things the author does not directly state. When independent reading time is over, take a few minutes to let students volunteer one clue they figured out, read the parts of the text that led them to the inference, and explain their thinking.
How Find It or Figure It Out Lessons Teach the Standards
Find It or Figure It Out lessons teach Reading anchor standard one (CCRA.R.1) because students learn how to make logical inferences and to cite textual evidence to support the inferences they make. The lesson framework teaches Speaking and Listening anchor standard one (CCRA.SL.1) as well, because students participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners both in their small groups and with the whole class. These lessons also teach Language anchor standard six (CCRA.L.6), because the statements include general academic and domain-specific words and phrases from the text, and the teacher builds meanings as students read these together before reading the text.
CCSS in a Question It Lesson
Question It is a lesson framework to use with a short, dense, and challenging text. When you lead students through this lesson several times and gradually release responsibility to them, you are helping them learn the reading, speaking and listening, and language skills in the following standards.
Reading
CCRA.R.1: Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
Speaking and Listening
CCRA.SL.1: Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
Language
CCRA.L.6: Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, 2010, pp. 10, 22, 25.
CHAPTER 3
Question It
When most of us think of reading, we think of spending leisure time with a book, magazine, newspaper, or website for pleasure or self-improvement. There is, however, a specific type of reading that demands a different approach: short, dense, and challenging texts. Think of being faced with directions for electronics with “some assembly required,” a new and complicated recipe for a dish, a contract we fear to sign but must, or instructions for filling out taxes. We recognize the need to read these texts differently. We slow down, reading deliberately line by line, sentence by sentence, or sometimes even word by word. If we are not sure we understand a sentence, we reread it, possibly several times. We are alert for implications and do our best to read between the lines to draw any logical inferences we are justified in making. This close reading that brief but difficult texts require also has periodic applications in our more casual reading. When perusing a literary or informational text, we occasionally encounter a section we are interested in whose meaning initially eludes us. So we shift to a lower gear and read closely for a bit before returning to a more normal pace and state of attentiveness. In our experience, schools have worked hard to teach students how to do typical reading but have spent relatively little time or effort teaching them how to read closely. Question It is a comprehension lesson framework that teaches students how to do this close reading.
The major emphasis in Question It is teaching students to read closely until they have exhausted what a short, dense, and challenging text says explicitly or implicitly about a subject. Beginning in third grade, with Reading literature and informational text standards one (RL.3.1 and RI.3.1), students must be able to cite textual evidence to support the questions they pose when required to do so: “Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010, pp. 11, 14). In Question It, the teacher preteaches a few general academic and domain-specific words and phrases from the text to ensure students can read it closely with comprehension. Using the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, Question It combines student trios and teacher-led collaborative conversations to discuss various aspects of the text’s content.
TIP
In most schools, Question It is a lesson framework students can be successful with beginning in the spring of second grade and moving on up through the grades.
A Sample Question It Lesson
This is the fourth Question It lesson Mrs. R.’s class has experienced. Because a handful of students still struggled with the lesson the last time she taught it, Mrs. R. continues with the full set of procedures from the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction in this lesson as she did in the first three lessons.
Purpose Setting and Vocabulary Building
Mrs. R. says, “In a few minutes, I’m going to have you open your social studies books and read a short excerpt. Before you start reading, I will give you a word or phrase from the text. Your job will be to come up with as many questions as possible that the word or phrase is the answer to.”
Several students raise their hands and say they remember this lesson from when Mrs. R. has taught it before. One student even recollects that the lesson is called Question It.
Mrs. R. continues, “Before I have you read, I want to make sure you understand some vocabulary terms in the passage. What is the U.S. Constitution?”
Students recall from previous lessons in the current social studies unit that the U.S. Constitution is a written document that spells out the U.S. government’s laws. Mrs. R. asks if anyone knows how old the Constitution is. No one remembers the exact year it was ratified, but several students agree it was over two hundred years ago. Mrs. R. tells them they are correct and that the year of ratification was 1789. She then asks, “What is an amendment to the Constitution?”
When no one answers, she explains that an amendment is something written and added to the Constitution in order to change it. She says, “The section you are going to read today is about amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
I Do, and You Watch
Mrs. R. writes the word citizen on the chalkboard. (Mrs. R. could also use a white-board, a projector, or any other means to display the word big enough for students to see.)
She asks the students to open their social studies books to the two pages that explain how the U.S. Constitution can be and has been changed. She tells them she is going to read the section to herself until it tells her something about a citizen. When she gets there, she is going to ask a question that the book answers about the word citizen. She reads silently until she comes to a place in the second paragraph.
She tells them exactly where she is in the text and then poses a question: “When someone is born in the United States, what does that make him or her?”
