Reading Strategy Video: Some Places More Than Others

Challenge / Context

While teaching Renée Watson’s novel Some Places More Than Others, I had a group of hybrid students who weren’t physically in class at the same time as their peers and needed to access reading strategy instruction asynchronously. I needed a way to model the strategy clearly enough that students could follow along independently, without the benefit of being in the room for live modeling and discussion.

Approach

I recorded this reading strategy walkthrough so hybrid students could follow the same modeling their in-class peers received, paired with supporting Canvas pages that laid out the steps in text at the time.

Design Rationale

This was an early application of Universal Design for Learning in my practice: pairing a modeled video walkthrough with written Canvas materials gave hybrid students more than one way to access the same instruction, so asynchronous learning didn’t mean a lesser experience. Recording the strategy directly, rather than only providing written steps, aimed to preserve the modeling and think-aloud process that’s central to good reading strategy instruction, even when students couldn’t be in the room to see it live.

Outcome / Reflection

This video gave hybrid students equitable access to reading strategy instruction during a genuinely difficult teaching context. Looking back, my accompanying Canvas pages from this period were considerably more text-heavy than the ones I build now — this project is a useful marker of my own growth as a designer since then, as I’ve moved toward leaner, more visually structured course pages that let video and interactive elements do more of the instructional work rather than dense text blocks.