What, Why & How: A Sample Text Structure Lesson (Part 3)
Posted on April 7, 2025Share This Content
teaching with informational texts
What, Why & How: A Useful Analogy for Introducing Text Structure(s) (Part 2)
Posted on March 24, 2025Ever hunt for the perfect texts to teach “text structure” and end up just banging your head against the wall? It’s because texts are more complex than five simple structures, right? In this blog entry I describe an analogy I’ve started using with students to move us beyond this problem.
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What, Why & How: Easy Steps for Teaching Text Structure in a Powerful Way (Part 1)
Posted on March 17, 2025Identifying 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.
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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
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Three-Phase Plan for Learning with Informational Sources (UPDATED POST)
Posted on September 10, 2024Teaching our students how to make sense of informational sources can feel overwhelming. With a systematic plan for teaching and learning, we can make this easier for ourselves and our students. Visit this updated post for the latest version of the three-phase plan – Meet the Source, Meet the Strategies, Meet the Response.
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Explode to Explain (Updated)
Posted on February 20, 2024Are your students citing “text evidence” without really having control of the meaning of that evidence? Do they forget to explain further or elaborate? If either of these is the case for your students, they may need to space to contemplate what one detail or quote from the text means. A simple way to do …Read more
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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
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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
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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
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In Part 3 of this series, I describe a three-phase lesson I gave on identifying text structures. I share lots instructional artifact photos!