Ep59-Determining-Importance.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
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Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast. We are trucking along here at Episode 59. Gosh, we have covered so much in those 59 episodes. Today we are adding one more episode to our series on how to teach Reading Comprehension Strategies. We've covered 4 of them so far. In Episode 41, I gave some background information about Reading Comprehension Strategies Instruction as a wholeo that's where you'll want to start if you haven't tuned in to this series yet. In Episode 42, we talked about teaching making connections. In Episode 47, we were talking about visualizing and in Episode 51, we tackled how to teach making predictions. I've been getting a lot of great feedback on these episodes. I hope that you're finding these strategies meaningful and valuable, finding ways for how you want to add your Reading Comprehension Strategies in your classroom.
Today we are going to tackle one of the tougher ones, one of the strategies that many students struggle with, and that is Determining Importance. It's important that we teach Determining Importance because this strategy, like many other things that students learn in school, is a fundamental skill that is needed in order to develop newer, more complex skills. Determining Importance is one of those fundamental skills that will lead to greater success in mastering other concepts and skills. For example, in order to summarize the text, a student needs to be able to determine the important information first before crafting a summary. In order to infer something about a text, students need to have the ability to pick out important information that informs their inferences. Many young readers tend to think that everything they read is essential. That's why you get those summaries from some of your students that are three pages long when they really should only be a paragraph or two. That's because they think everything is important and everything should be included. However, students can't read effectively if they try to balance every single detail as being equally important in their mind. There has to be some winners and some losers when it comes to remembering details from a text. This strategy is going to help them pick those winners.
Before we dive deep into how to teach the reading strategy of Determining Importance, let's cover some ground work first and some important things that you need to know before teaching this strategy. Let's make sure that we are all working with the same definition when it comes to what Determining Importance is. In short, Determining Importance means that the reader focuses on what's most important in the text so that the reader can develop a deeper meaning and an overall understanding of the text. Proficient readers who have mastered the Determining Importance reading strategy are able to decide from everything on the page what is most important to remember. Additional details provided by the author will make the text more interesting, but being able to extract the most important details will actually lead to better comprehension and retention of new information. Determining Importance also means that readers have to monitor their thinking as they read in order to notice when something important has been shared in the text. They need to say to themselves, 'Oh, that's important' and they need to know why it's important. In a sense, readers are going to file away these important details in their mind and be able to pull them out later in order to see how they all fit together as main ideas and themes. When readers sort out big ideas from the text, they're able to filter and organize all other information gained from the text around those ideas. You can already see why Determining Importance is important for so many other strategies and skills that we teach, things like main idea and themes. They need to be able to know the details that support those main ideas and themes.
Let's first look at fictional texts. In fictional text, when students are Determining Importance, they hone in on important things that characters say, what they do, and how those words and actions affect the events of the story. They also will notice how settings can play an important role in the story. When they read fiction, students should determine which events and characters make the biggest impact on the story as a whole. A few episodes back in Episode 54, I was talking about activities that you can do with any novel unit. One of those activities was to have students determine which characters were round characters, meaning important to the storyline itself, and which characters were flat characters, meaning not so important. This is a perfect way that students are going to use the Determining Importance strategy so that they can decide which characters are making the biggest impact and are the most important. In fiction text, students also need to determine which pieces of information give us details about how a character is developing over time and how that development impacts the outcome of the story. In fictional texts, students are focused on those important details that give us information about the important characters and events of the story. However, in nonfiction texts, students determine the main facts, the main details, important vocabulary about a topic, and notice important text features such as headings, illustrations, graphs, bold words, and photographs, as well as many others. When we're teaching students to determine important information in nonfiction, we have to show them that the author is including those text features for a reason because the author wants us to know that particular piece of information because they went the extra mile to include a text feature about it. Finally, it's important to know that in both fiction and nonfiction, by teaching students to determine the importance of the different information that we're receiving will allow them to move through a text coherently. They're going to leave behind the details that clog up our retention and keep only the critical pieces of information needed for full, concise comprehension.
