Close Reading & Reading Like a Writer

Where Does Rigor Fit? - Kylene Beers
What is Close Reading?
Defining the Signposts
Explaining the Signposts
Wondrous Word: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom by Katie Wood Ray
Mini-lessons for Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

SAY

I remember when I was in my AP Lit class in high school and we had the option of choosing 3 books for a final project. This project required us to take a “great literary work” and have a conversation with the author. This sounds like a fun project—one in which you allow your students to explore creatively and freely, no? It would have been that way for me, except the books were way too difficult to read and understand and we were expected to work on this alone. I knew that I liked English for a while, but I can admit at the moment I felt too overwhelmed and underprepared. My teacher thought that because we were the top of our class in an advanced placement course that the rigor of the work needed to be comparable to the course we were taking. After reading the articles for this week, I see that she could not have been more wrong! “Rigor is not an attribute of a text, but rather a characteristic of our behavior with that text. Put another way, rigor resides in the energy and attention given to the text, not in the text itself” (Beers, 21). Some teachers of English tend to be the elitist classroom practitioners who hold the belief that because they have their students reading books from hundreds of years ago that this creates an environment that is both rigorous and academically challenging, when in reality it creates an environment in which students are not able to conceptualize and understand what is being studied. Rigor, according to Beers, comes from the level of commitment and dedication spent with a text. If students are struggling to understand a text, but they (and you) are putting all your energy together into taking that text piece by piece until you understand it, this is what makes your curriculum rigorous. “If they are to read rigorously, students must be committed to understanding some intriguing character, to solving some problem, to figuring out what a writer believes or values and how those thoughts compare with their own…” (Beers, 22).  

Obviously we understand that in order to obtain this level of rigor in the classroom, we need to be scaffolding students to get to this level of thought. To do this, we need to be using much more close reading and reader response in our classes. I believe that for every close reading that takes place in the classroom, some sort of reader response needs to be added as well. Getting our students to think about a topic prior to digging in the text is a sure way to get them to make those personal and world connections to the text—and isn’t this what we want? I can admit that even though formal analysis is extremely important, I am someone who values reader response over it any day. I believe that in order for our students to become better readers, and even better writers, they need to go “there”. They need to have some sort of connection with the text prior to being tasked with understanding it. If you can make a student feel a certain way about a book before he reads it, you have won him over just a little bit more than if you tried to convince him this book is good because blah blah blah. Reader response and close reading work so well together in this regard. After you have students give their reader response, you employ a close reading for them and the “close reading should suggest close attention to the text; close attention to the relevant experience, thought and memory of the reader…” (WICR, 37). Having the two work together will then help the reader to make sense of their own memories as it relates to the text as well as help them take a smaller passage of the text and understand it too. But one key essential part is tying it all together again and making that connection with the bigger picture. Making sure that you come full circle and showing an understanding of the work as a whole. Sure this may take longer, but breaking it down and doing close readings will help ensure that your readers are understanding the text and relating it to those personal, world, and other textual memories.

The articles regarding signposts are simply amazing (shout out to B & P). Yes, I would use this in my middle school classroom, but the ideas are so practical and useful within the classroom and I think they would really help when you are trying to make sure that students are understanding the text. Making those connections are essential to your becoming a stronger reader. 

Do:

My do for the week is an example of student work in which they were asked to incorporate these same details in there own work with a book report.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/136oUDOOWD8zIEtdUL_Kfcvasz-jwCnCZMDnJIFrvYr0/edit?usp=sharing