How to Create a Structured Reading Assignment: Guided Reading Questions
We’re big believers in structured reading: guided reading questions are one of the eight elements we include in every text-based unit plan. Initially, we created structured reading assignments to help our AP Literature students come to class better prepared for discussion (“Read the book and come prepared to discuss” was not our finest planning, but we were new to AP!). As we moved toward a flipped classroom model, we used guided reading questions to guide all our students (AP, PreAP/honors, and standard-level) through their texts, freeing us up to work one-on-one with struggling students or provide individualized feedback.
We realized that it is hard for our students to know what is important when they’re reading; by providing them with structured reading and guided reading questions specifically, students, especially at the AP level, started to recognize what they should be looking for as they read fresh texts in practice exam situations. While many textbooks provide text-dependent questions, these questions aren’t always the ones our students need to successfully navigate a text, and they certainly may not serve our unique purposes. It can, though, be intimidating to create these assignments for yourself: you’re staring at a text and a blank Google Doc, wondering, Where should I start? Today we’re walking you through our process to give you a good head start.
This first suggestion sounds so obvious as to be offensive, but stick with us: read the entire text first. It’s so tempting to create the assignment as you read in order to save time (not that we’ve learned this from experience or anything ?!). And, to be fair, you can probably come up with most of your questions during your first read. But one of the biggest problems we’ve noticed with publisher materials is that there are a lot of questions that just . . . don’t matter. If you want your assignment to be meaningful, you need to know where the text is going so you can focus your questions on only those things that truly matter instead of stopping for every literary device or interesting detail.
Before you begin, it’s also helpful to have your end goal in mind. What is it that you want students to take away from your lesson or unit? What is the final project going to be? The more you can keep these things in mind as you write, the more useful your assignment is going to be in preparing students to reach those end goals. We found this to be especially important when creating guided reading questions for novels. If you don’t have a clear end in mind, it can be easy to rack up 50+ questions only to ultimately find out about 30 of them weren’t all that important.
Once you know where you’re going, start going back through the text looking for the places you want to ask questions. There are four things, in particular, that we look for as we are creating guided reading questions:
First, look for key points that are essential to help your students understand the text as a whole.
You know where the story is going, so your structured reading assignment can act as a guide, pointing out the most significant moments you don’t want students to miss. You can also bypass less crucial sections of the text, helping your students focus and keeping your assignment to a reasonable length.
Second, look for specific passages that will help students reach the unit’s end goal.
When we created our unit for The Odyssey, we knew we would be asking students to write an essay about the hero’s journey archetype, so we made sure to ask questions throughout the text about the 12 stages of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey model.
Third, look for moments when your students are likely to be confused.
The purpose for creating these structured reading assignments is to help students navigate the text, so when we know a section of the text is particularly challenging, it can be really helpful to include a guided reading question that helps students begin to make sense of it, even if it’s something you already know you’ll come back to later with class discussion, lecture, or a close reading assignment. This is one place where we might ask questions that aren’t necessarily essential to our final unit goals. Students often get frustrated when they can’t make any sense of what they’re reading, and one important goal of the assignment is to avoid having them give up in frustration. If we can anticipate places where they might get stuck, it increases the chances they will stick with the text.
Finally, we like to add questions when it’s just been a really long time without one.
Again, if the purpose of the assignment is to help our students process a text, we need to be asking them to pause regularly to think. Of course, this will look different depending on the length of the text—you’re going to let them go longer without a question in a novel than you will in a short story or article—but it’s something to keep in mind.
One of our biggest game changers when it came to making our grading load more manageable was the realization that we didn’t need to assign dozens of short-answer guided reading questions. We could make many of our questions multiple-choice and prioritize one or two short-answer questions. We’ve talked about writing detractors for multiple-choice questions before, but in a structured reading assignment, we like to include anticipated misunderstandings of the text as well as key words from the section that our students who just skim the text will likely assume are the correct answer. Because the assignment is intended to be a learning tool, we want our students to learn the importance of reading carefully. When choosing our short-answer question(s), we look for questions where there is room for interpretation, sections of the text where there is ample supporting evidence to choose from, and passages that connect to our unit theme or final project.
Creating these structured assignments is definitely a skill that takes practice: we have certainly come a long way from when we started teaching. But hopefully these guidelines will help you get started as you develop your own instincts for what will best help your students to be successful: that’s what matters most, after all.
Do you have your own guidelines for creating a structured reading assignment? Or do you have questions about guided reading questions? Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. We’ve come to enjoy creating these assignments (weird, we know), and we’d love to swap stories!