If your students are anything like mine, teaching them that a main idea / central idea is “what the passage is mostly about” just doesn’t cut it. This method of explanation yields weak student responses that typically only feature the passage’s topic, not the true main/central idea. After years of experimentation, I’ve stumbled on a method of teaching main/central idea that seems to do the trick. If taught carefully, deliberately, and repeatedly, students learning to find main/central idea can u