Article Reflection--"Closing in on Close Reading" by Nancy Boyles

During the past 15 years, I have taught all levels of English to ninth grade students, from remedial reading classes to Honors English II. Going deeper with a text is always a problem, no matter the level or student. Even my English II students who read regularly or on an 11th grade reading level sometimes fail to interact with the text on more than just a superficial level. "This reminds me of 'so-and-so'" as we are reading about the roaring '20s in The Great Gatsby, or "I once pulled a prank on my family" as we are reading "The Open Window." Making personal connections is great as we often retain information better when we can attach those details to something familiar; however, if we want our students to become better thinkers, speakers, and learners, we need to teach them to be more than "metacognitive readers," as Nancy Boyles calls them in "Closing in on Close Readers." In order to become those deeper thinkers, Boyles advises us to use shorter passages, aim for independence, and focus on observing and analyzing. The length of a text can be intimidating, both from the teaching standpoint and from the reading standpoint.

By using short texts, we can reiterate a close-reading skill numerous times in a short span of time, as opposed to hitting on it once or twice during a longer novel or work. I love teaching novels, but I often find that we aren't going as deep as I would like because I worry the novel will drag on and on ifI slow down. I believe it could be possible to still teach the longer novel and engage in some shorter close-reading activities within each chapter; my only concern would be that I wouldn't focus on the same skills each time and would want to hit on something different each day. This isn't, especially with the reluctant readers, going to strengthen the skills to the degree that I would like, though.

My ultimate goal as a teacher is to create independent learners; I want them to put me out of a job (sort of). As independent readers, students would not need me to point out where to stop and ask important questions. I often tell my honors students to ask the "What is this telling me about (character/conflict/etc.)?" "Why is (author) including this detail?" and "How is (author) showing us (personality trait/motivation) about (character)?" questions to go deeper into the text. I try to avoid too many guiding questions and push them to look for places to pause and ask questions. Both of these steps are crucial in nurturing those close reading skills our students need. I believe many students are uncomfortable with this, though, because the answers aren't always as concrete as they would like; many times the answers are based on personal interpretation of details connected with other details. Evidently, text-to-reader connections and close reading analysis must work in harmony.

Boyles includes a chart at the end of her article called "Craft Techniques and Related Questions for Close Reading" that I think could be useful to share with the students as a bookmark or a poster on the wall. This chart provides basic questions to encourage the students to go deeper, helping them make the connection between an author's craft and the text's meaning. Eventually, as the students continue to strengthen their close reading skills, they will create these questions on their own and become more aware of the deeper meanings of what they read.

As my Honors English II students wrap up their reading of The Great Gatsby and my English I CP students begin their nonfiction unit, I'm looking to take them deeper into the texts, pushing them to ask the tough questions that don't always have concrete answers.


Boyles, Nancy. "Closing in on Close Reading." Educational Leadership, ASCD, www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec12/vol70/num04/Closing-in-on-Reading.aspx.

Kristyn Kamp's "5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive"--Article Review

As I mentioned in my previous post, group projects are a struggle for me--some students don’t want to work with others, some students want others to do all the work, some students don’t get along with the other students, some students will be off-task the whole time. However, in the real world, we work as groups on a regular basis, and our students need to be taught how to work with others successfully. In her blog post “5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive,” Kristyn Kamps discusses how to motivate students and provide purpose to group activities. I have attempted these strategies to varying degrees with varying success:

1. Prepare students for working in teams. Kamps recommends providing numerous low-risk opportunities at the beginning of the semester to help prepare students for group tasks such as discussions, debates, and negotiations. She engages her students in a variety of skill-building activities in the forms of role selection and homework review. I also attempted some of these activities, but I believe I need to plan for more explicit practicing than what I’ve been doing. I often forget the purpose for the activity because of the fun nature of the activity or the final product of the activity.
2. Use team leaders as liaisons. Many years ago during one of my first PBL units (I did not realize then that it was), I structured my students’ groups to have a liaison. My classes were tasked with creating an amusement park from Odysseus’s adventures in The Odyssey. Each group had a different land which had to have a restaurant, three rides, and a show. Every day would begin with team meetings, and then the liaisons would come to a planning meeting with me. We’d share our ideas, give each other suggestions, work through problems, and then the liaisons would return to their groups. That year was probably the most successful of all my years doing that project. The students knew their concerns were being heard, and I knew everything that was going on without standing over the groups.
3. Train team leaders. In the back of my head, I have always known I need to train my students to be leaders, but I’ve never been explicit about it. Some students naturally want to be leaders in the group. I can see asking my students at the beginning of the semester what roles are most interesting to them and training them to fulfill those roles. Leaders aren’t the only roles for which they must be trained.
4. Structure team meetings with agendas. I kept saying my students needed to create agendas during the Invisibility Project. We even learned how to create an agenda at the beginning of one class period. However, I failed my students by not following up with it and encouraging them to continue. Because of that, I have a feeling some students floundered and were unsure of their daily goals. I tried to put too much on my students too soon; I needed to hold their hands a little bit longer.
5. Plan frequent opportunities for feedback. Kamps recommends providing multiple opportunities for self- and peer-feedback along the way, as opposed to at the end of the project. This is something I attempted to do on a daily basis, if not every other day. I wanted the students to recognize how their individual products would mesh with other students’ projects and encourage them to rise to the challenge of blending their ideas and writing with students of various writing abilities. I found most students receptive to this; however, I know that some of my students will need to be taught how to reflect and provide feedback. This isn’t always an innate skill.

