A Close Look at Close Reading

As teachers and schools continue to wrestle with implementing the Common Core Standards, I hear more and more talk—and more and more questions—about the term ‘close reading’. Interestingly enough, the term doesn’t appear in the actual Standards, though it crops up repeatedly in many Standards-related material, including the now famous—or infamous—videos of Standards author David Coleman dissecting Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” And Text Complexity co-author Douglas Fisher has said that close reading is “the only way we know how students can . . . really learn to provide evidence and justification,” as the Common Core requires.

So what exactly do we mean by ‘close reading’? According to Timothy Shanahan, who’s become something of a spokesman for the Standards, close reading is “an intensive analysis of a text in order to come to terms with what it says, how it says it and what it means.” I agree completely that close reading allows a reader to understand what a text says and what it means, with what it means directly related to the author’s decisions about detail and language and structure—i.e., how it says what it says. But for me, analysis is an off-shoot of close reading, something I can produce, if I’m asked to do so, after I’ve read closely.

I think this because, by definition, analysis involves thinking about how the parts contribute to the whole, which presupposes an understanding or vision of the whole. Putting analysis in front of understanding seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse. And asking students through a text-dependent question to analyze a part before they’ve had a chance to consider the whole risks putting them in the position of the blind men in the old Indian tale who sought to understand what an elephant was by attending to its parts. One man touched the trunk and thought an elephant was like a snake; another felt the tail and concluded it was like a rope; while a third stroked the ear and thought it was a fan. None was able to make sense of the whole when asked only to consider a part.

My own vision of close reading is better captured in some of the guidelines colleges provide students. The Purdue Online Writing Lab, for instance, advises ‘tracking’ your understanding of a text through margin notes that often consist of questions, with an example that bares more than a passing resemblance to the kind of questions that come up when students are using a Know/Wonder chart, noticing patterns across a text, and wondering what the writer might be trying to tell them through the details he’s chosen.

Example of close reading annotation using Doris Lessing’s short story “A Woman on a Roof,” from the Purdue Online Writing Lab

Harvard also provides a “How to Do a Close Reading” guide to students, which breaks close reading down into a two-part process: First the reader observes facts and details in the text, then he interprets what he’s observed through inductive reasoning—that is, he builds an interpretation bottoms-up from the details, rather than by deductively starting with a claim and then finding evidence to support it. And they offer the following tips, which sound similar to the kind of thinking the fifth graders I described in a recent post engaged in (with the teacher transcribing their thoughts in lieu of annotating the text):

1. Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text, noting anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or that raises questions.

2. Look for patterns in the things you’ve noticed about the text—repetitions, contradictions, similarities.

3. Ask questions about the patterns you’ve noticed—especially the how and why.

This two-pronged process has always seemed to me a lot like the scientific method. The reader attends to the details an author gives just as a scientist attends to the details of whatever phenomena he’s studying. And from those observations, each develops a hunch that attempts to explains what they’ve noticed, which in science we call a hypothesis. Then just like the scientist, the reader continues to probe and observe, testing her hunch out as she encounters new details and looks back on ones she’s read, revising, refining and developing her ideas until all the pieces fit—at which point she comes to a final understanding, which is like a scientist’s theory. Only then, I would argue, can the reader’s thinking be turned into a claim whose validity can be proved in a deductive fashion using many of the same details that helped her understand as evidence.

Unfortunately, however, some of the approaches that aim to support close reading rob students of the opportunity to notice and to develop ideas of their own—which, as Harvard says, ”is central to the whole academic enterprise.” Take Achieve the Core’s 8th grade Close Reading Exemplar for “Long Night of the Little Boats” by Basil Heatter, which recounts an incident from the Battle of Dunkirk when a ragtag flotilla crossed the English channel to rescue soldiers who were stranded on a beach during World War II.

My hunch is that the exemplar writers followed a process similar to Harvard’s to arrive at their own understanding of the piece (noticing, questioning, and interpreting, perhaps, automatically in their heads). They then rephrased their understanding as a question for the final writing task: “How did shared human values, both on the part of the little boat rescuers and the soldiers, play a part in the outcome of Dunkirk?” With that in place they then designed a series of questions and steps that would focus the students’ attention on details that were key to their own understanding’s development, such as:

The students neither own the noticings here, nor the development of the ideas. And the ‘help’ that teachers are asked to provide in order that students ‘see’ what they’re supposed to runs the risk of being as much an act of spoon-feeding as some of the pre-teaching practices that have come under fire are. Of course, it does increase the likelihood that students will meet the Standards. But they’ll do so by plugging in someone else’s language about details someone else has noticed to support an idea someone else has formulated. And that’s a far cry from the independent thinking that colleges want students to have.

