Reading Detectives
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One text, four things to find
Reading Detectives is a ten-minute activity. Learners get a short text and hunt through it for four things: the facts, the opinions, the evidence and the key terms. Then they say how they know. It is for learners who treat everything on a page as true, which is most of them.
For example“It says it's the best one, so it is.”
Your jobPut each sentence from the review in its box. Some fit more than one.
Note 1 of 8
The exhibition opened at the City Art Gallery in September and features work from 15 contemporary artists.
The handout
Colours of Identity: exhibition review
The exhibition opened at the City Art Gallery in September and features work from 15 contemporary artists. The exhibition includes over 50 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media pieces.
In my opinion, Fragmented Voices is the most powerful artwork in the exhibition. The piece stands over two metres tall and combines photography, textiles and sound recordings. Visitor surveys showed that 82% of attendees spent more than ten minutes viewing this installation. The varied textures and recorded voices create an immersive experience that encourages visitors to reflect on their own identity.
The curator described the exhibition as “a celebration of diverse experiences and creative expression.” The use of symbolism, contrast and composition is evident throughout the collection.
Where does it belong?
One text, four boxes, about ten minutes (a suggestion), one question.
Why this works in your room
Learners who ask how do you know are harder to fool.
For your learners: They tell a claim from evidence, and can say which source they would trust and why.
For you: You know which sentences will start an argument, and the argument does the teaching.
The text
150 to 250 words
A review, report, case study or advert that mixes facts, opinions, evidence and key terms.
The handout
Four boxes under it
Find the facts. Find the opinions. Find the evidence. Find the key terms.
Ten minutes, in pairs
Fill the boxes, or mark it in four colours
You go round asking one thing: how do you know?
Two for the board
Planned before the lesson
A sentence that fits two boxes, and an opinion written to sound like a fact.
Next time: two texts, one question
When they are ready
A maker's claim and a customer review. Which would you trust when advising a customer, and why?
Elsewhere in Bradford ThreadWorks
Big 4Copilot: writing a simple prompt and asking for a draft, such as a summary, a starter or a quiz.Open Big 4 (opens in a new tab)
Lesson WeaverGo Read writes a Reading Detectives text, with the facts, opinions and evidence marked for you.Open Lesson Weaver (opens in a new tab)
Prompts to paste into Copilot
Two prompts to paste into Copilot. They are our own wording, not Big 4 training. Change what is in brackets, and leave out learners' names.
A Reading Detectives text
I teach [subject] to [level] learners. Write a 200 word [review, case study or report] about [topic] that mixes facts, opinions, evidence and key subject terms. Include two opinions written to sound like facts, and one sentence that is both a fact and evidence. Then list which sentences are which, so I can check their answers.
Two texts that disagree
I teach [subject] to [level] learners. Write two short texts of about 120 words on [topic]: one a company's claim, one a customer's experience, that seem to disagree but could both be true. Then list what a learner would need to know to decide which to trust.
Reading like the subject reads
The Education Endowment Foundation's literacy guidance asks each subject to teach how its experts read: an engineer judging a claim, a critic weighing a review.
EEF, Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools (opens in a new tab)Questions that make them explain
Questioning the text and explaining an answer are reading comprehension strategies. The EEF Toolkit rates them among the highest-impact, lowest-cost approaches it lists.
EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit: reading comprehension strategies (opens in a new tab)How sure is this?
Moderately. Teaching learners to question a text is well supported. Reading Detectives is from the college's CPD deck, Reading Across the Curriculum, and has not been tested as a named activity.
No source claimed