Kuunari

The series “Reading Notice and Note” features essays I wrote for a distance learning class while reading the book Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading by G. Kylene Beers and Robert E Probst. Overall, I found the book and the class enjoyable and hope this series helps others as they read and think about the book. 

Close reading is an effective means of teaching the students how to make meaning out of text. By working collaboratively with your students, teachers can create close reading experiences that are authentic and valuable to both the students’ interests and the requirements of state and national standards. Notice and Note provides teachers with an template to create such a close reading experience for their students.

As a 4th grade teacher at an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme, I am excited to see the encouragement by the authors of Notice and Note to use student questions to help drive close reading activities and I know how successful a lesson set up with student inquiry at the center can be. 

Close reading is an activity where “we bring the text and the reader close together.” (36) It as an opportunity for the reader to look closely at a text and “notice those elements of the text that are, for example, surprising or confusing or contradictory, so that then we pause and take note, think carefully, reread, analyze—read closely.” (37)

The authors, cleverly including the title of the book in their description, describe clearly what an authentic close reading activity should be. Students will be asked to read closely texts the rest of their life, whether it’s in classes in high school and college or when looking over a contract for a job or at a bank. Close reading is a vital skill for students to learn. 

To create an environment in the classroom where students can be successful in developing this skill, the authors have a number of guidelines that serve to help teachers. Close reading should be based on a short passage and be identified by the students. There should be a clear, strongly defined focus to the reading and it should connect to other parts of the texts if it is an excerpt.

Discussion should be a key component of the close reading activity and should include both between the students as well as conversations led by the teacher. It should not be a question and answer activity with the teacher asking all the questions. And finally, close reading will require the students to reread the texts in ways that help them learn the value of rereading to help them make meaning from the texts. 

As part of the class discussions, the students should play an important part in developing the questions that guide the discussion. While many proponents of close reading, like the authors of A Close Look at Close Reading, K-5, believe that the questions should be designed by the teacher and be solely text-dependent, the authors of Notice and Note know that students will see close reading activities structured around teacher-directed questions as inauthentic. A big part of close reading is helping the students learn how to engage closely with the texts, and allowing the students to guide the questioning is a great way to do that. 

The authors provide an excellent step by step model to help teachers guide their students to making great questions that are text-dependent but authentic to their reading. Following their eight step plan, which shares a lot in common with the most recent version of Junior Great Books, will have the students reading the text closely, marking areas of confusion or wondering, and developing questions out of those moments.

The conversations they have about the text are driven by those questions, and then they find the questions that they find most interesting to help guide them back to the text to reread the text. There are numerous moments in the activity where the teacher can interject and guide the questioning if they find that the questions are leading too far astray from the text or from the skills or standards the teacher is hoping to cover with the close reading. I have had numerous close reading lessons similar to the one the authors described and I find the students end up asking better and deeper questions than I could have ever asked.