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professional learningComprehension & Knowledge

Understanding what you read: comprehension, background knowledge, complex text, and close reading.

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Workshop
Reading Comprehension
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Comprehension is not a skill you can drill in isolation.

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Text Complexity & Complex Text
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Students grow as readers by grappling with text that stretches them, but complex text can also shut them down.

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Building Background Knowledge
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Reading comprehension depends enormously on what a reader already knows.

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Reading Informational Text
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Most of what students read for the rest of their lives, and most of what they read to learn, is informational.

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Close Reading
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Some texts are worth reading closely, slowly, more than once, digging into what the author says and how.

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Knowledge-Rich Curriculum
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Reading comprehension depends heavily on what you already know.

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Comprehension Strategies
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Teaching students a handful of comprehension strategies, predicting, questioning, visualizing, inferring, summarizing, monitoring, gives them tools to tackle text actively.

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Text Structure
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Texts are organized in predictable ways, compare-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution, sequence, and readers who recognize these structures understand and remember far more.

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Academic Vocabulary
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Beyond everyday words and subject-specific terms lies a layer of academic vocabulary, words like analyze, evident, contrast, factor, that appear across all subjects and are essential for understanding school texts and talk.

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Teaching Inference
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

So much of what a text means is never stated directly, it must be inferred by combining clues in the text with what you already know.

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Visual & Graphic Texts
15 / 45 min or half-day · Teachers

Charts, graphs, infographics, diagrams, and maps carry crucial information, yet students often skip or skim them, missing or misreading what they show.

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