Anticipation Guide Strategy





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Use this Strategy:

Before Reading

During Reading

After Reading

Targeted Reading Skills:

· Draw upon prior knowledge

· Recognize the effects of one’s own point of view in formulating interpretations of texts

What is it?

When skillful readers pick up a new book, their minds go into "anticipation mode;" they have developed a set of strategies that help them get ready to read. They examine such things as: the cover and its art work, the book flaps, excerpts from the reviews, the writer's biography, the number of pages and print size; often these readers will open to several points in the text to sample the style and voice of the writer. Struggling readers will often skip all of these strategies as possible ways to approach a text; therefore, if we can design activities that will help them to anticipate "the big ideas" that will be revealed, it may provide an initial "hook" that draws them into the text.

What does it look like?

Anticipation Guides are often structured as a series of statements with which the students can choose to agree or disagree. They can focus on the prior knowledge that the reader brings to the text, or the "big ideas" or essential questions posed (implicitly or explicitly) by the writer as a way for the reader to clarify his/her opinions before reading the text and then compare them to the writer's message as they read.

The following is an example of an anticipation guide for Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Anticipation Guide

Hamlet

Directions: On the continuum in front of each of the numbers, place an "x" that indicates where you stand in regard to the statement that follows. Be prepared to defend and support your opinions with specific examples. After reading the text, compare your opinions on those statements with the author's implied and/or stated messages.

Agree Disagree

------------------------ 1. Families generally have a member's best interests in mind.

------------------------ 2. Having a clear goal, and the ambition to achieve it, is honorable.

------------------------ 3. Power eventually corrupts the people who have it.

------------------------ 4. Revenge is the only way to gain true justice.

------------------------ 5. A person's immoral choices can come back to haunt him/her

------------------------ 6. One must take a stand against injustice, even if the personal cost is great.

------------------------ 7. A person has to confront death in order to understand life's meaning.

------------------------ 8. Moral courage is more difficult to accomplish than physical courage.

------------------------ 9. Evil often spirals out of control.

Click here for a Word version of an Anticipation Guide template

How could I use, adapt or differentiate it?

Use them as a preparation for a preliminary discussion on one or more of the ideas as a way to introduce the text (dialogue, debate, Socratic seminar, jigsaw discussion).

Develop one or more of them as writing prompts (journal, essay, persuasive piece).

Have students chose one (or more) and "track them" throughout the piece of literature.

Return to them at the end of the play, novel, essay, etc. for clarification and closure.

Differentiate this activity to make it more inductive (and challenging) by simply giving students a list of the themes and have them generate a list of statements for an anticipation guide.