RESA/DOE SUMMER INSTITUTE Common Core Georgia Performance Standards: Focus on Close Reading

1. RESA/DOESUMMER INSTITUTECommon Core Georgia Performance Standards: Focus on Close Reading Gerald Boyd, Susan Jacobs Georgia Department of Education English Language Arts

2. TODAY’S FOCUS: CLOSE READING • What do the words “Close Reading” mean to you? • On the front of the index card write a colloquial definition. • On the other side add 3 things that you would add for an ACADEMIC definition of close reading.

3. Key Words? IN GROUPS OF 3-5, REACH A CONSENSUS OF WHAT YOU ALL BELIEVE ACADEMIC CLOSE READING TO BE IN A FEW BULLET POINTS HOW DOES IT DIFFER MARKEDLY FROM WHAT WOULD BE MEANT IS A LAY PERSON SAID, “READ THIS CLOSELY”?

4. Don’t You Ever Interrupt Me While I’m Readin’ a Book!

5. Varying definitions… • Education Week (June 2012) says: “In contrast to common practice, in which teachers explain reading passages and supply background information before students read, "close reading" confines initial study to the text itself. Students make sense of it by probing its words and structure for information and evidence. Through questions and class exercises, teachers guide students back through the reading in a hunt for... “ THIS PASSAGE SEEMS TO CONFUSE CLOSE READING WITH PRE-READING

6. Other training materials… Achieve the Core says: Close reading requires that, rather than asking students questions about their prior knowledge or experience, the standards expect students to wrestle with text dependent questions: questions that can only be answered by referring explicitly back to the text in front of them. In a shift away from today’s emphasis on narrative writing in response to decontextualized prompts, students are expected to speak and write to sources. THIS RESOURCE TIES CLOSE READING TO INTEGREATED ASSESSMENT

7. David Coleman on Pre-Reading • How much information do we want to give students about a text? • Ideal ratio • Kinds of information • When pre-reading doesn’t help

8. Where are We Going?

9. Example of Strategy Study: Reciprocal Teaching • Predicting • Questioning • Clarifying • Visualizing • Summarizing

10. Predicting • Preview headings, illustrations, and text features, such as maps, captions, and tables. • Preview text structure: compare and contrast, sequence, main-idea/details, cause and effect. • Use frame • I think I will learn…because… • Based on …I predict I will learn…

11. Clarifying • Words you don’t know • Sentences that are confusing • Ideas that are difficult • Use context clues • Reread • Look it up

12. Visualizing • Make it picture in your mind of what you read. • As I read this passage, I see…in my mind.

13. Questioning • Students ask higher-order questions • Require text-based answers • Why does the author say…? • How do …and …compare?

14. Summarizing • Identify the most important points. • What were the key ideas? • The passage about…begins with…develops the idea that… and ends with…

15. Steps for a Jig-Saw • 1. Establish a home group. • 2. Count off within home group (1-6). • 3. Read the Faulkner piece individually. • 4. Find “expert group” and complete close reading strategy together. • 5. Discuss and note what you like or do not like about your strategy. • Each group choose someone to speak briefly about the strategy and your conclusions about the piece.

16. William Faulkner “The Bear” (1942) He was ten. But it had already begun, long before that day when at last he wrote his age in two figures and he saw for the first time the camp where his father and Major de Spain and old General Compson and the others spent two weeks each November and two weeks again each June. He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the tremendous bear with one trap-ruined foot which, in an area almost a hundred miles deep, had earned itself a name, a definite designation like a living man. He had listened to it for years: the long legend of corncribs rifled, of shotes and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into the woods and devoured, of traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and shotgun and even rifle charges delivered at point-blank range and with no more effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a boy—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before he was born, through which sped, not fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape. It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It looked and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, huge, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big—too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it, too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. He seemed to see it entire with a child’s complete divination before he ever laid eyes on either—the doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism,1 indomitable2 and invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis3 of the old wild life at which the puny humans swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant: the old bear solitary, indomitable and alone, widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam4reft of his old wife and having outlived all his sons.

17. Accessing Unit Planning Resources • GeorgiaStandards.Org • Model Unit Frameworks • Blank Planning Template • Curriculum Maps • ELA Editable Unit Drop Box (sjacobs@doe.k12.ga.us) • ELA Reporter Newsletter • ListServ: join-ela-(gradeband)@list.doe.k12.ga.us

18. How Can We Help? Gerald Boyd Susan Jacobs gboyd@doe.k12.ga.ussjacobs@doe.k12.ga.us 404-617-7185 Kim Jeffcoat Daniel Rock kjeffcoat@doe.k12.ga.usdrock@doe.k12.ga.us 404-463-1933 770-617-9270 DOE ELA HOMEPAGE: http://public.doe.k12.ga.us/ci_services.aspx?PageReq=CIServEnglish