Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Close Reading

Understanding Bias

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Yesterday as I meandered the paths of the Bayard Cutting Arboretum with my husband and my eleven year old son, we got into a conversation about bias and how it’s important when you read to be aware of biases.  This word was new for my son and my husband and I both tried to give him examples but without something tangible, he was curious but lost.  He didn’t quite get what we were saying.
Fast forward to this morning when Newsday ran an article with this headline:
 After reading this tragic story, I called my son in to take a look.  When he finished reading, I asked him what he thought.  He gave me that blank stare that told me that he didn’t quite get what I was getting at so I asked him if we remembered how we were talking about bias. 
He nodded. 
I asked him to go back up to the headline and reread it, this time thinking about what the biases of the writers of this article might be.  What did he think they wanted us to know about this car accident?
He looked again and said, “That a kid on drugs killed his two friends.”
This is when the lightbulb turned on.  His eyes grew wider and he said, “Wait a minute.  In the article it said he had a taken a prescription drug.” He got out his finger and reread the part of the article that said, “Police said a blood test confirmed that Smith was impaired by a prescription drug, which they declined to identify.  Smith told deputies he had a legal prescription.”   He narrowed his eyes and began to think out loud.  “This headline makes us believe that the driver was irresponsible, like he did a bad thing and because he did that, now his friends are dead.  But, from the information in this article, it’s not like he was out snorting cocaine or something.”
We went on to talk about bias and how perhaps, in reporting about accidents involving young drivers, the writers’ bias was to make assumptions that they happen because kids were acting irresponsibly.  While this may be the case with the driver in this particular accident, the facts reported here do not support that conclusion.  
In teaching children to read closely, we need to introduce them to the idea of bias.  Identifying bias means prompting students to think as much about what isn’t written on the page as it requires looking at what is written on the page.  

Pruning the Educational Landscape

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If you’ve been in education long enough, the refrain, “The pendulum swings again,” is not new to you.  With the Common Core State Standards, many teachers have expressed a concern that as we usher in this new era, we’re saying good-bye to our latest and greatest and moving on to yet something else that is new.  I share this concern and I’ve been watching this unfold very closely.  I have a lot questions, and one of my biggest is about the suggestion that all students need to read grade level complex text and the way in which to go about this is through close, careful reads.  I come from the school of strategy instruction.  I’ve taught children how to connect, infer, question, determine importance, visualize, and synthesize with success.  The suggestion that I abandon this practice in exchange for something that seems to be brand new to the educational landscape makes me say, “What gives?”

What gives is the need for me to be open minded.  If this is the new educational dictum, then before I can criticize it, I need to really understand it.  I need to carefully consider what I don’t understand about close, careful reading, and I need to understand what’s behind the suggestion that this practice could potentially help solve the problems that ail American schoolchildren when it comes to comprehension. And so, I have been on a quest to learn everything I can about close reading.  I have watched and rewatched the EngageNY videos about the Gettysburg Address and Letters from a Birmingham Jail.  I have scrutinized the Feynman text and I have read and listened as people who know way more than I do about reading explain the rationale and justification behind it and I confess, I have stumbled upon some new understandings. The first being this idea that if children are going to be successful on state assessments, the first time they see grade level text cannot be the day of the test.   Now, I don’t mean to imply that the authors of the Common Core are only about good test scores, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that they are about improving reading proficiency.  The contention is that in our classrooms, we don’t do enough to create dissonance and when students don’t have ample opportunity to puzzle through the complexities of complicated text, they don’t stretch as readers.  Instead of working in zones of proximal development, we create zones of maximum comfort and like an exercise routine that isn’t adjusted when a certain comfort level is achieved, growth stifles.  We don’t get the results we are looking for.
So this idea of stretching a reader is an ideology that I share with the Common Core so I found myself very willing to experiment with close reading. Part of the theory suggests we shouldn’t provide students too much information about the text before actually reading it because doing this takes away the need for students to attend closely and puzzle out what the text is really saying.  This idea intrigued me because I’m so conditioned to preview and provide background knowledge but I decided to suspend what I know best and give it a try. And I have to say, I’ve noticed some interesting things begin to happen.
In the past, as I prepared students to read, I would often invite them to share their experiences and talk about their connections to what they thought they were going to read about.  Students would get super excited and we’d sometimes have interesting conversations, but there were also plenty of occasions when I felt like I was running interference trying to get the students back on track because the conversation had taken a serious detour from what the text was really about.  In addition, these pre-reading conversations would often eat up a lot of time.  Once upon a time, I thought it was time well spent. But since I have backed off from activating schema, I have found myself entertaining far less extraneous conversation about text.  Because there is less idle chatter, there seems to be less “noise” interfering with students’ understanding. On many occasions I’d observe students answering questions based on what they knew rather than what the text actually said.  I’m seeing a lot less of that now and it’s the result of a simple change.
My little experiment has taught me many things, mostly about close reading, but also about change.  Skepticism is a knee jerk reaction to change.  So is dread. Cynicism. Criticism.  When I first encountered the Common Core, I was suspicious that as educators, we were “being forced into a brand new educational landscape.” As I become more familiar with the Common Core, its shifts, and ideals, what I realize is that we’re not creating a brand new landscape so much as we’re pruning the one we already have. While we can hope that the greatest outcome of the Common Core will be better readers, writers, speakers, and listeners; the more immediate outcome will be reflection.  This document will force us to “closely read” our curriculums and teaching practices.  It will force us to try new things and in pruning the landscape, we may actually begin to create a new—and better—landscape for the 21st Century.

