Thoughts on reading chapter two of Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension by Jeffrey Wilhelm. This chapter is called “Making the Connections” and it covers pre-reading strategies.

He talks about brainstorming with students prior to a social studies unit on colonization. They struggled to come up with anything relevant and he realized there was no prior knowledge of that topic. So he changed the topic to parents and teens and came up with a lot of relevant terms around freedom. This is something I will try when my students are not able to come to the topic with prior knowledge. For my students (I generally work with adult developmental writers) they typically struggle at reading and writing so for them to come to class with a tool kit of prior knowledge is unusual. They do typically know about such things as cooking, gardening, and hunting. I have never tried changing the topic during a brain storming session – usually it will turn into providing the terms they need to know as a lesson on how to structure an essay.

Wilhelm states when pre-reading exercise don’t work it is because of lack of framing. He says that to frame things for learners they need to know:

1. What they are learning about and why

2. What set of circumstances and context will motivate and support the learning

3. Who the students (and teacher) will be in the enactment [what are their roles]

4. The viewpoint or roll they will take

5. What is expected of them (p.33)

What follows is an entire lesson plan to take us through a short story as a model of how to use his strategies. Then he goes back to a specific pre-reading strategy that I think could really work with students. Wilhelm shares a formal letter written by a teacher to students as the mother of the female character in the short story. This strategy is called a “trigger letter” (p. 46).

This letter models formal letter writing, and creates a platform for discussing some of the key issues in the text. It also looks like a great way to invite students to start building questions from question stems so that they can read the text critically, like an investigator.

Following that there are 17 more pre-reading strategies to utilize with students. One is called maps. I want to use this with my students on a regular basis to geographically orient them to where the text plays out, maps can also be of buildings or floor plans.

In using strategies prior to reading students can orient their prior knowledge and feel like they have some type of connection with the text. There are so many techniques that I feel we could all pick three that we would be comfortable using tomorrow and two that we would need to do a little planning for and we might all utilize the different techniques.

I also like that, while there is a time investment in deciding what you want to do, there is not much of a monetary investment in extra things. Most things that need to be brought in to class could be brought in by the students, such as photographs, precious items, and totems. I think the more that students are involved in this process and can contribute to their classroom construction, the more they will value their learning experience.