Supporting Comprehension through

Text-Based Discussion

Goals for Understanding• The important parts of planning for a text-

based discussion– Text analysis – Setting learning goals

• The kinds of questions and responses to students that support students in building a robust mental representation of a text

• How to apply a scheme for planning, conducting, and evaluating text-based discussions

• How to assess whether students actually learned what you set out in your learning goals

The Plan

– Select the text– Analyze the text (What’s new? What’s hard?

What’s odd or unfamiliar?) – Identify learning goals (focus on content) – Segment the text– Plan out initial questions

The Discussion

• Launch– Question/activity/comment– Connect to background knowledge and engage readers– Prompts wondering and sets a purpose

• Support student interactions with the text– Use of plan– Question asking– Responding to students

• Exit– Assessment– Transitioning

Take a few minutes to read the first four pages of Caves. Think about what might be

challenging for readers. Think about the kinds of questions

you might ask.

Quality Questions

• Lead students to make connections– A cave is a hollow; a cavern; a hole – what’s that all

about? • Focus student thinking on specific information in a text

– So now we start to find out more about the connect between water and caves. What do we find out?

– The author told us a lot about how water helps to form caves and tunnels here. What did we find out about this process?

– This part is called “Cave Formations.” What does formation mean here?

– There’s a lot of information in that long section, but what do you think the most important ideas are? What do you think the author wants us to understand from this part?

Quality Questions

• Elicit explanation– How would that work?

• Support students in making inferences– Why do you think Lee is acting this way? What is she

trying to do?– What do you think will happen when the water reaches

the water table underground?

• Get at the big ideas– What causes the earth to keep changing?

Quality Responses to Student Comments

• Connect student ideas, weave them together– You have given us such good examples of how caves

are formed. Putting them together lets us understand how that works very well now.

• Revoice student ideas, or pick the important ideas and suggest what students were trying to say– It seems as if you’re saying that acid rain can be

really dangerous. Is that what you mean?• Bring students back into the text to reread and talk

about what that part of the text is about

Quality Responses to Student Comments

• Bring students back into the text to reread and talk about what that part of the text is about

• Acknowledge and use important student comments and ideas– That’s a very important idea. Let’s remember that.

• Encourage students to explain, elaborate, and provide reasons for their thinking– Tell us more about that. What makes you think that way?

• Provide additional information that is not in the text, but could help students in comprehending the text– There’s no information in the text that explains what

evidence there might be, so I had to think about what might remain from people and animals.

Unproductive Moves

• Asking students about personal experiences related to the text

• Asking students to predict• Repeating verbatim student contributions• Collecting a series of student responses to one question

without building connections• Over-relying on questions that ask students to retrieve

or remember information in the text• Asking students to guess at the meaning of a word,

instead of providing a quick definition

Homework