Recently, I listened to a podcast about teaching reading comprehension. Learning to understand text is a complex task, but the speaker posed a very simple question for teachers: “What do you want students to get from the text they are reading?”
To answer this question, teachers need to determine what they need to have in place to understand the text: vocabulary, sentence comprehension, text structure, background knowledge and how to move from literal to inferential understanding. We are working on these questions and how to explicitly teach them as we develop units of work for our students. Our emphasis on high expectations in learning and behaviour provide the learning environment where we can challenge students with high levels of thinking and learning.
