I had been assigning students articles to read in a leveled text called Well Read 3. As reading texts go it's not too bad - each chapter has a content theme with a few interesting readings and also highlights a strategy or two, with limited opportunities to practice on the texts.
After I taught my students to preview, though, I found they could retell the articles with solid accuracy after previewing and putting the text aside, and they could also answer all of the multiple choice comprehension questions accurately before close reading.
Since the text builds in difficulty I could have skipped to later chapters, but the sequence of strategies attached to the reading makes it hard to jump ahead.
Mostly the text just seemed too easy.
I have had almost zero success convincing emerging readers to learn and use new strategies if they can manage without them. In fact, now that I think on it, even when the text is hard I find emerging readers loathe to replace their schema for reading.
So into inquiry we went.
My original goals went something like this:
- identify a topic for inquiry that would engage students in my afternoon class
- identify a question or inquiry prompt that would require students to hunt for answers
- identify a limited set of "data" or readings for students to use in the hunt
- include varied texts in order to support a variety of strategy lessons, for example texts of different complexity, charts, articles, source material, etc.
- see how this approach does or doesn't work in this context, for me as a teacher
- find out what students think of this approach after they have experienced it
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