Comprehension
Change Package: High-Level Comprehension Task
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. Comprehension work that utilizes a high-level question and scaffolds student understanding through student-centered routines 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 comprehension task sheets particularly helpful when working through a comprehension task.
How do you plan a comprehension task?
Planning
Review curriculum texts and tasks. The texts you select to use with students should be relevant & complex. When working with multiple texts, texts should cohere around a similar topic or idea that allows students to build knowledge across the arc of tasks. Plan a comprehension task to use with students. The task should include:
A high-level, open-ended, text-based question that asks students to make sense of the big ideas in the text
Opportunities for students to write about the text informally through quick-writes
Opportunities for students to discuss their ideas with their peers
Opportunities to metacognitively reflect on how their thinking about the text changed through talking and writing
Create student-centered task sheets that:
Help students understand the purpose for the work that they will be doing
Lay out the steps in the task
Provide some insight into how to complete new activities or skills, such as providing tips for completing a quick write if that is new for students
Scaffold task sheets for EML and Special Education students as needed. The scaffolds should provide access to high level work without removing the heavy lifting for students. For example, you might
invite EML students to compose quick writes in the language they are most comfortable writing in.
provide EML students a task sheet in their first language if needed.
provide a short paragraph of background information about a text for EML students if the text deals with a topic that might be new or unfamiliar. For example, students new to the U.S. may not know a lot about the civil rights movement and might not have the background knowledge that would help them better access a text on Ruby Bridges.
provide stopping points for students within a text and ask them to summarize each section and state how ideas build on each other. Then ask students to share their summaries with a partner and then work together to repsond to the quick write question.