Reading and Writing for Understanding

1. Source: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/05/07/reading-and-writing-understanding
Reading and Writing for
Understanding
The integration of reading and writing strategies helps students
to make the leap from knowing to understanding
Reading, writing, and understanding
The relationship among reading, writing, and
understanding is clear. Students engaged in reading to
learn will also be prepared to write well. In turn, students
who are engaged in writing to learn will become more
effective readers. Through both approaches, students
will gain a better understanding of material and a
greater ability to demonstrate that understanding.
Stage Three: Postreading
During postreading, students test
their understanding of the text
by comparing it with that of their
classmates. In doing so, they help
one another revise and strengthen
their arguments while reflecting
and improving on their own.
Reading to Learn
Jacobs explains that students learn and practice beginning
reading skills through about the third grade, building their
knowledge about language and letter-sound relationships
and developing fluency in their reading. Around fourth
grade, students must begin to use these developing reading
skills to learn — to make meaning, solve problems, and
understand something new. They need to comprehend what
they read through a three-stage meaning-making process.
Secondary school students can benefit
enormously when teachers of all subjects
integrate reading and writing strategies
into their instruction, according to Harvard
Graduate School of Education lecturer Vicki
Jacobs. These strategies, typical of “reading
and writing to learn” and “reading and writing
across the curriculum,” are problem-solving
activities designed to help students move from
simply knowing a fact to understanding a fact’s
significance. Helping students make that leap —
from knowing to understanding — represents
the very heart of the educational enterprise.
Stage One: Prereading
It's not uncommon for a struggling secondary reader to declare, "I
read last night's homework, but I don't remember anything about
it (let alone understand it)!" According to Jacobs, "How successfully
students remember or understand the text depends, in part, on
how explicitly teachers have prepared them to read it for clearly
defined purposes."
During the prereading stage, teachers prepare students for their
encounter with the text. They help students organize the background
knowledge and experience they will use to solve the mystery of the
text. To do so, they must understand the cultural and language-
based contexts students bring to their reading, their previous
successes or failures with the content, and general ability to read
a particular kind of text. Based on this assessment, teachers can
choose strategies that will serve as effective scaffolds between the
students' "given" and the "new" of the text.
Asking such questions as, "What do I already know and what do I
need to know before reading?" or "What do I think this passage will
be about, given the headings, graphs, or pictures?" helps students
anticipate the text, make personal connections with the text, and
help to promote engagement and motivation. Brainstorming and
graphic organizers also serve to strengthen students' vocabulary
knowledge and study skills.
Stage Two: Guided Reading
Students move on to guided reading, during which they familiarize
themselves with the surface meaning of the text and then probe it for
deeper meaning. Effective guided-reading activities allow students to
apply their background knowledge and experience to the "new." They
provide students with means to revise predictions; search for tentative
answers; gather, organize, analyze, and synthesize evidence; and begin
to make assertions about their new understanding. Common guided-
reading activities include response journals and collaborative work on
open-ended problems. During guided reading, Jacobs recommends that
teachers transform the factual questions that typically appear at the end
of a chapter into questions that ask how or why the facts are important.
The ability to monitor one's own reading often distinguishes effective
and struggling readers. Thus, guided-reading activities should provide
students with the opportunity to reflect on the reading process itself
— recording in a log how their background knowledge and experience
influenced their understanding of text, identifying where they may have
gotten lost during reading and why, and asking any questions they have
about the text. As with prereading, guided-reading activities not only
enhance comprehension but also promote vocabulary knowledge and
study skills.
Staff Development
Jacobs recommends that teachers who are considering
whether to implement reading-to-learn and writing-to-
learn strategies into their classroom first define their own
instructional goals. If teachers decide that their goals for
students' learning include "understanding," then they might
ask themselves such questions as, "What strategies do I use
to prepare my students to read a text?" or "How explicitly do I
share with students the purpose of an assignment?" As Jacobs
sees it, "Only after teachers have examined whether teaching
for understanding suits their instructional goals and after
they have defined their role in facilitating understanding can
they consider how the principles and practices of reading to
learn and writing to learn might support their instruction."
Writing to Learn
Writing is often used as a means of evaluating students' understanding of
a certain topic, but it is also a powerful tool for engaging students in the
act of learning itself. Writing allows students to organize their thoughts and
provides a means by which students can form and extend their thinking,
thus deepening understanding. Like reading to learn, writing can be a
meaning-making process.
Research suggests that the most effective way to improve students' writing
is a process called inquiry. This process allows students to define and test
what they would like to write before drafting. To help students prepare
their arguments, teachers guide them through the three stages of writing-
based inquiry:
• Stating specific, relevant details from personal experience;
• Proposing observations or interpretations of the text; and
• Testing these assertions by predicting and countering potential
opposing arguments. Through inquiry, students discover and refine
something worth writing about.
Writing-to-learn activities can include freewriting (writing, without editing,
what comes to mind), narrative writing (drawing on personal experience),
response writing (writing thoughts on a specific issue); loop writing (writing
on one idea from different perspectives) and dialogue writing (for example,
with an author or a character.) "Not surprisingly," writes Jacobs, "writing-to-
learn activities are also known as 'writing-to-read' strategies — means by
which students can engage with text in order to understand it."