Reading for Meaning: How to Build Students' Comprehension, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving Skills (A Strategic Teacher PLC Guide)

You're holding a new kind of professional development tool called a Strategic Teacher PLC Guide. Designed in partnership with more than 75 schools, Strategic Teacher PLC 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 (or professional learning community) 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 reading, during reading, 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.