Let’s call her Nadia. I’ve been working with her one on one for a little over a year now. “I suck at reading,” she told me bluntly, when she approached me for help toward the end of her sophomore year. “I do too sometimes,” I admitted, inviting her to sit with me a while so that I could learn more. We’ve learned a lot together, Nadia and I. It all started with frank conversations like…
“The sticky note is one of the most useful tools for knowledge work because it allows you to break any complex topic into small, moveable artifacts—knowledge atoms or nodes—that you can distribute into physical space by attaching them to your desk, walls, doors, and so on without wreaking total havoc. This allows learners to quickly and easily explore all kinds of relationships between and among the atoms and to keep these various alternatives within your…
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll admit: I agree with those who suggest that close reading isn’t a strategy, and I’m grateful to them for sustaining this particular conversation, even as some are beginning to grow weary with it. It’s an important one. If we fail to understand and honor the intention behind the call for close reading, we’ll likely fail to accomplish what is most critical: distinguishing readers who are strategic…
In my last post, I mentioned how some of the best conversations that I’ve had about close reading were steeped in stories that teachers shared about their own encounters with it. I recalled one of the first times I read a text closely, remembering how the experience drew me closer to my classmates and my teacher and not merely the text. Here’s the thing: when it’s working, close reading helps us savor delectable texts, and…
Image by Gris M. via flickr Four years ago, as teachers began digging into the Common Core Learning Standards and making sense of the six shifts that underpin them, questions about close reading began bubbling to the surface of nearly every discussion I was included in: What was it? How would we teach it? How would it be assessed? How would we know if we were doing it correctly? What would happen if we didn’t?…
This photo captures the thinking behind the most inspired moment of my week. I spent yesterday Gamestorming with a group of local English teachers in order to surface, prioritize, and resolve their emerging curricular needs. Once our work together was complete, we situated the games inside of a completely different context: lesson design. The anchor chart above reflects how we practiced using Post Ups, Clusters, Affinity Mapping, and Forced Ranking to help readers make…