Alexander T. K. Elnabli
The belief at the heart of this unit is that students get better at the skills of reading, writing, and collaboration by practicing explicitly articulated methods for each over and again with newer texts. Here is a description of the specific strategies adopted by my English department in order to ensure consistent training of students horizontally and vertically across their high school English experience. While the terms used to describe these strategies are particular to my department, they have ample analogues in teacher training frameworks you likely employ in your practice. Practicing these strategies allows students to answer the essential question: How do strong readers make sense of difficult texts?
Reading Strategies
Distinguishing Challenging Texts
By the time they are in 9th grade, students tend not to have a nuanced understanding of reading as a diverse set of skills. Rather, their reading education has focused primarily, and rightly, on the elementary acquisition of the ability literally to comprehend text by acquiring sufficient vocabulary knowledge, fluency in decoding, and familiarity with various sentence structures. They likely think of reading as something either easy or hard or interesting or boring. What they do not yet know is that the possibility of a text’s being interesting or boring is, in fact, dependent on one’s ability literally to comprehend it at an elementary level in the first place. Students are often turned off by the more challenging or antiquated texts we present them in school not because the content is not potentially interesting to them but because their literal comprehension has not brought them to the point of being able to take an interest in the first place.
Nevertheless, in having students consistently read challenging texts, they come to associate reading with drudgery, lose motivation or confidence in reading at all, and then fail to grow as authentic readers outside of school. Thus, it is imperative that students be taught to understand reading as a diverse set of skills, and that strong readers choose the right skills for the given text based on their goals. Simplifying Mortimer J. Adler’s framework, students in this unit are taught that reading can be for three distinct goals: (1) entertainment, (2) information, (3) understanding. While one text could possibly provide all three experiences, they won’t necessarily, and good readers learn not to judge a text that is adequately informative negatively for not being entertaining, etc.
Though it is not built into this unit plan, teachers should establish a parallel running assignment of “reading for entertainment and information.” In other words, students should read books that are pleasant and hold their interest, whether they are fictional and entertaining or non-fictional and informative about some subject in which the student is interested. Books, articles, magazines, or other should be embraced as the kind of media that readers use to receive communication through the written word. The only condition should be that the content is communicated in writing. Students should choose their own texts to read. These should be at a reading level that presents little to no barriers to a students’ literal comprehension. Various methods could be used, but teachers should dedicate in-class reading time for students to read their book for entertainment or information so students can develop a positive association with reading in the mode of a confident reader rather than in the mode of an aspiring student. Having students present their book to peers in small group, write up a book review, and rate their book out of five stars could be simple ways of having students express their joy, foster enthusiasm for reading, and become more self-aware of their own taste.
By contrast, students should be taught explicitly that reading for understanding when the text is above one’s reading level requires and additional set of skills. By practicing these and coming to understand challenging texts literally, students become stronger readers who can access a greater variety of texts for entertainment or information. Beyond literally comprehending challenging texts, reading for understanding requires analyzing the structure of a text in order to arrive at its theme, or larger message. Because reading for understanding requires going beyond what a text literally says toward its inferred or figurative meanings, it is doubly-difficult. First a student must use strategies to arrive at literal comprehension. Then she must use further strategies to analyze meaning. When reading a difficult text, then, students will be taught that they must read it twice. They must also actively read by annotating and taking notes, whether guided by graphic organizers or, eventually, self-generated in a notebook. They must also recognize that since it is harder and slower work to read complex texts, they must come to the task expecting that. The difficulty will create confusion that will invite boredom and sleepiness. Students should know that reading challenging texts requires sitting up straight, with a writing utensil actively to take notes, with bright light so eyes are not strained. They should save reading in bed for entertaining and informative reads.
*Note: the specific Three-Read strategy for close reading poetry is detailed in the Activities for Text Set 1 below.
Before Reading
For each text studied in the unit, students will use the pre-reading strategy of previewing key vocabulary and generating a Know, Don’t Know, Unsure if I Know (KDU) chart. Students will also participate in a Do Now task that gives the opportunity to preview from their own and their peers’ perspectives the ideas, themes, or topics that they will encounter in the reading. Students will then read the text twice.
