What, Why & How: Easy Steps for Teaching Text Structure in a Powerful Way (Part 1)
Posted on March 17, 2025Share This Content
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I offer a three-phase guide to teaching students how to effectively engage with informational sources such as texts, videos, and infographics. Phase 1 involves introducing the source, Phase 2 focuses on teaching strategies for understanding, and Phase 3 requires students to create a response, enhancing comprehension.
If students are reading multiple texts on a topic and taking notes on each of those sources, I require that (or strongly suggest) they write notes in phrases–just enough words to help them remember what they learned or what the author was saying or the student’s response to information. In most cases, I strongly encourage …Read more
Do you students notice when authors provide definitions and examples? Many nonfiction authors use these and other types of details when they describe concepts like forces, magnets, weather and so forth. Readers need to recognize these types of details to understand these concepts. I was surprised one day to find out the middle grade students I …Read more
Just be careful. NEWSELA is a great site for short informational articles for students to read. The content is usually worthy of student-led discussions and writing about in response. The beauty of NEWSELA is that the same article is available at different Lexile levels. (When you click on an article, check out the blue bar …Read more
Here’s a middle school lesson for teaching students to analyze how two authors writing about the same topic may shape their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence or advancing different interpretations of the facts. Preparation Go to Science News for Students and locate an article that cites a study. Most of these articles …Read more
Teaching the language of text structures can help students compare and contrast texts more easily (e.g., The author shares a problem and then several solutions… I noticed the author describes about multiple aspects of the….). What follows is a demo lesson I gave to introduce students to using the language of text structure to help …Read more
Have you ever conferred with a student who had difficulty recalling what they’d read? Or who seemed to recall the “easy to understand” parts of a text but not the harder parts? These students may need instruction on monitoring for meaning. I use the Coding Strategy (Hoyt, 2008) to reinforce self-monitoring. After each sentence or …Read more
Do your students struggle with determining what is important when reading informational texts? Are they unsure of what to underline and annotate? I remember one fifth grade student saying, “Well, I underlined the whole text because it was all important!” What follows are suggestions for introducing this analogy during a Phase 2 Meet the Strategies …Read more
Identifying a text’s structure(s) can play a powerful role in comprehension. Knowing the five types of structures is not enough, though. Over several lessons and across time, we have to continually weave in discussions about the what, the why, the how. In part 1 of this series, I share the tools for teaching students to identify a text’s structure in a way that leads to understanding the main ideas in a source.