Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, May 2001 v44 i8 p692

ABCs of content area lesson planning: Attention,
basics, and comprehension.

Beth Hurst.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 International Reading Association Inc.

Traditionally, content area classes consisted of lectures and teachers
telling students to read the textbook and then answer the questions at
the end of the chapter. Teachers have since learned from research that
students need to be actively involved in order to fully understand what
they are learning, but sometimes knowing information and knowing how
to implement it are two different things. In reality, teachers often revert
to the traditional methods of lecturing, reading the chapter, and
answering the questions because that's how they learned. In my
university content area reading courses I try to show preservice middle
school and high school teachers alternatives to traditional methods of
teaching based on accepted reading practices. Making students active
participants is one way to help students better understand material
presented in content area classrooms.

Using a simple rule of thumb--what I call the ABCs of lesson
planning--teachers can put the theory of active learning into practice
and make learning more meaningful for their students. In the lesson
planning ABCs, A stands for attention, B for basics, and C for
comprehension. If teachers can keep these three things in mind as they
plan their lessons, students are more likely to fully understand what is
being taught.

A-Attention

Before teaching anything, it is imperative to first get the students'
attention. It's hard to teach students if they are not listening. Beyond
getting their attention, teachers also need to make connections to the
students' schemata--the background experiences they bring with them.
Building on students' schemata helps them make meaning from the
reading; or as Frank Smith taught us, we can help students connect the
new to the known. He contended in The Book of Learning and
Forgetting (Teachers College Press, 1998) that interest and past
experience make learning possible.

Teachers have also learned from research that students learn better
when information is presented in a way that draws their attention.
Getting the students' attention could be something as simple as talking
about O. Henry's time in prison before reading his short stories or doing
a class Venn diagram comparing and contrasting the U.S. North and
South in the mid-1800s before beginning a study of the Civil War. By
using Donna Ogle's K-W-L strategy (from her 1986 article in The
Reading Teacher), teachers can find out what the students already
know about a certain topic to help draw students' attention to the topic.
The strategy also provides a reason to read through the question "What
do I want to know?" Finally, it aids in comprehension because after
students read, they write about what they learned.

Anticipation guides are another method to direct students' thinking. An
anticipation guide is a set of sentences that students respond to before
reading a text. For example, before introducing the concept of
photosynthesis, the teacher provides students with a list of statements
about the process, and the students mark if they believe the statements
are true or false. Then when the students read the text, they find out if
they were correct. The anticipation guide provides students with a
reason to read.

Providing attention grabbers serves to set a purpose for reading--and
giving students a reason to read is one of our most important jobs
before we assign a reading.

B-Basics

Teachers have all heard the clarion call "Back to basics!" One effective
means of teaching basic skills is through the use of minilessons. In The
Literacy Dictionary (International Reading Association, 1995),
Theodore L. Harris and Richard E. Hodges defined a minilesson as "a
short, focused segment of a larger curriculum unit" (p. 154). Nancie
Atwell used minilessons in the Reading Workshop that she developed
and discussed in her book In the Middle (Boynton/Cook, 1987). She
suggested beginning the workshop with a brief introducton of a
concept, skill, or pertinent information that will be used during the class
time and then providing some practice with that skill. As students spend
their workshop time reading, they should be aware of when to apply
the information they have been given during the minilesson. Brief times
spent repeating skills will help students learn the basics.

Jo Anne L. Vacca, Richard T. Vacca, and Mary K. Gove explained in
Reading and Learning to Read (Addison-Wesley, 2000) that
minilessons should follow this pattern: "(1) creating an awareness of the
strategy, (2) modeling the strategy, (3) providing practice in the use of
the strategy, and (4) applying the strategy in authentic reading
situations" (p. 569). The following would be an appropriate example of
this pattern, if the basic skill being taught is the use of quotation marks
for dialogue. (a) On an overhead projector or on the chalkboard,
provide students with a text that contains dialogue with no quotation
marks. Discuss the difficulty of understanding text without the quotation
marks. (b) Together as a class, add the quotation marks. (c) Provide
more samples of dialogue without quotation marks and have individual
students add them. (d) Let students read the text as partners.

A minilesson could even be a short lecture such as an explanation of the
events that led to U.S. involvement in World War II or an explanation
of how to work a certain type of algebraic equation. Lectures can be
effective, but they are even more so if students are involved in some
type of meaningful interaction with the skills that were taught.

C-Comprehension

The most in-depth and perhaps most important but often neglected part
of the ABCs of lesson planning is an activity to enhance
comprehension, our ultimate goal. John Dewey taught us that learning
by doing is the most effective way to help students comprehend
material and to cement it in their minds. Learning is more meaningful
when students are active participants. We all remember best that in
which we take an active part.

An example of a comprehension activity might be to have students do a
web of the text either individually or in groups. Another idea might be to
put a big sheet of paper on the wall and have students write graffiti that
pertains to what they have read or write a poem about their favorite
character in a book. Anthony Manzo's Request strategy, as explained
in his 1969 article in the Journal of Reading, is an effective way to get
students involved in the reading and discussion. With Request, both the
teacher and the students read a passage silently. After reading, the
teacher closes his or her book and the students ask questions. Then the
teacher and students take turns asking questions of one another so the
teacher can model different levels of questioning.

Higher level critical thinking skills are an important part of
comprehension. Asking questions that cause students to use inductive
thinking is important. Another means of using critical thinking skills is to
provide activities that are open ended and allow students the
opportunity to come up with a variety of answers. Having to explain
how they arrived at their choice and discerning whether or not they
have used logical thinking is also important. The DR-TA (Directed
Reading-Thinking Activity) is one such activity that promotes this type
of thinking. With DR-TA, the teacher reads aloud the first part of a
passage and then asks students to make predictions about what will
happen next. Students are encouraged to explain the basis of their
predictions. The class members are asked if they agree or disagree and
are encouraged to explain why. The teacher then reads further into the
text, stopping at predetermined intervals to ask the same type of
prediction and discussion questions. The purpose is to guide the
students' thinking and get them actively involved in the text.

Other strategies can be used after reading to help students comprehend
what they have read. For example, provide students with a list of
approximately 10 to 15 words or terms from the text along with three
or four categories. After reading the text, students match the words to
the appropriate categories. A variation on this activity is to group
students and have them create their own word lists and categories
based on material read, and then have the groups exchange papers and
work on one another's categorization sheets.

In conclusion, by tying together the three themes of building student
interest through attention grabbers, teaching the basics, and supporting
comprehension through reading strategies, teachers can make reading
and learning more meaningful for their students. The ABCs of lesson
planning can move teachers beyond lectures and help students become
active participants in their own learning.

Hurst teaches at the School of Teacher Education at Southwest
Missouri State University (901 S. National, Springfield, MO 65804,
USA).