Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives explores the relationship between text, learner, and learning through discussion and rhetorical reading and writing in elementary, middle, and high school. Chapter 1 describes the importance of recognizing that students have something worthwhile to say and that a discussion-based classroom requires that teachers relinquish some control of the discourse. It presents descriptions of literary theory, ways readers approach the text, ways to balance and scaffold text-based instruction, and explanations of reading comprehension strategies.

Chapter 2 explains principles of argumentation and rhetoric, which are common in high school English classrooms but less widely known in other grade levels and content areas, and discusses the text author's use of formal logic in argumentation and how detailed student analysis of argumentation allows deeper understanding of complex texts.