We follow an upside-down approach with the aim of giving students even more support in the process of understanding. Until now, students would frequently start expanding their knowledge by reading an advanced text in full.
They would then process this knowledge with the help of a worksheet. Our upside-down approach is designed to interlink these two activities much more closely in accordance with the didactics of reading comprehension.
The tasks, which are designed to guide students’ reading, are aligned with the three well-established stages of teaching texts: pre-reading, while-reading (content acquisition) and post-reading (deepening or broadening the content). This way we help students not only to make appropriate links between individual pieces of information in the text, but also to make connections with their prior knowledge and life experience. This increases the likelihood that important connections of meaning will emerge, enabling a deeper understanding.
The following diagram will help you choose the teaching scenario. The diagram is designed to show how students can work to complete the tasks while also having the knowledge sheet at hand. We recommend a digital setting, as it ideally supports the didactic approach mentioned above. The sections to be read in the factsheet are linked with a hyperlink in the worksheet; in other words, a single click takes students to the passages to be read. Depending on the class and the equipment available, of course, an analogue or hybrid setting might be more appropriate.
