The Classroom

10 Strategies for How To Teach Point of View in Your Class

Katrina Freund

Aug 9, 2024

Understanding point of view (POV) is an important skill that helps students’ reading comprehension. When they know who’s telling a story and why, they can better understand the context, purpose, and potential bias in a text. Need some tips on how to teach point of view in your classroom? Try some of these engaging activities:

10 ways to teach point of view

Use these strategies to help your students understand how to recognize the different points of view in a text and how that perspective changes the lens through which we view the story or narrative:

1. Teach personal pronouns

One of the simplest ways to determine the point of view in a text is to look for personal pronouns. Pronouns are words that replace nouns and noun phrases when the author has already established them earlier in a sentence or paragraph. We use personal pronouns in three ways, depending on the point of view of the text:

First-person pronouns: Used to refer to the person speaking or writing
Second-person pronouns: Used to refer to the person the narrator is talking to
Third-person pronouns: Used to refer to a person or thing the narrator is talking about

You can teach students which pronouns fit into each category to make it easier to spot POV when reading. Personal pronouns for each point of view include:

First-person singular: “I” and “me”
First-person collective or fourth-person: “We” and “us”
Second-person: “You”
Third-person: “She,” “her,” “he,” “him,” “they,” “them,” and “it”

2. Explain dialogue vs. narrative

Students may get confused if they see a mix of pronouns when trying to identify the point of view in a text. For example, a story in the third-person point of view may use pronouns like “she,” “him,” or “they” in the narrative text, but use “I” or “you” in dialogue. To help them decide where to look for pronouns, explain the difference between dialogue and narrative text.

Dialogue occurs when two or more characters talk or speak to each other out loud. Words that make up the dialogue appear in quotation marks.

The narrative includes almost all the rest of the words in the story. It gives background information, transitions scenes, and even tags dialogue with phrases like “he said” to indicate who’s speaking. The narrative text doesn’t usually appear in quotation marks unless the author tries to draw attention to a word or use it sarcastically.

After students understand the difference between the two, teach them that point of view signal pronouns appear in the narrative. They should look at text outside of quotation marks to determine the POV of a text.

3. Compare and contrast narrators and characters

To grasp points of view, students also need to understand the similarities and differences between narrators and characters. In some POVs, like all versions of first-person, the narrator is either a main or secondary character in the text. In other cases, the narrator may be the writer, an outside observer who isn’t a character, or an all-knowing entity—like Death in “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak.

Helping students understand the similarities and differences between characters and narrators builds literacy skill vocabulary, helps students identify points of view, and scaffolds an understanding of authors' choices and the why behind a writer’s point of view and perspective.

4. Discuss unreliable narrators

To discuss points of view in a text even further, you can discuss reliable and unreliable narrators. Reliable narrators are writers or speakers the audience can trust, and unreliable narrators are ones they can’t.

Students may not understand the concept of an unreliable narrator, especially the first time it’s introduced. It’s natural to believe the person writing or telling a story from any point of view is honest and trustworthy. However, unreliable narrators are common in mystery and suspense novels like Karen McManus's “One of Us Is Lying” or Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Unreliable narrators typically appear in the first-person point of view because the narrator talks about ideas and events from their own perspective without accounting for how others may interpret them.

Unreliable narrators can be intentional and unintentional. An unintentionally unreliable narrator may just be a narrator who only sees things from their point of view. They aren’t purposely trying to deceive the audience, but they don’t have enough context or information to be reliable.

An intentionally unreliable narrator purposely tries to deceive or misdirect the audience. In fiction, this type of narrator can lead to a shocking conclusion at the end of a mystery or suspense story. To get students thinking about the concept of unreliable narrators, ask questions throughout reading, like:

Is the narrator telling the truth? How do you know?
Are there any parts of the story the narrator might be missing?
Does the narrator have ulterior motives?

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5. Use an anchor chart

As you do when teaching other literacy skills, you can use an anchor chart to help students remember the differences in points of view. Split your chart into three columns or rows. Label the left- or top-most row or column as “First-person,” the middle as “Second-person,” and the right- or bottom-most as “Third-person.”

Within each row or column, include key details about each POV, such as the corresponding pronouns, common types of texts or genres for each one, and reasons an author may use that POV in a text.

