Scaffolding for Reading Comprehension

Let's face it: at times, we ask our students to read some pretty sophisticated stuff. Some of our students are advanced readers; they don't need our support. Others really struggle with reading challenging texts, and may need a framework designed to guide their comprehension. Eventually, this framework can be altered as students need it less and less -- the teacher can scaffold the support so that she gradually releases responsibility to the student.

What follows is a fiction example using Romeo & Juliet that I'm borrowing from Kelly Gallagher's (2004) Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. But, I truly think this type of scaffolding could also be quite impactful for non-fiction texts as well, across the content areas.

The Romeo & Juliet example:

As they begin reading this challenging play, students are given outlines of the upcoming scene, but the outline has some gaps in it. For example, for Act I scene i, students might be given the following outline:

• Sampson and Gregory, two of Capulet's servants, fight with Abram and Baltazar, who are servants from the rival house of Montague.
• Tybalt, a quick-tempered Capulet, enters the fight.
• 
  
• The Prince enters and, enraged, stops the fight.
• The Montagues express concern about their son, Romeo.
• Romeo confesses to Benvolio that he is in love with a girl who is indifferent to him.

Here, Gallagher has only left the third bullet blank for students to complete.

As students become more familiar with their study of Shakespeare's work, provide fewer bulleted details on the given outline, requiring students to provide more and more plot points. For example, for Act III scene i, students might be given the following outline:

• 
  
• Tybalt and other rivals arrive. Tybalt wants to find Romeo.
• Romeo arrives. Tybalt calls him a "villain."
• The Prince enters and, enraged, stops the fight.
• Romeo says he now "loves" Tybalt.
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

By Act V, students are much more proficient at reading Shakespeare, so they may be asked to provide all of the bulleted statements. Remember, you may be differentiating for readiness, so not all students in your class would opt to use such scaffolded supports.

Again, don't limit reading instruction to the ELA classroom. This same kind of outline scaffolding could easily work with a chapter from a challenging textbook for a social studies or science course.

Face Value -- Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Do you have students who accept everything they read in a newspaper or in a magazine or see on the Internet at face value? I'm willing to bet you do. (I'm even willing to bet you know some adults who are too often guilty of this!) This is a dangerous way, Kelly Gallagher (author of Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts and my latest in a long line of academic crushes) warns, "to read your way through life" (2004, p. 84).  And, regardless of content area, we want our students to dig around beneath the surface of the information they're encountering, to think about what's not being said.

A great way to get into this with students, according to Gallagher, is by examining tables, charts, and graphs. Here's a chart Gallagher shares with his students (p. 83):

Influenza-related deaths have increased dramatically since the 1970s.

Influenza Deaths                                       Influenza Deaths

1977                                                           1999

Approximately 18,000                      Approximately 65,000

Gallagher asks students to fill in the left side of a t-chart by listing everything the chart tells them. They might list the following: influenza deaths rose dramatically between 1977 and 1999; in 1977, there were approximately 18,000 deaths; in 1999, there were approximately 65,000 deaths.

Next, it's time to encourage students to dig a little deeper -- what's not being said in the chart? Students use the right side of their t-charts to brainstorm everything this chart may be leaving out, a list that might include: what caused this dramatic rise in influenza deaths?; where were these deaths? in the U.S.? elsewhere?; who is the source of this information?

Finally, Gallagher asks his students to think about this question: What might have caused such a dramatic rise in flu-related deaths? He records their inferences on the board (such inferences might include: there were more strains of the flu in 1999 than in 1977; people in 1999 had worse medical care than in 1977; flu vaccines stopped working; there were more people in 1999 than in 1977). Gallagher is "train[ing his] students not only to notice what is said, but also to infer what is left unsaid . . . [He] want[s] them to realize that every time something is said, something remains unsaid, and that every time something is written, something remains unwritten" (p. 84).

Bonus: I think this would make a wonderful pre-reading activity if students are about to read a piece of text that includes charts, graphs, and/or tables. Doing this exercise with a graph that's about to appear in the reading students will later do can provide students with an interesting purpose to read -- perhaps they will learn more through reading the entire text, and, if they don't, what will this tell them about this particular source? Students could even be encouraged to conduct further research (a lovely extension activity!).

Reading is the First R

You may remember my academic crushes on Lucy Calkins, Rick Wormeli, and Carol Tomlinson. Well, I’ve got another to add to my list. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m currently academically crushing on Mr. Kelly Gallagher. Gallagher writes a lot of books to his intended audience of secondary ELA teachers, but I think a lot of what he says applies to us all. After all, don’t most of us teach subject areas that require some reading from our students? And wouldn’t most of our students, regardless of content area, perform better in our classes if we were able to help them improve their reading? Don't forget that reading is the first R in the age-old reading, writing, 'rithmetic equation.

I’ve been reading Gallagher’s (2004) Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4 – 12. I find myself stopping every few pages or so and thinking, how could this apply to content areas other than ELA? What would this look like in a science classroom, for example? And so, now that I’m over halfway through the text, my brain is teeming with thoughts and ideas for all of us to help our students grow as readers across the content areas. I’ll be dedicating a bunch of upcoming posts to this topic, but, for today, let’s get started with a baseball metaphor, adapted from Mr. Gallagher himself (he writes a great baseball metaphor about experiencing the game with his daughters; for the purposes of this post, I’ll extend this metaphor to myself – and to my own inexperience with the game).

This summer, I went to a Red Sox game with a friend of mine who really knows baseball. FYI, I really don’t know baseball. We were the Odd Couple of Fenway that day.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve got the basics down. I know the batter is going to try to hit a pitch. If he does, he’ll run like crazy to as many bases as he can. The other guys will try to catch the ball and throw it to get this guy out. If he makes it all the way around the bases, his team scores a point. Three outs per team per inning, nine innings. Whoever scores the most, wins.

As Gallagher (p. 2) points out, “it could be said that at a certain level [I] ‘understood’ the game. But did [I]?” My friend sitting next to me saw things going on that I was totally oblivious to. He could watch the interaction between the catcher and the pitcher and he could spot the center fielder realizing what kind of pitch the catcher was setting up for and getting ready for it. My friend could see base runners looking to base coaches for permission to try to steal a base. And so many other intricacies!

To paraphrase Gallagher (p. 3), I watched and “understood” the game on a surface level while my friend watched and understood the game on a much deeper level; “we watched, and yet did not watch, the same game.”

Our students are sometimes reading complicated text the same way I was “reading” that baseball game. They stay on the surface, missing a lot of the more complex meaning of the text. “They can read and ‘comprehend,’ but they do so almost exclusively on a surface level. They miss much of the deeper beauty of the game” (p. 3).

If I wanted to get better at watching baseball, I would never be able to do it alone. My friend would definitely need to teach me how to watch the game more expertly. It’s the same with our students and reading. Simply assigning reading is not going to result in our students improving as readers. We need to teach them how to the read the texts of our content areas in more expert ways so that they get as much understanding and knowledge as they can from them.

How do we teach this? I’m glad you asked! Be on the lookout for upcoming posts with specific strategies and ideas for teaching reading across the content areas!