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Teaching Students to Find Just the Right Text

 
Learning Objectives
  • Identify best practices for using ISearch in the classroom.
  • Reflect on learning by sharing information with others.

 

The lessons in this module focus on how you can help your students, their parents, and your colleagues use ISearch. The steps in the previous lesson focused on finding items in your school library. This lesson builds on those, introducing students to finding text in your school library and digital resources from INFOhio that best fits their needs as readers and learners.

ISearch is your school library catalog + INFOhio. ISearch lets you and your users explore the contents of your school library along with multiple collections of magazines and journals, newspapers, reports, primary sources, encyclopedias, videos, and eBooks—reliable content that isn't available on the open web—from a single search box. ISearch is valuable not only as a research tool but also as a source of diverse and authentic text to help students grow as learners. 

The Reading Bill of Rights

In Daniel Pennac's book Better Than Life (1992), he writes about his experiences as a parent, author, and teacher who has explored how love of reading begins. In this book, he outlines the Reader's Bill of Rights to highlight how to build that life-long relationship. 

  1. The right to not read
  2. The right to skip pages
  3. The right to not finish
  4. The right to reread
  5. The right to read anything
  6. The right to escapism
  7. The right to read anywhere
  8. The right to browse
  9. The right to read out loud
  10. The right to not defend your tastes

Many librarians will be familiar with this list and some will post it for their students and teachers to see. The library has become a haven for many readers who seek to find the right text to read to fit their needs and interests.

Leveled Text

As educational philosophies ebb and flow in schools, many librarians will also become familiar with another approach to determining what the right text is for a reader. Many districts use reading programs such as Accelerated Reader or Fountas & Pinnell to level books not only in the classroom but also in the school library. There are multiple points of view about the use of leveled texts, some in support and others that discredit this practice. Research shows, however, that there is no real correlation between student learning and placing readers at their instructional level of text. 

Read more about leveled text in this School Library Journal article Where Did Leveling Go Wrong? by Wayne D'Orio. 

Read Reading Hall of Fame inductee Timothy Shanahan's blog post The Instructional Level Concept Revisited: Teaching with Complex Text

  • If your school uses a leveling system, how can you apply the research from these articles to your programming and policy in the school library? 
  • What components of leveling are beneficial and which will you advocate to omit from your daily practice?
  • What steps can you take in your school or district to help others understand the research and apply best practices in choosing text to fit the needs of learners?
Using the Best Tab to Search for the Right Text 

Students have a diverse array of interests and hobbies they wish to read more about. The physical collection in the school library may not be able to meet those needs, but ISearch can help them discover text to build knowledge on these topics. Use the tabs in ISearch to help differentiate reading materials and help students find the best text to read. You can find more information about what content is available in each tab in the lesson Getting to Know ISearch

  1. Tell students that ISearch is a great place to look for something to read in your school library because it's full of resources that the library purchases and recommends.
  2. Show students how to find ISearch. If you are pointing students to an ISearch widget, demonstrate how to select their library from the drop-down menu (as found when clicking on the ISearch button that opens a widget on the INFOhio website). 
  3. Demonstrate a search that uses simple keywords to show them how to find books in your library and articles from INFOhio. For example, you could try a search for the popular online game Fortnite.
  4. If you have items on this topic, you can direct students to these titles on the shelf. However, if you do not, you will be redirected to the Encyclopedia tab. Model for the students how you can see this article to decide whether it is the text that is right for them. 

isearchforlibsencyview 

 If the text does not have the content they are looking for, they can click the Basic Sources tab.

isearchforlibsbasicsources

Notice that there is a Lexile Reading Level available for this article from Scholastic Choices. Whether this is lower than, higher than, or right at their instructional level, ISearch provides supports that can help them read this text about their chosen topic. They may have two options for how they can view the text. One is HTML. 

HTML provides a read-aloud feature for students who may need assistance reading at the Lexile Reading Level of the article. It also has enhanced text visibility that will aid a student with vision impairments.

Another option of how they can view the text is PDF. This provides the student with the text as it appeared in its authentic context. Students can save both HTML and PDF to their list, email it, or send it to Google drive to access it later. They can also print it to take with them as they leave the library to return to their classroom.

 

 

Tools for Reading Digital Text

 Learn more about the many tools available within ISearch in this lesson, Tools for Reading Digital Text.

Reading on the Screen

Encourage your students to read text directly from their device. Reading on a screen is different than reading print. According to recent research, most American readers prefer print books to ebooks. Increasingly, students are required to engage with electronic text. These are just a few recent trends that require students to develop the skills needed to read digital texts for comprehension:

INFOhio's Best Practices for Digital Reading were collected by the INFOhio Early Literacy Task Force from journals, education publications, and research studies. Although the best practices were compiled with early readers in mind, most apply to working with older students as well, including:

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