Close(er) Reading: Resources and Ideas for Moving Forward--Part 3

Our instructional leadership team was working with the Iowa Professional Development Model last week and we were reviewing the four components of quality professional development:

• Theory
• Demonstration
• Practice
• Collaboration/Coaching

We reflected that sometimes, in order to understand something, we just need to 'see it in action.'  Some video clips on close reading from The Teaching Channel provide just that opportunity.

Think Notes is a video demonstration in a high school English Language Arts classroom.  This strategy helps students think about their responses to text and respond in deeper level discussions.  How might you adapt this for your grade level/content area?

Author's Choices another high school English Language Arts classroom looks at craft and structure through the analysis of the author's choices.

Developing Iowa Core Habits--Close Reading this elementary-based lesson models applying close reading to an arts-integrated lesson.

I hope these resources provide additional demonstrations to support your professional learning around close reading!

Close(er) Reading: Resources and Ideas for Moving Forward--Part 2

To continue with ideas to further support close reading, below are some ideas from a webinar I participated in.

A Webinar

I recently participated in a webinar--Close Reading: Teaching the Comprehension Skills of Text Analysis and Evaluation.  This webinar was sponsored by ASCD and facilitated by Diane Lapp, Barbara Moss, Maria Grant, and Kelly Johnson.

As I participated, there were many review ideas, some new ideas, and some particularly useful ideas for management and planning.  A handout provided additional support and may be accessed here.

As teachers continue to implement close reading, I think there are some questions as to how to put it all together.  A few of these handouts gave some ideas that might help us think further about what this could look like in our classrooms.  I particularly liked this organizer as it modeled how close reading could be used across the curriculum:

There was also a nice form to collect formative assessment data during close reading.  This connected to yesterday's blog on contingency plans when students struggle with close reading.  I would like to work on an organizer that combines both of these ideas.

That organizer might look like this:

Preplanned Text Dependent Questions	Observations of Students (Who is confused? What are misconceptions?)	Contingency Plan (Re-establish purpose, Analyze questions, Prompt and Cue, Model Thinking, Analyze Annotations)

And finally, a form for planning, teaching, and managing close reading.  

I am looking forward to implementing some of these tools.  What resources do you find most useful when implementing close reading?

Close(er) Reading: Resources and Ideas for Moving Forward-Part 1

        As I visit classrooms and work with teachers, I am seeing many wonderful close reading lessons.  This is a concept that I am also designing lessons for to expand my own learning.  The more close reading is implemented, the more we can reflect and learn in order to use this technique to support deep, analytic reading on the part of our students.

      I have recently read or viewed 3 resources that have helped me think more about close reading: an article, a webinar, and teaching videos.  Below is a summary of the article.  Stay tuned to future blogs for a summary of the webinar and teaching videos.

An Article

        Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey have an article in the new edition of The Reading Teacher--"Contingency Teaching During Close Reading."  A teacher from their study noted that when students were getting stuck during  a close reading lesson, she found herself telling student the answers or finding the information for them. She knew that this was not the goal of close reading, so she wanted additional scaffolds for when students get stuck.  Fisher and Frey identify 5 contingency plans when students struggle with close reading:

1.  Re-establish purpose: revisit and remind students of the learning target for the lesson.

2.  Analyze questions: consider cueing students on the relationship between questions and their answers.  QAR is an effective technique for providing this support.

3.  Prompt and Cue: As teachers, sometimes it is our nature to provide help to our students when often they just need a little hint to make things 'click.'  Fisher and Frey offer a chart of prompts and cues to use during close reading.

 www.reading.org                                                       

                        

4.  Model Thinking: Hearing an adult share their thinking can support student's own thinking during close reading.  Using a frame such as this can support this modeling: "I think _______________ because the author told me ____________.

5.  Analyze Annotations: Think about collecting and using student annotations as a formative data point, much like an exit slip or a quick write.

“Contingency Teaching During Close Reading” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in The Reading Teacher, December 2014/January 2015 (Vol. 68, #4, p. 277-286)

The Sounds of Silence--Do We Crave or Dread?

I have read some things in the past week or so that have given me pause.

First, this paragraph from a blog post from John Spencer (@edrethink) titled "My Biggest Concern with Devices."

"I wonder if the constant stream of conversations in social media are making it too difficult for people to be alone. Collectively, we've grown edgy with silence. We have a hard time with being alone with our own minds without being digitally tethered to other people. The problem is not that we have grown anti-social. The real problem is that we are social all the time."

--John Spencer

And then, this quote from the beginning of Chapter 3 of The Multiplier Effect by Wiseman, Allen, and Foster (Corwin, 2013).

