Text Rendering
Identifying significant lines of text is a reading skill. Many students will describe this process as being intuitive claiming, “the line just SEEMS important”. Students who struggle with this skill find this response frustrating. While there may be some intuitive sense to identifying important information in a text, students can also unpack this intuition by reflecting on the reasons why they have chosen a quote and sharing those with their peers. These protocols help students develop critical reading skills by collaboratively engaging with others’ choices.
Process
- Choose a passage for students to read:
- Language based texts: 20-50 lines
- Media or image-based texts: 6-10 frames depending on the depth and complexity of the images, panels, or stills.
- Form groups of 4-6 students.
- Ask students to independently choose the most important line of the passage (or the most important combination of images/aspects of the text).
- Instruct students to share their line or combination one at a time, without commentary, while a recorder takes notes on a viewable board.
- Ask students to choose the most important word in the passage (or the most important image or feature of the text).
- Instruct students to share their word or image/feature one at a time, without commentary, while a recorder takes notes on a viewable board.
- The group discusses what they heard and how these highlighted lines or features relate to the passage/text as a whole.
- The group draws conclusions about the passage/text based on the group’s selections and their discussion.
- Ask students to reflect in pairs, small group, as a class or in their portfolios: How is your thinking about the text now, different from when you first read it (if at all)? What happened in the protocol to confirm or challenge your thinking?
Credits
Adapted from: “Text Rendering Experience”. School Reform Initiative, https://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/download/the-text-rendering-experience/
Image by AnnaliseArt from Pixabay