Skip to main content

During Reading Strategies -- Post-its


DURING READING STRATEGIES

In his book, Subjects Matter, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels identifies a couple of dozen reading strategies to boost metacognition. Here is a short list of some of the during-reading strategies he mentions, and each has a strong research base.

  • Think Aloud
  • Reading Aloud (Pairs)
  • Dramatic Role Play
  • Post-it Response Notes
  • Annotating Text
  • Coding Text
  • Sketching my way through the text
  • Where do you stand?


EXAMPLE POST-IT NOTES
This week, I chose to use the post-it note activity with the novel, The Things They Carried.


  • Students identified key nouns/objects from the chapter.  In LARGE letters.
  • Students wrote associated feelings with each, noting the importance for the text: around the key objects, they wrote associated connotations. What associations can be made with each? What are the connotations concerned?
  • Students then posted these on the board, and a group of students sorted them and explained what each group has in common (list-group-label) as well as what it reveals about the chapter.
  • The students explained their groupings to the entire class in a discussion that followed.





Reflection: The goal of the activity and the discussion is to guide students to do some explaining and boosting of their associations with the text. If they can explain why the textual details matter to the feel of the text, then they will develop empathy and understanding for the characters in this war novel and also for the topic of PTSD, which is critical for the author's purpose.

I was satisfied by the choices that the students made as well as their ability to explain the details and connections across details. Although post-its are usually used with textbooks that cannot be written in, I selected the activity here because the post-its could be easily moved and grouped in order to facilitate a more concrete discussion of tone and character. Finally, this opening chapter of the novel can be a blitz of details that can overwhelm and confuse a fist-time reader of the novel, so the activity helped to give the students some handles on the book to grasp.

 

     

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Classroom Controversy

Constructive Controversy     I want to draw my students into a supportive classroom environment that normalizes struggle and controversy. Argument does not have to be a winner-take-call debate or (on the other extreme) a series of head nods to a commonly agreed-upon platitude.  Democracy takes  more work than that.  The empathy and rationality of rich humanism requires greater depth and search, as well.   Even after 21 years of teaching, I am still learning so much about how to set the stage for respectful and engaged discussion.  What about you? Praise, Pressure, and Performance This short unit focuses on setting the norms of inquiry and engagement that will lead to constructive controversy.  Please check out any of the lessons, or the whole unit!  I taught this in the 2013-14 school year in grade 9, but it could easily run in grades 8-11.   This topic is so compelling, I think, because it will help students...

Affective Learning

Pundits abound with promises that technology can "replace the middleman" in education.  Although I grate against the idea that a thoughtful, concerned, reflective, intelligent, passionate, caring adult--a teacher!--is the equivalent to a business owner who marks up merchandise for profit, the metaphor of the middleman forced me to think about just what, exactly, does the teacher add in a cloud-based, post-2007 , MOOC world, where a myriad of apps and sites (e.g. Khan Academy) can tailor feedback and where content has gotten so cheap (e.g. MIT's free courses, or sites like Coursera --featuring coursework from Stanford, UPenn, and Johns Hopkins--or nifty-looking courses like "Analytics in Course Design" through Dartmouth via Canvas ). Surely, teachers are not simply haggling with students for a better price on learning!  But just the same, I am asking myself what is the value-added I am bringing to my students that cannot be replaced. But if teachers are middle...