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Determine Importance

Children will be able to discriminate what is important from what is not. Children will be able to use this information to determine main ideas and themes of texts. Separating out what is important from what is not is the heart of the definition of comprehension. We study determining importance in all its fullness as well as how it relates to the other strategies in the eighth month of school.

Getting Started: What's Important?

Determining what is most important is critical to building life-long success. (Think buying a house or car, choosing a career, investing in stocks, etc.) In school, understanding main ideas (determining importance) is tested more than any other concept on standardized tests. However, I find that naming the most important idea is tough! Defending why we think the idea is important is even tougher.

Ellin Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought, writes, "Determining what is important - arguing and defending - helps build reasoning skills. Most students are competent readers. They pronounce words correctly, miss few words and sound out words they didn't know."

Keene continues, "But many were so disconnected from the text, especially expository text, that they were often unaware of what they were reading..."

She found the same to be true of adult learners. When adults come together to discuss a text, "All defend their beliefs. None absolutely agreed with one another." That is a good thing. The adults understand enough to have a belief and are articulate enough to defend it. That's where I want my students to be: comfortable with their opinions and able to support their ideas with evidence.

Unfortunately, Keene's words speak directly to my experience in the classroom. When my students read aloud, they struggle - even in 5th grade, even in high school! The strugglers call nonsense words for real words. The only link between the word on the page and what they read aloud is the same beginning sound. In addition, some have so little sense of story structure that they stop reading at the end of the page. They don't even realize there's more to the story; "...they were often unaware of what they were reading."

Obviously, these students need reading help. When struggling readers first came to me, I thought that as an intermediate teacher I wasn't supposed to teach reading. I'd never been shown how. Now, I've worked in high school. There I learned that strugglers still had the same reading difficulties - making me feel even more pressured. So, what do I do?

Reading Conferences

I guarantee you the best place to start teaching determining importance is by re-arranging your schedule. The most important teaching you can do will be in a one-on-one setting. Get to know your students by listening to them read no matter whether you're in an elementary, middle or high school setting. It doesn't have to be long - 5 minutes - I promise! In middle and high school, you can conference just a few times in a semester or year. Praise what your learners do well. Teach one thing. Keep a record of what you say. Even in a mini conference, you can show a student how to call the right word, read to the end of the story, and "defend, rethink, question and draw conclusions."

Minilessons

To support your conferences, you need minilessons. I like to introduce determining importance by asking students to fill a construction-paper suitcase with 10 of their most important items - or 5 items in the primary grades. (See photo of mine, right.) They can draw pictures or cut pictures out of magazines. When forced with choosing the most important items in their lives, they begin to grasp the process their brains work through in order to prioritize. I can build on this concrete exercise when talking about main ideas in reading and writing.

Retelling

Another place to start is with retelling. (Read my retelling page on this website.) Whether the students retell orally or in writing, they will be forced to choose the important details to tell. Plenty of practice will improve their writing and reading skills. I also like that tutors, volunteers and parents can listen to the kids tell stories and ask questions so students become aware of important, missing details.

A retelling center is a very easy center to keep up all year. All you need is a basket of books which the teacher updates occasionally and an assessment sheet. (Email me if you would like mine.) Partners go there to read together and retell the stories to one another.

Small Groups

Also, schedule time for conversation in small groups of 4-6 children. Just talking about selections in a more intimate environment gives children the opportunity to think out loud and consider other perspectives more thoroughly. It's in reading groups that, students "defend, rethink, question and draw their own conclusions." I can't imagine that metacognition can be unleashed with such power when thinking in front of the whole class.

From working with adults, I've observed that participants veer on and off course, but the work gets done. So, too, with kids. Even though I'm uncomfortable with exactly what is getting accomplished in these groups sometimes, I know that in talk time comprehension deepens. Furthermore, that's when the seed for writing ideas grow. And by the end of the year, the groups don't look as messy, the work not as ambiguous.

Many of my lessons are all about breaking down how people talk to one another: how we listen, show others we are listening, disagree with one another, and reach consensus, for example. Structure these groups in such a way that students must talk about main ideas, author's purpose, and themes and support their ideas with evidence. Talking, even for brief periods of time, will help students determine what's most important, comprehend their texts and tests, and prepare them for their futures. In addition, you will know where comprehension breaks down and will teach directly to the misunderstandings.

With conferences, small groups, effective conversation, and targeted lessons, students are sure to succeed with determining importance. Below, I offer some more of my favorite lesson ideas.

Favorite Determining-Importance Lesson Ideas

Determining important ideas and information in text is central to making sense of reading and moving toward insight... When we teach the strategy of determining importance, we often introduce it in nonfiction. They go together. Nonfiction reading is reading to learn. Simply put, readers of nonfiction have to decide and remember what is important in the texts they read if they are going to learn anything from them. Strategies That Work, Harvey & Goudvis.

