MINI-LESSON CONTENT & SETUP RATIONALE
After compiling the data for our "Comprehension WITHIN Text" Survey, we made some decisions about what to include in each of our mini-lessons and how to setup each of them. The following cites the reasons and rationale behind our choices.
While "Solving Words," "Adjustment," and "Fluency" came in at our lowest three, we decided not to do our mini-lesson on them because other groups were assigned those topics and were solely dedicated to informing the class about those skills of reading comprehension (i.e. "Expanding Vocabulary," "Accuracy and Fluency"). Additionally, "Adjustment" is dependent on student familiarity with genre features (i.e. archetypal characters) and text structure features (i.e. headers, captions, etc) so they can adjust their reading and switch purposes according to the type of text they are navigating. However, for us, that knowledge necessary for adjustment seemed like more "Comprehension ABOUT Text" skills than "Comprehension WITHIN Text," so it seemed odd to do a mini-lesson on "ABOUT Text" thinking for "WITHIN Text." Fontas & Pinnell (2006) supports this tricky overlap that we saw: "All three kinds of thinking are occuring simultaneously before, during, and after reading" (p. 32). Therefore, we thought it best to leave those three skills up to their respective groups, avoid redundancy ("better safe than sorry" mentality) and not, as the cliche goes, "steal their thunder." We did, however, include numerous strategies for each of those areas under the "Instructional Strategies" tab. Please refer to that if you have any questions - or would like more strategies - after all the groups present. Also, we felt that if we focused just on "Solving Words" and "Adjustment," we wouldn't be accurately representing what "comprehension WITHIN text" actually is.
We decided to do our mini-lessons on the next two lowest: "Monitoring and Correcting" and "Identifying Important Information." Our instructional setups were pulled right from the top two selected: an "I do, We do, You do" format and a Stations activity. We chose an "I do, We do, You do" lecture modeling, guided practice, and independent work setup to teach several self-monitoring strategies. Lending towards depth over breadth, the mini-lesson focuses on one elementary and one secondary level self-monitoring strategy. More monitoring and correcting strategies, however, are available under the Instructional Strategies" tab. For our "Identifying Important Information" mini-lesson we choose a stations setup, split into four stations: elementary fiction, elementary informational, secondary fiction, and secondary informational. Each station will have one elected group member and each will focus on one strategy, but again, more are available through this website. You will be able to chose two stations to attend during this mini-lesson.
Splitting the "Monitoring and Correcting" mini-lesson only into elementary and secondary sections factors into our beliefs that self-monitoring strategies are virtually universal, meaning neither age- or grade-specific or text-based. In other words, a self-monitoring strategy for an elementary student could easily be given to an adolescent with positive results. And a self-monitoring strategy for a fictional text could be applied to an informational or expository text. Most are generic strategies. However, for "Identifying Important Information," we discovered that the so-called "important information" in a text is heavily dependent on type/genre of text and the grade level. Therefore, we split the lesson four-ways aforementioned.
We've dedicated approximately half of our presentation time - which equates to 30 minutes - to our mini-lessons, so each mini-lesson will be approximately 15 minutes long (and approximately 7 minutes at each station). We hope that the content we chose to focus on and the setup in which we arranged each mini-lesson has a positive effect on your knowledge base of "comprehension WITHIN text" strategies for both secondary and elementary grades as well as for both fiction and informational texts!
SURVEY RESULTS & DATA