Determining importance and summarizing is a complicated task for many readers. This professional development, presented by Catlin Goodrow, provides participants with instructional scaffolds that will help students comprehend informational text.  Included is an overview of the Cognitive Strategy Routine and demonstration lessons that can be used with students in grades 3-5. Participants are also provided text samples to plan lessons they can use at their campus.

In this first clip, Catlin discusses the importance of determining importance and summarizing and leads an activity to help teachers experience when and how we use these strategies.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Handout

Additional Handout

Final Reflection:

Reflect on the following questions:

Why is determining importance and summarizing important for students to learn? What challenges have you seen with this strategy?

Note: Remember, although we may highlight or focus on one strategy to make the strategy explicit, we need to ensure that our students know that strategies don’t happen in isolation. We use multiple strategies automatically and interchangeably; and usually, we use more than one at a time. We do not want to teach isolated strategies for very long at all. Michael Pressley (2000) tells us that, “Strategies are taught just a few at a time and students learn to coordinate multiple strategies as they read. Strategies instruction is long-term and woven through the content areas so students learn to apply appropriate strategies to comprehend a wide range of genres” (Isreal & Duffy, p. 512).

Catlin begins with a brief explanation of the Cognitive Strategy Routine.  She continues with a modeled lesson of Step 1. This step provides an anchor lesson for the cognitive strategy.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Slides

Additional Handout

Cognitive Strategies Routine Card

Look at Additional Handout 2 and decide how you might introduce/or anchor determining importance and summarizing for your students.

*Note: Step 1, the anchor lesson, is a stand-alone lesson and meant to be done once with students.  As you revisit or review determining importance and summarizing you can remind students of the anchor lesson experience.

In this clip Catlin defines steps 2-4 of the Cognitive Strategy Routine and models each step. Teachers will repeat steps 2-4 every time they are beginning instruction or reviewing a cognitive strategy with their students.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Slides

Additional Handout

Cognitive Strategies Routine Card

Final Reflection:

How would presenting a cognitive strategy with this routine help students?

This clip begins by clearly defining topic, main idea, and summary. Catlin then models a think-aloud (Step 5 of the Cognitive Strategy Routine) for identifying topic.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Slides

 Additional Handout

This clip reviews the before reading, during reading and after reading tools for determining importance (HO5). Catlin also models the before reading think-aloud (Step 5 of the Cognitive Strategy Routine) for main idea.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Slides

Additional Handouts

*CPQ note: A Comprehension Purpose Question (CPQ) is provided to students prior to reading as a scaffold to support and enhance COMPREHENSION. It is meant to be a single thoughtful, guiding question.

Thoughtful “questions appear to be effective for improving learning from reading, because they:

• Give students a purpose for reading
• Focus students' attention on what they are to learn
• Help students to think actively as they read
• Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
• Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know."

(CIERA, 2001)

This clip begins with a brief discussion of different informational text structures and includes a during reading think-aloud (Step 5 of the Cognitive Strategy Routine) for main idea and details model lesson.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Slides

Additional Handouts

This clip includes the model lesson for teaching students to summarize informational text.

Materials needed:

PowerPoint Slides

Final Reflection:

How will you use what you learned in this training to help your students with comprehension?