Lesson on previewing ("flying over") text before close reading

Over the years I have developed a bad attitude about teaching previewing.  Previewing is a pre-reading strategy where the reader skims the material at a medium trot to see what the text is about and how the author is approaching the topic, returning later for a close reading. Sometimes it's called a "fly over."

As I have read more about the brain, though, I've come to appreciate why this technique might be valuable. The brain works by making associations. With material the brain has never seen, on an unfamiliar topic, it could be a struggle to create associations. It seems logical that previewing would give a reader's brain a quick dose of background knowledge - creating a mental framework to support further associations.

The problem is that previewing (as I have taught it in the past) has made no sense to students, for many reasons:

1. It flies in the face of students' dearly held schema for reading. Everyone knows that the way to read is to start at the first word and continue to the last word. Skipping around before you do that is confusing. How can you expect to know more by reading less and taking information out of order?
2. If the problem for the struggling reader is that reading something first word to last word takes a a long time, adding steps before the reader starts that process makes a bad thing worse.
3. The steps themselves seem arbitrary to students. What if there are no headings to reveal the structure of the text? Why would it work to read only the first sentence of every paragraph? What if the first sentence of many of the paragraphs is taken up with rhetorical questions and flourishes, instead of conveniently announcing main ideas? What if the reading is 50 pages long? 
4. Previewing comes at the beginning of the term (the first of a chronological sequence of reading strategies) when students are anxious to improve comprehension. Since it seems unlikely to make a difference, this lesson leads students to question whether they will make any progress in the course or whether this is another situation where they will not learn to understand what they read.

Yesterday, though, I had a rare shining moment teaching previewing. It left me hopeful that my students grasped the value of the technique. I plan to post-test them at the end of the term to see if they will share with me which strategies they plan to keep using after the term and I am fascinated to see whether previewing will make the list.  Here is the lesson I used, adapting what I used to do based on principles of Reading Apprenticeship:

Lessons on Previewing: Objective: Students preview a text with no headings.

Past lessons related to this (starting with previewing with headings):

Lesson on previewing a reading with headings:  On Day 1 the students used the Course Description document to work in pairs to solve and share their solution of a common student problem. (Note: depending on student reading level, class size and the type of class the number and type of problem varies. This link is to an example from a non-credit class. In graded classes I include many scenarios about grading, late work, etc.). In order to make it possible for them to solve the problems without reading the document closely I taught them to preview by skimming the headings, so they could become acquainted with the contents and the location of the information.

I explained:

• previewing helps the brain connect to the reading by building some knowledge of the contents
• it's easy to preview by looking at headings
• in previewing you don't slow read from the first word to the last, you skim rapidly
• the goal (put on board) is to find out "what's there and where is it" for future close reading

I demonstrated previewing the top of the document. They tried previewing, solo, and then used the Course Description to solve the student problems and share their answers with the group.

Yesterday's lesson:

• I gave students two articles about the value of failure (one from Forbes, the other from Harvard Business Review). 
• We started with one article (Harvard Bus. Review piece about the failure wall)
• I put them in pairs 
• I asked them to read the first line of each paragraph aloud, alternating with their pair
• I demonstrated this with a student pair very briefly
• Students tried it (and said it felt freaky!)
• I gave each student a sticky note
• I asked them to write down any words or ideas that came to mind after previewing
• We discussed what they wrote on their stickies as group and whether they were able to make sense of the content (most of them got the topic, a few got the main idea, one extracted the emotional tone only!)

It was wild to see the impact of background knowledge play out. The person who made the most complete sense of the text on her stickies was a department manager in a business. We discussed the impact of her background knowledge.

Students asked why this technique makes a difference in comprehension? Was it worth the time? When would they do this? With all texts?

I invited them to

• develop the skill through practice 
• test out its effectiveness. 
• observe  and talk about whether this makes a difference in comprehension. 

I said in my own experience it's especially useful if I lack background knowledge of the text to start with.

I was so excited about the success of this lesson using college-level text. In the past I have used a text about how to read, aimed at struggling readers.  I am convinced the level of challenge is the key change. Students won't bother to learn a new skill unless their existing skills are not equal to the challenge in front of them. Texts about how to read, in my experience, don't offer students enough challenge to force them to confront the shortcomings of their existing reading strategies, which usually boil down to re-reading and moving on without comprehending. When I've taught them reading strategies is as if we were walking along flat ground and I spent a lot of time showing them where to put a ladder.