To support that kind of independence, we have to design instruction that engages students in both components of the close reading process: to first be observers and questioners and then to use their observations and questions to, as Harvard puts it,  ”reason toward our own ideas.” That may, indeed, involve asking students questions, but those questions need to be open enough for students to engage in real close reading, not an overly-prompted knockoff.

And so to ensure that we don’t put the cart before the horse, let’s remember this when it comes to close reading:

Questions before Answers

Hunch before Claim

Understanding before Analysis

What Are We Asking Students and Why: Exploring the Difference Between a Prompt and a Scaffold

Last week I raised some questions about text dependent questions, the instructional approach approved by the Common Core Standards authors, which many states and school districts are starting to adopt. Clearly I worry that this approach may decrease, not increase, students’ ability to truly become independent, as College and Career Ready Students should be, because the method hinges on us directing students to what we, from our own reading of a text, have determined to be important.

At its heart, the text dependent question approach seems to embrace the ’straight road’ vision of reading that I looked at in my post on teaching uncertainty, with the questions acting as signposts that tell students what to pay attention to in order to reach a designated and pre-determined meaning. And it puts us, as teachers, back in the authoritative role of  the “curator or gatekeeper of content,” as Randy Bomer puts it in his great book Time for Meaning, rather than in the role of a facilitator who’s, “less concerned with what students are supposed to get and more concerned with what the students can make with the materials they already have.”

This doesn’t, of course, mean that we shouldn’t ask questions. But if we truly want our students to be independent meaning makers, we need to think about what we’re asking and how we can craft questions that are open-ended enough for students to find their own way into a text and are framed in a way that makes them transferable from one text to another. And here’s where I think it’s useful to explore the difference between a prompt and a scaffold.

In What Readers Really Do, Dorothy Barnhouse and I spelled out what we see as the difference between the two in a chart that looks like this:

To make these concepts more concrete, let’s return to the excerpt from the Curriculum Exemplar on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave that I shared in last week’s post to see the differences in the teaching moves and outcomes more clearly. Here, for example, is the first question the Exemplar directs teachers to ask, with the aim—i.e., the answer—printed below it:

The question leads students to notice what the teacher (or in this case the Exemplar writer) has noticed and to draw the same conclusion from that detail that he or she did. It also anticipates what some students might miss (that this is, in fact, a slave narrative), and it seeks to ‘correct’ that by directing those students to the title in a way that solves a problem for the students rather than letting them solve it themselves as they keep on reading. The question also does nothing to teach the thinking around the text in a way that might be transferable to other similar texts, all of which makes it a prompt.

A scaffold, on the other hand, teaches the thinking around the text by offering students some instruction on how texts like this generally operate and what readers do because of that, along with a more open-ended invitation to notice what there is be noticed and consider what that might mean. That kind of scaffolded question, introduced by what I call a teaching point, could look and sound like this:

One of the things readers always do when they read a first-person narrative is to try to get a first impression of the narrator and his situation. And they do this by paying close attention to the details the narrator gives them in order to begin to get a sense of who he is and what’s going on with him. So take a look at these first few sentences. What kind of person might do and say the things that this narrator does? And what might we begin to understand about his situation from the details the narrator gives us?

Unlike the more tightly focused prompt which aims at a single answer, this scaffold might allow students to not only think about the world Douglass is describing but, depending on the details different students latched on to and what they made of them, to develop a first draft impression of Douglass as someone who’s industrious, persistent, generous or even crafty. They might also begin to question some of the assumptions they might have about slaves—such as slaves live only on plantations or slaves don’t speak to whites unless they’re spoken to—in a way that might position them to be more open to whatever Douglass might be saying overall about slavery. And they’d come away with a way of thinking they could apply and transfer to almost any first-person narrative they read.

