Close reading resources to support the Common Core

"Close reading" is the new buzzword in education, especially in Language Arts and Social Studies classes. Last summer I wrote a post called "Five close reading strategies to support the Common Core." After publishing that article, I received several requests for ideas on WHERE to find passages for students to close read.

Here are four ideas to get you started, with instructional ideas for implementation in your classroom:

1. Room for Debate - New York Times

If you are looking for multiple perspectives on current issues in the news, this is your one-stop shop. Room for Debate takes an issue and asks multiple experts to write a short editorial on the issue. I haven't counted, but I would estimate there are over 700 "issues" that are covered, and the site is updated with a new topic every couple of days.

I love the fact that most of the topics start with an essential question, such as: "Should Tweets Cost You Your Job?" and "Should Kids Pick Their Own Punishments?" Within those topics, there are usually 4-8 different opinions about the issue from professional writers. As you can see, they are high-interest topics for high school students.

Instructional idea: This site is great for pulling ideas for synthesis essays, where students must pull from different sources and address the opposition. Students can close read the articles and then develop an answer to the question in the form of an argument.

Mentor Writer: Leonard Pitts, Jr.

2. Mentor authors

In another post, I wrote about "Three ways to engage your students in writing." One of those strategies is to use "mentor texts" where students closely examine the "moves" that professional writers make, much like how I analyze the swing of professional golfers to help improve my struggling golf game.

There are many great mentor writers out there. Some of my favorites include:

• Leonard Pitts, Jr. - Miami Herald
• Mitch Albom - Detroit Free Press
• Rick Reilly - ESPN.com
• Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun Times
• Dave Barry - Miami Herald

Instructional idea: I ask students to first close read articles from these mentor authors and then emulate them for their own papers. Check out Kelly Gallagher's book Write Like This for more information on mentor texts.

3. Kelly Gallagher's "Articles of the Week"

Speaking of Gallagher, if you want a treasure trove of diverse articles, his website is the place to go.

In his book Readicide, Gallagher discusses how he noticed his students were not aware of current events happening in the news. His school implemented "Articles of the Week" where students read about a current event, while practicing close reading.

The last two years, I have had great intentions of doing an article each week for my students to stay current on what is happening in the news, but I keep moving away from it because I run out of time. This is something I need to commit to and stay consistent with in the future.

Instructional idea: Gallagher's site really kills two birds with one stone: practicing close reading strategies, while learning about what is happening in the world. 

Don't teach like this...

4. Short Passage from Novels

For years, I spent my time "teaching" as nothing more than a human Cliff's Notes, laboring through the plot and characters of novels. My quizzes and tests were filled with questions about which character said a particular quotation or what color of hat Holdyn wears in The Catcher in the Rye. It was boring for me, and I felt like I was working harder than my students.

I began to ask myself, "In 10 years, does it really matter that a student remembers the color of Holdyn's hat?" 

Honestly, I would argue that it is irrelevant and a waste of time.

Let me be clear: I believe it is important for students to be exposed to a variety of texts, including the "classics." However, I also believe that my job is to teach students how to dissect those works so they can extract meaning from them and then be able to apply those skills to other complex texts for the rest of their lives.

Instructional idea: I made the switch to teaching "excerpts" from the typical class novels, rather than the entire plot of a novel. 

For example, read this post to see how I changed my approach to Julius Caesar by focusing on the rhetoric of the speeches.

For Fahrenheit 451, students read the entire book on their own, but did close readings of specific passages. For example, we closely examined the first four pages for the imagery and figurative language that Bradbury used. We also looked at the argument between Captain Beatty and Montag, and analyzed the rhetorical strategies that Beatty employed. 

I know... it is a radical way of thinking about teaching novels. Trust me. Students will dig far deeper into the novel and have a better understanding of the book than if you just plow through and answer questions about plot.

Final thoughts

My teaching style has been revolutionized by the Common Core. In my previous teaching life, students were only swimming at the surface level of a book. Now, we are diving in to the deep end of the reading pool. These are great places to go in order to get started with close reading.

What are other resources you go to in order to find close reading passages? Please post in the comments below.

Three ways to make your CLASSROOM more efficient

I believe that in order to be a great coach, you must be a great teacher. The two skills are really the same.

When I am coaching football, my classroom is 100 yards long, and I am managing 100+ student-athletes. When I am teaching Sophomore English, my classroom is about 15 yards long, with 25+ students. The skills needed to instruct on the playing field and in the classroom are really the same, even though the size of the classroom and number of students may be very different.

Last week, I wrote a post called “Three ways to make your practice more efficient.” As I thought about it, those three components really extend to the classroom as well: have a plan, go on the clock, and create competition.

