Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Close Reads

The Habit of Thinking

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Every family has its traditions and since my children were little, my husband and I have always made it a point to check in with our two boys at dinner by asking them to share their day’s “best” and “worst.” Through the years, we have been regaled with stories about what happened on the bus, school assemblies, games on the playground, and other highs and lows of their daily lives.  “Best and worst” has become an important family tradition, but as my children grow older, I wonder if reflecting on the day’s events is enough.  Might I need to do more to inspire their conversation and thinking skills? In mulling over my options, I decided to add a new conversation prompt at dinner and follow up “best and worst” with “What’s your new idea?”

When I began this, my children were perplexed.  After sharing a story of a music teacher who all but dashed his best friend’s hope of becoming a musician,  my sixth grade son, Matthew, looked at me with squinty, confused eyes, “What do you mean, ‘what’s my new idea?’” he asked, almost annoyed at the extra work required of this new layer of thinking. But I coached him to think about why that story struck him as the day’s low. As he began to reflect, he quickly shared that his new idea was that there’s absolutely no truth to the adage “sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” He thought out loud about the pain of a punch versus the power of words and he decided that while a bruise or a bump might last for a week, words can stay with people forever.

I was struck by how a simple question had the power to elevate the quality of our conversation and wondered if I had stumbled upon beginner’s luck or if, perhaps, I was witnessing the beginning of a shift. Since beginning this ritual of asking, “What’s your new idea?”, we have had many interesting dinnertime conversations. We have talked about society’s infatuation with movie stars and have formulated the idea that perhaps we need to choose our idols carefully.  “Wouldn’t it be better,” my third grade son, Nathan, thought, “if we admired scientists and inventors and other people  who help to change the world?” On another occasion, my older son Matthew described his plan to construct a Lego universe, sharing that his big idea was that he’d need to create a capital city because after all, “all roads lead to Rome.”

As we’ve habituated reflecting on our living and learning, I’ve noticed that the practice of asking, “what’s your new idea?” has begun to spill over into other aspects of my children’s lives.  One night, my older son announced that his summer reading plan would involve rereading the Harry Potter series.  This time, he decided, he would read it much slower and flip back and forth between the pages to find how things connect. (His plan, I swear!) He told us that he had already begun to do this and “he had a new idea.” As he read, he noticed that when everybody else was referring to Voldemort as “You-Know-Who,” Dumbledore’s position was “…I have never seen any reason to be frightened of saying Voldemort’s name” (The Sorcerer’s Stone, p.11) which made him think that there might be some sort of mutual respect between Voldemort and Dumbledore.  It is his plan as he continues to reread to follow this theory and see if he finds other places that support this idea about Dumbledore and Voldemort’s relationship.

Time has helped me to realize that our dinnertime conversation is a shift.  In fact, it is a shift that mimics the fourth shift of the Common Core Standards that emphasizes text-based responses.   When I ask my children “what’s your new idea,” I am prompting them to regard their lives as text and question, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and integrate new ideas.  No matter whether individuals do this by thinking about what happened on the playground or closely reading the words or illustrations in a book, the benefit remains the same: they develop a habit for critical thinking. As a conduit to problem solving, innovation, and creativity, critical thinking leads not only to infinitely more interesting dinner conversation, but also to a higher achieving student body and even better, to a more insightful citizenry.

Shorts

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First, watch this short, Bastille, from a collection of shorts about love and Paris called Paris, Je T’Aime (Paris, I Love You).

Bastille, in a little more than five minutes, gave me something that has stayed with me since I saw it in our local, independent theatre in 2007. This story of a man rising to an occasion and becoming his “best self” by pretending his way into it has become a metaphor for finding my way through changes I want to make in my life (Denton, 2007, p. 21). I have thought of this short a few times a week for the last five years, although I have only watched it three times (including the viewing just before linking it to this blog.)

The man in the short became who he needed/wanted to be by pretending. He imagined what the man he wanted to become would do in the same circumstances, and then he practiced that. I can translate this strategy into any dimension of my work on myself. To have a cleaner house, I can ask myself what people who maintain routines for sustaining an orderly environment do. Then I can copy them and practice these routines until I become someone with an orderly home. To become a better mother, I can look at the language of intelligent mothers and consciously assume their vernacular, practicing until I can own this vocabulary myself. If we become our habits, then we become new people by creating new habits, and we create new habits by first imagining them.

