Knowing that I'll be working with 8th graders and more complex reading materials, I've been working this summer to think about how to help them read with more understanding. Certainly Common Core advocates for this. But there isn't much out there in terms of actually how to go about doing it. Like Doug Haller's mentions in his article, "Stop Passing the Buck: Literacy for Educators" all too many science teachers dodge around this...dumbing down the reading and not showing students how to stick with it. My stick with it I mean...how do you read hard stuff. I've asked around and lots of secondary ELA teachers are sort stumped with how to read hard stuff that is non-fiction, informational texts (once you move pass the standard teach background vocabulary & frontload content....all of which continues to dumb down the reading process).
Hours of research has led me back to two old favorites..... Cris Tovani's book What Do They Really Know and Rick Wormeli's book Summarization in Any Subject. Both are dog-eared from multiple re-reads throughout the years. Smart people with ideas that honor the intellect of the student by giving them ways to cope with hard tasks....no throwing them and hoping they'll swim....and no making it so easy anyone can do without trying.
My first thing is to teach students how to annotate. Tovani advocates this as an effective formative assessment strategy....probing what students are thinking as they read. She believes in an incredibly effective early warning system that will help you detect who needs more help and what they need. But I also think that this annotation will come in very handy when it comes time to write pieces in the scientific argumentation style. As students become more sophisticated in their annotations, they can collect evidence to support their claims.
Secondly I'm using Wormelis' brilliant categories of text structure. I've been scouring the web for related short articles where I can show students examples of enumeration, cause and effect, problem and solution, compare and contrast and chronological order. I'll have model lessons where we'll do skill building...and then I'll have a library of articles where they can show their ability to apply the understanding of that structure to something new and novel. What Wormeli's book does (because there are lots of text structure options out there) is to then link it to graphic organizers that will help me help student structure their thinking. This really puts me ahead on differentiating content....because it makes reading more accessible to the struggling readers.
I want to get thru this as quickly and efficiently as possible. Literacy is key for understanding science and I would be negligent if I didn't spend considerable time on it. But the love of science comes from doing....probably not so much from reading or writing about it.