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

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

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.