Reflecting on Reading: Strategy Logs, Targets and Interconnected Skills

Thinking about your own thinking: here, being aware of how you read and which strategies work for you.

It is vague and can't be checked. Better: For the next three articles, I'll write one question before reading and answer it in one sentence after.

Rereading hard parts (used 5, helps 2).

Listening, speaking, writing, viewing, representing.

Hearing others' interpretations and questions shows you ideas and details you missed, and explaining your own view tests your understanding.

Skill: any one of skimming, following hyperlinks, reading multimodal texts, checking sources quickly. Risk: shallow reading / difficulty with long, slow, deep reading.

A record of which reading strategies you used, how often, and how helpful they were.

A short meeting with your teacher to discuss your reading and find new strategies.

Representing.

Viewing.

Any one: previewing features, setting a purpose, checking author and date, recalling what you know.

To summarize, you must find the thesis and main ideas and drop minor details. Doing this regularly trains you to read for structure and importance.

It can show settings, people and tone visually, and its choices (what it cuts, adds or emphasizes) make you notice what the book emphasizes, or leaves out.

Sample: For the next four opinion pieces I read, I'll count whose voices are quoted and write one sentence about who is missing. I'll check my notes on (date).

Memory is unreliable and tends to be general or flattering; evidence (a log, your work, results) shows what actually happened, so your goals target real problems.

Reason: it takes time and Jordan skips it under pressure. Fix: a 5-minute limit or a simple template, used only for persuasive texts, so it becomes a habit.

Sample: At the start of this unit I read infographics by looking at the pictures first. After Lesson 10, I read the title, source and axes first, and I caught a truncated axis in a news graphic last week, so this is now a strength. My weakness is old texts: the 1729 Swift excerpt took me three readings, and I still missed some irony. My target: before reading any text written before 1950, I'll spend five minutes on background and keep a glossary of unfamiliar words, then rate my understanding from 1 to 5 to see if it improves. Look for: evidence, a strength, a weakness and a checkable target.

Sample position: Different, and better at some things. Online reading has built real skills: fast searching, lateral reading, handling multimodal texts. But constant scrolling trains skimming, which can weaken stamina for long, complex texts. So teens are better at finding and checking information and need deliberate practice at deep reading. A strong answer takes a clear position, gives examples, and concedes the other side fairly.

Sample, for satire: (1) What clues tell you a text is satirical before you're sure? (helps recognize irony earlier). (2) Which background should I research before reading older satire? (fixes the context gap). (3) Can you model how you'd annotate one paragraph of Swift? (shows a strategy in action). Each question targets a specific difficulty, which makes the conference useful.