Teachers from all content areas continue to struggle with how to help students comprehend more of what they read in their content area textbooks.  These simple 8 tips can help content teachers better prepare students to comprehend more of what they read on a daily basis:

1. Help students activate their prior knowledge on a topic before beginning a new unit. When students make connections to information they already know, they process new information more fully and more thoroughly.
2. Make sure that students know the purpose for reading. When students know what they will be doing with information they can use more useful strategies to read. Provide guiding questions to help students get the most out of the text they are reading.
3. Help students organize information and create visual images from the text. Our brain is programmed to remember visual information so help students put what they are learning in frames or graphic organizers.
4. Help students read “deeper” by helping them draw inferences and make conclusions. Teachers can help their students by asking probing questions that require students to go beyond superficial responses and thinking.
5. Require students to summarize the key ideas from text either orally or in writing. Marzano, Pickering and Pollock (2001) tells us that being able to summarize information is a powerful skill that helps build deep comprehension. We cannot summarize what we don’t understand.
6. Help students synthesize what they read to think more deeply about the content they are reading. When students apply new learning to themselves and the world around them, comprehension increases. Our brain prefers to link new knowledge to what we already know and have stored in our brains.
7. Use “thinking aloud” strategies to help your students “hear” your own thought processes and require your students to also “think aloud” when describing how they arrived at key understandings.
8. Teach students how to use “fix-up” strategies to monitor their own reading. Help students understand that all readers – even excellent readers – lose meaning on occasion. Help them understand and model what good readers do when meaning is lost. Encourage students to talk to one another about confusing parts of a text to develop clarity.

When students organize their thinking, ask questions and clarify misunderstandings, they can greatly increase their comprehension of the text they are reading. By weaving strong foundations under our students, we can make learning not only more accessible but also more interesting for our students.

Marzano, R.J., Pickering, D.J. & Pollock, J.E. (2001). Classroom Instruction That Works, Alexandria, VA, Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.