Have a plan

This really goes without saying. However, there are multiple types of plans I believe you should have in the classroom: daily, weekly, unit, and yearly.

I still keep an old-fashioned plan book where I write down what we did each day in class. At the end of the day, I use any extra space to reflect on how the lesson went, and what I would change for next year. This is very valuable to me as I reflect back on the year, and when I prepare to teach the same unit or lesson next year.

When planning ahead, I have learned not to write anything in ink. Instead, I use small Post-It notes to write lesson plans on. I have found that it is easier to move those Post-It notes around in case there is a snow day, fire drill, or some other distraction that throws off your entire schedule. On the day of the lesson, I write down the objective, lesson, and my reflection in the book.

Go on the clock

Much like using a clock during practice to keep yourself on pace, I have found that using an egg timer is extremely valuable during class. It keeps me from getting too long-winded, but also gives students time to fully write or discuss a topic. I use it several ways:

• Timing the first 10-minutes of Silent Sustained Reading at the start of the hour.
• Giving students 5-10 minutes to “Quick Write” where I ask them to write and keep their pen or pencil moving the entire time.
• Providing students with one minute to discuss a topic with their shoulder-partner.
• Holding myself to a certain amount of time when delivering a mini-lesson so that I do not speak too long.
• Keeping track during a time-write assessment.

I would be lost now without my egg timer. It is a simple thing to use, but it really helps to keep my lesson on pace each day.

Create competition (with yourself)

A few years ago, I went in a radical new direction with the “3PGrading System.” I have modified this system some, but one of the key components is factoring in how much a student improves throughout the year. This creates competition within the student: motivation to improve.

As I wrote about with my outside reading project, I ask mystudents to read 20 books in one school year. For some students, they have never read more than one or two books, if any. To think about reading 20 books seems like a huge stretch, so I ask them to compete within themselves to do it. If I have a student who only read one or two books last year, but reads 10 books in my class, I call that a huge win.

My students also keep writing portfolios. At the end of the year, I ask them to reflect back on their writing from the start of the year until May. I challenge them to identify areas where they have improved, whether it is organization, ideas and content, embedding quotations… something. This drives our end-of-the-year conferences where we look at their reading and writing and how much improvement they have made.

These are three simple things I do in my classroom that parallel what we as coaches do on the football field. What are some other strategies that you bring from the classroom to the athletic field?

Three ways to engage your students in writing

For years, most schools have operated under the following assumptions:

• Social studies teachers know how to teach students about World War II and the Constitution.
• Art teachers know how to teach students about painting and art analysis.
• English teachers know how to teach reading and writing.

This is the logic in many schools; however, in the era of the Common Core State Standards, this paradigm must shift. One of the great things about the CCSS is that it asks ALL teachers to help teach reading, writing, speaking and listening. Previously, I wrote about five easy ways any teacher can get her students to start close reading.

For some reason, even though all teachers wrote countless papers in high school, college and maybe even graduate school, teaching writing simply freaks teachers out. Even English teachers aren't immune to this feeling when it comes to writing instruction.

Writing instruction should not fall only on the Language Arts department. Kelly Gallagher's book Write Like This is an excellent example for how English teachers can teach writing in their class.

However, his basic principles can be applied to ANY subject area.

Here are three simple things that you, yes even you Mr. Math teacher, can do to engage your students in writing:

1. Training wheels: Provide templates

Learning how to write is a bit like learning how to ride a bike. At first, students need to have "training wheels" before they can learn how to write on their own. Templates make excellent training wheels.

I first learned about templates from the book They Say I Say. 

Before the CCSS, my assignments would require a minimum number of quotations, and students would just "throw" those quotations in without any introducing or explanation. They would just appear randomly throughout the paper. Now, we use templates especially with our freshmen and sophomores when we teach them how to incorporate evidence in their writing. Simple quotation templates from the book include:

Introducing a quotation:

According to ___(Author)____, "________(Quotation)___________."

__(Author)________ states "______(Quotation)____."

Explaining a quote:

In other words, _____(Explanation)_______________________.

Basically, _________(Explanation)___________________________.

Sure, it is a bit like doing a Mad Lib, but it works. Once students have a basic understanding of how to incorporate templates in their writing, we expand to longer templates that we create in our professional learning communities. Here are some examples of longer, more complex templates:

Rhetorical Precis (From: http://www.lhsseniorproject.com)
Satire analysis of Animal Farm
Imagery in Fahrenheit 451

Could you design a template for writing a lab report in science class? What about justifications in Calculus? Heart rate analysis in physical education? Think about templates that would be applicable to your subject area, and then create them from scratch. Once students have this basic writing idea down, then we can begin removing the "training wheels."

2. Take the plunge: Teacher modeling

We learn new skills best by observing others who are experts at the skill we are trying to learn.  Kelly Gallagher's analogy is that you would learn how to golf by watching PGA golfers swing a club. I show my quarterbacks game film from college and professional teams to teach them technique and plays. This is basic teaching, but something we forget when it comes to writing. Students need to see the teacher write (and sometimes fail!) in front of them.

It. Is. Terrifying.

Take the plunge! Write in front of your students.

It is scary to sit at a computer in front of 25 teenagers and have every keystroke appear on the projector. Sometimes the words flow right through my fingers. Sometimes, I can't think of anything to type. Sometimes, I make a number of mistakes that my students are quick to correct. It is very scary, but it is essential for students to see us struggling with the same work we are asking them to do.

This can apply to ANY subject area:

• Social studies teachers can write thesis statements.
• Math teachers can write justifications.
• Art teachers can write art reviews.
• Science teachers can write lab reports.

The next time you incorporate writing in your class, take the leap and try writing in front of them. You will learn something about the assignment you are giving them, and your students will learn through watching you write in front of them.

3. Learn from experts: Mentor texts

The problem with most high school students isn't that they don't know how to write. The problem is that they have yet to find their own style and voice. That takes time and work; unfortunately, it doesn't happen over night. One way to help this is to provide mentor texts that students can close read to analyze what the author is DOING, and then emulate that style in their own writing.

We first have students perform a close read of the text, making note of the moves that the author is making. I will often have questions about "how long" a piece has to be, or "what all needs to be included" in the writing. When we look at these mentor texts, we notice the length of paragraphs - usually 2-3 sentences (Not 8-10 you say? Blasphemy!) There are also usually 20+ paragraphs, which is wildly different from the five paragraph essays that we all know and love (hate?) to teach. This is how real writers write, and our students need to closely examine what these writers do.

There is a great blog written by two English teachers called Teach Mentor Texts where they highlight examples of texts that can be used for emulation. I love using Roger Ebert, Rick Reilly and Leonard Pitts Jr. articles as mentor texts because they have have distinct styles that students can emulate.

Admittedly, I am lacking knowledge when it comes to this area in other subjects. I do not know who the writing gurus are for math, science or social studies. I would encourage you to look through articles or examples from real experts in your field, allow students to closely look at the moves author makes, and emulate the style until they are able to find their own voice.

Final thoughts

Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers. The basic idea is that it takes 10,000 hours for anyone to become an expert in her area of expertise. If students are only writing in their English classes, they will never get to the 10,000 hour mark in 12 years of school. However, if the writing is happening in every subject area, this is a much more realistic goal.

No matter what subject you teach, all teachers can implement writing in their courses. The responsibility should not fall solely on the shoulders of the English department. These are three strategies that any subject area teachers can quickly implement in their classes: templates, writing in front of students, and mentor texts. My belief is that if we can just get students writing in their other classes, the English teachers can worry about the grammar, organization and everything else that comes with it.

Tackling Readicide: Five tips to get started

Guilty confession: For the first eight years of my teaching career, I was clueless about teaching literature. By the way... I'm an English teacher.

In college I took several literature courses ABOUT literature, but we never had instruction on how to TEACH literature. My experience in college went something like this: we would read a book each week, then sit around in a circle discussing it... usually from a Freudian perspective. Then write an essay. That's it.

When I started teaching, I tried the same technique. The problem was, my students didn't care about the symbolism of the ducks in The Catcher in the Rye or the green light in The Great Gatsby. I quickly realized that I was merely a human Cliff's Notes, delivering the plot and basically having a discussion with the handful of students who actually read the book. 

I tried quizzes. I gave tests. I assigned projects. I showed movies.

My students simply weren't reading the books I was assigning.

Then, my teaching world was rocked. Two years ago, I read two books about teaching reading: Readicide by Kelly Gallagher and The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller.

After reading these books, I slowly began to implement the strategies from the books. This blog post will be the first in a series about how I set-up and run our outside reading assignment. It is a work in progress, but I am confident it is much more effective than the "Human Cliff's Notes" way of teaching reading.

Five rules to get started:

1. Allow students to choose what they read

This is a huge paradigm shift for many teachers. I will admit that I am a control freak in many ways. I believed that I was the paid professional, so I should control what students read and write. However, I have discovered that it is much more powerful when students get to choose and have ownership over the books they are reading.

When I look across the room at the books my students are reading, I see a wide variety of books. Some students are reading The Hunger Games series. Some are reading graphic novels. I even have students reading classics such as A Tale of Two Cities and Pride and Prejudice. Whoda thunk?!

The kicker? They are actually reading! Does it really matter that all students read the same book at the same time? I would argue no. As long as they are reading, that is what matters the most. Allowing students to have choice in their reading selections is far more powerful than force feeding "classics" like Jane Eyre down the throat of a 16-year-old sophomore.

2. Give up control

Repeat after me: "This is not about you."

We have already established that I am a control freak. Giving up control is scary, and this kind of shift forces the teacher to give up a great deal of control in the classroom. It is scary... and that is kind of cool.

I am not proposing that you let this turn into total chaos. There needs to be guidelines in place (which I will discuss in another blog post), but the teacher must be willing to turn control over to the students: selection of books, pacing, "abandoning books" when the student isn't digging it, etc...

This should be very individualized for each student. I set a goal for my students to read 20 books in one year. However, through individual conferences if a student tells me she read one book last year, and has read eight books this year, how can that be anything but a win for everyone? 

Giving up that control that EVERY student has to read the same books at the same time is scary, but also exhilarating.

3. Give students time to read

If you are going to make a commitment to reading, students need time to actually READ in class. I used to think of "reading" time as filler or a time-waster, but I have found huge value in providing SSR (Silent Sustained Reading) time to my students. The ONLY way students can become better readers is to actually READ.

We start each hour with 10 minutes of SSR. Once everyone has settled down (usually within the first 30 seconds after the bell), I start a timer and the students know they have 10 minutes to read. This does not change. It is the procedure for how we start the class each day.

I also ask my students to read 20 minutes five days a week outside of class. That time could be in another class during the school day, on the bus on the way home, or in bed before they fall asleep. I don't care, as long as they get in another 20 minutes during the day. This builds stamina. Just like a runner needs to invest time in running, readers need to invest time in reading. 

My classes meet four times a week. If you do the math, students should read 40 minutes a week in class, plus 100 minutes outside of class. That is 140 minutes of reading a week. If they can read one page a minute, they should be able to read a 300-page book in approximately two weeks. 

4. Model reading for students

Kelly Gallagher asserts in Write Like This that the teacher is the best writer in the room; therefore students need to see the teacher writing in front of them. The same logic applies to reading. 

Students need to visually see their teacher reading books along with them. 

During those 10 minutes of SSR time, I sit at my desk and read a book. I have been trying to read books that my students are reading (I am currently reading The Maze Runner, for example), but I also have been working through my own personal reading list. 

I would venture to guess that many students do not regularly see an adult reading books. You may be the only adult in their life that they can see actually reading books. That is a powerful responsibility. If they can see you as the teacher taking part in the same reading experience as them, it makes it a shared experience that you can discuss and talk about with your students, not an "assignment" where the teacher doesn't take an active role. 

5. Do not be a fun-sucker

Let me be clear: If you are not careful, you are going to suck all of the fun out of this:

• Do not get bogged down in how you are going to grade it.
• Do not worry about how you are going to keep track of everything.
• Do not stress about students who are not keeping up with the pace.
• Do not get upset with the students who are "gaming" you on the number of books they have read.
• Do not force students to read things they don't want to read.

This should be an enjoyable experience for everyone. If you implement too many rules and guidelines, you are going to make it a dreadful experience. Some students will "game" you. There is no good way to grade this. Things will fall through the cracks.

Keep some guidelines in place, but the focus should be on reading enjoyable books. 

These are some simple guidelines I started out with when we started outside reading in my sophomore English class. What are some tips you have for getting started with outside reading?

Five close reading strategies to support the Common Core

I walked in to my first college class, Political Science 101, eager to learn. For my inaugural college assignment, my professor asked the class to read the first three chapters of the textbook for the next class period. 

That night, I returned to my dorm room, determined to learn everything I could in those three chapters. I pulled out my textbook and highlighter. Growing up, that is what I always saw the “older kids” using when they read a textbook. In my naïve 18-year-old mind, I believed that highlighters must have some magical power that transports the words on the page directly to your brain. I assumed that if I just figured out the right words to highlight, then it would be easy for me to remember what I read.

However, when I opened my textbook it was unlike anything I had read in high school.  Where were the pictures? Where were the definitions for words in the margins? Where was the chapter summary at the end of each chapter? All of the things I relied on in high school to get me through a text were missing.

I shrugged, pulled out my highlighter and started highlighting. That is what college kids did to study… right? But, what was I supposed to highlight? The bold words? The headings? “Important” information? I wasn’t sure. I started highlighting everything that looked important on the page. Before long, the page looked something like this:

I quickly realized that I had no real game plan for reading this complicated textbook. I didn’t know what to highlight or how to find the important information to study. The text simply overwhelmed me.

