Choosing the Right Strategy

I devoted a considerable amount of time discussing the importance of building context, prior knowledge, or schema for students prior to reading for understanding. Now I'll devote some time discussing how to choose the right strategy for students.

Dough Buehl (2001) suggests three general rules when wanting to choose a strategy for students:

1. What is to be learned is more important than which strategy.
2. The focus should be on what students are thinking, not the steps being followed.
3. Adapt the strategies to match student needs and teachers' goals.

Strategies that build context therefore, help direct students' attention to the major ideas and introduce how the information is structured in a text. In other words, where do I want my students to be looking for information and how will they know when they have found it?

Strategies are often broken down into three categories:

• building context when a student knows little about the topic to be learned
• activating what a student already knows when he/she knows some things about the topic
• organizing additional knowledge gained when a student knows a lot about the topic

Building Context:

Predicting & Confirming Activity (PACA) based on Beyer's (1971) inquiry model, uses predictions to set a purpose for reading. It allows students to do what good readers do naturally, which is to make educated predictions based on a little bit of information, set a purpose for wanting to know more, and revising their predictions as they continue through the text.

Example

A language teacher is planning a lesson on the Renaissance. She would like to use a reading passage in the native language that discusses the influence of the Renaissance on modern society. The article includes references to several key paintings that after an exit poll in her class the day before, she knows her students have very little knowledge about. The teacher introduces her lesson the next day with a brief discussion about the Renaissance and displays several of the key paintings mentioned in the reading on her LCD display.

Step 1: The teacher asks a question: "How might paintings like these be interpreted by us today?"

Step 2: The teacher initiates the lesson: Dividing the class up, the teacher groups her students into small discussion groups. She provides them with a list of vocabulary words from the article that are associated with influence of the paintings on our society today. "Based on the words from the reading, how might you think other people feel about these paintings?"

Step 3: Students meet to write predictions: After a brief discussion by they groups, the teacher poses the question again. This time responses from students include which words they used to make the prediction. She can use her tablet, or overhead projector to display these.

Step 4: The teacher presents new information: This could be reintroducing the pictures and providing additional information or showing a video to help build background knowledge.

Step 5: Students and teacher revise or modify predictions: Together, on the basis of new information, students revise or modify their original hypothesis.

Step 6: Students read the selection using the predictions as a purpose for reading: Students read the selection and can be reminded of their predictions as they read if they are written down or displayed.

Step 7: The teacher works with the students to revise their predictions based on the new information acquired from reading: The teacher works with the students to use the new information to revise the previous predictions.

The point of this strategy is to give students practice with the abstract concept that knowledge is tentative and can be revised when new information is introduced.

I'll add more strategies on future dates. Stay posted!