Deeper Reading, Chapters 4 and 5

I was a sophomore in high school when I first read Brave New World and I absolutely hated it.  I hated the generic questions my teacher asked.  I thought the text was transparent and irrelevant.  I couldn't wait for the class to move on to a different text because I thought we were wasting time on an outdated book.  Two years later, on a flight to Italy, I read the book again.  I couldn't understand why I had hated the book before.  I couldn't even remember what had rubbed me the wrong way about it in the first place.  In fact, reading it again, I could see huge implications and relevancy to our modern American life.  I thought about the book for the entire two weeks of my holiday, revisiting passages on long train rides and discussing it with my travel companion at length over many dinners.

There are several significant reasons why my second reading was so different.  The first was that I wasn't being required to read the text.  The second was that I had learned a great deal more about the world, and specifically about the historical context in which the book was written, since my initial encounter.  The third was that I knew the basics of the story, so my mind was free to focus on details. 

With each reading, text becomes more vivid.  Every time we revisit a text, we find a sparkling gem of truth we hadn't noticed before.  Chapters 4 and 5 of Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading investigate the importance of both the initial and the second reading of a text.  We have to ask ourselves what is actually happening on the page, and secondarily, what does it mean.  Chapter 4 reminded me of a lot of the fix-up strategies discussed in Cris Tovani's I Read It But I Don't Get It.  Gallagher discusses methods for helping students realize where comprehension is actually breaking down and developing strategies for addressing the breakdown immediately.  Scoring Comprehension and Color Coding (p. 67-69) are two strategies students can use to help identify specifically what they don't know when they are reading.  It's so important to explicitly identify parts of a text that don't make sense because students can immediately know what's wrong and seek help and teachers can understand precisely what students don't know.

In Chapter 5, Gallagher discusses an important element of second reading, identifying not only what the text says and what it means, but also what the text doesn't say and how that impacts meaning too.  So often we are trained to see what's only on the page.  However, in both simplistic and complex ways, authors exclude information that's either implied or subverts the meaning of the text.  Gallagher talks about the excluding of information when reading statistics, but in fictional and nonfictional texts, the exclusion of information may be an intentional craft device.  Sometimes authors want readers to understand an emotion through inferences without explicitly labeling the emotion.  Sometimes leaving out specific information is a craft device to create doubt in the mind of the readers.  Left out information, as Gallagher illustrates, may also unintentionally subvert the meaning or the validity of a text as well.  This aspect of text is typically revealed in a second reading because it often takes zooming in on the details of a text to begin to see what's missing. 

Another essential aspect of the second reading is examining how the text actually works and why it matters.  The second reading is really where students can move from the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, to the higher levels, analyzing meaning and evaluating validity.  The second reading helps move students toward the standards the Common Core charges teachers with upholding. 

Deeper Reading, Chapters 2 and 3

Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading Chapters 2 and 3 focus on teaching challenging texts and focusing the reader on the text at hand.  In my Reading in the Content areas course, we talked a lot about various strategies for creating meaning in text and tackling challenging texts.  Gallagher's book almost feels like a continuation of that same discussion, which was largely driven by Chris Tovani's text I Read It But I Don't Get It. 

In chapter 2, Gallagher essentially describes how he sets up his class for the reading of a text and walks readers through the lesson that he uses with students.  Each piece of the lesson is specifically crafted to touch on various levels of comprehension and reflection of learning.  In particular, I was specifically drawn to page 17 where Gallagher drives home the importance of collaboration in making meaning and identifying how a text works.  We comprehend 70% of what we discuss with others.  If this is true, than we need no other evidence for giving students ample opportunity to discuss, reflect, and create with one another.  I particularly like the idea that students collaborate as a group to make sense of literary devices by actually creating sentences using those devices.  The lesson described in this chapter is a strong approach to increasing comprehension and helping students read deeply without frustration.

Chapter 3 focused on the how to get the reader centered on the reading.  In particular, I appreciated the focus on capitalizing on students' previous learning and making learning relevant.  I believe these key elements are essential to the success of literally any lesson.  The section of suggestions for framing new texts was extremely useful.  Although I have been exposed to many of these strategies, I thought it was really useful to see how they can be applied to readings in creative ways.  For example, I loved Gallagher's idea to have student's locate references to "Big Brother" in various genres of art and media in beginning a unit on 1984.  When beginning a reading with a kind of scavenger hunt of media, you give students a chance to approach text with a sense of background knowledge which is rooted in pop culture.  I think one of the best ways to increase interest and focus the reader's attention is to put the subject and ideas in a text in a language students understand and bridge personal interests with academic learning. 

