Episode 400: A Simple Hack for Helping Students Find the Main Idea in Informational Text

Struggling to get your students to actually find the main idea—without guessing or copying random sentences? You’re not alone.

In today’s episode, we’re sharing a simple, classroom-tested hack that helps middle school students confidently identify the main idea in informational text—without the frustration (for you or them!).

If main idea lessons have been feeling like a struggle, this quick shift might be exactly what you need

Transcript

Hook And Promise

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. And I have to be honest with you about something as we head into this episode: a simple hack for helping students find the main idea in informational text. And that is that informational text has a reputation, and it is not a great one. I actually posted something on Instagram not too long ago about the struggle of teaching informational text, and the response was insane. There were so many comments, so many teachers basically saying, yes, I hate informational text. This is my life. And I get it. Sometimes teaching informational text is the worst for you and for your students. But what I want you to know before we dive in today is that it doesn't always have to be that way. And today, what I'm going to give you is a concrete, simple tool that is going to make one of the trickiest parts of informational text, which is finding the main idea, so much more manageable for your students. So this is a simple hack for helping your students find the main idea. Let's get into today's episode. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple: to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher Digital Planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. All right, here is the thing about main idea. On the surface, it sounds really simple, right? Read the text, find the main idea. Like how hard can that possibly be? However, if you know, like I do, if you've ever asked a class of middle schoolers to do that, especially when we have dense informational text, you know it really is not that simple at all. Students are either gonna give you a detail instead of a main idea, or they give you something that is so broad it could apply to literally any text ever written, or they just stare at you like you ask them to solve, I don't know, like a calculus problem or something crazy like that. And the reason that this happens isn't because your students aren't capable, it's because finding a main idea is actually a multi-step thinking process. And we often ask students to skip straight to the end without actually walking them through the steps. So today I want to give you a tool that changes that. So the tool is called the inverted story triangle. Now I want you to picture a triangle flipped upside down, right? It's wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. And the idea is very simple. Students start with a lot of information at the top and they gradually narrow it down until they arrive at one concise main idea at the very bottom of the triangle. So if you think of it like this, the top of the triangle is an email, the middle is a text message, and the bottom, the main idea, is as short as a tweet. You're taking a lot of information and compressing it step by step into something that is concise and meaningful. So there are three steps for this process, and I'm gonna walk you through each one. So the first step lives at the widest part of the triangle, which is the top. And this is where students are going to write a tag and a summary of the text that they just read. And if you are an EB teacher, you already know what a tag is. It stands for title, author, genre. And then following the tag, students write a short summary of the text. And we're talking like three to five sentences. This step helps students' ideas get flowing. They're not trying to analyze anything yet, they're just capturing the most important information from what they read. And I want you to think about the summary also of using our somebody wanted but so then approach for teaching summary writing. I actually shared about this over on one of our Instagram stories. Um, I can uh link that in the show notes for you guys as well. So if we're talking about an article, just to give you guys an example, um, if we have a biographical article about Claudette Colvin, we have the following text as an example. This would be what that would look like for the top of the triangle, right? The wider part. So Michelle Carter's biographical article, Claudette Colvin, a biography, tells the important story of Claudette Colvin's role in the fight for civil rights. When she was 15, Claudette bravely refused to give up her bus seat, inspiring others and sparking important events like the Montgomery bus boycott. Claudette's courage led to changes that helped end segregation, showing that even young people can make a big difference in the fight for justice. So notice what happened in that example. The tag came first, right? We had title, author, genre, and then we had a short focused summary that followed. That's it. That's step one. Now, granted, that was a very well-written example, but that's the example nonetheless. And what I love about starting here is that summarizing is a skill that students have been building since elementary school. By the time they're in your middle school classroom, it should feel like familiar ground, but even if it's not, that somebody wanted but so then approach is so immensely helpful. And really, here, like you're not asking them to do something crazy. You're asking them to do something that they should be familiar with, and you're giving them a launching pad that they already know how to use by giving this them this tool at the top of the pyramid. Um, so to help students write their best summary, you can try asking some of these questions, right? What are the most important details in the text? If I only had five sentences to retell this, what points would I include? Or what would someone need to know to understand this text correctly? So you can ask those questions too. All right, now we move into the middle of the triangle. And this is where students start to shift away from summarizing to analyzing. And this step really uses that somebody wanted but so then method to make their summary even more concise and compress it down now into like one to three sentences. So students are gonna take everything they wrote at that top of the triangle and they're gonna make it shorter, one to three sentences that breaks the text down by identifying a person's motivation, a complication that they face, and how that complication shapes the events of the text. So we're going from the email to the text here, right? It's less information and more precision. So for that Claudette Colvin article, uh somebody wanted but so then sentence might look like this. Claudette Colvin wanted to sit on the bus, but she was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger. So she refused and was arrested for defying an unfair law. Then Claudette's brave actions inspired others and contributed to the ending of bus segregation in Alabama. So if you notice how that works, students are no longer just retelling, they're organizing, they're identifying what mattered and why, which is why that somebody wanted but so then sentence is so helpful. So to help somebody to help your students rather write their SWBST, you can ask them, who is this text about? What do they want? What happens to complicate that? How does the person respond? And then what happens as a result? All right, step three. We are at the bottom of the triangle now. This is the tweet, and this is the main idea, which is the one sentence that captures the message the author wants the reader to take away from the text. The key here is that because students have already worked through the tag and the summary and the SWBST sentence, they have done all of the thinking. They're not staring at a blank page trying to pull a main idea out of thin air, right? They've already built up to it. So for that Claudette Colvin article, a specific main idea might be the following. Claudette Colvin's brave act of refusing to give up her bus seat had a significant impact on the fight for civil rights. Or you can push students to make a more like universal main idea, one that applies beyond this specific text. So that might be something like even young people can make a difference when they stand up for what they believe in. Both of those sentences and main ideas are valid. The universal version just asks students to zoom out a little further and think about like the broader message of the article. So to help students land here, you can ask them the following two questions. What does the author want me to learn from this text? And what point is the writer trying to make? And like, really, that's it. That's kind of how simple it is. But I do want to give you one big piece of advice when you are using the inverted story triangle. Try to use it every time. Anytime that you're doing the main idea. Because the first time students work through it, it might take them a while. It might take 10 or 15 minutes. And yes, that might feel like a lot, but if you stick with it, it's gonna get a heck of a lot easier, right? By that third time or that fifth time, they're gonna move through it so much faster. And their main ideas are just gonna be so much stronger. So this tool works best with informational texts that like tell a real life story. If we're talking about biographical articles, texts that walk through a progression of events, anything that's narrative driven. And the bonus is that you can also use it with fictional texts too. All you have to do is swap out the words main idea for theme, because a theme is really just the author's message to the reader, which is exactly what the inverted triangle works towards. And you can have students complete the triangle individually in partners, small groups, however you want to set it up. And you can also even make it like a large anchor chart that different groups create with different texts and then you share with the class. Like there are so many different ways that this tool can be used in your classroom. But however you use it, use it consistently because that is what makes it stick. All right, you guys, hopefully this episode was helpful for you. The inverted story triangle just takes students from summarizing to analyzing to reflecting, and that gets them to the main idea that actually means something. Try it this week, and if you do, let me know over on Instagram at eB Academics. If you're an EB teacher, let us know inside of the EB Teacher community. Myself and my entire staff genuinely love hearing from you. So please feel free to reach out if it's something that you use with your students. All right, you guys, thanks so much for being here, and I will see you next week on the podcast.