1. VIP (Very Important Point): Give each child 3 sticky notes and a selection to read. Ask them to mark what they find to be the most important points in their reading with the sticky notes. They can read a selection from a magazine or a chapter from a book. Tell them that when they come back, they will need to defend one of their sticky notes as the most important point using references from the text. Over time, with guidance and debate, students become quite adept at finding the main ideas of the text. They begin to use chapter titles and nonfiction headings as clues for locating the main idea sentences. They also learn that main idea sentences are often the first sentence of nonfiction selections.

2. Overviewing: Overviewing is a form of skimming. Students need to look over the whole text before they read. Teach students to note the length of the text, the structure, headings and subheadings, what to read, what to pay careful attention to, what to ignore, what to skip, what they already know about the subject, and whether the information needs to be skimmed or read carefully. Many adults still ignore these features and miss critical information.

   Overviewing can also be used when the reader doesn't need to read in detail. When practicing for our end of year tests last year, I gave my students a recipe for snow cones. I asked students to tell what ingredients they needed to make the cones. I watched as my students read the entire recipe... like a novel! I had to teach them that they don't always have to read everything! Sometimes all they have to do is skim. Again, students need to know that they have a repertoire of reading strategies stored in their brain and it is their job to pick the strategy that matches the job.



3. Marking a text (coding) & highlighting: "No one ever taught me how to determine what was important in a text. I was simply asked to highlight the important parts. Asking someone to highlight what's important is easy. Choosing what to highlight is the challenge."

   We know that! Hand a child a highlighter and every thing is yellow! Authors Harvey & Goudvis outline a plan for teaching students to highlight in their book Nonfiction Matters. If students are to highlight successfully, model how. Put a copy of text on the overhead and show how you determine what to highlight. (See my overhead, right.) Here's a highlighting guideline: do not highlight more than 1/3 of the text. Now, consider this question as an inquiry study. Figure out what 1/3 you highlight and why. Agree on guidelines. The conversation alone will help students understand not to use up their markers when highlighting.

4. Informal outlines of important facts: The simple act of writing a list from a paragraph is very difficult for some children to grasp. When we outline, we select the most important information. We list the main ideas and the details underneath. Model how you choose what is a main idea, what is an important detail and what is an unimportant detail, not even to be included. Use the science or social studies text to meet two objectives: learn about content studies while determining what is most important.

5. Reciprocal teaching: The best way I know to teach how to determine important ideas is with reciprocal teaching. First, students or teachers divide the reading into sections. Students read each section 3 times - the first time to figure out vocabulary they don't know, the second time to figure out questions they have, and the third time to write a summary. They continue in this way until the entire selection is read. If you haven't started reciprocal teaching in your class, this would be a great month to start.

6. Writing a teaching book: Another way to teach writing and main ideas at the same time is to ask students to write a "teaching book" or an "expert book." (Strategies That Work) Students research a topic of interest. They determine which details are the most important to share in a book. They write a nonfiction book, complete with pictures, captions, bold and italic print, sidebars, titles and subtitles, and the works. I teach students how to begin each page with a generalized sentence, a main idea, that unites the details on the page. Download my "main-idea books" lesson plan on my www.liketowrite site, research page.

7. Nonfiction conventions book: Students make a dictionary of nonfiction text features. Page 1 - they draw a picture and explain what a picture is and how it helps the reader. Page 2 - they draw a picture and write a caption and explain how a caption helps a reader. Each page identifies another aspect of nonfiction text with an explanation and a visual: title, subtitle, caption, map, headings, table of contents, glossary, index, photograph, chart, graph, diagram, summary, bold print, italic print, etc.



8. Make a nonfiction page: Students study nonfiction texts to determine what makes a book nonfiction. This is an innovation on a text gone nonfiction! Once the children understand the conventions of the text, they create their own nonfiction page on a self-selected topic. The goal is to understand what details are most important to write on the page while at the same time investigating what writing nonfiction is all about: engaging readers by telling stories and then, once hooked, disclosing the facts and using nonfiction conventions appropriately. Download my "nonfiction page" lesson plans on my www.liketowrite site, research page.

9. I-Search papers or (KWL): Writing what you know about a topic, what you want to know, and what you find out is a GREAT way to research nonfiction topics of interest. In the process, students study features of nonfiction text that make reading nonfiction easier. Condensing the information into "What I learned" focuses children on selecting the most important facts in an authentic way. (The I-Search paper by Ken Macrorie is much more involved than the KWL we use in elementary school. I encourage you to explore I-Search papers in more detail for upper grade students.)