BIOPSIA HEPÁTICA EN NAFLD Ventajas
5.6. Diagnóstico con marcadores serológicos indirectos
Once your students have developed a general sense of knowledge by browsing the texts you have available, having lots of partner- and some large-group conversations, and creating classroom learning tools, they’re ready to start zooming in on more spe- cialized subjects. If you’re aligning this reading unit to your social studies workshop and writing unit, then students can begin collecting information toward their writing projects. Even if you’re not doing a writing unit, students will be writing to think and sharing their knowledge with other students. The Common Core State Standards emphasize the importance of short research projects that build knowledge through investigation of different aspects of a topic. This unit provides the perfect opportunity
for students to do just that. You’ll want to help students to zoom in on an area of inter- est and to form inquiry groups around these special topics. Two ways to focus our research are through essential questions we have and topics we find fascinating.
One way to help you guide your students’ research is generating meaningful, pow- erful, and possibly essential questions. You can teach your students to look back over their notes, revising their thinking to form questions that become springboards into inquiry. Some of you have been laying the groundwork for questioning and categoriz- ing information in your past units. Informally assess your students—are they familiar with the practice of looking over their notes, seeing what larger categories emerge and questions they could pursue? You might choose to draw on some of the charts the class did earlier in the year to remind students of this work.
Some teachers like to pose essential questions, or guide their students toward the kinds of essential questions that social scientists often ask, such as:
■ What information do I know about this topic?
■ What am I curious to learn more about? What questions do I have? ■ How might I find some of the answers to my questions?
■ What are my hypotheses to my questions?
You might also want to steer children toward unit specific questions like: ■ What are some characteristics of this country that make it unique? ■ What are some similarities and differences between two countries?
■ What are some ways to describe some elements of a culture, such as language, religion, customs, artistic expression, and money?
■ Describe the stories, folktales, music, and artistic creations that are part of the country’s culture. Compare and contrast these with those of another culture. ■ Compare elements of the country or culture you’re studying with elements of
your own culture or country.
Teach your students that researchers search for answers to questions such as these as a way to guide their study. Teach your third graders to return to their texts, reading in order to develop more knowledge about the essential questions the classroom is researching. Of course, as they read, they may decide to add to the essential questions and expand the scope of the classroom inquiry—or they may decide that one question is too broad, and you’ll teach them how to create smaller, more focused questions.
You don’t have to begin with questions, though—you can also begin with what you find fascinating. You may find that it’s easier for your students to come up with cate- gories of information about subtopics they find fascinating. In that case, their inquiry groups may form around topics such as:
■ Music and the Arts
■ Languages and Cultures inside a Country ■ Government Systems and Money
■ Sports and Recreation
Once your students have some areas of focus, help them to organize themselves into research groups around their special topics. As your students embark on their research, you may wish to return to the unit on writing to learn, and to the nonfiction reading unit, to see if there are any particular strategies that you want to reinforce with small groups of readers. Continue giving students time to read, to talk to their partner, and to share some of what they’ve learned with other students. They’ll probably no longer be putting as much up on the walls of the classroom, since they’ll be busy fill- ing their notebooks with the Post-its and notes they’re jotting as they read. You may find it helpful to teach some quick note-taking strategies, including boxes and bullets, tables and charts, time lines, and labeled drawings. You’ll also want to revisit how readers use their strategies for narrative and expository texts, to read across texts that are multi- structured. Show how you look across a page and synthesize the information you gain from the captions, the sidebars, and the main text. Then show how you ponder not just the information but also the feelings that are instilled by the informational images you encounter. Teach your students to begin to read each new text against the ones they have already read. What new information does each text offer? What new perspectives are included?
At this point in the unit, the goal is for kids to not only be reading a lot but also to be reading with purpose. By the nature of reading like a researcher, your students may not be reading each text in their bin from beginning to end. Rather, they are poring over multiple texts, collecting information from a lot of different sources. The Common Core State Standards remind us that students need to learn this process of gathering relevant information through multiple print and digital sources, as well as drawing evi- dence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. Some stu- dents will soar with this type of reading, while others might get overwhelmed. Teach kids the powerful tool of signal words—all,most,few,but; these words almost always indicate important information for readers. This means that as kids are reading poten- tially at a quicker pace than usual, they can be on the lookout for those words as cues of when to slow down and take note.
Additionally, capitalize on the fact that students are working collaboratively in this unit! Have students stop and share with their research groups often, processing the information they are collecting and learning about the essential question they are pur- suing. Teach your students that researchers can work together to identify all of the possible facts that might help address or explore a question, wondering how all of these facts fit together and hypothesizing possible answers. Many teachers find it very helpful to remind or teach partners or groups to make quick lists of information, describe an important scene, explain something using a boxes-and-bullets structure
to organize the information, discuss a specific cause-and-effect relationship, or explore the dynamics of a topic by comparing and contrasting.
One last note about the questioning process: Teachers have found great success when modeling their own reading and research process, generating their own questions as they read. We put the highest regard on modeling our own reading and writing for our students; Harvey and Daniels remind us of the importance of modeling your own research process, including modeling your own curiosity and pursuing your own ques- tioning. Carry this modeling beyond the content area study—demonstrate this inquiry process in other subject areas or even in everyday occurrences. Begin a connection to a minilesson by saying, “You know, class, I’ve been wondering what all the orange flags mean that have been recently put in, lining the sidewalk outside my house. I’m espe- cially interested in this because the flags go right past my favorite old tree that my grand- father planted years and years ago. I’m worried about it! Can’t you see why? So I did a little research . . .” You might bring out a printout from a recent Google search or per- haps a book that you checked out from the library on urban planning and preservation. Or even an informal transcript of an interview you did with a worker who was putting down flags in other parts of the neighborhood. Examples like these model how natural and curious the research process can be for people. They also model the quick, on-the- run, responsive research the Common Core State Standards highlight.