More detail on content questions

The structure of the daily writing depends on the students'

• Lower-level students will need more structure and will move more slowly into analytic and reflective writing on the right-hand side.
• Higher-level students can sometimes whisk right into reflection with much less attention and structure imposed for literal information.

The structure also depends on the particular reading/writing tasks, especially if you are building a sequence of tasks leading to a substantial writing assignment at the end of a unit, for example.

Obviously, teachers can assign specific questions to be addressed in the left-hand section, or assign more general prompts:

• What do you remember?
• What did you hear?
• What was the "talk" about?
• Who is the focus of the reading?
• What was the most important idea in the reading? What are the next important ideas?
• What particularly striking example do you recall?
• Who is the target audience for the selection?
• What is the author's intention in this passage?

These prompts will focus on what because they are getting at the basic content (though we must remember that content is constructed and so even literal information may not appear the same to each reader/writer/speaker).