Getting the Gist for Reading Comprehension

Name: Adrian Headley

EMK Academy for Health Careers

10th grade History Teacher

The Challenge:

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The Challenge

What challenge or need were you responding to?

The challenge was having students understand primary sources and also being concise in summarizing the readings/ primary source / paragraph they were reading.

What were you curious about experimenting with?

During Common Planning Time and with our Reading Specialist, we were working on using strategies from The Writing Revolution and helping students comprehend what they were reading.

What I/We Tried

Gist Statements

• Divide/Chunk the reading into sections
• Label the sections 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
• The students read the sections together in a group of 3-4 people each.
• The students discuss it and then “Gist it”.
• Who or what is this paragraph about?
• What’s the most important thing about this who/what?

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IN YOUR READING GROUPS….!

30 min.

TEAM MEMBERS WILL...

1. READ
2. DISCUSS EACH SECTION FOR CLARIFICATION.
3. GIST EACH SECTION.

MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND THE SECTION ONCE YOU HAVE FINISHED READING IT.

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Reading Groups!

1. CHOOSE SOMEONE TO READ/READ ALOUD/TAKE TURNS
2. DISCUSS EACH SECTION FOR CLARIFICATION.
3. GIST EACH SECTION AFTER DISCUSSION.

MEMBERS WILL…

1. Highlight any words they don’t know/find meanings of words
2. Participate in reading discussions.

I/We expected that…

And what actually happened was…

I expected that students would struggle.

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I expected that students would have reading fatigue.

Students read and discussed together and came to an agreement on the meaning.

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Students wrote a gist statement for each section.

Early impact

So with my/our students, I/we started to notice a shift...

• Students are now doing gist statements on their own without the prompts.
• The statements are becoming more concise.
• The gist statements have helped students in their reading comprehension of text.

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What I/We Learned

Key ingredients: what made this work?

# 1 - Student buy in - The students realize that stopping and providing gist statements helps them understand the text more.

#2 - Being consistent with the routine. This helps internalize the routine so that it becomes second nature.

#3 - Heterogeneous groupings. This helps aid the students who might be struggling in their reading comprehension.

Next steps...

I/We want to keep: Experiment with:

Will keep doing the gist statements.

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Buy-in from the 9th and 10th grade teachers - everyone is using it so it makes it more of a routine across disciplines.

Different genres of text (not just primary sources) - chunking pieces of a novel next.

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