You can create anchor charts before a lesson and reference them while you’re teaching. Or you can create the anchor chart during a lesson and make it an interactive experience for students. In either case, display the chart in your classroom after it’s created for future reference.

6. Have a POV scavenger hunt

A fun way to determine if your students can identify different points of view is to have a POV scavenger hunt. Do this with texts from your classroom or school library or with various curated texts from across Newsela ELA’s collections and text sets.

You can have students do the scavenger hunt independently or in small groups and choose from one of two formats. In the first option, ask every student or group to find at least one text narrated in the first-, second-, and third person. In the second option, assign each student or group a POV and have them find multiple text examples that fit their category.

Choose to have students write down the names and authors of the texts they find so multiple groups can use the same titles. Alternatively, you could ask students to collect physical books as they find them so other groups don’t duplicate the same titles.

At the end of the hunt, have students come together as a class and share their findings. During the recap, you can ask additional questions about their choices, like how they knew a text fit each point of view.

7. Create a story based on an image

Point of view and perspective aren’t just for written texts. Movies, television shows, and even artwork, like paintings and drawings, each have a point of view, too. To help students understand POV in all stories, try an art analysis activity.

Choose a photograph, illustration, or painting to share with the class. For example, you may choose to analyze Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Explain to students how every work of art has a perspective, just like the point of view in the story. Then, ask students what they notice about the image. For “Nighthawks,” students might say things like, “It’s nighttime” or “People are sitting at the counter.”

Next, ask students to write a story as if they are one of the characters in the painting. In “Nighthawks, they may choose one of the three people at the counter, the person working behind the counter, or someone outside the window, from the perspective we see as the viewer.

Then, ask them to rewrite their story from a second- or third-person perspective. Discuss how the story changed as they adjusted the point of view. Did they have to share different details? Did the reader see, learn, or understand different things about the characters as the point of view changed?

Instead of using still art like paintings, you could do this same activity with video content, using scenes from students’ favorite movies and television shows.

8. Make text-to-text connections

You can have students compare and contrast texts written from the same point of view to help them understand the nuances of each one. For example, high school students could look at Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird” and F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby.”

Both narrators speak in the first person, but in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Scout is the main character, and in “The Great Gatsby,” Nick is a secondary character. Students may compare the characteristics of each narrator, like age, gender, location, and reliability, and discuss how the differences in the narrators affect the stories as a whole.

For example, Nick views Gatsby’s life from the edges, helping the reader see Gatsby’s faults. In contrast, Scout is so young that she doesn’t understand all that’s happening around her. That innocence makes the choices of the people around her darker by comparison.

You can have students use a Venn Diagram graphic organizer to record the similarities and differences in the points of view of the two texts.

9. Try a rewriting activity

Have students rewrite an existing tale from another perspective to help them better understand how point of view influences a story. For example, the short story “Buzzer Beater” by Rich Wallace in our K-2 ELA collection tells the story of a basketball game from the third-person limited omniscient point of view. There are two main characters mentioned: Mason and Edwin.

For this activity, you may ask students to rewrite the story in first person from Mason’s or Edwin’s perspective. You could also ask students to rewrite the story from a third-person objective or third-person omniscient point of view to change what we know about the events and other characters’ feelings.

After students rewrite the story and share their new versions with a small group, come together as a class to discuss what they learned about point of view and perspective and how they affect a text.

10. Give a variety of examples

The more texts students can read from different points of view, the better they’ll get at identifying the right type. Newsela’s knowledge and skill-building products have over 15,000+ pieces of fiction and nonfiction content to help you give examples of each type of POV. From first-person short stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe to third-person informational texts in our News collection, you can find a variety of texts and examples for students to read and practice identifying the point of view.

Teaching point of view with Newsela

With Newsela ELA, you can access more than relevant, real-world content to help your students learn about points of view. Our updated ELA Standards and Skills collection provides resources beyond texts, like interactive videos, to teach students the fundamentals of point of view and perspective.

Plus, Newsela ELA’s updated teacher reporting features make it easy to monitor students' skill progress. You can identify classroom trends and patterns to determine how well students understand each skill.

Not a Newsela customer yet? You can sign up for Newsela Lite for free and get access to a 45-day trial of our premium products for all the content and skill-building scaffolds you need to teach point of view in your classroom.