Steve Peha's Newsletter

FREE: PDF Slide Decks For Close Reading, Building Background Knowledge, And Improving Evidence-Based Comprehension

We’re all trying to read a little closer this year, with deeper understanding, and greater certainty about how we’ve formed our opinions from the text. Here are three slide decks with 15 strategies (some familiar; some we’ve invented) that tackle the toughest issues we face in teaching a more rigorous form of reading comprehension:

1. Close Reading: High Payoff Strategies. I don’t like to say that some reading strategies are good and that others are bad. I like to think of it this way instead: If I taught a strategy 100 times, how often would it be helpful? That is, what’s the percentage likelihood that any given strategy will help students learn? The three strategies presented here (The Why Game; Building Relationships; and Question-Infer-Clarify) pay off more often than any others I’ve ever used.

2. Close Reading: Medium Payoff Strategies. If there are high payoff strategies, it stands to reason that there are at least a few others that, if taught with a certain emphasis, will yield pretty good results. Here’s the set I use most frequently—along with how I focus them on evidence-based comprehension—when I feel the high payoff strategies aren’t paying off as high as I would like.

3. Structural Comprehension. Close reading often involves line-by-line study of a text. But texts communicate in larger structures, too: paragraphs, sections, etc. This set of strategies does a great job of helping kids see the bigger picture. Each of these strategies can also be used as a writing strategy as well.

I’m especially fond of the structural comprehension strategies because they allow me to integrate reading and writing in a seamless way with no additional preparation.