Review the texts you are using to teach English skills and knowledge and those you are using over the coming week across other subject areas. Consider the challenges each text presents to your students, in the area/s of decoding or comprehending. If any of these texts are difficult, there are opportunities for you to use the text for shared reading.
- First, you must identify a teaching purpose. Is there an aspect of the text you need to make accessible for students? What must they learn to do in order to access or understand this aspect or feature of the text?
- Consider the ways you will highlight the way, or ways, an experienced reader problem solves this aspect of the text. For example, a busy text used in science may feature headings, subheadings, photographs, captions, diagrams, etc. This is a useful text for teaching or refining students’ abilities to skim for meaning and interpret meaning cues before reading.
- Consider the language you will use to discuss and highlight the feature of the text requiring teaching, plus the way you will make the thinking or action you are teaching for overt and clear to students. Remember that students must know how to do precisely what you are doing to access the tricky aspect of the text.
Make a list of the teaching goals you have identified over the week. As you practice this each week, you should observe that there is never a time that you are not identifying specific reading goals and strategic actions to teach for, or revise, across the curriculum.
That’s all for Part 3!
