Extending Thinking Through Reading Comprehension Strategies
Debbie Willingham
Aug 09, 2010
How can you extend student thinking while using reading comprehension strategies?
We all realize now that many of the questions on the state and national tests our students take are primarily based on higher levels of thinking. Because of that, we need to regularly incorporate higher level reading comprehension strategies into our assignments in all content areas. The Extending Thinking assignments we make can reinforce reading comprehension strategies to take students to a deeper level of content understanding. Integrating Extending Thinking and reading comprehension strategies is easily done because they complement each other so well. These "combination" strategies include main idea and details, text elements/classifying/abstracting, sequencing, cause and effect/error analysis/deductive reasoning, inference/inductive reasoning, compare and contrast, and fact and opinion/constructing support/analyzing perspectives. Often several of these go hand in hand in our assignments, so it is not as important that we label an assignment with a particular strategy as that we just be sure to make those types of assignments.
In order to easily do this, we should follow these steps:
1. Decide the purpose - what students should get out of the reading. The Extending Thinking and/or reading comprehension strategy can be included or implied in the Lesson Essential Question.
2. Choose (or create) a graphic organizer for the content information that will organize it according to the strategy being emphasized.
3. Think of an assignment students will complete that will use the graphic organizer and reinforce a higher level thinking strategy.
Here is a simple example:
Essential Question: What details explain and support the reasons for writing the Constitution? (Incorporates both main idea/details and constructing support strategies).re is a simple example:
Activating Strategy: Brainstorm reasons for making a major change in your life, discuss and lead into tie-in with the United States' decision to make a major change in the government.
Teaching Strategies: Teacher-led discussion and reading of the Preamble, with students completing a matrix organizer paraphrasing details; Assessment Prompts after each two details with partners listing specific examples for each detail.
Assignment: Students complete the following RAFT:
Role: delegate to the Constitutional Convention
Audience: the public
Format: letter to the editor
Topic: constructing support for the new Constitution based on at least three details/reasons/ examples on their graphic organizer
Summarizing Strategy: "The Important Thing" about reasons for writing the Constitution
Understanding the importance of having students think beyond foundational or surface content knowledge enables teachers to consciously reinforce the use of extending thinking and reading comprehension strategies. Incorporating them into into lessons and assignments enables students to get more content from their own reading and better prepares them for later assignments and tests. We need to be sure to do this in all content areas on a regular basis to help our students get the most from our teaching and their learning.
