Kill Two Birds With One Stone--Read then Write

Ditch Your Study Guide & Do This Instead!

By Sarah Stratton


Writing on Command is primarily about writing, but writing about reading grows readers and is still writing. My daughter, Jessica, has taken the Quotes of Support Template and has run with it with her 10th grade students. She uses this instead of a study guide/study guide questions that follow reading assignments. (Any subject area could ditch the study guide and use this.) Study guides ensure that students review the important content in any subject area. The problem with study guides is this–they require very little cognitive effort, are not text-dependent, and do not grow readers. (I even doubt that they improve knowledge.)


However, some sort of review is important. I created the Quotes of Support Alternate Study Guide when my 9th grade honors class at Drew Central was reading The Crucible. Because it was a play, I knew that some students would not be reading aloud at any given time and might just passively listen. Besides, it was also a COVID year (2020-21), and some of my students were virtual or were at home being quarantined. Surprisingly, all my students performed well during that unit; I attribute that fact to this Quotes of Support Template. 


Students are provided a true statement (They don’t have to guess the plot.) about the text in the lefthand column, and they must delve back into the text (or, frankly, delve into the text for the first time) to find a quote that supports the statement. (Sometimes several different quotes work. There usually isn’t only one correct answer.) 


This activity has the propensity to grow readers and writers at the same time! 




You can even take it a step further and make the students explain HOW the quote supports the statement. If you think of the statement as a claim and the quote as the evidence, the HOW explanation is the elaboration. That extra step would help support the ATLAS informative body paragraph format–specifically elaboration.


Jessica reports that students like it. She added that students are highly engaged in digging through the text and searching for quotes that will support the given statements. They aren’t having to figure out WHAT happened. Instead, they are thinking about what in the text supports the statement. If they explain the quote, they are also engaging in elaboration–a difficult skill for most students. 



Now isn’t that much better than using Google to find the answers or providing one word responses to the study guide questions? This works beautifully for any subject area that has students engage in any type of reading. I’ve tried it in social studies, and it works great! You can find the template and numerous samples on the Writing on Command Website under Powerful Reading Templates That Support Writing Too. It’s the NEW TEMPLATE!




 Ⓒ Sarah Stratton 2025 All Rights Reserved

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