#textsets

Text sets are "curation." This article provides a rationale for creating and sharing text sets and links the practice to multiple levels of Bloom's.

From the Global Digital Citizen Foundation: "In our EQ Guide, we define an essential question as one that leads us to explore the problem and choose from plans and strategies to generate an applicable solution. It’s much more than that, though. A good essential question: inspires a quest for knowledge and discovery, encourages and develops critical thinking processes, leads students to engineer real-world solutions for real-world problems, is all about possibilities.

Results from a study by Hiebert in which she compared three different tiered text sets from three different publishers to determine if the necessary text features to support developing readers (particularly vocabulary and volume, i.e. sentence length) are present. Crucial finding: "For struggling readers, two features of text matter a great deal—the vocabulary and the volume of reading. The perspective underlying the texts for struggling readers in these programs of leveled texts goes in the opposite direction of what struggling readers need. Rather than getting texts with more accessible vocabulary, they get texts where the ideas have been sacrificed or simplified to comply with the aim of achieving a target text complexity." My take-away: eschew ready-made, multi-leveled text sets from publishers. Teachers need to be empowered to locate, evaluate, and curate their own text collections to suit the particular needs and interests of their own learners.

New book and video about using short texts in content-area literacy instructions by Nancy Steineke

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