To avoid feeling that they have to stop teaching content in order to teach reading, secondary teachers might think of reading as a comprehension or understanding process that involves three stages. (These stages are derived from a model of learning called "schema theory.") The first stage is called pre-reading. One of the purposes of pre-reading is to acknowledge the different contexts, experiences, biases, and background knowledge (often called the "given") of students that will influence how they read and learn from a text (the "new"). By knowing what students bring to their reading, teachers can provide them with bridges, or scaffolds, between the given and the new-clarifying unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts, and offering other necessary information in the process. Pre-reading activities also promote students' engagement and interest by providing them with means to preview and anticipate the text. Such preparatory activity is critical for comprehension to occur.

For example, a 9th-grade social studies class may be planning to read about Moscow as an introduction to a unit on Russia. Depending on the purpose of the reading (and it is important to be explicit to students about purposes), the teacher might have students brainstorm individually about what they already know about a national capital that is more familiar to them: Washington, DC. Most likely, the brainstorm will spark both common associations (such as the president, the Capitol, cherry blossoms, or Arlington National Cemetery), as well as less common associations certain students might have because of their own knowledge and experience (say, the Holocaust Museum, or an anecdote about a visit to Washington, DC). The class could then compile and share their brainstorms, which the teacher can use to help the students grasp particular concepts or vocabulary that will be important to understanding the text.

The class might then organize their brainstorms into categories (such as monuments, government buildings, a tourist's view of the city), or into webs, outlines, or clusters-graphic organizers that visually illustrate the relationships among vocabulary or concepts. The teacher could then divide the class into small groups and assign each group a category from the brainstorm, asking them to use the Washington, DC, examples as a way to think about Moscow. For example, a group that is assigned "a tourist's view of the city" might consider whether there are gardens in Moscow that equal the beauty of cherry blossoms or whether there is a national cemetery near Moscow as there is near Washington, DC. They might also consider the monuments or government buildings that a tourist would be interested in seeing. As a result, the students build on the knowledge they bring to a text while beginning to anticipate and pose questions about that text.

In addition to brainstorming and graphically organizing information, teachers can also instruct students to ask and answer questions before reading. These questions, which can be supplied by the teacher or developed by students through directed writing or interactive discussion, might include, "What do I already know and what do I need to know before reading?" and "What do I think this passage will be about, given the headings, graphs, or pictures?" Teachers can also make use of cloze-that is, deleting important words or concepts from a passage and having students guess or choose the word that would best fit the blank. Pre-reading activity requires considerable time, but that time is a wise and critical investment, for it prepares students to actively engage with the text.

Guided Reading