When I saw Bastille, its message of pretending toward becoming was not a new idea to me; I have read it in many places. The strategy, however, found a resting place in my thinking after this short became a metaphor for anchoring this paradigm for practice to my daily life. I think about this short all the time and anyone I talk to at length hears about it.

In their session at IRA a couple of weeks ago, David and Meredith Liben recommended using short, complex texts with students as we support them in developing stamina and proficiency in more difficult material. Kim and I have been thinking about short texts vs. longer pieces, and questions have arisen: Can we communicate the power of text with short texts? Can we develop readers using short texts? Can we sustain them or, better yet, teach them to sustain themselves? We think so.

As educators, Kim and I have both appreciated the advantages shorter texts offer, i.e. students can read through the entire piece in one lesson, students can reread them in even less time, short texts are less threatening than longer texts, and brevity can actually increase complexity (consider the haiku, for example). We hope the Common Core encourages educators to give themselves permission to broaden their ideas about what constitutes texts, especially short texts. A painting is really a short text. A video clip is, too. And how would readership change if middle and high school teachers used some of the more profound and/or clever picture books with their students? I would love to sit in on a high school discussion of Jon J. Muth’s The Three Questions, which would naturally connect to reading Tolstoy.

We can say with confidence, however, that the unintended side-effects of abandoning novels, of missing opportunities to connect ideas across longer texts, and of diminishing stamina for reading texts that require patience, are not the intention of the Common Core crafters. We recommend that you embrace short films, short stories, novel and article excerpts, etc. as viable opportunities for students to learn new ways to dig into text and think about ideas. We also recommend that you hang on just as tightly to longer texts, to novels, to read alouds connected over days and weeks, and to intricate ideas that unfold in connections that make a thinking reader whisper, “Wow!”

Coixet, Isabelle. (Director). “Bastille.” Paris, Je T’Aime. Ossard, Claude & Von Schenk,

Burkhard (Producers). (2006). Paris, Je T’Aime. First Look Studios: Thousand Oaks, California.

Denton, Paula. (2007) The power of our words: Teacher language that helps children learn.

Turner Falls, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.

Liben, David and Meredith Liben. (2012). “Text Complexity and the Common Core Standards:

What’s a Practitioner to Do?” IRA 57th Annual Convention, Chicago, April 29-May 2,

2012: Celebrating Teaching.

Asking “Good” Questions

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In a recent presentation at the Nassau Reading Council/Long Island Language Arts Council Spring Conference 2012, Kate Gerson, Senior Fellow with the Regents Research Fund in New York, spoke in depth about text-based questions and the need for close readings of text. In her presentation, she explained, “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.”

To give context to her assertion, Kate invited the educators in the audience to explore the impact of text-based questions by sharing a series of questions about Abraham Lincoln’s The Gettysburg Address.

One set of questions she posed was this: What does Lincoln mean by “four score and seven years ago?  Who are the “founding fathers?”  The footnote on the handout defined “score” as twenty, and there was buzz in the room as people talked about their responses.

But as people talked, I went back to Kate’s comment: “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.”

Once everyone had done the math and listed the founding fathers, the conversation stopped dead in its tracks. “Where are we supposed to go from here?” I wondered.

So I asked Kate to clarify the thinking behind this question because to me, while it is based on the text, it seemed rooted in background knowledge that some readers may bring to the text, but others may not.  She disagreed, she felt that this question lent itself to a rich discussion about Lincoln’s intentional choice to refer to this historical event—and that’s when I thought again about Kate’s words, “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.” And it occurred to me that Kate’s intent may have been good but she didn’t really ask the real question. Based on her response, she seemed to be asking “Why is mentioning ‘the founding fathers’ important to Lincoln’s message in the Gettysburg Address?”

Asking “good” questions is hard work.  Few would say that it comes naturally which means that if we aim to develop “close read” units of study for our students, then we must change the way in which we plan and prepare.  We can no longer pull books off the shelf a half hour before we intend to use them or come up with questions off the cuff as we share text with students.  Close reads require thought, reflection, intention, and revision.  To add to Kate’s comment “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text,” I would say, too, that a “good” question is borne in the company of colleagues and unless we are working collaboratively with others to develop “good” questions, we may find we aren’t asking the questions we intended. Perhaps, instead of “good” questions, we should work together to ask “better” questions.