Creating a scaffold instead of a prompt requires us to consider the knowledge and experience we have with texts and reading, which I believe we automatically—and often invisibly—draw on to make meaning of what we read. Then we teach to that underlying knowledge, sharing what we know about the act of reading and texts, rather than to the specific meaning we make of a given text. Thus we teach what we know about first-person narratives and the role that details play, not the particular importance of any single detail. (See “What We Knew by Heart: Turning Our Own Reading Practices into Curriculum” along with What Readers Really Do for more examples.) The scaffold method also means trusting that there’s more than one way to think deeply about a text and that students don’t need to catch every detail that we do.

Text-based Know/Wonder charts also act as scaffolds, and they’re always a good place to start as they’ll give you a sense of what students can do with a minimum of support. The teaching point behind them is that readers keep track of what they’re learning from a text while holding on to details and a slew of questions that they expect they’ll learn more about as they actively keep on reading. And this knowledge about what readers do yields the questions “What are you learning from the text?” and “What are you wondering about?”

All of this makes me think that the difference between a prompt and a scaffold is a bit like the old Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give a student a prompt and he feeds you an answer. Teach a student through a scaffold and you build a close reader—often for a lifetime.

The Messy Work of Reading

Here’s a question I found myself thinking about as I prepared for a presentation that I thought could use some visuals. What does reading look like? Not the act of opening the covers of a book and scanning the lines with your eyes, but the path a mind takes as it tries to make meaning of both the words on a single page and the pages of an entire book? And what does the teaching of that journey look like?

I decided that too often our vision of reading looks like this: a straight road that leads over time and many pages to a particular meaning we want our students to ‘get’ that we, as teachers, have gotten from our repeated reading and teaching of a book or from a teacher’s guide.

Of course, we don’t simply set our students on the road and expect them to arrive there without support. We ask them questions. We direct them to passages we know are important from our own prior reading or the teacher’s guide. We invite them to make predictions and connections, latching on to those we think will help nudge them down that predetermined road so that ultimately they ‘see’ what we saw in the text and ‘get’ whatever we got.

Whether we do this explicitly or not, you could say we offer students a route map, like the highway sign below, with page numbers posted instead of mileage and literary features as destinations. Foreshadowing, we convey through our questions and prompts, coming up on page 23. Significant scene on page 57. Important image on page 104.

              These practices might help some students read more closely, as the Common Core Standards ask them to, but I’m not sure how it helps them reach the Standards’ overarching goals as captured in the “Students Who are College and Career Ready” descriptors−particularly the goal of demonstrating independence “without significant scaffolding.” That’s because I believe that the road of meaning making is only straight when we’ve already read a text before and can see retroactively how the pieces fit together to form a meaningful whole−and even then there’s usually no single road, since whatever meaning we’ve made of the whole is open to interpretation, which depends on who we are, what we’ve noticed, and how we fit that together.

Instead, when we enter a text for the first time, we often have no idea where it’s going nor what the writer might be exploring. If we did, there would be no point in reading on; we’d know everything right from the start. But not knowing means that, on a first read, we can’t know which passages are significant. We can’t know which scenes are pivotal, which details will reverberate later, beyond a general understanding and awareness that everything we encounter in a text−from the tiniest detail to the overall structure−potentially carries meaning and has been deliberately chosen by the author for some purpose that will eventually become clearer as we keep on reading.

In this way, I think the path of meaning making as we make our way the first time through a text actually looks like this: a messy tangle of highways and side roads, with on-ramps and off-ramps, dead-ends and detours, and lanes that merge or diverge and divide or sometimes go round in circles−all of which we must navigate on our own by paying attention to the details we encounter and considering what they might mean, while remaining open and flexible enough to revise our understanding as we go.

My co-author Dorothy Barnhouse and I explore what it means to teach with this vision of reading in our new book, What Readers Really Do, which will come out next year. I’ll be sharing out-takes and ideas from it here. But for now I think it’s important to consider that if we want to support and nurture readers who are able to enter a text knowing nothing and emerge pages later with a deep understanding of a text’s ideas and themes, we need to let them know that this is what reading looks like. It’s not a beeline to a given, accepted meaning that either you get or you don’t. It’s a messy, complicated and confusing process that’s filled with wrong turns, false starts and uncertainty. And I believe we serve our students better if we acknowledge and honor that messiness and confusion as the place from which learning and understanding starts.