All right, so that's the nitty gritty behind the Determining Importance reading strategy. Let's get into the fun stuff of how to introduce this strategy to your students. Of course, as with any new concept that you're going to be introducing, you're going to start with concrete examples that are simple for students to understand. To begin, I always love to play the game, 'Pick Three'. If you've been with me for a while, you know that I like the idea of using quick, short, easy games to introduce a new concept, this is no different. In this game, 'Pick Three', you're going to present students with several scenarios where they are required to pick the three most important things related to that topic. Think of it like if you were on a desert island, if you had to pick three items, what are the most important? Here's another example, baseball. Create a quick anchor chart, on the anchor chart you can have the heading 'Going to a baseball game, which three items are the most important to have?' Under that heading, you can have six different items. These are the ones that I would choose, a team shirt, a baseball mitt, popcorn, baseball itself, a bat, and a team hat. I ask students to choose the three most essential items needed to play in a baseball game. I require them to not only identify the three most important items, but also to justify their answers. In this very easy example, students will most likely decide that the mitt, the bat, and the baseball are the three most essential items because you need all three of those to play. The hat and the shirt, they're nice to have and they help you identify which team someone is playing on, but they aren't essential to actually playing the game. The same way popcorn might be a fun snack to have, but it's only for really watching the game and certainly not essential to the game itself. To extend this activity even further, you might even break students up into small groups and give each group a different scenario to talk through. For this, you'll just have to come up with several scenarios. One could be going bowling, another could be making an ice cream sundae, going camping, things to bring to school. You give each group a scenario and have them discuss which three items are the most important. For example, going bowling, they have the option to choose between the bowling ball, pizza, bowling shoes, bowling pins, soda, and music. For making ice cream, they have to choose between ice cream, bowl, sprinkles, ice cream scoop, hot fudge, and a cherry. You can make this as challenging for them to choose the three items as you want. In the case of the baseball example that I gave, it was pretty easy to identify that students are going to need the bat, the baseball and the mitt in order to play but you could make it as challenging as you want. It would really spark some great discussion for those students who want to really get into a debate. That's the activity that I always use to introduce what Determining Importance is. It kind of just sets the stage for what students should be looking for.
When it comes to actually modeling this strategy in a book, you're going to want to obviously choose a book that's going to have lots of rich detail that will make it fairly obvious which information is important. I always like to include an anchor chair in my mini lesson when I start modeling the strategy for the first time. It's a very simple T-Chart, on one side it says 'Important Information' and I define important information as 'Information you need to know in order to understand'. Then on the second column of the teacher is 'Interesting Details' and I define this as 'This is neat to know, but it's not essential to my understanding of the text'. Of course, before I share the read aloud, I've already gone through the book and I've identified important information as well as interesting details that I can use as I'm modeling this strategy. Another way to visualize this and help your students really understand what it means to Determining Importance, have them imagine boiling a pot of water and then putting spaghetti into that water. Once your spaghetti is all cooked through and ready to go, you pour that spaghetti and water into a strainer. Of course, the water is going to slip through the holes leaving only the noodles behind. You don't need the water anymore, you just need the noodles. In the same way when we read, our brain is like that strainer, we keep only the important things and we let everything else strain out. You can use that vessel with your students as you begin to introduce important information versus interesting details.
Now, I love using picture books as I've mentioned in some of the other episodes about the Reading Comprehension Strategies because they're easy to show how the strategy is used before reading, during reading, and after reading. It's important to model how to use the strategy at all different points of the text. I will link to some of my favorite books to use for this strategy in the show notes. All you have to do is head over to classroomnook.com/podcast/59 and I will have some links there for you to check out some of the text that I like using for this reading strategy.
Now when it comes time to share your read aloud, explain that as you're reading, you're going to stop often and record the information that you are deeming as important to remember on one side of your chart and record the interesting information and details on the other side. Now, you can prepare these details ahead of time. You can write them on sentence strips or Post-it notes so that you don't have to actually take the time to physically write out the details with your students. That will save you some time and it'll keep your lesson flowing a little nicer as you work through the text. Again, as you come across the information that you have prepared ahead of time, as you're reading, just put it up on the chart. Of course, be sure to justify your thinking so that you are showing students that you can't just randomly pick pieces of information. You have to have a reason behind why it's important versus just interesting. Now, you're going to need to model the strategy over several days, using several texts. As you do introduce the strategy over several days, you can gradually release more responsibility to your students and allow them to begin adding to your anchor chart with their own thoughts about what they consider to be important versus interesting. You might even provide your students with several Post-it notes before you begin reading and have them jot down pieces of information as you're reading and then invite them to put their sticky notes up on your anchor chart or however you are organizing it.
