Guided Comprehension in Action: Teaching Summarizing With the Bio-Cube

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Using biographies to engage students in active learning provides teachers with many opportunities for motivation. Biographies of current, well-known figures can help students draw parallels to their own lives, while biographies of figures from the past can help students make connections to content area subjects in meaningful ways. In this lesson, students learn about how biographies are constructed using the Guided Comprehension model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen. They use self-selected subjects to fill out an online summarizing tool and then analyze potential applications for summarizing in other academic areas.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

Bio-Cube: This tool is a cinch to use and allows students to compile all of the biographical information they collect into a tangible visual aid easily.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Taylor, G. (2002). Who's who? Engaging biography study. The Reading Teacher, 56(4), 342–344.

• There are excellent biographies suitable for students of all ages that can be used for instructional purposes.
  
  
• Recent biographies for children and young people have been written from a more realistic point of view so that readers can relate to them.

 

McLaughlin, M., & Allen, M.B. (2009). Guided comprehension in grades 3-8 . Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

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