I.N.S.E.R.T. Anchor Chart
Interactive Notation System in Effective Reading and Thinking As a during reading strategy for students to self-monitor their reading comprehension, I.N.S.E.R.T. encourages students to use a notation system to monitor their thinking. Organized in a chart to the left, the notation system consists of four marks that symbolize common student thoughts that may come to mind while reading: a check for prior knowledge, a minus sign for a information that contradicts one's original thinking, a question mark for confusing information, and a plus sign for new information. Students should use this notation system in the margins of their texts or directly over words and sentences within the text. The anchor chart could also be posted on a bookmark and distributed to students or written on a poster. McLaughlin, M. & Allen, M. B. (2009). Teaching ideas and blackline masters. In Guided comprehension in grades 3-8 (2nd ed.) (pp. 219-220). Newark, DE: International Reading Association
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MINI-LESSON
Specifically designed for secondary students, the I.N.S.E.R.T. strategy could be employed in most classrooms and subject areas. In this mini-lesson, students will be challenged to think about their thinking process when they read. Many of them will be unfamiliar with the background noise that their brains make while comprehending a text and some will recognize it and ignore it in order to preserve their reading accuracy and fluency. After generating a list of reading strategies that they currently use, the teacher will introduce them to the I.N.S.E.R.T. strategy. Underscoring the concept that “fake” reading is when we read the text, but ignore our thoughts about the text, the teacher will explain how to self-monitor thinking while reading. The objective of this lesson is to challenge students to self-monitor their own meta-cognitive thinking in order to identify and record their schema’s most ephemeral thoughts.
Connection & Teaching Point The I.N.S.E.R.T. self-monitoring reading strategy will be introduced to students at the beginning of the school year as a close reading strategy that students will use for all readings throughout the course of the year. To begin the mini-lesson, the teacher will activate students’ prior knowledge by asking students what their brain is doing during the reading process. After discussing student responses as a whole class, students will work with a partner to generate a list of note-taking and self-monitoring strategies that they have used thus far in their academic careers to help them better comprehend text. Following this conversation, the teacher will ask for student responses and list them on the whiteboard. At this point, students will be introduced to the I.N.S.E.R.T. strategy which will replace many of the strategies that they have produced. The teacher will make a distinction between highlighting important parts of the text, and using higher-level, meta-cognitive thinking to analyze and record the multifarious thoughts and connections they generate from sentence to sentence. |
Model & Teach
After explaining the strategy, the teacher will model I.N.S.E.R.T. on the SMART board using a passage from a short non-fiction article "Dolphins players defend Ingonito, question Martin in bullying case." This article is current and addresses a controversial topic that challenges students to look at two very different perspectives about bullying. This article also serves as a hook because it is relevant to the prevalence of bullying in school and will engage sports fans in the classroom. As each symbol is added to the text, the teacher will think-aloud and explain why she put each symbol where she did. She will explain that there is no right or wrong ways to annotate a text as long as students are recording their thinking. Margin notes will be added to expand upon the symbols when more detailed explanations, questions, or connections arise. After modeling the I.N.S.E.R.T. strategy on two or three sentences, the teacher will ask the class to participate in the activity. Students will continue reading silently and raise their hands when they have a thought. The teacher will walk around the classroom selecting one student at a time to record their thinking on the SMART board. If done correctly, all hands in the classroom should be up. By doing this, students will see a visual representation of their classmates’ self-monitoring and thinking in action. Mihoces, G (2013). Dolphins players defend Incognito, question Martin in bullying case. USA TODAY Sports. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/dolphins/2013/11/06/miami-dolphins-jonathan-martin-richie-incognito-locker-room/3458891/
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Active Engagement
For the active engagement portion of this mini-lesson, students will work independently on a close reading of a text. The worksheets below are examples of difficult texts that exist in an English, social studies, or science curriculum. These texts are ideal to couple with the I.N.S.E.R.T. strategy because they are challenging, high-level texts that require some degree of decoding and self-monitoring. Once students have completed their individual annotation of the text, they will share their thinking with a partner and compare and contrast their use of symbols. Finally, as an extension to this mini-lesson, students will complete an activity which will challenge them to use the self-monitoring notes they made while comprehending within the text to complete an comprehension about and beyond text SOAPstone summary.
Secondary English:
Secondary Social Studies:
Secondary Science:
Link
Students would have to synthesize their I.N.S.E.R.T. symbols into a short summary of the text that they just read demonstrating the relationship between their self-monitoring and ability to identify main ideas within the text. Students would complete a SOAPstone activity which challenges them to record the subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, and tone of the text. Once they complete this activity, they will compile their information into one cohesive summary. In addition to the summary, they will include a short refection detailing their meta-cognitive thinking during the I.N.S.E.R.T. process. |