February Unit Plan: What's Important in Nonfiction (with a bridge to argument writing)
One of the most efficient reading/writing combos I've ever accidentally created
I’m pretty sure every English teacher on the planet fell in love with Beers and Probst’s Notice and Note signposts a few years ago. Finally: a concrete list of textual elements for students to find so that they could know what to pay attention to in a text.
I’ve taught the signposts in some way almost every year since those books (the fiction one and the nonfiction one) came out.
And yet.
I’ve always felt a little … unmoored? Unsatisfied? Like there’s this little nagging “pebble in my shoe” (as the brilliant Angela Stockman likes to call it). Something has never been quite right.
This has been my conundrum:
For a few students, just being told how to figure out what’s important is a HUGE step forward in their reading lives.
The signposts are, objectively, good and smart things to notice about a text.
For most students (and especially our most adept readers), just noticing and noting didn’t do a ton. Yes, they could find these elements … but then what? They asked themselves the questions … but was it helping them become stronger readers? I was unsure.
But this year, by accident, really, I figured out some ways of making this work more meaningful and stickier. By consciously connecting these reading skills to students’ upcoming writing unit, blending in vocabulary study, and using them to stimulate discussion, and connecting to prior learning, students learned not only what they should be noticing in their nonfiction reading but also what to do with that info.