By giving each student a job to do when tackling complex text, teachers help ensure that students actually understand what they are reading.

In Fatima Belouahi’s classroom in Copenhagen, Denmark, she uses a popular small group activity called role reading to help scaffold her ninth graders’ comprehension of challenging texts. Students are placed in groups of three, then assigned a task to do as they work through the material: One student reads aloud, another writes a summary, and a third comes up with a title for the paragraph. With this approach, students must demonstrate their understanding as they go, which helps bolster their grasp of the text—and the likelihood of getting lost goes down.