Now, I've already mentioned some of the differences between Determining Importance in fiction versus nonfiction. Let's just go into a little bit more detail now about how you actually model fiction versus nonfiction. In fiction text, it's important that students are understanding the overall structure of most fictional texts and by that I mean that they understand the story mountain and that's the background knowledge, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the solution and conclusion. I will include a visual of the story mountain that I've used in the past when teaching Determining Importance in fictional texts so you can use it yourself or create one on your own. I like using a visual like the story mountain to help students kind of classify their details that they determine as being important. It helps students to identify where on the story mountain their important information falls into. If it doesn't easily fall onto a specific part of the story mountain, it's likely not considered important, but rather an interesting detail. Important details in a fiction text, like we discussed, is going to be that background knowledge, those important characters. It's going to be those main events that lead up to the main problem and the main events that lead into a solution. It just gives students a little bit more support when it comes to determining what details are important in nonfiction. Of course, the text structures are going to vary greatly. You don't have a nice, neat story mountain that everything is going to fit on but there are several text structures that students do come across over and over. These structures include descriptive, sequential, compare and contrast, cause and effect, problem and solution. When you're modeling how to Determining Importance in nonfiction text, you're going to want to help them identify the structure that they are working with, that will help them to decide which details are important. Again, I've got another really great visual that I will include in the show notes that helps students to know which details they're looking for in each of the text structures. For example, in a sequential text structure, students are going to be looking for when the author outlines a main step, to something that they're trying to teach. In a problem and solution text structure, students are obviously going to be looking for the main problem and the details that help get whatever the problem is to a solution. In comparing and contrasting, the important details are going to come from when the author highlights how something is the same and how something is different. In a cause and effect text structure, students are obviously going to be looking for a specific cause and its effect. You can use all sorts of graphic organizers to help students to organize their thoughts. There is a lot to unpack when it comes to Determining Importance. You are definitely going to be spending more than one day, more than one week on this strategy. You're going to keep coming back to it and you are going to really just try to teach one aspect of Determining Importance at a time.
Here are some examples of some mini lessons that you might include to help students build their understanding of Determining Importance. Here's one, you're going to help students learn how to determine when and why a character begins to change. Help students to determine the importance of something a character says, does, and why it's important. You might have a mini lesson on determining the importance of a story's setting. You can have a mini lesson that helps students to determine the significance of an event in a story and how it will impact the rest of the story. Determine the importance of nonfiction text features that the author is including, why it's important, and what it's trying to teach the reader. Have a lesson in determining the importance of the theme in a story or an important lesson learned in the story. You can also have an entire mini lesson on determining important vocabulary that is introduced in the text. Again, each one of those can be its own mini lesson and it doesn't have to be one mini lesson right after another. You can sprinkle these lessons in as you see fit and obviously as they fit with the stories that you're reading with your students.
Now, the final piece to the puzzle is going to be whether your students are using the Determining Importance strategy correctly and effectively or not? The assessment piece is really important to seeing how well they are mastering this strategy. Whether it's formal or informal, it's important to have some guidelines that you're going to follow to see how well they're performing. Here are some things to look for and consider when you're observing your students using or not using this strategy. One thing you're going to look for is, are they able to identify when something significant has happened in a story that they're reading? You're also going to look to see if they can summarize the text that uses only important details. Another thing to look for is if they can identify important characters and settings. Do students pay attention to nonfiction text features and draw out important information found in those features? Can students determine new and important vocabulary in the text? Can they justify why something is important? That's a big one. justifying Can students determine important details from a text to identify themes and lessons learned from the story? Those are some key components to assessing your students understanding of the strategy that will then inform your instruction and drive your instructions on where to go next with helping your students get this strategy down.
A couple final things that I'd like to mention before we wrap up, if you've been with me from the beginning of this series on Reading Comprehension Strategies, you're likely expecting there to be a free bookmark over in our Members Resource Library that you can give to your students. The bookmark has some important information that will be great reminders for students on how to use the Determining Importance reading strategy. Of course, I have that free bookmark for you. If you are not already a member of our Members Resource Library, you can do so by heading over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/59 and there will be a link with some information about how to get that free bookmark. Make sure you grab that as well as the other reading strategy bookmarks that are there for you. It'll just be an easy reminder for students to continue using this strategy when they're reading on their own.
If you want to go all in on using this reading strategy with your students and you want some support with that, I've got a LINKtivity there to support you. I've got a Determining Importance LINKtivity all cued up for you. It has a fun animated student video that they can watch to help reteach the strategy, as well as some other scaffolds and support in an interactive learning guide so check that out if you haven't used one of my LINKtivities yet, this one is sure to serve you and your students well.
All right. this might be one of those episodes that you need to listen to a couple of times, because we packed a lot in in a short amount of time. Hopefully you've got some actionable steps ready, you've got your marching orders, and you know how you are going to begin tackling teaching this strategy to your students. Again, if you want more support and you want the exact resources that I use to help teach Determining Importance, head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/59 and I'll get you all the good stuff so you will be well on your way to helping your students to Determining Importance.
All right. that is all I have for you today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and I will see you again next week. Bye for now.
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