The Importance of “Why Do You Think That?”

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Last week I shared the story of the exasperated teacher who wondered why children who demonstrate such great understanding when they talk about text can’t seem to demonstrate the same understanding when faced with multiple choice test questions.  Ever since she posed this question, I have been on a quest to find answers that help explain this apparent lack of transference.
In the past week, I have led numerous close reads of text and have been informally researching what seems to be behind this problem.  Today I had one of those moments that we all covet as teacher-learners: the epiphany, the moment when what was once very confusing begins to make a lot more sense.
This is what happened:
As I worked with a group of fifth graders to look closely at the “The Great Mouse Plot” from Roald Dahl’s Boy, we zeroed in on the following paragraph:
When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful.  Truth is more important than modesty.  I must tell you, therefore, that it was I and I alone who had the idea for the great and daring Mouse Plot.  We all have our moments of brilliance and glory, and this was mine.
Knowing that the shift in focus here can be confusing, we puzzled through the question who is Roald Dahl addressing when he says “when writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful”?  The students postulated different responses including “himself,” “his friends,” and “his audience.”  We took great care to eliminate incorrect choices one-by-one as we noticed evidence like “I must tell YOU…” and “we ALL have our moments…”and that there were not quotes around this part of the story as opposed to what was happening just prior when the characters were speaking to one another.  All of these examples supported that Roald Dahl was speaking to his audience.  The conversation was pointed and rich but of course the question about transference lurked in the back of my mind so after all was said and done, I gave the students the following question:
When Roald Dahl, writes, “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful.  Truth is more important than modesty,” who is he concerned about lying to?
  1. Mrs. Pratchett
  2. His friends
  3. Thwaites
  4. His reader

Based on our conversation, I was certain there would be unanimity about the correct response being 4. 
However, that was not the case.
Many students answered 1.  When I asked why, they said, “Mrs. Pratchett is mean.  He knows that lying to her would get him into trouble.” 
Because I asked, “why do you think that?” I now understand that part of the problem is that they are not giving full consideration to the entire question.  They saw the word “lying” and had just finished reading about and discussing Mrs. Pratchett so that made A seem like a reasonable response.  That’s a problem I can fix.
Other students answered 2.  At first, I was stunned because these children spent no less than ten minutes discussing why he wasn’t addressing his friends in this part of the story.  But then I asked, “why do you think so?” and a boy raised his hand and explained that it seemed to make sense because “look Mrs. Yaris, it’s in quotes and didn’t you tell us that when words are in quotes, that means that people are talking?”  The skies opened up for me.  The problem here isn’t understanding the text, it’s understanding the function of quotation marks in text. In this case, these readers couldn’t distinguish dialogue from a direct quote. That too is a problem I can fix. 
So in returning to the question about why the apparent lack of transfer, I am beginning to conclude that students do achieve new understandings when they have rich discussions of text.  When they fail to demonstrate the same understanding on test questions, very often the error is not in understanding the text, it is in understanding the question being asked which leaves us wondering how to rectify the situation.   
I think the answer to that returns to the Common Core suggestion that we train students to gain and integrate new information through the close, careful analysis of text.  What we must realize is that text does not only mean passages and poems, it also means test questions as well.  I’m wondering when close reads become part of our regular classroom practice if it will naturally begin to occur that students read questions more thoroughly and subsequently begin to do better on tests?  Will one good practice beget another? 
Only time will tell…

