Margin Notes

In an earlier post, I shared Marilyn Pryle’s Five Questions for Any Text as a framework for reading. This follow-up focuses on what comes next.

In the resource, each of the five questions is broken into subcategories that guide student thinking in more focused ways. Each one follows the same structure, so you can use it right away and align the lesson with the text you are using.

Example from Identifying the Audience:

Questions to guide thinking:

• Who is the intended audience for this text?
• How do you know?
• Who might be excluded?
• Why do you think this?

Teacher supports:

1. Guidance for introducing the thinking, including simple ways to scaffold students into this kind of analysis. The example from this section can be found in the Try This Tomorrow invitation below.
2. Annotated student samples across grade levels that show both student thinking and how a teacher might respond or extend it.
3. Follow-up questions that deepen discussion and support students in transferring this thinking to new texts and real-world contexts.

The rest of the resource provides similar supports for the other four questions, along with student samples and classroom videos that show the work in action.

All credit for this framework and instructional approach belongs to Marilyn Pryle and her book, 5 Questions for Any Text: Critical Reading in the Age of Disinformation.