Text Learning Exercises

Below is a series of text learning exercises. Each exercise is a protocol for supporting students to engage with one another and the text when learning in havruta. These protocols can be used flexibly with a wide variety of texts and curricular goals and can be adapted for different age groups and small group work. For an introduction to these text learning exercises, watch the video above.

Listening to the Text: This protocol helps students notice a text’s details and practice bringing textual evidence to support interpretations. It supports the PoP stance that we should listen to the text and seek to understand what the text is saying.

Listening to My Peer Partner: This protocol helps students discover ideas in a text and share them with one another. It supports students to become accountable for understanding their partner’s ideas as well as their own.

Noticing and Wondering: This protocol helps students slow down and do a closer reading and/or translation of a text. It encourages students to wonder about the text and ask questions.

Is There Another Way of Understanding That: This protocol helps students consider multiple ways of understanding the same text. By structuring students to look for multiple possibilities of meaning that can be supported with textual evidence, the protocol prevents students from rushing to judgment about a text’s meaning and instead reinforces a habit of wondering and seeking to understand.

I Agree/Disagree because… This protocol engages students in exploring and understanding the content from multiple perspectives. It does so by providing structures so students can practice the PoP skills of Supporting and Challenging in a basic way, by agreeing or disagreeing.