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Create an opinion guide of your own for a text or media that your students will be using in the upcoming unit. Remember, an opinion guide can be used for a number of different media: podcasts, op-eds, documentaries, novels, news articles, paintings. You do not need to read an opinion essay in order to apply the Opinion Guide.

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Note that there should be a limited number of statements for the reading. Between 3-7 is an appropriate range. You may want to include an area on your opinion guide for student to cite text evidence to support their answer for the author's opinion.

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This is an example that could be used with the NPR link to the journalistic article below. Though the article itself is not an opinion piece, challenging students to think critically about what lens the author takes can be a useful endeavor for deepening their thinking about perspective.

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It's 9 a.m. in central Vietnam's Quang Tri province, and several dozen grade-schoolers sit cross-legged on the floor as their teacher holds up pictures, asking the kids to identify them.

"Bombi!" several shout in unison, when shown a small cluster munition used by the U.S. during the Vietnam War, more than 40 years before any of these children were born. "M79!" they blurt as he flashes another, a picture of a rocket-propelled grenade.

Their teacher is Nguyen Thanh Phu, the manager at the Mine Action Visitor Center in Quang Tri's provincial capital, Dong Ha. He's good with the kids - making a game of the presentation to keep them interested. And keeping them interested is serious business.

"It's a life skill," he says. Children have to be aware of how to identify and avoid unexploded ordnance - like learning how to ride a bike or crossing the street.

Quang Tri was the most heavily bombed province of the Vietnam War, says my host and guide, Chuck Searcy of Project Renew, which runs the center. As much as 10 percent of those munitions didn't detonate, according to the Pentagon.

"Four decades later, it is still a threat in heavy concentrations in certain parts of the country, Quang Tri being the worst," Searcy says. "The ordnance is still active, lethal and will still blow your arm or leg off or kill you, and these kids are especially vulnerable."

Which is why Project Renew, in cooperation with local schools, runs awareness workshops for students from all over the province. They're quick learners. Fourth-grader Huy Nguyen says he knows exactly what to do if he sees unexploded ordnance in a ditch or the garden - or the schoolyard.

"Yeah, I run," he says in perfect English. "But first I calm down. And then I'll run. And then I'll call my dad."

His dad will then call one of Project Renew's disposal teams, who will come and deal with it, Searcy says.

"Every day, these teams operating all over the province get five or 10 calls a day," he says. "Our teams safely destroy 200 to 300 munitions in a week. So it's an ongoing problem. It will continue. But it can be managed."

Managing the problem is something Searcy has been doing for a while - more than 20 years. He made his first trip to Vietnam almost 50 years ago, as a reluctant draftee.

"I really had no idea where Vietnam was; I couldn't find it on a map or a globe," he says. "And I didn't have any particular interest in Vietnam, except, like many young men at the time, I wanted to avoid serving in Vietnam. I didn't want to go to war."

But he did. He was assigned to military intelligence. Now everyone - congressional delegations, tour groups, business people - comes to see Searcy. A genial, soft-spoken native of Athens, Ga., he came back for good in 1995, working first with the Vietnam Veterans of America and later, Project Renew. He is tall and lean, and looks and talks like a cross between Jimmy Carter and Gary Cooper.

Searcy remembers a time in the mid-1990s when it was difficult to get U.S.-based donors interested in helping here. The war was still too fresh in the minds of many back home. And in Vietnam, too.

"I've been here a long time and it's been a frustrating process at times, and sometimes not very hopeful," he says.

But in the past year or so, Searcy says, there's been a sea change. Earlier, his group would be lucky to get a few hundred thousand dollars a year from the U.S. government to help fund its work. But in the past year, the spigot has opened. The State Department, he says, recently gave nearly $8 million for Project Renew's partner, Norwegian People's Aid, and even more for several other ordnance-disposal groups working in Quang Tri.

"It's been a long time coming, but the U.S. government is now fully engaged in dealing with these efforts," he says. "In fact, now the U.S. government is the biggest donor in supporting cleanup efforts to rid Vietnam of the bomb and mine threat. And there's greater cooperation between all organizations and with the Vietnamese government than ever before."