Kamps’s blog post has provided me an opportunity to reflect on recent successes and struggles with my PBL units, and I can definitely see how I can use her strategies to my students’ benefit. I strongly recommend reading her post to gain more personal insight for your classroom’s PBL units.

Kamps, Kristyn. “5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive.” Blog | Project Based

     Learning | BIE, BIE, 

     www.bie.org/blog/5_strategies_for_making_project_work_time_more_productive.

January 27, 2018--Reflection on the beginning of the semester + Matt Bertasso's call to action

January 27, 2018
Course 3 Blog Post: Reflect on the beginning of your semester and any PBL units implemented; optional: In a recent blog post for New Tech, Matt Bertasso, Director of Compass Academy asks us as educators are we giving students fish or are we teaching students to fish for a lifetime? After reading his article below, reflect on your current unit of instruction and consider how you are structuring your content. Are you providing opportunities for students to discover through their own reading, writing, thinking, questioning essential understandings or are we providing it to them? What areas are strengths? Where can we grow and improve our practice?

https://newtechnetwork.org/resources/secrets-great-teaching/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=newtechnetwork&utm_content=The%20Secrets%20to%20Great%20Teaching%20-%20New%20Tech%20Network
Bear with me...this is a long post (as mine tend to be...it's the writer in me). The first two paragraphs are an update, the next two paragraphs are my response to Matt Bertasso's article, but the last paragraph is the Call to Action for me--how I want to utilize what I gleaned from Bertasso's article. Skip to that if you'd like. I won't be offended.

Once again, we begin a semester with the weather throwing a curveball at us. Last semester it was total eclipses and hurricanes; this semester it’s fake ice storms and real snow storms (which I was reluctant to believe would come up until the second I looked out my window at a blanket of beautiful white snow covering the ground and rooftops). These curveballs have me scrambling to make sure I can get through each of the PBL units I’ve planned before the end of the school year. Their first nine weeks is packed full with nonfiction- and community-based PBL, and I want to get them to the second nine weeks fiction and media-based PBL units rolling around in my mind.

We jumped head-first into a getting-to-know-you PBL (unit title pending) with the students writing personal narratives and opinion essays, conducting classmate interviews, and designing a class website. Some students are more excited than others (mostly because we’re in the writing phase of the unit as opposed to the designing phase), but I’m hoping they will all come around the further along we get. My biggest obstacle so far has been student absences--one student has been absent all but one school day, another has missed the last four school days, a third has missed every other day this past week. Once these three students return, I will need to find numerous opportunities to catch them up to the rest of the class without keeping them from making up work in other classes.

I designed this unit to ease the students into the idea of using projects to learn various skills--creating websites, interviewing people, solving problems in the community; however, after reading Matt Bertasso’s “The Secrets to Great Teaching,” I’m wondering if I’m providing the fish too much as opposed to teaching them how to fish. I’ve located the sample personal narratives and opinion essays to read and examine for style, albeit mostly because the students cannot access Teen Ink on our network; I’ve stipulated the required elements for the website instead of letting them throw out ideas for what should be included. Granted, I’ve struggled to get them to answer my questions about what the writer is doing, but I wonder if I could eventually get them to answer more if I continue to expect it instead of settling back into the habit of giving them all the answers.

I also wonder if I’ll get better reactions if I give my students the rod instead of holding it myself. Bertasso says “When students have ownership over their learning, they aren’t learning for the teacher, the grade, or for their parents, they are learning for themselves and deeper learning happens. Students, at this point, are truly fishing.” I want them to fish for themselves. Every semester, my students receive a letter that describes my role in the classroom: “My goal is for you to emerge from this year as eager learners—always looking for the next big idea and indulging your curiosities. I am here to facilitate and monitor you on your educational journey.” I’m a facilitator--my job is to make the learning easier, but I’m not doing that by giving them the fish, answering the questions for them. They will never learn to catch fish on their own if my hands are always on the fishing rod or I’m always giving them the fish.

That brings me to my next thought, and it scares me: What if I involved them in the planning of the unit? Completely throw out every bit of my plan other than a chunk of time during the semester and let my students design the unit with my guidance? I’d give the students a problem, theme, or essential question and see what they create. At its core, this is Genius Hour but full-time. Can I give up that much control in my classroom? I might have to flesh out the unit to ensure it’s not fluff and my students are truly learning the standards, but part of me believes they will be fine. I’m not sure I’m ready to do that just yet with my CP students; perhaps I will after these first few units. However, I’m about to begin the first true unit of my English II American Literature class after we wrap up our summer reading writing unit next week. I’ve been toying with the idea of having them research life in Colonial America and creating a presentation to sell the idea to those still living in England at the times. What if I tossed them the question “What was it like to live in American during Colonial times?” Would that be too open-ended? Would I get high quality products? Would they access the primary sources I would like them to use or would they create a project that could be completed by simply doing a Google search? How do I fit in all the literature I don’t want to leave out--Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, Henry’s speech to the Virginia Convention? I’m scared, but I want to give it a shot. Am I crazy? A quote from one of my favorite movies keeps running through brain: “You’re daft, lady!” I think I’d rather be daft like Jack, though, than play it safe and limit my students’ potentials.