When skilled readers approach the reading of a fiction or nonfiction text, they automatically summon up prior knowledge of any information or experience that will provide a foundation and/or context for the text. One of the ways we can explicitly teach our students this strategy is to have them consciously create a framework for their reading. When readers create these connections, it engages them right from the beginning and helps them to deepen their understanding. This strategy asks the reader to summon what they know about the topic, place, event, or issue and to think about how they know that information. Taking a critical look at how we gather our knowledge on a topic is an important step in evaluating its depth and validity.

Frame of Reference is a graphic organizer that helps students to access prior knowledge as well as the sources by which they gathered that knowledge. This visual mimics the structure of how a photograph or drawing might be "framed." The small diagram below illustrates the blank template; the topic, event or issue is labeled in the center; a student’s notes on what they know about that topic are written (in single words or phrases) inside the interior rectangle, and how the student gathered that information is (the people, texts, events that influenced their thinking) in the outer rectangle.

How could I use, adapt or differentiate it?

• For homework, students can choose 3 or 4 of the questions to answer to illustrate their understanding of the reading.

• Once students have generated questions in response to a text, consider having them work with a partner to categorize the kinds of questions they have posed (e.g., knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) using the collaborative questions graphic organizer and then work with their partner to answer the questions they have posed.

• A great closure activity for a full-length text is to ask individual students to develop questions for homework (e.g., two content questions and two writer’s craft questions that remain “unanswered” for them).  Collect them the next day for compilation.  On the following day, distribute a list of all of the questions to the class and have small groups or the large group choose the questions that strike a chord with the group and answer them in small or large group discussions.

• Or, from a compiled list, for homework, students can choose 3 or 4 of the questions to answer to illustrate their understanding of the reading and/or as a springboard for discussion the next day.

• Students can choose a question that intrigues them and develop a writing prompt or a thesis statement that they defend by gathering evidence from the text to support it.