Flash forward to my first few years of teaching. I taught senior English, and I was determined to provide my students help when it came to annotating texts. We practiced annotations throughout the year, and my instructions went something like: “Mark it up! Underline important information! Write in the margins!”

While this method may have been slightly more effective than what I used that first day of college, it was still too vague and ambiguous for my students. They had no direction for reading, especially when it was a complicated text they did not understand.

Last fall, I attended an AVID workshop about critical reading strategies. To be honest, it completely changed the way I teach reading. I learned many simple strategies to help my students attack a text. After the conference, our department began adapting the strategies to all of the types of texts that we teach. Here are five simple strategies to help teach students how to critically read complex texts. The best part? Highlighters are not required.

1. Number the paragraphs

The Common Core asks students to be able to cite and refer to the text. One simple way to do this is by numbering each paragraph, section or stanza in the left hand margin. When students refer to the text, I require them to state which paragraph they are referring to. The rest of the class will be able to quickly find the line being referred to. 

2. Chunk the text.

When faced with a full page of text, reading it can quickly become overwhelming for students. Breaking up the text into smaller sections (or chunks) makes the page much more manageable for students. Students do this by drawing a horizontal line between paragraphs to divide the page into smaller sections.

At the beginning of the year, I group the paragraphs into chunks before I hand out the assignment. In the directions I will say, “Chunk paragraphs 1-3, 4-5, 6-8, 9-12.” I look at the paragraphs to see where natural chunks occur. Paragraphs 1-3 may be the hook and thesis statement, while 6-8 may be the paragraphs where the author addresses the opposition. It is important to understand that there is no right or wrong way to chunk the text, as long as you can justify why you grouped certain paragraphs together.

By the end of the year, I begin to let go of that responsibility and ask my students to chunk the text on their own. They number the paragraphs then must make decisions about what paragraphs will be grouped together. Usually, most of the class is very similar in the way they chunked the text.

3. Underline and circle… with a purpose.

Telling students to simply underline “the important stuff” is too vague. “Stuff” is not a concrete thing that students can identify. Instead, direct students to underline and circle very specific things. Think about what information you want students to take from the text, and ask them to look for those elements. What you have students circle and underline may change depending on the text type.

For example, when studying an argument, ask students to underline “claims”. We identify claims as belief statements that the author is making. Students will quickly discover that the author makes multiple claims throughout the argument.

When studying poetry, students could underline the imagery they find throughout the poem.

Circling specific items is also an effective close reading strategy. I often have my students circle “Key terms” in the text. I define key terms as words that: 1. Are defined. 2. Are repeated throughout the text. 3. If you only circled five key terms in the entire text, you would have a pretty good idea about what the entire text is about.

I have also asked students to circle the names of sources, power verbs, or figurative language.

Providing students with a specific thing you want them to underline or circle will focus their attention on that area much better than “underlining important information”.

4. Left margin: What is the author SAYING?

It isn’t enough to ask students to “write in the margins”. We must be very specific and give students a game plan for what they will write. This is where the chunking comes into play.

In the left margin, I ask my students to summarize each chunk. I demonstrate how to write summaries in 10-words or less. The chunking allows the students to look at the text in smaller segments, and summarize what the author is saying in just that small, specific chunk.

5. Right margin: Dig deeper into the text  

In the right-hand margin, I again direct my students to complete a specific task for each chunk. This may include:

·     Use a power verb to describe what the author is DOING. (For example: Describing, illustrating, arguing, etc..) Note: It isn’t enough for students to write “Comparing” and be done. What is the author comparing? A better answer might be: “Comparing the character of Montag to Captain Beatty”.

·     Represent the information with a picture. This is a good way for students to be creative to visually represent the chunk with a drawing.

·     Ask questions. I have found this to be a struggle for many students, as they often say they don’t have any questions to ask. When modeled, students can begin to learn how to ask questions that dig deeper into the text. I often use these questions as the conversation driver in Socratic Seminar.

There are many other things students can write in the margins. However, we must model and teach these strategies so that students will have an idea of what to write when they are on their own.

Here is what a completed Article of the Week might look like after a student has performed a close read of it:

To ensure our students are college and career ready, we must teach them critical reading strategies in order for them to independently attack a text. They must learn how to own a text, rather than letting the text own them. After following these steps, students have read the text at least five times and they are actively interacting with the text. This is a much different experience than skimming through a text one time with a highlighter in hand.

What strategies do you teach students in order for them to critically read complex texts? Please leave your ideas in the comments below!