Course+Content

=Strategies for Understanding Informational Text=

Goals:
expand knowledge of comprehension strategies for informational texts; promote technological literacy; participate in a professional learning community

Essential Questions:

 * 1) How can we make the content areas the “home” of strong comprehension instruction, using nonfiction topics and materials?
 * 2) How can we adapt our teaching practice to meet the demands of “traditional” and “contemporary” literacies?
 * 3) What is comprehension and how do we teach it?
 * 4) How can we leverage digital media tools to support reading comprehension instruction?
 * 5) What are the connections between DI, Content Maps, and strategy instruction?

Major Understandings:

 * All proficient readers, regardless of reading level, use strategies to make meaning from text. These are monitoring comprehension, asking questions, connecting, visualizing, inferring, determining importance, summarizing and synthesizing.
 * Non-fiction features (graphs, charts, maps, etc.) give information and signal importance.
 * Understanding how informational text is framed around varied structures helps readers determine essential ideas.
 * The “new literacies” require a shift in how we teach reading comprehension strategies.
 * Think aloud protocols utilizing technology enable educators to model metacognitive strategies, promoting active reading.
 * In terms of cognitive strategy use, in some ways, reading on the Internet looks the same as reading printed text and in other ways, reading on the Internet is uniquely more complex. (Leu et. al., 2008)