What, Why & How: Easy Steps for Teaching Text Structure in a Powerful Way (Part 1)
Posted on March 17, 2025Share This Content
teaching nonfiction
Revisiting Text Features – Going Deeper with WHAT, WHY, HOW
Posted on September 24, 2024Preparation Select a text that has strong supporting/extending features – graphs, maps, photos and captions, etc. Locate 3-4 features that you can focus on during the Phase 2 part of the lesson. If you’re unsure whether the features are strong, think about how you might answer the questions posed in steps 1-3 on the ANCHOR …Read more
Share This Content
When students shrug in response to “What’s the main idea?”
Posted on October 27, 2023Are your students regurgitating facts from a text without really thinking about the big ideas being conveyed? A few weeks ago a teacher and I conferred with a student reading a book called Gorillas (Pioneer Valley series). When we asked the student, “What’s the main idea?” They shrugged. Here’s a version of what happened during …Read more
Share This Content
Noticing an Author’s Purpose Can Lead to Transformative Understanding
Posted on February 9, 2023Noticing an author’s purpose helps us 1) determine what’s important in a source, 2) begin to think critically about the information in a source, and 3) remember what we read. What follows are a few recommendations for teaching “author’s purpose.” Integrate WHY into your discussions of author’s purpose The WHY of noticing an author’s purpose …Read more
Share This Content
Thinking Aloud for Students – The What, Why, How & When
Posted on January 13, 2022When we realize a student does not understand a complex chunk of text, we may need to stop asking questions for understanding and “think aloud” for the student, modeling how to make sense of the text. What follows is an excerpt from a middleweb.com column “Letting Go is Messy” that I co-wrote with Julie Webb …Read more
Share This Content
Why do I have to annotate? Why can’t I just highlight?
Posted on November 12, 2021Note: This post was first published in January 2019. I’ve revised and posted again because it’s still so relevant! “Why can’t I just highlight? Why do I have to annotate?” Ever heard that from a student? I don’t have to convince you of the value of annotating, but we do need to remind (and even …Read more
Share This Content
Would a clearer purpose help?
Posted on February 2, 2021If your students struggle with determining what’s important or they think “it’s all important!” make sure they have a clear purpose for reading. A purpose stated as a question is even better. Questions like “What is the author’s point of view? What are details in the sources that make me think so?” or “How did …Read more
Share This Content
Conferring Tip #2: Assess Fluency
Posted on November 4, 2019Truth #1 – When a student is reading nonfiction, their rate may slow down when they are making sense of harder parts and speed up when they are making sense of easier parts. THIS IS BEAUTIFUL! It means they are attempting to monitor for meaning making!!!! Truth #2 – A student may never read as …Read more
Share This Content
Conferring Tip #1: When readers get stuck on a word, teach for cross-checking.
Posted on October 27, 2019Our students may need a reminder to use multiple sources of information to figure out a word – meaning cues (context & pic clues), visual cues (the letters in a word), and syntax cues (how the language sounds). They may need to learn to ask questions like: Does that make sense? Does that look right? …Read more
Share This Content
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.