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Genre Structure Strategies Using The Notepad

Genre structure is an important way for students to comprehend text, and the notepad is a perfect tool to help them to do that. A caveat is typing speed. Writers who type less than 10 words per minute will struggle to compose digitally. So, if students aren’t typing with accuracy and fluency above that level, time to add typing practice. Once typing practice is no longer needed, then you can move on to the notepad. Here are some genre structure strategies to help support comprehension using the notepad.

Preparing the Notepad

Like before, readers use genre characteristics to track the text and monitor comprehension. With a narrative text, the reader can open the notepad and place it over the questions. They prepare the notepad for the text structure by creating the genre structure.

A narrative genre structure would look like this:

(Characters, Setting, Problem, Events, Conclusion)

C
S
P
E
C

As students read, they can jot down salient information.

A genre structure for informational text would look like this:

(Hook, Thesis, Ideas/Details, Thesis revisited)

H
T
I/D
T2

Argumentative text would look like this:

(Hook, Claim, Counter, Sources, Reasoning, Claim Revisited)

H
C
C
S
R
C2

Persuasive text might look like this:

(Hook, Thesis/Opinion, Ideas, Reasoning, Call to Action or Thesis Revisited)

H
T/O
I
R
C2A or T2

As students read, they can jot down ideas to help them remember the key points.

Using the Genre Structure for Questions

After students have read the text, they can use the genre structure on their notepad to reference ideas. This helps in two ways. First, students can consult the notepad and generally reference ideas and interpretations as a smaller text. They can use the location of the elements in the notepad to reference the locations physically in the text if they need to consult more text evidence.

Second, students can look at the main question and see if they can put the answer in their own words before looking at the answer choices, where it can often be difficult to determine the best over the good answers. They can check their own understanding before being “misled” by an answer choice. They can also look for salient evidence before being presented with selected evidence by the test writers.

Cautions

Students must be fluent in typing and in saving the notepad. Losing data is frustrating. And taking too long to type is a waste of time and energy.

Bottom line, students must be using the notepad—and all other tools and routines—as genre structure strategies that are powerful for them as individuals. If we are having students do things as procedures and rote rules, then we are divorcing the process from meaning. And meaning is the point of all of this mess. Students may need the notepad or other strategies for one text and not for another. Or they may need it for a time and then are ready to abandon it because they no longer need the support it provided. I like to think of tools and genre structure strategies as tool-making “assists” for scoring points on STAAR. In basketball, you might be able to make the basket on your own. But you might need a team of resources in game play.

TEKS Commentary

If you’ve been with me for a while on these posts, you know that I believe that the answer to “which TEKS?” is “all of them.” You can’t really separate one from the other because reading and writing are processes and not isolated bits of knowledge. If we had to focus on one TEKS to comply with administrative demands for what we write on the chalkboard, I’d pick Multiple Genres—Genres F and Comprehension I.

Hopefully, you found these genre structure strategies helpful. Until next time!