When selecting a text to model comprehension strategies, what is the most important consideration?

• A. asking students what types of books they want to read
• B. analyzing the text for possible supports or barriers to understanding
• C. providing students with other texts by the same author or in the same genre
• D. searching the Internet to find positive and negative reviews from other educators

Answer: (B)

When you model comprehension strategies, the most important thing is to analyze the text for supports or barriers to understanding. This helps you plan how to guide students through the reading with the right prompts, think-alouds, and scaffolds. By looking at elements like vocabulary difficulty, sentence length, text structure, genre, and how much prior knowledge the passage assumes, you can anticipate where students might struggle and decide which strategies to model at those moments. For example, if a passage uses a term that’s unfamiliar, you can demonstrate how to use context clues or a quick reference to bridge that gap. If the structure is complex, you can show chunking the text, making predictions, or summarizing after each section. This targeted approach makes the modeling purposeful and gives students concrete steps they can transfer to their own reading. The other options don’t connect the modeling to the text itself: asking about preferences focuses on motivation, not strategy demonstration; offering more books by the same author or genre doesn’t address the immediate comprehension challenge in the current text; and consulting online reviews doesn’t inform how the text might support or hinder understanding.