In this visual podcast ( this is the second in the series, the first can be viewed here) Anne Goudvis and Stephanie Harvey walk you through the structure and content of each of the ten lessons in the Short Nonfiction for American History series. This overview will show you exactly what students will learn with each lesson, and how these resources are developed around a gradual release of responsibility framework. 

What might this look like? Watch the video below to see Anne and Stephanie explain how students will learn to:

• Read and reason through many different sources about the past, connecting to the experiences, dilemmas, discoveries, and reflections of people from other times and places
• ask their own authentic questions, just like historians do
• learn to read critically-- to understand different purposes and perspectives, asking, "Who wrote this? Why did they write it? What are the authors' biases, points of view, and purposes?"
• try out ways of thinking about history-- inferring, analyzing, and interpreting facts and evidence to surface themes and important ideas. 

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To learn more about Short Nonfiction for American History and to watch Anne and Stephanie overview of the entire four-book series, click here. 

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Anne Goudvis is the coauthor the Heinemann title Comprehension Going Forward and of Strategies that Work (with Stephanie Harvey). She and Steph also created best-selling classroom materials The Comprehension Toolkit; The Primary Comprehension Toolkit; and Comprehension Interventions. 

Anne has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, and university instructor. For the past fifteen years, she has worked as a staff developer with the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition and currently does staff development in schools around the country. Recent interests include working in schools with culturally and linguistically diverse students and integrating reading comprehension instruction with content area topics in social studies and science.

Stephanie Harvey has spent her career teaching and learning about reading and writing. After fifteen years of public school teaching, both in regular education and special education classrooms, Stephanie worked for twelve years as a staff developer for the Denver based Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), a partnership of leaders from education and business, who support innovation in public schools.

Insatiably curious about student thinking, she is a teacher first and foremost and currently serves as a private literacy consultant to schools and school districts. In that role, she conducts keynote speeches, presentations, workshops, demonstration lessons, coaching sessions and ongoing consultation to teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, principals and district administrators. With a focus on K-12 literacy, her specialties include comprehension instruction, inquiry-based learning, content area reading and writing, nonfiction literacy, and the role of passion, wonder, and engagement in teaching and learning.