"Between stimulus and response there is space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

--Viktor E. Frankl

Those of us in education are used to noise.  Lots of it.  So you would think when we leave the school environment we would crave silence.  But I find myself filling that space--radio, music, TV.....

Have we grown 'edgy with silence?'  Does wait time in the classroom make us uncomfortable?  Is there wait time, or do we or our students jump to fill it in?  I make myself physically count off the seconds in my head when I am presenting or teaching--yet still I know I miss countless opportunities for reflective silence.   And while there are never enough hours in a day, 3 minutes of silent thinking or writing feels like forever.

In leadership training, we learn about the power of reflective practice.  And I have made attempts to improve on this.  But with so much information available, I click and read, click and read.  I'm reading more, but reflecting less.

And then along came our instructional leadership team's blogging challenge.  I started to blog because I am a wee bit competitive.  (Oh and to be a good model--yes, that's it--to be a good model!)   But a few things happened along the way.  First, I was so inspired by our teacher leaders--their courage in new roles and their honest reflections about the journey and their growth.  This inspired me to be more thoughtful and reflective in my own writing.  And true to what we know about the reading/writing connection, now when I read blogs or articles, I read more deeply and thoughtfully.  So with this inspiration comes commitment--taking time to be reflective in this blog space.  Using silence as a space to think, wonder, and create.  For ourselves and for our students.

I want to close with the Frankl quote again because it becomes more powerful to me each time I read it.

"Between stimulus and response there is space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

--Viktor E. Frankl

Shhhhh..........

Language Frames: Models for Speaking and Writing

As a district, we have been using accountable talk stems to support our routines for working in groups. (Here's one resource....and here's another).

As a part of our work with writing to learn, we have revisited the use of writing frames. (Summary Frames)

Both the talk stems and writing frames are scaffolds that:

• support students in a close examination of styles of speaking and writing;
• provide differentiation--they can be used as much or as little as students need;
• model expectations for writing and civil discourse;
• strengthen the use of academic language.

Our students are exposed to arguments every day--from political barbs exchanged in television ads to life topics polarized through social media. Providing a structure to disagree in a respectful way is an effective way to have your voice heard.  Writing and language frames increase the possibility that arguments will result in action rather than just noise.  

I was happy to see the 200 argumentative writing prompts from the NY Times Learning Network.  These prompts are relevant for both writing and speaking, and frames could be designed and used to further support the ideas.  These prompts and frames have the potential to provide the models we wish we had more of.  

Do you have some favorite resources to support writing and speaking? What are some of your most effective writing or speaking prompts?  How do you use them in your teaching?

Background Knowledge: Too Much or Not Enough?

No one would argue the influence of background knowledge on comprehension. What we know about a topic provides an anchor for new information and prior experiences bring a level of familiarity with vocabulary and concepts to our reading.

There has been a lot written lately in regards to background knowledge as well as much discussion on the instructional approaches that build and activate this knowledge.  Add to that the focus from the core standards on close analytical reading that limits building background as a part of the instructional sequence and we have the opportunity to reexamine our practice and the role of prior knowledge in instruction.  Below are some ideas I have recently read related to these ideas and some connections to our work with teaching and learning.

In a recent blog post, Timothy Shanahan addresses the dilemma of prior knowledge and notes that the research clearly supports the idea that comprehension improves when students have background knowledge around what they are reading.  It is this understanding that resulted in more attention to both building and activating background knowledge as a part of lesson design. But as Shanahan suggests, have we gone overboard with this?  Sometimes I was so thorough at building background knowledge that students could be successful with the lesson and not even have to read the text.  In addition, a recent article from the Reading Teacher (Reading Thematically Related Texts to Develop Knowledge and Comprehension, Gelzheiser, Hallgren-Flynn, Connors, and Scanlon, Sept. 2014) cautions that spending large amounts of time preteaching and previewing text could result in students seeing the teacher as the source of knowledge and information rather than the text.

Our recent work with close reading has really caused me to examine the role of the teacher in building and activating prior knowledge.  I have read some concerns that close reading does not value the role of background knowledge. But Doug Fisher reminds us that this is not the case.  When planning instruction to help students read text closely, the teacher is making an intentional decision that the text rather than the teacher will activate background knowledge.  This has the potential to put the student in a much more active stance when reading, and demonstrates that meaning is created by the reader interacting with the text rather than something that comes from a teacher.  

So where does that leave us?  We can't ignore the influence and impact of background knowledge on comprehension.  But spending massive amounts of time on this takes away opportunities for students to authentically interact with text.  And while close reading is a powerful instructional technique, not every text should be or needs to be read closely.  Where we typically run into problems in education is when we make these ideas opposing rather than compatible. Real-life reading includes reading different types of texts in different ways for different purposes--so should our instruction.