After so many years, Searcy says he now sees a light at the end of the tunnel - a time, he says, within a decade, maybe less, when Vietnam will be able to manage its unexploded ordnance problem on its own and keep its people safe, even in Quang Tri province.

"Not that every bomb and mine will be cleaned up, that's impossible," Searcy says. "They're still doing cleanup in Europe from World War I and II; 5,000 bombs a year is not uncommon."

The goal isn't to remove every piece of ordnance, Searcy says, but to keep Vietnam safe through education. "We're doing it in Quang Tri province, teaching the children and adults how to be safe. The combination of local people being informed, knowing what to do, calling the hotline number, that's the answer to the problem."

Searcy is also encouraged that the U.S. is now doing more to help deal with the lingering effects of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange. U.S.-funded teams are cleaning up Agent Orange hot spots in several parts of the country, though Searcy says the U.S. could and should do more to help Vietnamese families who may be suffering from exposure to it.

"Three million families, according to the Vietnamese government, suffering health consequences of exposure to Agent Orange, or a genetic link to Agent Orange," he says. "Those people need help of the most basic kind at home to make their lives a little more bearable and we haven't quite gotten a handle on that."

The work is far from over. Meanwhile, the danger from unexploded ordnance is still very real.

While Searcy and I were talking, one of his colleagues was killed as he worked to dispose of a cluster bomb just a few miles down the road. Ngo Thien Khiet was a 45-year-old father of two, a team leader who had been with Project Renew for nearly a decade. He joins the list of more than 100,000 Vietnamese killed or wounded by unexploded ordnance since the war ended more than 40 years ago.

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Teaching Kids In Vietnam To Avoid A Deadly, Everyday Legacy Of War

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In Quang Tri province, the most heavily bombed during the Vietnam War, 10 percent of the ordnance never detonated. A former U.S. military intelligence analyst is part of a group cleaning up the bombs.

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This strategy provides your students with several opportunities for constructing knowledge about the topic - first, in forming their own opinions and activating their background knowledge on the topic; then, seeking to understand others' opinions; finally, re-evaluating their opinions in light of others' thinking. Students need these "multiple opportunities to construct meaning: by reacting, writing, discussing, thinking about their own reactions, and responding to the reactions of others" when it comes to literacy (p. 20). The metacognitive aspect of the Opinion Guide allows students to "develop the reflective abilities" that lead to students gaining access to otherwise disengaging or challenging materials (p. 20). Students benefit from making personal connections to the texts they read, and an opinion guide is a simple, yet effective, way to accomplish that.

Stephens, E.C. & Brown, J.E. (2004). A handbook of content literacy strategies (2nd ed.). Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.

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An opinion guide is a series of statements that students can respond to while watching a documentary, reading an editorial, listening to a podcast, reading a text, among a number of other applications.

Because of its flexibility in the type of media it can be paired with, the Opinion Guide can be used in a number of disciplinary settings. A science teacher might find use for this by pairing it with a documentary that emphasizes the need for taking care of the environment. Social Studies teachers might pair this with a podcast about the enduring impact of the Civil War. Math teachers might find it helpful for watching a Khan Academy video about the best strategies for tackling a word problem about ratios.

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Opinion guides ask students to evaluate their own opinion about a topic, and discern what the author’s opinion is about the same question. Because students evaluate their own opinion and the author’s opinion, they can’t simply extract information from the text, and they also can’t think only in terms of their own reaction to it.

This leads them into deeper thinking, as they are asked to digest what the text is saying, discern the author’s points, evaluate what the author’s opinion is, and respond by forming their own opinion.

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1. Have students read the opinion guide and mark their opinions before reading the text.
2. As they read, students search for ideas that will help them understand the author's opinions.
3. After reading, mark author's opinions on Opinion Guide. Optional: require students to cite text evidence.
4. Students may go back and modify their original opinions.
5. Optional: Have a discussion about each statement, and determine together what the author's opinions were.