4. STRATEGIES USED FOR DETERMINING IMPORTANCE Before reading, determine the purpose for reading.
5. Reading for a Purpose Students need to have an understanding of the purpose for reading and viewing particular texts before they begin. Teachers can assist students to clarify the purpose of reading by asking the questions: Why are you reading this text? Are you reading for enjoyment, to retell, to answer questions, to gain information?
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7. Determining The Purpose For Reading ENGAGE STUDENTS IN THE PURPOSE FOR READING 1. Establish one clearly stated purpose - For example, “Read pages 283-285 to find out what a tide pool is.” 2. Model and directly teach students how to read for the stated purpose.
8. “ It is critical to support learners through the learning process and gradually release responsibility to them.” Keene & Zimmerman - Mosaic of Thought Teacher Modeling Guided Practice Independent Practice Independent Application
9. Teachers should model thinking aloud about their own process of determining importance during reading. Teacher Modeling
10. Guided Practice In small or large group mini- lessons, students are invited to share their thoughts about what is important.
11. Independent Practice Students may work individually, meet in small groups, or work in pairs to compare ideas about what is most important in text and how they came to that conclusion.
16. Main idea thinking is tentative. Readers alter their thinking as they encounter new information later in the text. Main idea is difficult.
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18. 3. Ask questions about what, in your experience (schema), the combined clues seem to say about what is valued. 4. Decide what the main idea is by saying, “If I had written this and said things this way, what would that say about what I thought was important?” 5. Remember your purpose for reading. Five SECRETS TO FIGURING OUT MAIN IDEA 18
21. “ We must teach our students what nonfiction is. Teaching our students that expository text has predictable characteristics and features they can count on before they read allows them to construct meaning more easily as they read.” ~ Debbie Miller NonFiction Features
Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis (authors of Strategies That Work ) share that when we teach the strategy of determining what is important, it is often introduced in nonfiction. Nonfiction text and this strategy go together.
Allow time for participants to read the slide.
“ Skimming and Scanning” may be a part of this process. Skimming and scanning are techniques which allow readers to only attend to the most important information (as determined by the text’s structure and content or by the reader’s own purposes).
The gradual release of responsibility is assumed in teaching all the strategies. In the beginning, students are given a great deal of support and responsibility for learning, and working is gradually released to the students.
Modeling should occur frequently using short selections. Teachers should focus not only on conclusions about importance, but on how and why they arrived at those conclusions. It is important to think aloud about how the focus on what you as the teacher believe to be important enhances comprehension. It would also be a good idea to include some of your own knowledge.
Be sure students provide some evidence or reasoning to support their judgments.
Guided Reading or small instructional groups should focus on determining importance during the strategy study. This would be a good time to discuss different conclusions about important ideas if all are reading the same text.
Read Slide
Many textbooks today present information in a variety of visual formats in addition to print, and offer numerous study aids that highlight what is important in the chapter. Unless attention is specifically called to these text features, students often skip over them as they read to complete an assignment. We need to assist students in noticing ways the chapter forecasts organizational structure (i.e. cause/effect, compare/contrast, concept/definition, problem/solution, and so on) and how it signals key concepts and ideas.
Nonfiction text features help to focus readers as they sort important information from less important details.
Allow participants to read through the list. More information related to text features can be found in Strategies That Work – Chapter 9 and Appendix F. In addition to these text features, students need to learn to attend to text clues that signal importance. These would include phrases such as, “For example; For instance; In fact; In conclusion; Most important; But…; Therefore; On the other hand; and Such as.” A powerful instructional idea would be to create an Anchor Chart related to these text features (See Strategies That Work, page 121, for more information . )
Once again the versatile two column notes outline also comes in handy as an aid to guide students towards understanding the strategy of Determining Importance. When using two columns, the left column would state the main idea and the right column would list the details that support the topic.
A ninth grade student shared with his teacher that, "Determining importance is like a strainer, and the words are like noodles in a pot. It sifts out the water and leaves the noodles.” Let’s continue to work with all our students, giving them the tools they need to be successful readers.
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