Before-During-After

Effective teachers don’t just assign reading and expect students to “get it.” They craft the preparation for the reading, help students organize their thinking as they read, and plan meaningful work after the reading to guide students to reflect on, integrate, and share the ideas they culled from the assignment.
While the questions at the end of the passage might seem like the way to go, those questions can be tedious to students and result in cursory responses. As you plan for activities to help students construct meaning, think about the purposes of before, during, and after work. Harvey Daniels and Steve Zemelman, in Subjects Matter (2004) describe in detail what teachers need to do BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER reading to help students improve their comprehension:
BEFORE Reading activities are ones that

1. get students focused on and excited about the reading
   
2. develop purposes for reading
   
3. activate students’ questions, beliefs, and predictions about the reading
   
4. help students make connections between their prior knowledge and the new material, which will help them make sense of the reading
   

DURING Reading activities help students construct meaning and process and question ideas as they read. These activities often as students to

1. visual what is happening in the reading, whether it is a story or a science experiment
2. make connections between the reading and their lives and the world around them
3. question the author or the text
   
4. make inference (going beyond the information given to other implications)
   
5. distinguish between main ideas and minor ideas as they read
   
6. monitor their understanding and comprehension as they read, noticing when they lose track of the meaning
   

AFTER Reading activities help students reflect on the reading by guiding them to

1. synthesize ideas, connecting what they’ve learned to information they already know
   
2. make inferences and connections
   
3. look back at questions they initially had and decide if they have had those questions either answered or changed
   

As you plan for readings for you students to complete, always consider: What am I doing to help them make meaning BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER they read?