Close Reading

I took a number of professional development classes this week, and I’m happy to say that all of them were good. Of course, now my head is spinning with a lot of new information, book titles, and strategies to try in the classroom, but it’s a good kind of spinning.

One class I was particularly interested in attending was one on close reading. It seems to be the new “in” thing in education, and I have read a bit about it, but I was interested in delving deeper. Kari Ross, a reading specialist at the Minnesota State Department of Education, led the session, and gave us a good place to start learning. Much of her information is based on the work of Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, who have some good resources on their website. 

The gist of close reading is to get kids to struggle with text that is a bit above their reading level, using rereading and discussion to better understand what they are reading. Because of this, you wouldn’t want to use close reading all the time, as I think you would kill any enjoyment kids have in reading. But with a good choice of text, kids will have a chance to not only delve deeper into the meaning of the text, but to see how an author chooses words and text structure for maximum effect.

We used a short piece by Sandra Cisneros called “Salvador, Late or Early”, which would be a great choice to use in an upper elementary classroom (here is a link to a PDF ). Short text is key with close reading, as kids are going to be working with more challenging text than they may be used to reading.  Generally the teacher gives very little background information; the goal is that the kids do the work of uncovering the text. We began by reading the text with a pencil to annotate. We were asked to circle any powerful words or phrases that affected us, and to underline what confused us. After reading, we did a quick write about what our impressions were of Salvador.

Next, we chatted with a partner about our impressions. The discussion with others is important in close reading, as we want to see what others thought and why they had those thoughts.

The teacher does the next reading out loud. It’s a chance for kids to hear the text read by a fluent reader, and they may pick up something they missed the first time. The teacher then asks a series of text-dependent questions. Having students go back into the text to support their answers is critical. The teacher may start with questions designed to get at general understanding, but then moves to questions about text structure and vocabulary, such as “Why does the author use so many color words in this text?”  The last kinds of questions relate to author’s purpose or ask students to make inferences. Fisher and Frey have a nice Power Point on their web page about text-dependent questions that may be helpful for teachers wanting to try this.

It can be confusing to just read about how to do something, so if you’re interested in doing more with close reading, I’d recommend watching a couple of YouTube presentations of teachers doing close reading. It looks different in each classroom, but many of you have probably done aspects of this in your classroom for years.  I’m anxious to try it out and see how it goes!