Readers of biography (these represent teaching points that can be incorporated into a unit study)

• Think about what they know about the historical period and the people in the story.
• Scan the text for support features such as timelines, pictures, documents, sidebars, index, table of contents, etc.
• Ask questions about the text (i.e. what surprises me? What information disagrees with other things I knew or thought I knew? What don't I understand?)
• Work to understand what is the author's perspective on this person's life? (what does the author think is important about this person's life? Why did he or she choose to tell this particular story?)
• Ask themselves "what is the big idea about this person's life?"
• Identify turning points and major decisions in the person's life
• Figure out what conflict the character encounters? How does the character act in light of the conflict?
• Identify the large social and political issues that affected larger society that are illustrated by this biography.
• Consider how the world in which the person made decisions was different than our own.
• Asks "what if..."
• Identify important words and phrases and consider what they mean (segregation, integration, "separate but equal"
• "Cultivate puzzlement" - ask "What don't I understand?" "What is confusing?" "What do I need to know more about?" "How did this happen?" "Why did this happen?"
• Pay attention to the sources the biographer used
• Examine and try to verify evidence used in relating the story
• Go beyond collecting information about the person's life
• Recognize various points of view on an event or era
• Compare different stories of a person's life to determine how authors have different points of view
• Look for details and anecdotes that show how the author interpreted the person's life
• Pay attention to words that show the author constructed the biography based on research (So and so probably did this .. , it seems likely that this person...

Teachers of readers of biography need to:

• Scaffold text structures (how the story is told: flashback, chronological, narrative/expository, poetry, epilogue, author's note, vignettes, introduce background)
• Provide supplemental material to scaffold content (primary source images -photographs, paintings, etc., short piece of non-fiction to provide content)
• Teach readers to compare and contrast people, eras, beliefs
• Help students identify the authorial voice (what information is included, left out, what language is tentative, can you tell how the author is figuring out what happened)
• Invite community members to come in to talk about that era in history (civil rights workers, the elderly, etc.)
• Help students construct a time line of that person's life and historical context

Biography units can be structured around...

• An era (the civil rights era, revolutionary war era, etc.)
• A theme (struggle for freedom - can be people from multiple eras.
• A problem (Justice - How have people worked to make the world more just? What can we do?)
• An individual (compare multiple biographies of one person)

Sample lesson plan sequence

Developed by Victoria Schaub PS1M, Margie Ho PS72, Tom Kelly PS33

Sample lesson plan sequence

Developed by Yolanda Williams, Luisa Valentin, Brenda Cartagena PS1X