It Says . . . I Say . . . And So

"It says... I say... And so" is an excellent strategy to help students make inferences and to draw conclusions from the text material. The educator provides the students with some inferential questions for the text that they are going to read, and then the strategy comes into play to make sense of the text. Normally, it is used in chart form. The "It says" box is used for information that the students pull from the text itself - this information can be paraphrased or direct quotes can also be used. The "I say" box is reserved for students' opinions and their prior knowledge. This box functions as the bridge between drawing conclusions and reading information. The last box, "And so" is where they students combine the information from the previous two boxes to answer the question(s). This way, the students have an organized chart that highlights the main ideas from the text without being overwhelming or simply copying directly from the text itself.

This week, we read Chapters 5 & 9 in Content Area Reading. My two main questions are the following: Why is B-D-A instructional framework effective? Why is writing to learn so important?

It Says: B-D-A instructional framework is a method teachers can use to plan a lesson. This format of lesson planning can help teachers to incorporate instruction strategies and activities into lesson involving content literacy and learning through differing degrees of scaffolding. The lesson does not have to be confined to a one-day only period, but can extend over several days - depending on the need of the class. This structure emphasizes that readers need varying levels of guidance, and prior knowledge, familiarity with the subject, and the educator's own judgment play very important roles in the construction and implementation of the lesson. B-D-A stands for before reading, during reading, and after reading. Each of these elements are meant to assist students to pull meaning from the text. The purpose of before reading activities is to motivate students, engage them in the material, activate their prior knowledge, and gently introduce new material, such as vocabulary words. During reading activities help the students to recognize the important parts of the text by bridging the gap between the students and the text. Activities including, but not restricted to, study buddies, definitions of unknown words, collaborative reading to emphasize the important aspects of the text and to foster a deeper understanding. The after reading activities clarify and elaborate anything from the other two categories. This is the stage where knowledge is refined and it is the springboard for discussions, questions, written responses, and any other tools used to enhance comprehension.

I Say: The B-D-A framework appears to be a very effective way to organize a lesson plan around a text. Students need to be motivated before they engage in a text because many students are intimidated or overwhelmed by textbooks or any large section of text. The before reading stage is an excellent way to motivate students and to activate their prior knowledge in order to ensure that they begin reading with confidence that they have some direction and some background knowledge regarding what the text will be about. The during reading activities avoid boredom and frustration for the students. It is almost always easier to understand something if you can talk it out with another person. These activities break up the text into sections and the important content is grasped in class instead of students feeling as if they were really struggling to understand what's going on. The after reading activities are necessary for clarification. A teacher summarizing what is important helps everyone to internalize the main points and to shave off the unnecessary details. This also is a great time to get feedback and to challenge the students to dig deeper into a text. If a text is read in class, most students will be more willing to participate and ask questions because they already have a road map from their teacher and other peers. This will be especially important in my content area because material will be more difficult to understand automatically -- it's in another language!

And So: I believe that the B-D-A instructional framework is an effective and flexible way to engage students in a text. It is extremely important to begin class with motivational activities/review so that students feel that they are capable of learning new material that will be presented in class. The during reading activities are also essential because students are kids. Whether they are 5 years old or 17 years old, they are still kids. They need a change in scenery from time to time so they do not become too bored and miss what is being taught. Scaffolding activities ensure that students stay on task because they are responsible for their own learning. That ties in to the after reading activities because that is the part of class where students and teachers work together to create a meaningful summary of the important points of the text and to dig deeper into what the students think. This allows students to create connections to their own lives - the learning becomes their own. Once students internalize knowledge in this way, they are much better at remembering and applying what they learned. I will definitely be using this approach in my classroom. Spanish texts are difficult to understand not only because they are in a foreign language, but the way they are written are simply distinct from English texts. My students will need my guidance and lots of activities to be able to pull out the main points and meaning from the texts we read in class.


Writing to learn is important for many, many reasons. Perhaps the most important one is simply that students are able to learn through their own words. As I mentioned before, that gives students ownership of that knowledge and it is much more significant to them. There are an impressive number of WLT strategies, each with its own twist, but all of them involve writing and spontaneous thinking. The strategies can be incorporated into any classroom in any content area, so they are quite versatile. Writing is an essential life skill. Why would we not stress writing activities in our classroom?! These WTL strategies are perfect for incorporating into a B-D-A based lesson plan. It provides an easy way to check for comprehension and to engage students in metacognitive thinking. Writing to learn is too important of a tool to ignore.

