Kuunari

A year ago I read the book A Close Look at Close Reading: Teaching Students to Analyze Complex Texts, Grades K-5 by Barbara Moss, Diane Lapp, and Maria Grant. This book was disappointing, never naming race or rarely discussing multilingual learners. It did explain what close reading is clearly, and as a tool, it has it’s place in a complete language arts classroom. I’ll be posting the essays for the next 11 weeks on Tuesday.

Text complexity is the reader digging deeply into a text to draw out understanding, nuance, and meaning. While the authors of A Close Look at Close Reading break text complexity into three distinct dimensions, I find the distinctions they make contradictory to the actual organic nature of knowledge acquisition and reading comprehension. They have taken something that is more art and attempted to make it a science. Nonetheless, I do find some of their analyse valuable to understand my own strengths and weaknesses as a reading teacher. 

I am a fourth grade teacher in an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program public school that as an ideal teaches through inquiry and concept based learning. I have moved away from grouping students and books into reading levels, either by Fountas and Pinnell or lexile, except in rare circumstances.

I find that my students cognitively want to read and discuss topics that are at a 4th grade level, whether or not they are able to read at that level. Also, my classroom library is organized by interest, author, and genre to help enable students to find more books that in their interest level. They are more likely to enjoy a book that falls within their interest than within a narrow leveling band. 

That is not to say that I do not utilize reading levels in both the texts that I pick for my classroom library and for small and whole group teaching. Reading levels help me quickly find text that I can be confident most of my students will be able to access at a surface level, being able to read the text fluently and accurately.

In addition, I stay aware of where my students reading levels are according to standardized tests and use that to help guide the scaffolding I might put in place while we work on a text. In this way I am able to utilize the lexile level of the students and the texts effectively and efficiently to improve my practice as a reading teacher. 

I feel that I do a good job of considering the reader/text factors as I select texts for close readings. I make sure that the texts we choose to read either help move forward their understanding of a concept/topic of study or answer questions that have arisen from my students. I want the students to be construction knowledge about topics we are studying while we read. I try to find texts that will be engaging to the students while exposing them to new knowledge. 

An area I feel that I could strengthen is qualitative features of text complexity. While we do discuss and explore all of these features in our reading, I don’t provide the students with enough time to really dig in and delve deep into all of these standards, particularly with non-fiction text.

In that regard, this division by the authors does help to remind me to focus my reading instruction to ensure that I am providing my students with the opportunity to grow in their reading of complex text through the lenses of text organization and language features. I need to be more explicit in my planning and instruction to help my students utilize these qualitative features of text complexity in their close reading.