An Epidemic of Poor Comprehension

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This week, at a teacher training for using conversation to lift student comprehension, an exasperated teacher raised her hand and asked, “I’m concerned because my students seem able to have really thoughtful conversations about books but when I turn around and give them a “test question” about it, they bomb!”

This question set me thinking—a lot.  
Is the problem the topic of the conversations students are having?  Is it that their conversations aren’t going deep enough?  Do their ideas dance around the periphery of the real meaning of the text?  Or is the problem something different all together?  Is it an issue of vocabulary?  Or careful reading or interpretation of the questions themselves?  The fact of the matter is this: when this teacher asked this question, I had no idea how to respond because it felt like the answer rested with  any one of a series of infinite possibilities. 
But here’s the good news.  As a follow-up to this training, I have started visiting classrooms in this district and together with the teachers who echoed the same sentiment voiced by this exasperated teacher, we’ve begun to take a close look at this lack of transference. While the jury still seems to be out on the absolute answer to this question, the observations we have made have been fascinating. 
One behavior that we saw time and again was the inclination to make snap judgments. Test questions require that we fully absorb all aspects of what is being asked.  They require that we not only read the text closely and carefully, but also that we take the time to fully reason and consider what a question is really asking.  What we saw were students who seemed to be skimming the questions and answering according to what they knew instead of using the information provided in the text.  For example, when we asked the question “What does the word prise mean in the first paragraph of “The Great Mouse Plot” from Roald Dahl’s Boy, many children saw the word knife and immediately concluded that the best definition for this word would be cut.  When we asked a question about Roald Dahl’s relationship with his friends, they saw the word truthful in the line that read “When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful,” and immediately thought that their relationship was based on honesty. When asked how Roald Dahl felt when he was placing the mouse in the jar, students said “proud” in spite of the fact that at the point when he places the mouse in the jar the text says his “heart was thumping like mad” and his “hands had gone all sweaty.” Instead of honoring those words,  they keyed into the last sentence that read it was marvelous to be so popular and called it a day.
Instead of reading closely and carefully, the students we looked at read lightly and literally.  And what I’m wondering is why?
When I was first introduced to the Common Core State Standards, specifically the idea of being able to read increasingly complex text through close readings that emphasized text-based questions, I was somewhat skeptical.  When I heard David Coleman speak about it, I felt that he was disparaging strategy instruction and as a teacher whose entire career has reflected the ideas espoused by Ellin Oliver Keene’s Mosaic of Thought and Harvey and Goudvis’ Strategies that Work, this felt a little blasphemous (amazon affiliate links).  However, what I have observed in the last few days is enough to convince me that aspects of our strategy instruction may well be counterproductive.  I sense that we may overemphasize things like making connections and predictions and underemphasize things like synthesis and determining importance.  And in so doing, students’ thinking dances around the periphery of the text never quite making it to the core.  And as a result, we’ve got kids who answer test questions based on what they think as opposed to what they know from the text they are reading—and you know what that means: bad scores.  But what’s worse than that is this: We’re grappling with an epidemic of poor comprehension and that’s a bigger problem. 
The question now is what can we do it about it?  I know that’s what I’ll be thinking about in the coming days but I’d love to know what you’re thinking, too.  What are you doing to help students achieve “close, careful analysis” of text?

