What follows is a description of a lesson I taught a small group of 5th grade students on how to identify a text’s structure. (Confession: Based on the lesson I taught, I suggest a few changes.) This was a three-phase lesson using a text structure module for planning that I discussed in Part 1 of this series.

Backwards Plan

After reading the ReadWorks article I’d chosen and thinking about the text’s macrostructure, I decided I wanted the students to be able to describe the problem for coral reefs and the solutions conservationists are pursuing to resolve this problem. So my Phase 3 Meet the Response prompt for writing would be the following: Explain the problems climate change and pollution are causing for coral reefs and the solutions that conservationists are pursuing. This helped me think about which part of the text we’d read during Phase 2 (just two paragraphs midway through the article) to identify the text’s macrostructure and the vocabulary I’d need to introduce during Phase 1 & 2 (symbiosis, structure, conservationist). (Link – slide deck with these vocabulary words.)

Phase 1 Meet the Source

I introduced a vocabulary word – climate change BUT I wish I’d introduced symbiosis. (Understanding the term climate change really well is not critical for understanding the text. Students just need a sense that it is a problem for the corals.) Symbiosis would help me with my discussion question and would aid me in Phase 2 when the students need to understand the dire circumstances that occur for other organisms (like algae) if the coral reefs die.

Next we previewed an article from ReadWorks.org and then as they read, I conferred with individual students. Then I posed a question for discussion: What is the relationship between the coral and the algae?

Phase 2 Meet the Strategies

We quickly reviewed what we’d discussed in Phase 1 and then I asked the students to mark the two paragraphs we’d be closely reading. I also shared another vocabulary word – conservationist. (Ideally, I’d like to have also taught the word structure.)

To start the lesson, I shared a building analogy for helping students conceptualize what we mean by a text’s structure. In short, different buildings have different structures (e.g., a house, a grocery store, a school) that serve different purposes. When we know what kind of building we are entering, we expect a particular type of organization or structure; this helps us in many ways similar to how thinking about an author’s purpose and a text’s structure is. To read more about this analogy, see Part 2 of this series.

As discussed in Part 1 of this series, I continued the lesson by stating what, why and how of identifying a text’s structure (using the module as a guide for what to say), presented the student-friendly description of the structures, and introduced the anchor chart with three simple steps for identifying a text’s structure (i.e., notice, connect, synthesize).

I did a think aloud or I DO in which I referred to the steps on the anchor chart (notice, connect, synthesize) as I modeled noticing a few important details (climate change, pollution, harm, dirty water), making connections between those details in a way that might be revealing a text structure (i.e., they all seem to be describing a problem) and synthesizing what I was learning and why it was important. Then I engaged the students in WE DO and YOU DO. As we read and thought aloud (noticing, connecting & confirming the text structure, synthesizing), we generated notes (on sticky notes) to help us track our thinking; I was the scribe this time around. As we added each note, we looked for a pattern across the notes; they all seem to be describing problems for the coral reef.

In this 15-minute lesson, we only closely read the first paragraph. (You could say that this first paragraph has a micro-structure of cause-effect but because they’d eventually read the next paragraph, the larger structure of problem-solution would emerge.) Because this was a demo lesson I didn’t get to lead another 15-minute lesson for the second paragraph; however, I did add in hypothetical words for a follow-up lesson in the image below (i.e., conservationists, studying, growing in labs, transplanting).

The key words/phrases should be just enough to trigger a memory of what the reader learned; avoid asking students to write sentences in this phase because they may just want to copy those notes when they get to Phase 3 (and they may just copy from the text to begin with).

BTW – Using graphic organizers for text structure is okay. I like to use sticky notes (written by me or by students) because they can be manipulated into a plan for writing in phase three. The graphic organizers on the student-friendly list of structures seem to be enough to help them visualize how they need to organize their thinking as they read. That’s just me, though ;).

Phase 3 Meet the Response

The notes we created in Phase 2 became the plan for writing in Phase 3. Before the students began writing (only about the first paragraph because that’s all I had time for in the demo), we orally rehearsed. In the I DO for oral rehearsal, I used each of the key words in a sentence (aloud) as a model for students. For example, for the first two sticky notes with key words, I said something like “Today I learned about coral reefs and how climate change and pollution are harming them.” Then they took turns using a key word to create sentences (orally), building on the previous student’s sentences. In the image below, you’ll notice how I jotted connecting words (as a result, in addition). Finally they began writing and I led conferences with individuals. (Unfortunately, I don’t have permission to share their writing here in this blog!)

Closing Thoughts (on making this manageable)

What I’ve shared here is a lot. If you tried just a few of these ideas, I’d recommend these three:

• when planning, spend time reading and thinking carefully about which parts of the text have strong clues as to the text’s structure (these are the parts worth close reading)
• use the three-step anchor chart for identifying a text’s structure
• write key details on sticky notes to track student thinking (and to support writing).

Hope this helps.