Close Reading, Quick and Dirty

The Common Core asks teachers to focus on close reading of complex and rich texts. What precisely is close reading and how do you get your students to do it.

According to The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) (which, coincidentally, is also one of two consortia that is creating the assessments that will be used to test CCSS)

Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole.

This lens is useful because it emphasizes the need to slow down and attend to textual details in orderly way as a function of analysis. It seems to me that there are essentially two types of close reading: reading that focuses on craft and reading that focuses on concept, though often the focus on craft will lead to conceptual understanding. For example, imagine reading the second paragraph of the Declaration of Indepence, which has the famous Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness line. If I am focused on craft, I am looking at diction, parallelism and other techniques Jefferson used. If I'm looking at meaning, I'm looking at definitions of words, ideas, confluences and contradictions.

Adept readers do this as a matter of course, shifting between craft and meaning seamlessly. Emerging readers need explicit prompting and, in some ways, tricks to remember to read closely.

To that effect, these are generic but typical things my students do with a small piece of text. Be warned, though, that you cannot and should not attempt to have anyone read an entire novel or book closely. Choose excerpts, pieces of articles, or shorter pieces to practice. Choose questions or activities that force a student back into the text. It's not especially useful to know what a student thinks Happiness means or for him to describe a time when he was happy. If you are really checking the student's ability to understand the text, make the question text-based; ask instead what Jefferson meant by Happiness and ask them to back it up with details.

Quick and Generic Steps to Close Reading

Close reading happens after you have already read the text once. You don’t have to go in this order but you should always start with step 1 and end with step 7.

Step 1: What is your first understanding of the text? What would you say the text is about right now? What are the Big Ideas or what is the focus you find most compelling?

Step 2: Look for and mark interesting words that jump out at it you. If you were going to group them together and give that group a name, what would it be? Is there a pattern to the words? What is the author describing with these words?

Step 3: Divide the text into natural sections. Look for shifts. What is the purpose of each section?

Step 4: Examine the syntax. Is there anything interesting that this author uses? Do you see sentence variety? Is there a short sentence among long sentences? Are there plenty of questions? Repetitions? Parallelism? What is he emphasizing with this and why?

Step 5: What images are interesting? What do you picture? How are those images created (devices)? What is the purpose of these images?

Step 6: What’s the tone at the beginning? What is it in each section you have marked? What is the tone at the end?

Step 7: What new claims or ideas about the focus of the text do you have now that you have looked at it closely?

What are your thoughts? What ways do you get students to revisit text?

Recommendation: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to critical accolades. This narrative nonfiction examines the story of the HeLa cells which are cells that have revolutionized biological testing, been the basis of at least 60,000 scientific studies because these cells dynamically thrive in a laboratory environment. According to the New York Times, if you have taken a pill stronger than aspirin, than you've benefited from the HeLa cells.

The cells originated from a tumor that Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman from Baltimore Maryland, who was diagnosed and eventually died from cervical cancer, had biopsied. Lacks had never given permission for her cells to be cultured and grown and she had never benefited from the growth and sale of these cells.

Skloot covers a remarkable amount of history and science in this book in a way that is conversational (at times) and completely accessible. While I am widely read, my understanding of genetics, cell replication and biological research is limited to what I learned in high school. I was able to follow the science without any problem because I was deeply engaged in a sympathetic portrait of the Lacks family dealing with poverty, segregation and racial politics.

Dwight Garner, in his New York Times review captures the force of both the writing and the story when he states

I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

Another interesting aspect is that Skloot herself is a piece of the story. She took 10 years to research and write this book and the reader definitely is aware of her telling the story. In some ways she resembles narrators such as Nick in The Great Gatsby, a steady but sympathetic voice. The Lacks family initially accuses her of essentially writing her book on their backs, but she convinces them to allow her to tell the story, which she does with extreme sensitivity, bordering on bias.

You finish this book with an understanding that this has been Skloot's labor of love. It is moving and shocking in ways both large and small.

For an excerpt, click.

If you are a teacher who is looking for resources visit the Faculty Lounge for links and ideas.

Why Does Diane Ravitch Hate Nonfiction, or Let's Shift the Debate

As many readers already know, the Common Core State Standards have what Diane Ravitch calls "arbitrary percentages" for what the split between fiction and nonfiction taught in K-12 classrooms should be. While I agree that arbitrary percentages are nobody's friend, and I strongly believe that this is a conversation that is essential.

For some background, I was not an English major, though now I am an English Teacher. I took AP English Literature with Sister Mary Eileen Quinlan. I hated almost everything we read in that class, and, in fact, can't remember much of it, except, I will admit it prompted my continuing antipathy for Huck Finn. When I finished her class and passed AP Lit exam with a 5, I prematurely swore off of English for the rest of my career.

Does that mean I hate fiction? Quite the opposite. I love stories. I love a good strong plot that can pull me through the plodding nonsense that author's use as character development. I love poetry (though that may only be since I discovered Billy Collins and Mary Oliver). My senior year, when I should have been reading Thomas Hardy, instead I read every book in the oeuvre of trashy romance. I read Judith Krantz and Julie Garwood and Danielle Steele. Read everything other than what I should have been reading. I may have read five books a week. While I was busy reading bodice-rippers, I avoided nonfiction in high school.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at my Alma Mater and I spent $800 on required reading for classes like World Politics and Beyond Sovereignty and Macroeconomics. I was pleased, knowing I could read books and no one would question whether or not I understood the symbol of the green light on the dock. Having been an avid reader, I had skills that I could transfer. I knew how to get through a book and fast. But I didn't know the ins-and-outs of actually understanding nonfiction. There's an art there, but I didn't know it then. I could survive the nonfiction. I could glean information, but I could not understand or really hear it sing.

In high school, I was also voted most likely to become a writer. I scribbled poorly realized stories and angsty poetry in my journals. Sister Eileen did a bang-up job getting me to be a fast writer and an analytical one. I could write a 5-page paper on Contemporary Russia in 60 minutes and still make it to happy hour. But when I made it to a composition class for pre-law students my second-year of college I realized how I had skated by, how weak my skills were when dealing with this specific type of nonfiction.

Flash-forward a dozen years and I was sitting in a conference room at the annual convention of CATE, California Association of Teachers of English. Some presenter asked, "Why do we spend so much time in English classrooms training kids to be English teachers? Shouldn't we teach them forms of reading and writing too?"

Ah. There it is. Nonfiction or at least a yeoman's explanation of why to teach it. The truth is more complex than we should teach nonfiction because it's good prep for college. We should teach nonfiction because some of the most passionate, beautiful, moving and insightful writing that is currently being published is nonfiction. Nonfiction can't only answer the question you are researching for your paper, but it can make you laugh, cry and wonder, just like fiction.

Recently, Sara Mosle argued that one of the most important reasons to teach nonfiction is to help our students have excellent models for good nonfiction. I don't disagree. How much nonfiction is a ridiculous red-herring. In fact, Mosle is most prescient when she states "What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing."

Mosle goes on to enumerate a list of good nonfiction which could be lifted from my Google history or NPR.

This blog, then, is to not only encourage you to read more nonfiction but to choose the good stuff, the nonfiction that can stand alongside the literature that is also taught in English classrooms. It's out there, I swear. Some days you just need to search a little more for it.

So welcome. Pull up a chair.