In teaching this unit, I implement various strategies and modifications. Specifically, I start the unit with a pre-reading/writing activity for each text, either written or visual. The previewing activity, also known as a warm-up, is an essential strategy to motivate my students. The choice of effective strategies is the basis of the entire unit. Research shows that the level of motivation students bring to a task impacts whether and how they will use comprehension strategies. Reading for a real reason and creating an environment rich in high-quality texts are equally important. Sometimes an oral preview of stories, which are then turned into discussions and predictions, increases the comprehension of the story, and a creative variation of the preview that asks students to compose a narrative based on key words from the upcoming story can also trigger a deeper comprehension of it.
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Consequently, I use two different activities: a Quick Write activity at the very beginning of the unit and whenever it is necessary, and the Tea Party exercise before the reading of each written document/excerpt for the weakest students who may be in a regular class. The Quick Write strategy makes the students predict, reflect, and/or draw conclusions. It is recommended for the AP and regular students. Differently, the Tea Party strategy encourages an active participation with the text. This pre-reading strategy allows students to predict what they think will happen in the text while inferring, comparing and contrasting, see casual relationships, and use their prior knowledge. It is extremely effective with unmotivated and/or struggling readers,
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and it is an excellent way to achieve the formal-operational stage.
Throughout the unit, modeling and scaffolding are recurrent, as is the use of writing prompts. Following both Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories, I extensively use Class Discussion, Questioning, Comparing and Contrasting either to move students from the concrete-operational stage to the formal-operational one or to bring them to the nearest zone of proximal learning. Actually, I find the Class Discussion strategy, which I usually call Sharing Time, very beneficial because many of my students refrain from saying what they think. In order to overcome their resistance, I usually present this strategy as a celebratory time, in which we share whatever we have done or whatever we think without being or becoming judgmental. My students need to accept diversity while developing the ownership of learning. This technique generally works very well, and it helps to move the concrete-operational students to the formal-operational stage.