This week, I turn my attention to the relationship between reading and writing and showcase a few ready-to-use strategies that can help you achieve success with challenging texts in your classroom.
1. Cornell Notes: Cornell Notes are a cornerstone of the AVID classroom, not because there's anything magical about the two-column notes themselves but because they help students understand the kind of thinking required for learning. When you ask your students to take notes in the right column of Cornell Notes, you want them to record the main ideas and supporting points in the text. This aids with meaning-making; students have to sort through the text to sift the main points out of all those words and succinctly summarize them in note form. The most helpful teachers will provide students with an Essential Question to guide their reading or even a reading prompt. After the note taking occurs, ask students to enter the note making phase of the Cornell Note-taking process in which they revisit their notes, highlighting, underlining, or circling main points and key terms, crossing out information that turned out to be irrelevant or unnecessary, and chunking the notes into sections. Then, ask them to write some questions in the left margin, preferably higher-level thinking questions using Costa's Levels of Thinking or your taxonomy of choice. Students can spend some time discussing those questions in pairs or small groups or using the questions to guide a full-class discussion or Socratic Seminar. Finally, conclude the process by asking students to synthesize their thinking at the bottom of the page in a summary that answers the Essential Question. This multi-step process requires students to revisit the text at different cognitive levels and helps the learning stick. By jumping through these hoops, students have made friends with the text and can use their new-found learning for whatever the next part of your curriculum requires.
2. Metacognitive Reflection: In my last post, I addressed the idea of explicitly teaching students the things that good readers do. One way to make these processes become routine practices for your students is to ask them to reflect on the thinking that went into their reading of a text. How did they approach the process? Where did they encounter difficulties? What did they do when they realized that understanding was breaking down? Asking students to reflect in writing about the process of the reading itself is challenging for them but can lead to fruitful discussion--full-class or one-on-one--on the "how" of reading. By making students aware of their thinking, you can cause real change in their reading behaviors, and perhaps the next reading assignment will seem less daunting.
3. Quickwrites: I'm a big fan of using ungraded quickwrites at every stage of the reading process. Sometimes, I find it's useful to have students write about what they already know or want to know about a topic before they read. Or pose a question that piques their interest on the topic and whets their anticipation to know more. I've also used quickwrites during reading, asking students to stop in the middle of an article, chapter, or fictional text to write about what they already know, what questions they have, and what they anticipate they will discover as they continue reading. After reading, quickwrites are a handy tool to help students clarify their thinking about a topic before discussing it with others. As the name implies, these writings should only take a few minutes, and grammar, spelling, and all those other English teacher concerns aren't important. The purpose of the quickwrite is to generate thinking and get students' ideas down on paper. I've also found that routine quickwriting helps students get used to writing on demand; consequently, the ideas flow much more easily later on when they're asked to share their thoughts in writing on a standardized test or other on-demand essay later on.
4. Annotation: Teaching students how to annotate a text--whether informational or literary--requires the students to write. Frequently, students think that marking a text only requires underlining, highlighting, or circling words and phrases. The teacher who wants to make big strides helps the students understand that the real power of annotation lies in the comments, questions, and thoughts you jot in the margins as you read. Teach your students how to annotate thoughtfully, and you will see their comprehension skills soar.
5. Gist Summaries: Summarizing is a notoriously difficult skill for learners. Ask any fifth grader to tell you about a movie she just watched, and you'll likely hear a scene-by-scene rehashing rather than the succinct summary you hoped for. One method I've found helpful is the Gist Summary. After reading, ask students--individually or in pairs--to sum up the main idea of the text in 25 words or fewer. Sometimes, it's helpful to brainstorm key words as a class prior to writing the summary to give struggling students a word bank of important points to add to the summary.
6. Learning Logs: Learning logs combine summary and reflection. After reading, ask students to explain what they've learned, how they learned it, and why it's important. It's a more formalized version of the quickwrite or metacognitive reflection mentioned above. I've seen two-column learning logs with "what I learned" and "what I thought about it" on the two sides. I've also seen logs that look like journal entries. The format is up to you. The thinking is what's important.
7. Exit Cards: Formative assessments like exit cards allow you to monitor effectively whether your students are "getting" the reading you're asking them to do. If students are spending class reading, ask them to write a three-sentence summary or a gist statement as a ticket out of class when the bell rings. You can stand at the door and collect them. It'll only take a moment to flip through the exit cards to determine whether students understand the reading or whether more discussion and debriefing is needed tomorrow.
8. KWL: One more prior-to-reading strategy for informational texts is to create a three-column chart called a KWL. In the left column, students write what they already Know about the topic. The middle column is where they write what they Want to know about the topic. And the right column is where they will write what they Learned about the subject from the reading. I recently saw a variation on this: a two-column chart with "Know" on the left and "Questions I have about the topic" on the right. Both types of charts help students activate prior knowledge, develop anticipation for the reading, and prepare them to dive into the text with a learning mindset.
From the list above, just a smattering of many possibilities, you can see that writing can be one of your best allies in helping your students process challenging text.
Next time, I'll examine how inquiry (the I in WICOR) can be equally helpful.
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