Teaching With Text-Based Questions: Helping Students Analyze Nonfiction and Visual Texts

by Kevin Thomas Smith

Overview

Help your students navigate complex texts in history/social studies and English language arts! This book shows you how to use a key tool—text-based questions—to build students’ literacy and critical thinking skills and meet the Common Core State Standards. You’ll learn how to ask text-based questions about different types of nonfiction and visual texts, including primary and secondary sources, maps, charts, and paintings. You’ll also get ideas for teaching students to examine point of view, write analytical responses, compare texts, cite textual evidence, and pose their own high-level questions. The book is filled with examples that you can use immediately or modify as needed. Each chapter ends with a reflection section to help you adapt the ideas to your own classroom.

What’s Inside:

• Helpful information on teaching different types of nonfiction texts, including literary nonfiction, informational texts, primary and secondary sources, and visual texts
• Ideas for locating primary sources
• Questions students should ask about every text
• Techniques for soliciting higher-order questions from students
• Ways to get students to think critically about the relationships between texts

• Strategies to help students integrate information from different types of sources, a skill that will help students respond to performance tasks on the PARCC and SBAC assessments and DBQs on AP exams
• Tips for teaching students to write good responses to text-based questions, including how to cite sources and incorporate point of view
• Ideas for using rubrics and peer grading to evaluate students’ responses
• Connections to the informational reading standards of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts for grades 3-12 and of the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415744041
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/18/2014
Series:	Eye on Education Books
Pages:	142
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kevin Thomas Smith earned his B.A. and M.A.E. from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. During the past ten years, he has taught a variety of AP subjects, including AP World History, AP European History, and AP U.S. Government and Politics. In 2005 and 2006, the Clay County School Board recognized him as an exemplary teacher.

In addition to being a teacher, Kevin Thomas Smith is an AP Reader for the College Board. He also conducts workshops on text-based questions for elementary, middle, and high schools in his district. In 2012, he was invited to serve on a special task force on clinical education at the University of North Florida.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why Text-Based Questions?

Chapter 2: The Different Types of Nonfiction Text

Chapter 3: Questions Students Should Be Asking About Texts

Chapter 4: Working with Multiple Texts

Chapter 5: Writing Good Responses to Text-Based Questions

Chapter 6: Evaluating Students’ Responses to Text-Based Questions

Editorial Reviews

"If you are concerned about how to elevate the thinking in your classroom, how to infuse high quality nonfiction texts into your curriculum, or where to look for visual texts that will augment your language arts and/or social studies lessons, then look no further than Teaching with Text-Based Questions. The book is divided into six easy-to-read chapters, each ending with thought provoking questions and space to jot how you might integrate his ideas into your own classroom."

—Tess Alfonsin, Middleweb

"Regardless of years of experience or area of expertise, educators need this book in their writing toolbox. Kevin Thomas Smith offers concise, practical, and meaningful examples that will help teachers guide students in mastering the skill of critical thinking."

—Matt Rickey, Language Arts/Social Studies Teacher, East Noble High School, Kendallville, IN

"While the Common Core provides the literary standards for K-12 educators, it does not explain how to use the standards with real students. Kevin takes these rigorous standards and provides step-by-step instructions for educators to use from the very first day of school. This book gives the necessary tools to coax students deeper into all types of texts from visual to informational."

—Sharon Walsh, Secondary Reading Coach, Clay County School District, FL

From the Publisher