Comprehension Constructors

In years past, I have often given both fiction and nonfiction reading assignments with five to eight follow-up questions, assuming that students who could correctly answer the questions could also understand the material. I have learned, however, that at this point in the game, many of my students can read questions, search for the answers in the text, and copy them onto a piece of paper. Whether or not they understand what they have read is a different story.

I recently read about the use of Comprehension Constructors, graphic organizers developed by Cris Tovani (author of I Read It But I Don’t Get It and Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?). Although the organizers differ in appearance and can be tailored to each specific reading assignment, their purpose is to help students choose sections of the reading that are meaningful to them and process how those sections make them think. They promote various reading strategies such as determining importance, questioning, connecting, predicting, and using fix-up strategies.

Please access a few of the Comprehension Constructors I have used in my classroom and feel free to use these models to create your own to match the specific purpose of your reading assignments.