Scaffolding Reading Experiences
to Promote Success: A Flexible Approach to Fostering Comprehension
by Michael Graves, professor and head of the
Literacy Education Program at the University of Minnesota, and
Bonnie Graves, a freelance writer specializing
in instructional materials and fiction for children.
 Nearly
fifty years ago, Emit Betts introduced the Directed Reading Activity
(DRA), a preset plan for teaching basal reading selections, and
for most of this time the DRA was the mainstay of the basal approach.
In some ways, the DRA served its purpose well, providing teachers-many
of whom were not highly trained in instructional methods-with a
conventional approach to dealing with conventional basal selections.
Today's teachers, however, are highly skilled in instructional methods
and are well prepared and eager to assume the role of reflective
practitioners; they are professionals who make informed decisions
to create instruction especially well suited to their students.
At the same time, basal readers are changing or being replaced with
trade books, and teachers no longer are satisfied with conventional
approaches to conventional selections. Students in today's classes
are diverse, the selections they read are diverse, and the approaches
necessary to foster successful reading experiences are likewise
diverse. A Scaffold Reading Experience is a flexible framework for
planning reading experiences in today's classrooms.
A Scaffold Reading Experience (SRE) is a set of pre-reading,
reading, and post reading activities designed specifically to assist
a particular group of students in successfully reading, understanding,
learning from, and enjoying a particular selection. An SRE presents
a set of options from which you, the classroom teacher, choose those
best suited to lead a group of students to success-to the fluent,
rich, and rewarding reading experience that produces lifelong readers
who both can read and who choose to do so.
The two phases of an SRE are shown below. During the planning
phase, you consider your students, the selection they are reading,
and the purposes of the reading.
 Based
on these considerations, you select those pre-reading, reading,
and post-reading activities that will lead to success during the
implementation phase. In general, with less proficient students,
more difficult selections, and more challenging purposes, more scaffolding
is needed. The Scaffold Reading framework, however, is designed
to suggest specific combinations of activities for specific situations,
and thus each SRE is likely to include a unique set of pre-reading,
reading, and post reading activities.
Pre-reading activities prepare students to read the upcoming
selection. They can get students interested in reading the selection,
remind students of things they already know that will help them
understand and enjoy the selection, and pre-teach aspects of the
selection that students may find difficult. Pre-reading activities
are important because only with adequate preparation will the experience
of reading be enjoyable, rewarding, and successful. Pre-reading
options for an SRE include motivating students, relating the reading
to students' lives, activating background knowledge, building text-specific
knowledge, pre-teaching vocabulary, pre-teaching concepts, pre-questioning,
predicting, setting directions, and suggesting reading strategies.
Reading activities include both things that students themselves
do as they are reading and things that teachers do to assist them
as they are reading. Reading options for an SRE include silent reading
by students, oral reading by teachers, teacher-guided reading, oral
reading by students, and teacher modification of the text.
Post reading activities serve many purposes. They provide opportunities
for students to synthesize and organize information gleaned from
the text so that they can understand and recall important points.
They allow students to evaluate an author's message, his or her
stance in presenting the message, and the quality of the text itself.
They allow both teachers and students to evaluate students' understanding
of the text. And they provide opportunities for students to respond
to a text in a variety of ways-to reflect on the meaning of the
text, to compare differing texts and ideas, to imagine themselves
as characters in the text, to synthesize information from different
The combination of pre-reading, reading, and post reading activities
suggested in this example is only one of a number of combinations
you could have selected. You would select the activities based on
your own assessment of the students, the reading selection, and
the reading purpose.
To summarize, the purpose in planning and carrying out any SRE
is a straight-forward one: the objective is to do everything possible
to ensure that students have a successful reading experience. A
successful reading experience is one in which students understand
the selection, learn from it, enjoy it, and achieve the goals you
and they have set. Moreover, such an experience leaves students
realizing that they have been successful, recognizing that they
have dealt competently with the selection. If students are to become
successful readers-adults who can and do read, both to gain information
and for the pleasure and satisfaction that reading can provide-the
vast majority of their reading experiences must be successful ones.
Parts of this article were taken from Scaffolding
Reading Experiences: Designs for Student Success, by Michael F.
Graves and Bonnie B. Graves, (Norwood, Mass: Christopher-Gordon,
Inc., 1994). Used with permission from the publisher.
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