prompted, and then often without great sophistication. It often
takes many successive approximations of a strategy before students
begin to show any facility with using it and then many more
opportunities to practice using a strategy before students are ready
to demonstrate the strategy independently. If the Good Readers’
Strategy List is being used at this point it may be a short list that
shows an emerging awareness of the reading process and may
include some misconceptions which will be revised in time.
Throughout the year, but especially in the beginning, some
students will be ready to work independently before the last few
are ready to demonstrate a new strategy. Provide some
opportunities to work in heterogeneous groupings well as times for
those who still need help in a particular area to work with the
teacher providing additional support. It is very important when
grouping students in this homogenous way that the groups remain
flexible, so that students are not permanently assigned to “skill
level” groups, but rather that the groups serve as temporary
groupings for specific instructional support. These should also be
flexible in the sense that they are one of several or many groups
that students will be a part of for the day or week.
In the middle: Students may demonstrate a strategy, or set of
strategies, with some flexibility and independence, or begin to
identify effective strategies to clarify during the reading process.
Some strategies may be better developed than others. If the Good
Readers’ Strategy list is being used, it may be substantially
elaborated and revised at this point, with some categories of fix-up
strategies beginning to emerge, and many misconceptions revised.
Strategy uptake may lag behind concept attainment and can span
several units of instruction. For example, students may still be
working on clarifying as they read, even though they finished a
major unit on Rome. The teacher focuses on pacing the curriculum
content, while embedding strategy instruction. Students have
multiple opportunities in the regular course of instruction to read
extensively and to think metacognitively about their reading
process. The metacognitive conversation is a central part of
classroom talk, and informs instructional decisions about explicit
strategy instruction.
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Notes
In the end: Many Reading Apprenticeship classrooms have
demonstrated this axiom: Successful strategy instruction depends
on persistence and multiple opportunities for practice in many
varied contexts. By the end of the year, with ample opportunities to
practice with many varied texts, students will begin to demonstrate
spontaneous use of a set of strategies while reading independently.
Evidence of this will be seen in a variety of classroom applications
that capture and represent students’ metacognitive thinking such as
Think Aloud, metacognitive logs, and double and triple entry
journals. Students will be able to discuss their reading process, and
identify those strategies that they use comfortably. If the Good
Readers’ Strategy List is in use at this point, it will be very
elaborate, and probably be categorized to reflect groups of
strategies that are effective in dealing with common reading
challenges. Don’t give up too soon!
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Additional Resources
Schoenbach, R., C. Greenleaf, C. Cziko, and L. Hurwitz. Reading for Understanding:
Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass Publishers, 1999.
For more Information on Teacher’s Curriculum Institute and using Interactive Notebooks
in history (they can also be adapted for mathematics and science!) visit
http://www.teachtci.com/default.asp
For more on Marilyn Burn’s publications in Mathematics, visit
http://www.mathsolutions.com/
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Scaffolding Questioning within
Metacognitive Conversation Routines
Scaffolding is enough help (but not too much) for long enough (but not too long!) that I can
learn to do by myself something that used to be too hard for me to do alone. Metacognitive
Conversations are tools for collecting information about what help to give and for how
long. This is a 3-4 week sequence in which a teacher decided to teach Think Aloud and
Talking to the Text as routines to support Metacognitive Conversations, and taught
students how to ask better questions using Question-Answer Relationships.
Weeks 1-2
Teach Think Aloud/ Talking to the Text. Students read supplementary content related text,
and discuss their metacognitive responses each time in pairs or small groups, then debrief
with the whole class. Focus on creating safety and accepting all responses that were fit for
public consumption. Encourage students to share their thoughts, confusions and issues of
motivation.
Use student work samples to collect information to inform instruction.
As students began to engage in the task and generate work samples, collected and
assessed student work. Asked: what evidence do I have that students are engaging with
text? What evidence do I have that students are using prior knowledge to ask productive
questions to build comprehension?
Identify instructional needs in the student work.
•
Students are rarely connecting to (relevant) prior knowledge
•
Students are rarely asking questions that support deeper comprehension
•
Students are not engaged- there are no, few or perfunctory responses to text
Plan forward with this instructional information
•
Students need help asking questions and connecting to prior knowledge.
•
Question Answer Relationship helps readers develop independent productive
questioning strategies to use while reading.
•
Question-Answer Relationships help readers make explicit the connections between text and their own prior knowledge.
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Scaffolding Questioning within Metacognitive Conversation Routines
Weeks 3-4
Teach Questioning through Metacognitive Conversation.
Students do more Think Aloud and Talking to the Text (in response to new content
related text) with the supportive prompt, “Ask Questions about the reading as you go.”
The class engages in a Metacognitive Conversation, a collaborative in-process assessment
of their own reading: “What kinds of questions do we ask as we read? How do we answer
our questions about the reading? Are any kinds of questions more helpful/ interesting/
easier/ harder etc. than others? What do we need help with?”
Model Questioning
•
Teacher models asking productive questions using Think Aloud.
•
Students record and discuss the teacher’s questions and discuss as above.
Guided Practice with Questioning
•
Teacher and class practice questions with ReQuest.
•
Whole class introduction to QAR and practice with Room As Text
•
Whole class practice QAR in Question Around structure with simple text
•
Small groups practice QAR Question Around with simple content-based texts
(supplementary texts or short chunks of core texts) and debrief, discussing how
questions build interest, draw on their prior knowledge and help make sense of
the text.
Independent Practice with Questioning
•
Students routinely use QAR to prepare for small group and whole class discussions about core and content related texts
•
Students independently ask interesting productive questions of text while reading
to support engagement, connect to prior knowledge and build comprehension.
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Text Samples for Schema - Corandic
Corandic is an emurient grof with many fribs;
it granks from corite, an olg which cargs like
lange. Corite grinkles several other tarances,
which garkers excarp by glarcking the corite
and starping it in tranker-clarped storbs. The
tarances starp a chark which is exparged with
worters, branking a slorp. This slorp is garped
through several other corusces, finally frasting a
pragety, blickant crankle: coranda. Coranda is
a cargurt, grinkling corandic and borigen. The
corandic is nacerated from the borigen by means
of loracity. Thus garkers finally ghrap a glick,
bracht, glupous grapant, corandic, which granks
in many starps.
1. What is corandic?
2. What does corandic grank from?
3. How do garkers excarp the tarances from the corite?
4. What is coranda?
5. How is the corandic nacerated from the borigen?
6. What do the garkers finally thrap?
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