Best+Practices+for+Reading

I've really been challenged finding activities that engage students with reading to learn, but today's lesson seemed to work.

I took a college level text (Strayer, //Ways of the World//) - 7 paragraphs (2 pages, or so) that discussed the decline of the Qing Dynasty in China and the Taiping Rebellion. I made photocopies, but with the paragraphs in a random order (and with enough space b/w them to cut them out), with all the dates, time references, footnotes, etc. whited-out.

I cut the paragraphs apart (so that each paragraph was on a strip - that way students could annotate the strips) and had students work in pairs to try to figure out what order they went in. I gave them about 10-15 minutes depending on the class and how close students were to getting the right answer. Only some of the groups had gotten the correct order when I called time.

Then we went over the answers and discussed why each paragraph belonged where it was and I gave them the dates.

Because of time constraints I gave the students the three topics that were covered in the reading and had them take notes about each topic (collapse of the empire, the rebellion, after the rebellion) - my plan was to have them group the paragraphs on their own and come up with the titles for each topic, but because I had spent the first half of class wrapping up the previous day's work, I ran out of time.

This worked particularly well in my class with the weakest reading skills. My 6th period pretty much avoided actually reading the paragraphs at all cost - 1 pair tried just putting it together as a puzzle based on the scissor cuts (but I had foiled this plan by reorganizing the paragraphs before I photocopied them). I think next time I'll require them to annotate the paragraphs, rather than just suggest it.

This activity didn't get at "Reading to Learn" so much as focused more on reading, questioning and looking for evidence. It's an EBA activity called Scavenger Hunt. Essentially, based on a reading you create a series of true and false claims. Students then have to figure out if the claims are more true or more false, provide evidence from the text (warrants) to support their idea, and explain how those warrants support their idea. I found that, at least with Juniors, they can complete the activity, and get a lot out of it if the True/False statements are not directly supported or refuted in the text (which would make the analysis superfluous. For example, my text said (among other things) that the Catholic Church influenced the kings of Europe in the pre-Modern world. The claim was that the Church had more power than the kings in the pre-Modern world. That's as close as it got, though the text also discussed Divine Right of Kings and other examples of Church power. So they had to "read between the lines" a bit. Anyways, it worked well, they asked great clarifying questions and learned a lot. Here is the reading and the worksheet: