CLOSE READING Our goal today: to become aware of what “close reading” is and to practice “close reading” a bit

It’s about helping students learn to read complex texts and understand beyond the surface meaning

• It helps us understand WHY WE READ.

• It promotes CRITICAL THINKING, conversation, and understanding.

• It’s one of the main analytical tools used in HIGHER EDUCATION.

• It’s a SURVIVAL SKILL in our media-saturated world.

• I want you to be successful readers and thinkers.

PURPOSE of CLOSE READING: It’s not about the Smarter Balanced Test

What Dr. Douglas Fisher says…• “A close reading is a careful and purposeful reading. Well actually,

it’s rereading. It’s a careful and purposeful rereading of a text. It’s an encounter with the text where students really focus on what the author had to say, what the author’s purpose was, what the words mean, and what the structure of the text tells us.”

**author’s purpose: inform, teach or instruct, entertain, persuade

**text structure: how is the piece organized and how does this organization relate to the author’s purpose? When students understand the structure they have a better chance of remembering it. (chronological, cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast)

And…• “The students are regularly taking notes as they read. They

are extracting ideas and concepts that they want to remember from the text. And that reading with a pencil helps students go back into the text over and over again to really get a strong sense of what they author is trying to say.”

• “In a close reading, students also talk about what they’re thinking about. They share their evidence with their peers, they use argumentation, they agree, they disagree, they ask for evidence, they provide evidence, they offer counter claims. It’s that give-and-take of discussion in which the text serves as a primary tool for forwarding that conversation. That’s what we’re looking for in a classroom that has close reading.”

What CLOSE READING is NOT• You do it because you have to for the state test

• You read the text only once

• Understand only the surface level of complex texts

• Having you reread silently several times by yourselves to “get it!”

• Me going as fast as I can to “get it over with and move on to the next “fast thing to get it over with”

• LONG, LONG passages that go on forever (you’ll see this enough in college classes)

• A new “educational fad” that will go away . . . . It’s a skill you’re developing that will help you through life.

A look into a close reading. . . .

A close reading of an excerpt of "What, of this Goldfish, Would You Ask?"

1. Establish the Purpose with Students – connects to the unit of study and uses short worthy passages

3. First Discussion: Partner talk to check “gist” meaning and share their paraphrased writing

4. Second Discussion: Teacher leads class assessing for understanding and confusions from first read.5. Second Reading: Teacher reads paragraph sentence by sentence or selected part aloud to class along with Think-Aloud – discusses words the author used / vocabulary and text dependent questions

6. Third Discussion: Answer text-dependent questions – partners / paraphrase each paragraph or section

7. Teacher asks for sharing of new paraphrased text and is for checking deeper understanding

Quick Steps for Close Reading – one model

2. First Reading: Students read independently and read with a pencil to get the “gist” – paraphrase on their own