Tools to Improve Learning: Trade Books and Writing

What is the first thing that comes to mind when someone says the word "textbook"? Most students think of a heavy book that contains dry, complex, confusing, disorganized, and an overwhelming amount of information. Textbooks are used in 75-90% of classrooms across the United States, and most of our students do not know how to think or learn with them. That statistic shocked me. The information points to the idea that textbooks alone are not enriching learning tools in a classroom. What can we use to complement students' learning? Content Area Reading suggests that educators use trade books to be used in tandem with textbooks. Although textbooks provide a wealth of knowledge about an impressive number of topics, they tend to lack depth. I have experienced the feeling of being defeated by a textbook before I have even turned to the chapter I was assigned. It seemed like there was a never-ending stream of information that was, at best, arduous to read and even more challenging to remember and connect all of the facts. Trade books provide an opportunity for students to enter a literary work that has depth and an emotional dimension. They also expose students to many different genres and allow teachers to offer books at many different reading levels which creates more accessible literature. If our students are scared away from textbooks, they might associate those negative feelings with reading in general. Trade books can help to bridge that gap.

There are so many different ways that trade books can be incorporated into a classroom to enrich the curriculum. Once the students read the books, how can we, as educators, follow up on what they learned? There are many effective reader response strategies to engage students. One of my favorite examples is through drama. I will never forget one of my IB History classes. We read an excerpt from a source outside of our textbook about how World War II quickly accelerated to involve almost all of the European countries. My teacher, Mr. Affeldt, separated us into small groups and every group was assigned to be a country involved in the war. We were responsible for listening to his instructions regarding our actions and improvising to recreate what happened throughout the beginning of the war. We would invade other countries by bringing them into our group, and we "bombed" other countries by making paper airplanes, crunching up loose leaf paper to create "bombs" and walking in a formation across the classroom to throw the paper (gently) at the group members of the country being bombed. To this day, I can recall, with nearly perfect clarity, exactly what happened. All of that stemmed from an excellent application of a trade book that gave us in-depth information about what happened during World War II. Our textbook supplied almost no details regarding the same topic. The classroom vibrantly became alive that hour. That is a beautiful gift to give to students (and a gold star to give to the teacher). I hope I can use trade books to create the same sense of joy in learning that Mr. Affeldt gave our class. 

Another effective tool to enrich student's learning, that is also essential to the reader responses to trade books and textbooks, is writing. Writing is an important part of our everyday lives. We use it to make lists, scribble down reminders, express care to the ones we love - it's so useful and it starts at school. Normally, writing in school is associated with formal papers. However, Content Area Writing stresses the importance of writing to learn (WTL). WTL means that students write informal, spontaneous, short, personal, exploratory, and ungraded writing samples. In short, it is free, loosely structured with few rules and no penalties. This form of writing provides students with true learning power. They can write - express themselves - openly and without judgment. It is a wonderful opportunity to encourage writing in a non-stressful setting. Students sit in classrooms for about seven hours a day, five days a week. That is a lot of sitting. Breaking into their monotonous routine gives students' brains a breather that is important so that they can reflect on what they are learning. In my opinion, one of the most effective ways to remember something is to by making learning your own. If students can be proud and unabashed to express their thoughts, they could be more motivated to learn and to stay engaged. WTL is an excellent way to do that, and it can be applied in every content area, especially my own - Spanish. 

High Stakes Testing or Portfolios - Is One More Effective than the Other?

Assessments. Tests. Exams. Quizzes. Regardless of which name is used, students probably stress about it. As educators, it is essential to realize the importance of assessments. It helps us to "check up/in" on our students, to see where we need to improve our instruction, and to compare where are students are and "where they should be." There are a multitude of forms that we can use to assess our students, but is one better than the others?

After reading Chapter 4 of Content Area Reading this past week, I realized that the challenge of choosing which assessments and assessment methods to use is a daunting task. The chapter discussed two major types: high-stakes testing and portfolios.

