Put a Frame Around That Learning!

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I am currently obsessed with my latest academic crush, Mr. Kelly Gallagher. This week, I want to share with you some tips from his 2004 book, Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts 4-12, that address how to effectively frame reading for students in order to ensure comprehension and engagement.

Although Gallagher’s book and suggestions zero in on reading, I’m going to take it one step further – while the following ideas can frame reading for students, they can also frame lessons or even whole units of study. 

Let’s get into it!

Framing a lesson (or a unit, or a reading) means that you’re putting some scaffolds and supports in place right at the beginning, usually to build necessary background knowledge and/or provide students with a purpose for learning/for reading. If we just dive into a piece of reading, or the core of a lesson, we might lose a bunch of our students who were not ready; their brains were not primed for these tasks. These students will most likely end up “checking out” of the lesson or of the reading pretty early on, giving up because they don’t have enough background knowledge to help them understand the reading/the lesson, or they don’t know what their purpose for learning is.

Here are some framing ideas from Gallagher (2004):

·      Assign a web search at the beginning of a unit or before students read a text. Specify for them what key ideas/terms/concepts/words/pictures/videos they should be looking for. Determine how students should synthesize what they find, and how they will share with others.

·      Use anticipation guides as a way to frame major ideas/themes in an upcoming unit or text. Provide students with a list of statements to either agree or disagree with (when I taught the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451, I came up with statements that would connect to themes or big ideas in the book, such as “Ignorance is bliss” or “Modern technology drastically reduces our ability to communicate with one another”). Students use a Likert scale (strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, strongly agree) to rate their disagreement or agreement with each statement. This can spark some interesting discussions, especially if there’s no real “right” or “wrong” – the statements should fall into that lovely gray area. What I MOST love about anticipation guides is that you can give students the same statements at the end of the reading/lesson/unit and have them once again rate their agreements and disagreements. It’s interesting to see whether their minds were changed over the recent course of study, and why.

·      Try out a spin on an old classic, the KWL chart. Gallagher recommends a KWLR chart. At the beginning of the unit/lesson/reading, students list what they already know about a given topic under K, and then list everything they want to know or have questions about under W. It’s a great idea to fill in this chart as a whole class and to post the chart somewhere in the classroom so that it can continue to be filled in over the course of the unit/lesson/reading (if posted, it also serves as a constant reminder of a purpose for learning – to get those questions under W answered!). As students learn answers to their questions in the W column, they list these under L. And finally, at the end of the reading/lesson/unit, students look to see which questions in the W column are still left unanswered; they also add any new questions that have arisen for them during the recent course of study. With this list of questions (those that are still unanswered and those that are new), students are ready for some further research. These newly discovered research topics are listed under R and serve as great extension activities that engage students – they are, after all, based on the students’ own questions!

There are a bunch of other ways you can frame a reading/lesson/unit for your students, and also a bunch of ways you can frame during a reading/lesson/unit (instead of only at the beginning). If you’re interested in incorporating framing into your lessons and units and want help getting started, send me an email and we’ll frame together!