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.

Close reading, like any instructional model, thrives when the teacher utilizes feedback from the students, often in the form of formative assessment. Close reading offers numerous opportunities for formative assessment due to the nature of the activity and the repeated readings of the text. Based on student success or struggles in a close reading activity, teachers can adapt their teaching and activity to better meet the goals of the lesson. 

Formative assessment is “the recursive cycle of using evidence of student understanding to adjust instructional practice” (152) and has been found to have a powerful impact on students learning. It’s clear that responding to the students success, failure, and engagement to an activity or lesson leads to better teaching. An ideal close reading lesson has a strong outline of activity planned but the teacher is ready to adapt and change as the students dig into the text. It is important that the teacher has a clear goal in mind when setting up a close reading activity.

However, based on students conversation, work, and collaboration, the teacher can modify the activity to better meet the goal of the repeated readings. For example, if the teacher discovers that many students are struggling with the vocabulary, they can discuss the vocabulary as a group before the next reading. They can even pose a question for the students to help them use context clues and text features to understand the words meaning.

If one of the goals was to develop their understanding of the text’s role in explaining a character but the students quickly pick up on that in their first reading, the teacher does not have to continue asking more probing questions about the character and can instead move the focus onto other important reading comprehension skills. 

The authors of A Close Look at Close Reading, K-12 have a more formal model for pairing formative assessment with close reading instruction. (155) Their model involves four steps and is a cycle, representing the fact that what is taught today informs what is taught tomorrow. Starting with plan, the teacher will identify the learning purposes, standards, the text, and design text-dependent questions.

The teacher then teaches the lesson, while continually assessing the learning throughout the lesson. Next, the teacher will analyze the students performance and will create questions to encourage rereading and deeper analysis. Fourth, the teacher will continue to teach, having the students reread the text, asking additional text-dependent questions, and providing additional support as needed. That teaching will inform the next close reading experience for the students. Quality close reading lessons require  formative assessments, both formal and informal, to be most effective, just like any lesson.