Reading for Meaning : How to Build Students' Comprehension, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving Skills

Here's a guide that makes it easier to implement the Reading for Meaning strategy from The Strategic Teacher. When you and your colleagues want to explore more ways to help students understand what they read, make inferences, and support their thinking with evidence, this book is your ideal tool. Use the sample lessons, student examples, and planning forms with your professional learning community (PLC) to

- Understand the thinking skills that students use before, during, and after reading to build deep understanding of their texts.
- Learn how to use Reading for Meaning statements to pique interest in reading assignments and increase students' analytical powers while reading and learning.
- Plan a complete Reading for Meaning lesson for your classroom.
- Use student work to plan next steps in building their reading, thinking, and comprehension skills.

Be sure to order enough guides to enable every teacher to engage in all the hands-on learning activities.

You're holding a new kind of professional development tool called a Strategic Teacher PLC Guide. Designed in partnership with more than 75 schools, these guides make the important work of bringing high-impact, research-based instructional practices into every classroom easier than ever before. Each guide focuses on one strategy from the best-selling ASCD book The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson and serves as a complete professional development resource for a team of teachers to learn, plan, and implement the strategy in their classrooms.

This guide focuses on Reading for Meaning, a reading and reasoning strategy that helps students understand new ideas, make inferences, and support their thinking with evidence. The strategy is designed around research showing that proficient readers use a specific set of thinking skills to build deep understanding of the texts they read and apply those skills in three distinct phases: before, during, and after reading. Reading for Meaning gives all students the opportunity to practice this three-phase approach by

* Using simple statements to preview and predict before reading.

* Actively searching for relevant evidence during reading.

* Reflecting on and synthesizing both their learning and their thinking process after reading.

This PLC Guide takes you and your colleagues on a "guided tour" of Reading for Meaning, enabling you to

* Learn how Reading for Meaning builds reading, reasoning, and problem-solving skills.

* Experience a model lesson using the Reading for Meaning strategy and learn from sample lessons and planning forms designed by other teachers.

* Plan a complete Reading for Meaning lesson for your classroom.

* Reflect deeply on your lesson to refine and expand your use of the strategy.

* Examine student work at various levels of proficiency and use your findings to plan next steps in building students' reading, thinking, and comprehension skills.