Patterns of Organization for Teaching Non-Fiction

Here is the latest blog post from Keys to Literacy, on teaching Patterns of Organization or Text Structures to help students learn to read non-narrative non-fiction.

Patterns of Organization

New Strategy for Teaching Non-Fiction

Comic Book Templates: An Entry Point into Nonfiction

Check out this short video from Teaching Channel about Teaching Non-Fiction – 

a brilliant strategy using comic book templates to help students identify text structures and attributes of non-fiction in a graphic way.

How to Get Students to Actually Read a Teacher’s Essay Comments

In this Cult of Pedagogy article, high-school teacher Kristy Louden says it was incredibly disheartening when students looked at the grade on papers she’d carefully annotated and either tossed their paper away or consigned it to the depths of a backpack. “Wow, glad I put so much time into that assignment,” was Louden’s sotto voce reaction. “Not only did I feel like I had wasted my time; I felt like they just didn’t care. And then the snowball of thoughts would start: How will they survive if they don’t care about feedback? What’s going to happen in college? Or when they get jobs?” She confesses that this often led her to put off reading students’ papers for days at a time.

After nine years of suffering through this unproductive dynamic, Louden stumbled upon a process that has worked remarkably well for her.

Click here to read about her process.

Student Self-Assessment

An article from Mind/Shift called
How to Build Self-Assessment Into Jampacked High School Classes
highlighting 3 great new strategies:

1. Monthly Student E-mail to Parents
2. Writing Feedback using Anchor Papers and Kaizena, a Google tool
3. Collaborative Reading using Perusall, an app

"Helping students learn to evaluate their own work is a crucial skill that taps into their metacognitive abilities."

Educator Goals

Educator Goals
Click on the link above to see your colleagues' goals for the year. If you see a goal that you think you can help a colleague reach through your support or materials or consultation, please let them know that you can help! This is called Professional Collaboration, which is under the Professional Culture standard on the Educator Rubric. And it's good practice!

Nonfiction Analysis

Click on the link to find a nice Nonfiction Analysis and Summary Paragraph Frame that Ben Francavilla created.

Nonfiction Analysis

Tone and Mood

I know that a lot of you have been teaching Tone and Mood to students, and you report that students often confuse the two. I think the easiest way to distinguish the two - and to address that craft and structure standard that is so difficult - is to focus on Tone as author craft and Mood as effect on reader. Here is a link to a teacher's website that provides a great list of words to describe Tone and Mood - so important, because students often lack the vocabulary to discuss Tone and Mood in a sophisticated way.

Tone and Mood