During Reading
On the first read, students will merely focus on making sense of the unfamiliar vocabulary in order to arrive at an initial summary of what they literally comprehended in the text. Students will guess at the meanings of the words they are unsure of, then use context clues on the first read in order to guess meanings. Students will then compare their guesses against dictionary definitions and update their personal dictionary in their notebooks accordingly.
Students will then conduct their second read. Students will begin a guided close reading to identify the key textual elements of setting, character, and plot before drawing inferences and identifying theme, if there is one. Students identify setting in the text by identifying the where, when, and mood, recording these in a graphic organizer. Teachers may provide “mood” word lists as a scaffold. Then students will identify any characters in the text and characterize them in relation to SLATE (speech, looks, actions, thoughts, and effects on others).
After Reading
After completing the second read, students will provide a more detailed summary of the key “plot” points in the story. It is worth noting that since the myths and spiritual stories in this unit do not necessarily contain all of the moments commonly associated with a “plot map,” the expectation for students is primarily to provide literal summary of key changes in events from the beginning, middle, and end of the text.
Participating in small or whole group discussion, students will collaborate to answer inference-questions that require evidence and explanation to support these. Such discussions usually will conclude with a final writing task for each student individually to record her answer to the question using evidence, providing a work product teachers may use to assess individual student understanding and writing skill.
Writing Strategies
The description below explains the writing cycle that should be used when students complete the Key Performance Task. I will not duplicate this information as a Classroom Activity, but you should plan to allot approximately six class periods to this process. The process is designed to habituate students to the extensive, intensive, and reflective activity that is the production of polished, formal writing. It is also designed to ensure students rely on their own skills and understanding in order to produce a polished final piece of writing rather than turning to AI tools or editing software. To that end, the process explicitly begins with handwriting and moves under supervision into a typed format. Teachers are encouraged to use the “version history” feature in modern word processing software in order to verify within reason that students have made their own edits to their essays. Sentence or paragraph-level copy-paste changes may be indications of plagiarism. Practicing the following process writing cycle allows students to answer the essential question: How do strong writers develop impactful writing?
Before Writing
Using the accumulated notes from close reading and discussion on all of the required texts, students will have a robust set of material and discursive experiences to help inform their argument. With these, students will brainstorm an outline to their essay, providing their initial answer to the prompt and then selecting at least four pieces of evidence from two myth-allusion text pairs. Teachers should assess these outlines before students begin the writing process.
During Writing
Students will compose four drafts of their essay. The first draft is to be handwritten using a graphic organizer explicitly tied to the argumentative essay writing format adopted by your school. This draft should receive comments from the teacher focusing on quality of evidence selection and line of reasoning. The second draft should be typed in class and be a near word-for-word copy of the handwritten draft but for any changes based on feedback. Teachers should then provide targeted conferencing with students in order to provide feedback on this draft. Verbal feedback in conferencing helps build student investment and can provide greater clarity than mere marks on a page. Students will then edit a third draft based on feedback. Students will then use a proofreading, and MLA formatting checklist in order to polish a fourth, final draft of the essay for submission. This final draft may be submitted digitally or printed and turned in as hard copy for assessment.
After Writing
Once students have completed their final draft, they should engage in several meta-cognitive strategies. First, they should self-assess their essay against the rubric (teachers should use whichever argumentative essay rubric is adopted by their department). Second, they should answer the reflection questions, such as the following: (1) What am I proud of in this essay I wrote? (2) What was challenging or new to me in developing this essay? (3) What habits do I need in order to develop strong essays? (4) What do I want to remember for the next time I write an essay? Finally, after students receive their final graded essay back, they should read any comments and rubric descriptors received, record their performance in an ongoing Key Assessment tracker, and answer reflection questions there, such as: (1) What are 1-2 key strengths in this essay? (2) What are 1-2 key weaknesses I need to improve in my next essay?
