Critically Analyze Text

Improved Essays
The video “Organize Your Thinking to Critically Analyze Text” (Brouhard, 2012) showcases an instructional strategy called “Keep it or Junk it” in which students read a short passage and select key vocabulary words from their reading to identify the main idea. After this is done, the students are eventually asked to write research essays on the content matter. There are multiple stages to the strategy, and the teacher does implement alternative techniques when she sees students who appear not to comprehend the task and cannot properly fulfill the objective. The students in the video are also shown using various terms from academic language in their classroom responses. The terms are all related to the subject or content matter, such as the “focus question” that they are required to answer or the “colonists” and “Powhatan” who were the focus of the readings. The first stage in the “Keep it or Junk it” strategy has students work together in small groups for ten minutes to write a list of words that they believe are important from the short passage they have been reading. The teacher monitors them as they work and talks to them about the terms they are choosing. Discussing the context in which the words …show more content…
Having students work on this task as the instructor watches gets them engaged further in the lesson and positively affects their understanding of the material. McCarthy and Anderson (2000) state that students who engage in active learning techniques have been found to express better retention of what they have been taught as well as generally performing at higher levels than those who were taught using more traditional

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