Scaffolded Reading
Change Package: Scaffolded Reading
Impact on Teaching
Comprehension work is an essential piece of any text-based task situated within a coherent arc of lessons. If students don’t get the gist of the text or grasp an author’s ideas, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to do deeper analytic and interpretive work. It is especially important for emerging readers and emergent multi-lingual (EML) students to be able to access the big ideas of a text while building their comprehension muscles. Students should be supported to develop a coherent mental model of the ideas in the text as a whole during the comprehension process. Scaffolded reading comprehension work that supports students to respond to a high-level question through reading, writing, and talk helps teachers to assess students understanding of the big ideas in a text so that teachers may help students bridge gaps in understanding prior to taking students deeper into the text. Engaging students in comprehension work sets students up for success with future tasks.
Impact on Students
Through exit tickets, students indicated that comprehension task sheets helped them to better understand the text and EML students found imbedded queries to be particularly helpful when working through a comprehension task.
How To
Planning
Working to segment a complex text and develop appropriate queries for each segment should be shared work among collegues. By sharing in the development of the segments and queries, you'll deepen your understanding of the process and possible ways a text can be segmented to help students develop a coherent mental model of the text as a whole.
Process for Planning Scaffolded Comprehension
1. Identifying the major understandings students should develop from a text and anticipating obstacles to comprehension.
2. Segmenting the text to decide where in the text to stop reading and initiate discussion.
3. Developing Initiating Queries and potential Follow-Up Queries to promote students’ understanding of text ideas.
Step 1
Please begin by talking about the text that you will be working with.
• What are the major understandings that you’d like students to develop during their first read?
• What in the text do you think will be obstacles for students?
• What will be the high-level comprehension question that you’d like students to respond to after they’ve read the whole text?
Step 2
Next, discuss how you might segment the text. As you segment the text, think about the following:
For Narrative Texts:
• Where does the author introduce new characters?
• Where are new conflicts introduced?
• Where are ideas put forward that students should pay attention to?
• Where are places that lend themselves to connecting back to earlier information?
• Where are places that are particularly tricky and will require students to slow down and untangle ideas?
For Expository Texts:
• Where does the author introduce their argument?
• Where does the author introduce new concepts?
• Where are ideas put forward that students should pay attention to?
• Where are places that lend themselves to connecting back to earlier information?
• Where are places that are particularly tricky and will require students to slow down and untangle ideas?
Step 3
Once you’ve identified the segments, think about the queries you’ll ask. Remember, the queries should:
• prompt students thinking about the segment without giving too much thinking away.
• prompt students to connect information across segments when appropriate.
• deal with understandings and not discreet facts and details.
• build towards answering the comprehension quick write.
Step 4
Finally, read the text, stopping after each segment, and responding to the queries. As you do this, note:
• Do the queries keep you in the text?
• Do they help you process ideas and information in and across each segment?
• Do the queries help you talk and write about the text as a whole?