Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives: Comprehending, Analyzing, and Discussing Text

A central assumption of text-based discussions is that comprehension and learning can occur through dialogue with others. The text-based discussion approach challenges students to extract information from text, consider background knowledge, and engage in academic discourse about ideas and concepts, and it demands that students read, write, and think rhetorically in order to interrogate the text itself: Where did this come from? What influenced its creation? How does the author¿s viewpoint shape this text? What other perspectives need to be explored? What might be missing? By posing and exploring these kinds of questions in depth, with the text itself at the center, students become more sophisticated readers, writers, and thinkers.