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

by Kevin Thomas Smith

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

142 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

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.

Reviews

[The Reading Countess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a successful AP high school teacher, this easy to read and equally easy to implement book is ripe with ideas.

Divided into six easy-to-read chapters, each chapter ends with thought provoking questions and space to jot how you might integrate his ideas in your own classroom.
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

I particularly enjoyed the second and fourth chapters, and found the visual thinking components to validate my training at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in visual thinking strategies. I loved Smith's ideas on how to dovetail primary, secondary and visual art together-synthesis is the level we want all of our kids to get their hands the dirtiest, after all.

Highly, highly recommended!

Thanks to MiddleWeb for a copy of the book in return for an honest review.