High-stakes testing tend to be state or federally mandated standardized tests that have a number of consequences attached to poor results. The No Child Left Behind Act was instated to attempt to raise the overall achievement of American students. The level of progress would be measured yearly and that meant that each year, the test scores needed to progress. There was no falling behind without serious consequences that can include school closure, the lack of funding, or restaffing. Under such extreme amounts of pressure, schools began to change the curriculum to fit the requirements of the test. Some people question what happens to the knowledge base that just didn't make the cut? Is it just lost to the textbooks and the teachers' brains forever? We hope not. In that light, standardized testing seems far from favorable. Yet, they do yield important information. Standardized tests provide an accurate (if the correct test is used) ranking of where students stand in comparison to one another and to students across the United States. They also can be useful tools to assess whether students are ready to pass on to the next grade. However, standardized tests are not the only way to assess students.

Another effective method of assessing students can be through portfolios. Portfolios are vehicles for ongoing assessment. They are different from "tests" because they are done over time and are a collaboration between student and teacher instead of the students working alone to prove they have learned what has been presented in the classroom. Portfolios intend to encourage the students to take ownership for their achievements and to emphasize their academic progress throughout the year. The compilation of portfolios is much more flexible and less stressful than standardized tests, yet they cannot provide the same comparison that high-stakes assessments do. Portfolios tend to be graded through rubrics that the teacher creates, not by the code of bubble answers that can be read by a computer. However, does that make them a better form of assessment?

So, which one is better!? The evidence provided by this text implies that standardized testing creates many problems in the education world today. I cannot help but agree. Portfolios seem to offer a promising way to assess students in a way that significantly lessens stress levels and encourages student involvement. It seems to me that both types of assessments are valid, useful, and necessary. In fact, I think it is a brilliant idea to use many types of assessments to ensure that every student's learning style is addressed. There is no one "best" way. Our challenge lies in ensuring that our students take in the knowledge we present to them and that it sinks into their brain, not that it simply is skimmed off the top after we assess them. What an excellent challenge!

Literacy Matters!

This blog will be used primarily for my class Reading for the 5-12 Teacher at the University of St. Thomas. However, I hope it also sparks your interest and emphasizes the importance of the role a teacher plays in the life of each and every student that passes through the door of his or her classroom.



Not all children love to read. That does not mean, however, that they lack the potential to learn to enjoy reading. The key lies in motivating students and in their teachers' ability to weave literacy tools into lessons without creating separate islands of content area information.

After reading the first chapters of our textbooks, Content Area Reading and Content Area Writing, the challenge of ensuring that my students will have a strong foundation in literacy seemed both overwhelming and exciting. Literacy is perhaps one of the most important tools for a successful life. When a child becomes literate, a whole new world opens up to him or her. Throughout the early years of education, children learn how to read. Once they reach adolescence, reaching should shift to become a tool to learn. Reading is not the only aspect of being literate. Writing is also an essential aspect of literacy. As the authors of Content Area Writing brilliantly state, "Reading helps us to take in knowledge; writing makes it our own."

Due to the fact that both reading and writing are essential skills, it is clearly important that these skills are stressed in every content area. The authors stressed that even the most unlikely of subjects require students to know how to read and write. What would math be without those beloved (or despised) word problems? The most prestigious of researches write out procedures and publish papers about their findings. History is an eloquent story, packed with information, yet a story all the same. Every single subject has a similar application. The bottom line is this: the task of teaching students to read and write does not fall only on the shoulders of English and literature teachers. Each and every teacher is responsible for fostering a curiosity and a desire to learn how to read, write, think, analyze, (the list goes on) that pertains to the specific content area while avoiding isolating those skills. It is no easy task.

Literacy does matter. (that was an excellent choice for a chapter title). Although all of my lessons will be in another language, the foundation that my students will have in terms of their literacy skills are based on what they have learned from other subjects. Students use prior knowledge to make connections and to help them to learn new things. Spanish and English are very different, but they are both beautiful ways to express thoughts, to comment on a situation, to share experiences, and to grow as an individual. Language is a powerful tool; it is so much more than simply sounds that create words and have meaning. Language contains culture, history, and beauty. I hope that my students will be able to realize that through my classes.

Life is such a rich, rewarding experience, and learning new things is one of the best ways to make the most out of what we are given. Teaching students to read and write, and then to use reading and writing to learn opens an innumerable amount of doors for them to choose to explore at their leisure. What a wonderful privilege it is, to be able to pass on the tools and to instill a desire to learn and grow.