Assigning Reading Comprehension vs. Teaching Reading Comprehension

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When it comes to comprehension instruction, we have data that says that we spend as little as 2% of our instructional time teaching children how to make meaning.   (Lanning, 11) What we tend to do instead is give students a passage like this:
Some fire is a natural part of the life of a forest.  Fire cleans out dead brush by burning it to ash.  Then animals that live in the forest can find food more easily.  New plants and trees have more room and sunlight to grow.
(From Fires and Floods by Kate Waters, p 11)
And ask questions like:
What is this passage mostly about:
  1. How fires destroy forests
  2. How fires can be helpful
  3. How fires help animals
  4. How fires clear away dead brush

And when children respond anything but answer 2, we conclude that this student does not understand main idea. 
However, foregone conclusions like this are not particularly helpful in helping us make decisions about how to correct the problem.  We are left wringing our hands, wrought with worry over what will happen come April when these students take the ELA.  We know we need to fix the problem but we are all left wondering the same thing: How?
The sample question that you see above actually came from a group of six fourth grade students working together to figure out the main idea of the paragraph about fire.  This group of children had received explicit instruction on what a main idea is and how identifying main idea helps readers monitor text for meaning.  Next they took a look at this paragraph and worked with partners to figure out what it was mostly about.  As they did that, the teacher listened closely and took notes about what they said and discovered that sometimes children were too broad and general when identifying the main idea.  In other cases, she recognized that  students were too specific and pulled details from the story and dubbed them “the main idea.”  And in yet other instances, children relied solely on their background knowledge about the topic to identify the main idea.
The small group structure allowed the teacher a rare glimpse into the otherwise invisible process of making meaning.  In returning to the original dilemma of knowing that there’s a problem but feeling stuck knowing what to do about it, this glimpse provided the answer to the original question of HOW to fix the main idea problem: Responsive small group strategy instruction. If we are to effectively raise children’s reading proficiency, creating situations where children are active participants in their learning is imperative.  We must listen closely to clues they provide about their learning processes and then work with the diligence of Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery of what is standing in the way of growth.  In the end, good assignments don’t make children better readers but good teaching…wow!  What a difference that can make!
Lanning, Lois A. 4 Powerful Strategies for StrugglingReaders, Grades 3-8: Small Group Instruction That Improves Comprehension. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2009. Print. (Amazon affiliate link)

Deeply Reading a Diorama

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On Sunday, I took my children to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.  As we wandered the halls of the Asian Peoples exhibit, my eight year old son stopped to peer at a diorama of an ancient group of Syberian people.  As I looked over his shoulder at tiny little figures pulling a whale on a handcrafted sleigh and another group of men pointing swords at a wolf, he exclaimed, “That’s cool!”  I was excited that he was excited but I wanted to know more, I wanted him to know more, so I asked him, “What is this about?”
I can bet any amount of money that you know what he said when I asked this question because his response was the knee jerk answer to probing questions that we hear from children on a daily basis: “I don’t know.”
I prompted him to look again and this time, to look closely at the diorama in small chunks.  He began by peering at the whale being hauled on the sleigh.  His first musing was that the whale was hurt but after some consideration, he decided that the men had gone hunting and that this would be their food.  He guessed that the whale was very, very heavy because there were five men pulling it.  He guessed, too, that it must be very cold there because the men were wearing heavy parkas and boots.  
After looking at this section of the diorama he moved on to the wolf.  I wondered out loud if the wolf was a religious symbol in this culture because in the center of the diorama was a large pole with two wolves hanging.  My son quickly discounted this theory because of the way in which the men had gathered around another wolf with swords, ready to kill.  His thought was that because this was such a cold place, they needed to gather every bit of food that they could.  He hypothesized that the other wolves were hung so high on the stick so that other animals and predators wouldn’t come in to the village and steal their food.
As I think about this learning experience, I realize how at the beginning of this exchange, my son was looking closely but not thinking critically about what he saw.  On the heels of a symposium on the Common Core in Baltimore, I can’t help but think this is exactly what the Common Core aims to change.  In the same way that my son got very little from his first encounter with this diorama, children get very little from their first encounter with difficult text. It requires looking at text in small chunks and close reading and re-readings that force children to actively engage and think about what is at work with literature.  When we take the time to do this, we realize that what makes something “cool” is not simply the words on the page, but the meaning implied and derived from those experiences.  Close reading is about active, critical thinking and until we train children to manage complex text, their response to the question “What is this about?” will always be the same: “I don’t know.”