WEBVTT 00:00:05,930 --> 00:00:15,650 The first thing you need to do is to select the essential words to teach. Many teachers get stymied here, and they worry that they're 00:00:15,650 --> 00:00:25,390 going to select the wrong words, not pick the right word, or somehow mess up, and what I want to say to each of you is don't worry about 00:00:25,390 --> 00:00:35,970 that. Pick what you think are the most important words that students need to know in order to understand the big ideas of the unit you're teaching. 00:00:35,970 --> 00:00:47,910 Number two, you need to be able to define and put the word in a context. Use words to define the word that students understand and 00:00:47,910 --> 00:00:59,900 put it in the context in which the word is going to be used. Also, most of the words you're teaching have more meanings than the ones 00:00:59,900 --> 00:01:08,700 you're teaching for that particular big idea. So you may want to say to students, "I'm going to be telling you about the meaning of the 00:01:08,700 --> 00:01:20,950 word cell as it relates to biology. But you remember that cell has other meanings. For example, who do we put in cells in prisons? 00:01:20,950 --> 00:01:28,740 Well, we put people who commit crimes in cells, and so that's a different meaning." You want to be sure to emphasize the context of 00:01:28,740 --> 00:01:37,200 the meaning of the word you're teaching, but you also want to be sure they understand that most of the words have other meanings. 00:01:37,200 --> 00:01:44,860 The third thing you want to do is you want to be sure that students can actively process the word. In other words that they make the 00:01:44,860 --> 00:01:56,480 word their own. They learn not just what you say the word means but the way in which they define the word and use it. 00:01:56,480 --> 00:02:04,190 And then fourthly you want to be sure that they have multiple experiences with the word. What that means is they have a chance to 00:02:04,190 --> 00:02:14,900 turn and talk, use the word with their peers, write about the word, use the word as they describe the big ideas in the content area, and 00:02:14,900 --> 00:02:19,730 use the word throughout the day. Make it theirs. 00:02:19,730 --> 00:02:29,500 The ways in which comprehension can be promoted and integrated into content-area learning is to focus on the most-important 00:02:29,500 --> 00:02:37,730 comprehension practices. There are numerous comprehension practices in the research literature, and many of them are interesting and fun 00:02:37,730 --> 00:02:45,250 to teach. But if we try to teach them all, the fear is the students won't learn any of them very well. So you're probably better off 00:02:45,250 --> 00:02:53,170 focusing on three or four of these practices that are associated with improved comprehension in the content area. 00:02:53,170 --> 00:03:00,270 First of all, you know that you need to activate prior knowledge, and you can do that quickly. This doesn't need to take hours. It 00:03:00,270 --> 00:03:09,700 can be done in 30 to 90 seconds, to two minutes to three minutes. There are several key ways to promote background knowledge. One of 00:03:09,700 --> 00:03:17,900 them is to show a very brief video clip. And when I say brief, I mean brief: 90 seconds, not 20 minutes. 00:03:17,900 --> 00:03:27,750 You can give students a chance to highlight key words or phrases by reviewing the text ahead of time and then using those key words or 00:03:27,750 --> 00:03:37,230 phrases to expand on and extend what they already know. You can get students to ask questions by pre-skimming what they're 00:03:37,230 --> 00:03:45,720 reading and learning, and those questions will make them aware of what they want to know, and so as they either listen or read they 00:03:45,720 --> 00:03:54,610 can fill in those gaps. So, activating prior knowledge, it can be done very quickly, and many teachers spend too much time on the 00:03:54,610 --> 00:04:04,380 building of background knowledge and not enough time on getting students to highlight what they want to know about the background 00:04:04,380 --> 00:04:08,610 knowledge that's linked to what they're reading. 00:04:08,610 --> 00:04:17,880 Number two, you want to be sure that students are, if you will, awake while they're reading, monitoring what they're reading and 00:04:17,880 --> 00:04:28,410 learning. So we don't want them plowing through text and getting to the end. The goal isn't to finish. The goal as you go through text 00:04:28,410 --> 00:04:34,130 is to ask and answer questions about what you're reading. So you want them to monitor. 00:04:34,130 --> 00:04:42,410 The third thing you want them to do, you want to be able to have some kind of a visual schema or some way to organize what they're 00:04:42,410 --> 00:04:52,650 reading so that they can remember it. One of the best ways to do that is through a graphic organizer or a visual display in which the 00:04:52,650 --> 00:04:59,780 key words or key ideas are linked so that they can be better retained by the student. 00:04:59,780 --> 00:05:08,250 The fourth thing, it's important for students to know how to answer easier and more-advanced questions. So, for example, easier 00:05:08,250 --> 00:05:19,690 questions are questions in which the answer is right there, right in the text, in just a few words. So who wrote the...? Well, you can go 00:05:19,690 --> 00:05:29,480 right back to the paragraph and see a sentence that says, "Thomas Jefferson wrote the...," and it's a right-there question. Those 00:05:29,480 --> 00:05:36,330 questions are important questions, particularly in science and social studies, and so you want to be sure students know how to ask 00:05:36,330 --> 00:05:46,360 and answer them. There are more-complex questions in which students have to use information from different places in the text, 00:05:46,360 --> 00:05:59,550 paragraphs that are separated. Linking that information to answer a more-complex question type is also important. So a question like 00:05:59,550 --> 00:06:11,400 "Why did the settlers come to the West?" the answer to that question might be in multiple paragraphs within the same text. 00:06:11,400 --> 00:06:21,780 There are even more-advanced questions in which the answers to the question aren't in the text per se but can be inferred from the text 00:06:21,780 --> 00:06:36,380 based on what you've read. So you might ask a question like, "Why do you think that characters in this particular era were so interested 00:06:36,380 --> 00:06:46,540 in making the kinds of cultural changes that we just read about?" So that requires students to have read the text but also to think 00:06:46,540 --> 00:06:48,870 beyond the text. 00:06:48,870 --> 00:07:00,490 Get students to both ask questions and answer the questions, both before they read, while they read, and after they read. The key 00:07:00,490 --> 00:07:10,970 question steps, like who, what, why, where, how, can be taught to students, and they can use these question stem to formulate 00:07:10,970 --> 00:07:20,740 questions. They don't formulate every question stem every time, so you might even say to students, "Before you read, skim what you're 00:07:20,740 --> 00:07:28,570 about to read and come up with a good who and what question, and then at the end see if you can answer it." Asking questions and then 00:07:28,570 --> 00:07:33,280 answering them is a really important way to promote comprehension.