"Assignment Template Aligned to California's Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy"

The template provided in the article is a template in order to help us as teachers guide our students into better reading, comprehending, and responding to texts.  In order to become great readers, comprehenders, and responders, there are a lot of steps that they can take in order to get there and this article does a fine job at pointing our students toward those steps.  Personally, I found the section on pre-reading to be extremely important.  I find that a lot of teachers don't have their students do any sort of pre reading or pre activities before reading a text, they just dive in.  In my experience, I don't ever really even do any pre reading.  I think it would be extremely beneficial to have my students do activities before reading to get them prepared on what is to come.  I could definitely see myself using the pre reading activity of making predictions and asking questions.  I think this is a great way to get the students into discussions and sharing, while also preparing them for the text that they are about to read.

I also really love the ideas on post-reading.  A lot of teachers have their students write summaries or take quizzes, which is great, but I think that post reading should go beyond that just as the template shows.  I would want my students to have the chance to write responses and ask open ended questions.  This is a great way to further their learning and also give them a chance to have discussions with one another and share their thoughts and feelings on the text.  When students are able to do this, I think it is easier to understand the types of texts that my students enjoy and I would be able to hopefully base their learning off of their preferences.

I thought the the formative assessment section of this article was extremely useful.  I love the "student generated test questions" assessment.  This is a great way to get the students to think critically about the text, but at the same time it would help me as a teacher to see where their thinking is and what they think is a fair and reasonable question.  I think this would really help me to see how deep their thinking goes and what else we need to work on.