Utilizing challenging pieces of text in our content area classrooms is a great way to support students in both their content area comprehension and their literacy growth. When accessing a piece of text in your class, how can you get students critically thinking, writing, listening, and speaking? How can you scaffold instruction so that each student (regardless of their literacy strengths and areas of need) can access the text and apply what they know? How can you connect a piece of text to the experiences, interests, and funds of knowledge that a student already brings into the classroom? Informational texts are a great way for students to experience cause/effect, compare/contrast, problem/solution, process, and more text structures! What does a challenging piece of informational text look like in your content area?
Instructions
Resources
Review the following resources before you begin your assignment, as they will inform your work. In parenthesis, there are guiding questions to help guide your thinking and instructional planning.
Read & Watch
- IRIS Center. (n.d.). Secondary reading instruction (part 1): Teaching vocabulary and comprehension in the content areas. [Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0]
- IRIS Center. (n.d.). Secondary reading instruction (part 2): Deepening middle school content-area learning with vocabulary and comprehension strategies [Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0]
- Michigan Department of Education. (2015, May 27). Using informational text to build literacy and content knowledge (Part 2) [Video]. YouTube. [8:50]
- Edutopia. (2019, March 28). Using reading and writing to do math [Video]. YouTube. [4:01]
- Reading Rockets has videos for the following vocabulary strategies (listed here): List group label, Possible sentences, Semantic gradients, Word Walls, Concept sort, and more!
- Tovani, C., & Hartman, L. (2003). Thoughtful reading teaching comprehension to adolescents[Video]. Stenhouse
- D’Arcangelo, M., & Wurzburg, G. (2002). Reading in the content areas [Video]. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
- Shea, M., & Roberts, N. (2016). FIVES: An integrated strategy for comprehension and vocabulary learning. Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education, 8(1), 95–108.
Directions
Part 1
Identify a challenging piece of informational text that relates to your content area. This could be an article, journal, report, graph, etc. Explain why you chose the informational text that you did, and include a citation for where you located it. (In your content area specifically, what does a challenging piece of informational text look like?)
Part 2
Create a learning activity with the informational text you selected that will: (1) measure and assess students’ vocabulary comprehension and (2) teach the students how to access the features of the text. (How can you engage students in the process of vocabulary comprehension? How can you scaffold reading so students can access the text?)
Part 3
Design a writing prompt based on the informational text that will require students to answer with a claim, evidence, and reasoning statement. (What can you ask the students about the informational text that will allow for them to synthesize their learning through writing?)
Part 4
Explain how the writing prompt you designed will allow for you to measure each student’s language and literacy needs. What will you do for students based on how they answer the writing prompt? (What are you looking for them to be able to do? What will you do if they do not get it the first time?)
For this assignment, utilize the medium of your choice. Think about how you would deliver this information to a focus student (Google Slides? Video? Adobe Spark? Diagrams? etc.)