Mechanically Inclined, Part One

Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined gives educators a practical and incredibly refreshing approach to teaching grammar.  Instead of treating grammar as a stand alone series of lessons wherein students are mindlessly asked to correct worksheets full of poorly composed sentences, grammar is taught as an integral part of writing.  Anderson encourages attention to grammar and mechanics not merely through correction but by examining how authors use grammar effectively.  This shift in attitude is assuredly as exciting for teachers as it is for students because it removes all of the rote responses from grammar instruction and focuses on how to write exciting and interesting prose.  Perhaps most importantly, Anderson's approach emphasizes art and play in authorship.

In my undergraduate education as an English Literature major, I wrote a lot of academic text.  I remember getting through that first year of college and feeling quite proud of the improvements I had made as a writer and as scholar.  However, I didn't really get writing until a particularly persnickety teacher sat me down and explained that good writing isn't just about grammar and message, it's about style.  Style is what makes a paper a delight to read.  Style is about using rhetoric, even in academic and nonfiction writing, to make the reader feel something.  Style is essentially about manipulating the reader into viewing something from a particular perspective.  Anderson's approach to grammar instruction emphasizes style in addition to mechanically correct writing.  In fact, it's almost as if Anderson wants his students to believe that style and mechanics really cannot be separated.  He also asks that readers collect ideas from writers and investigate how grammar works to make reading exciting.  As soon as I got that advice as an undergraduate, I started regularly reading writers who wrote nonfiction prose creatively.  I read the New Yorker and the Economist weekly.  I read almost all of David Foster Wallace's creative nonfiction.  Slowly but surely, I started seamlessly replicating a lot of the rhetorical devices these writers employed.  However, as a future English teacher, it never occurred to me to teach grammar in the same way.

Until reading this text, I was fairly terrified of the idea of teaching grammar.  Even for a student of English, grammar is intimidating because the rules are complex, the teaching approaches are typically dry and tired, and by the time most kids get to high school, grammar has practically become a torture devise.  However, I can definitely see myself implementing a lot of his approaches on a regular basis in my future classroom because the emphasis on writing well and enjoying reading and writing as an art.  In particular, my top five teaching strategies and tips are as follows:
1. Collecting great sentences or bits of writing to study and inspire.  Including students' original writing in the collection of great sentences.
2. Posting great sentences on the walls around my room. 
3. Sharing a "writer's secret" regularly and using the secret during writing instruction and freewriting.
4. Using the writer's notebook per the guidelines presented in Mechanically Inclined
5. Read a stimulating piece of writing before each freewriting session and build freewriting time into lessons frequently.

Close Reading

Close reading has become a kind of catchall term in recent years to describe a deep investigation into text.  However, for trained students of English Literature, the close reading is a technique of New Criticism, sometimes referred to as the Formalist approach.  While Formalism is a common way of investigating texts and is traditionally learned in schools, and a particularly good way to analyze poetry, it can have some drawbacks as well.  Therefore, I remain personally hesitant to say whether or not I am in favor of this approach taking such a dominant role in the classroom as a result of the Common Core.

As was mentioned in the book article from Text Complexity: Raising the Rigor in Reading, Reader Response criticism grew out of New Criticism as a kind of reaction to the idea that texts should be studied in a vacuum.  However, the ways in which we process art is colored by our own personal experience.  Furthermore, authors themselves are both consumers and producers of culture, and therefore create within the larger context of their world experience, sometimes in unconscious ways.  It is for these reasons that we must approach close reading with caution.  In my experience, close readings may be extremely insightful or they can be terribly superficial, devoid of any real substance or understanding. 

As with most of the Common Core, there is a huge window of opportunity which given talented, well educated, and creative teachers, can lead to deep understanding and incredible improvement in student learning and skills.  However, my fear is that a return to close reading, without a real definitive set of professional development on how to use it effectively, will only lead to history repeating itself.  As a secondary student, much of my literature education centered around close readings.  Much of that education felt uninspired, uncreative, and completely dry.  Making meaning without context can often make learning disconnected at best and detrimental to deep thinking at worst. During my undergraduate, most of my professors took an approach to literature called New Historicism, which as the name suggests, puts significant weight on the world within which literature is created.  For me, this approach to study made literature connect to life.  I was somewhat alarmed to see the Shanahan article suggest that the same kind of preparation that was so essential to my understanding, should be decreased significantly under the Common Core. While I understand that the goal is to have students interacting with text, context can make a huge impact on meaningful reading. 

While I like a lot of the ideas of close reading, I do hope to see examples of teachers conducting close reading lessons with some flexibility to employ effective teaching strategies such as background education on the author and an examination of context.  Without some flexibility, how can students truly be expected to evaluate text for validity and quality?  One must have an understanding of context and texts with which to compare to truly get at the meaning and value of a text.