Deep Dive: Close Reading

 My school, like many, has professional learning communities (PLCs).  These group sessions provide teaching faculty the time to focus on key areas where we feel the need to do further research with the support of our peers.  I have found my PLC group to be really invaluable.  Having a group of my peers who I meet with weekly to share, reflect and troubleshoot has always been really helpful.  Last year one of the areas that I wanted to focus on was reading.  I felt that I had done so much work professionally to teach strong literacy and phonetic skills that my students had become excellent decoders, but were often struggling when it came time to analyzing a text.  I hated the feeling of asking an analytical question about a text, and just having my class stare silently back at me.  I decided to do a deep dive into close reading techniques.  Throughout the year, I read books, watched YouTubes, listened to podcasts, and read countless articles on close reading.  I noted during my research that I was doing a lot of the close reading steps, but I was dropping the ball on some parts of the process.  I decided to go back to basics and re-teach all the steps and really spend time on each part of the process.  

Previewing is the first step in close reading. I was doing this, but in reflection I wasn’t spending enough time previewing the text prior to the first reading.  We now spend an entire class, or even two classes, on this part of the process.  It may not be immediately obvious to adults, but young readers really need to be taught how to understand text features, and this is an essential part of the pre-reading process.  We need to spend time looking at the title, the table of contents, bolded words, chapter headings, pictures/images etc and point out why they are important and explain what kind of information we can discover in each one.  We also make predictions during the previewing process, and share our predictions in groups and talk about what those predictions are based on.  We talk about what we already know about the subject and then build on that knowledge with expert groups, or video clips etc.  This process helps students to then approach the text with more confidence, but I’ve found that this process REALLY helped my EAL students to be on more of an equal footing with their peers prior to reading.  

In close reading it is often suggested that you read with a purpose and this is the next step for us.  Together as a class, with direction from myself, we will come up with our guiding question/purpose for reading.  This gets written on the white board, and students will eventually write it on the top of their articles as well.  While we were always reading with purpose, prior to my deep dive into close reading, it wasn’t a collaborative process, nor was I having students write the question directly on the article itself.  I find that once I made adjustments to this part of the process students stayed focused, and felt more comfortable to read with a clear objective that they participated in creating.  

The next step of the close reading process is the teacher think-aloud, or teacher modeling, which ever term you prefer.  Basically, this is when the teacher does the first read of the text aloud, but pausing to make lots of, “I wonder….” questions, or “This reminds me of….”.  What we as teachers are doing here is making connections, modeling our thought process, and sharing our internal monologue.  This is a step that I feel I wasn’t really using to its full potential.  I was doing the first read, but I wasn’t sharing my thoughts and I see now how this was a missed opportunity on my part to really model close reading habits for my students.  We now spend more time on this step of the process, and I also really like that it is a low stakes exercise for students that further enhances understanding of the text when they get to their first solo read. 

After these few steps, students are ready to get to their own first read.  However, students are not simply reading here.  At this stage of reading I ask students to annotate their article.  Again, this is area that on reflection I wasn’t pre-teaching in-depth.  Students don't know how to annotate, and what seems to us teachers a simple task, can be really confusing to students.  When I asked students about the things they had circled or underlined prior to the re-teach, they often responded that they didn’t know why they marked that area of the text really, that they just did it to ‘annotate’ like they had been asked.  Essentially, they were doing it, just to fulfill my instructions, but weren’t getting anything out of the process.  I could honestly write a whole post about this, and most likely will in the future.  But I certainly made some changes to this portion of my lessons.  Ive really spent time on showing examples of annotated texts, making suggestions on what to what to look for and how to organize annotations. And little by little I think we are getting there.  

The last two stages of the close reading process, making connections and summarizing, is where I think I was initially the strongest prior to the analysis of my practice.  Though I realized that by strengthening all of the stages of the reading process prior to these final steps the quality of student responses in these final stages has vastly improved-especially with my multilingual learners.  Im by no means an expert on the close reading process, though I'm happy to say that due to my honest reflection/self-evaluation and consistent research, and with to the support of my PLC group this last year, my students definitely became better at analyzing texts and developed a deeper understanding of what they had read.  At the end of the year, I put together a brief workshop for my peers on my findings and some of my take-always on close reading.  I have shared the slide show that I used in that workshop below in case anyone would be interested to learn more about close reading.  There are lots of links for videos, podcasts, worksheets etc that may be of use as well. 

Thanks to anyone who stuck it out and read to the bottom of this lengthy post! I find the act of writing, and reflecting on my teaching process, really powerful. I would love to hear from other teachers on your thoughts, tips or suggestions to cultivate stronger readers.  

Click to download the Close Reading Workshop with live links in its entirety : https://tinyurl.com/kellyhoganclosereadingworkshop