Master Close Reading Skills - Understanding Text-Dependent Questions & Strategies

1. If you have not downloaded and/or viewed the materials that will be discussed during this webinar, you may access them at the MDE CCSS SharePoint site.

2. Close Reading and Text Dependent Questions January 30, 2013 Vincent Segalini, Director of English/Language Arts Office of Curriculum and Instruction

3. Close Reading • What is close reading? • Read the passage in small chunks • Stop and identify key terms and/or define unfamiliar vocabulary • Ask text-dependent questions throughout the reading • Ensure students refer to the text when answering questions • Go slow! • Due to the extended nature of the process, this strategy lends itself best to shorter selections such as chapters, passages, paragraphs, excerpts, poems, or essays.

4. Meeting the Demands of the CCSS • Students will be able to extract and employ evidence to support their claims (Standard 1). • Studentswill be able to independently engage with increasingly complex text (Standard 10). • Studentswill be able to infer, analyze, interpret, integrate, compare, and evaluate content and claims in a text (Standards 2-9).

5. Pre-Close Reading Activities • Independent read • Expert reader read-aloud • Number paragraphs • Chunk or group long text • Highlight unfamiliar terms

6. Freedom Riders and the Mississippi Summer For a long time, it had been illegal to segregate people by race during long-distance travel. But the federal government had never enforced the law in the South, where blacks and whites were still kept apart on interstate buses. In the spring of 1961, a group of black and white protesters set out to change that. These Freedom Riders got on a bus in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans. They never reached New Orleans. Riders were beaten in South Carolina. A bus was set on fire in Alabama. Segregationists attacked the Riders with fists and iron bars. The southern police did nothing. Neither did the federal government, even though FBI agents watched the violence. Taken from “A Young People’s History of the United States.”

7. Freedom Riders and the Mississippi Summer For a long time, it had been illegal to segregate people by race during long-distance travel. But the federal government had never enforced the law in the South, where blacks and whites were still kept apart on interstate buses. • Based on the text from the passage, what does it mean to segregate? What are the words in the text that help you identify the meaning? Taken from “A Young People’s History of the United States.”

8. Freedom Riders and the Mississippi Summer Neither did the federal government, even though FBI agents watched the violence. • What is the author implying with this statement? How do you know? Taken from “A Young People’s History of the United States.”

9. Text-Dependent Questions As the name suggests, a text dependent question specifically asks a question that can only be answered by referring explicitly back to the text being read. It does not rely on any particular background information extraneous to the text nor depend on students having other experiences or knowledge; instead it privileges the text itself and what students can extract from what is before them. For example, in a close analytic reading of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” the following would not be text dependent questions: • Why did the North fight the civil war? • Have you ever been to a funeral or gravesite? • Lincoln says that the nation is dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Why is equality an important value to promote? Taken from achievethecore.org

10. Text-Dependent Questions • Good text dependent questions will often linger over specific phrases and sentences to ensure careful comprehension of the text—they help students see something worthwhile that they would not have seen on a more cursory reading. Typical text-dependent questions ask students to perform one or more of the following tasks: • Analyze paragraphs on a sentence-by-sentence basis and sentences on a word-by-word basis to determine the role played by individual paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words. • Investigate how meaning can be altered by changing key words and why an author may have chosen one word over another. • Probe each argument in persuasive text, each idea in informational text, each key detail in literary text, and observe how these build to a whole. • Examine how shifts in the direction of an argument or explanation are achieved and the impact of those shifts. • Question why authors choose to begin and end when they do. • Note and assess patterns of writing and what they achieve. • Consider what the text leaves uncertain or unstated. Taken from achievethecore.org

11. Text-Dependent Questions Step One: Identify the Core Understandings and Key Ideas of the Text As in any good reverse engineering or “backwards design” process, teachers should start by identifying the key insights they want students to understand from the text—keeping one eye on the major points being made is crucial for fashioning an overarching set of successful questions and critical for creating an appropriate culminating assignment. Taken from achievethecore.org

12. Text-Dependent Questions Step Two: Start Small to Build Confidence The opening questions should be ones that help orientate students to the text and be sufficiently specific enough for them to answer so that they gain confidence to tackle more difficult questions later on. Taken from achievethecore.org

13. Text-Dependent Questions Step Three: Target Vocabulary and Text Structure Locate key text structures and the most powerful academic words in the text that are connected to the key ideas and understandings, and craft questions that illuminate these connections. Taken from achievethecore.org

14. Text-Dependent Questions Step Four: Tackle Tough Sections Head-on Find the sections of the text that will present the greatest difficulty and craft questions that support students in mastering these sections (these could be sections with difficult syntax, particularly dense information, and tricky transitions or places that offer a variety of possible inferences). Taken from achievethecore.org

15. Text-Dependent Questions Step Five: Create Coherent Sequences of Text-Dependent Questions The sequence of questions should not be random but should build toward more coherent understanding and analysis to ensure that students learn to stay focused on the text to bring them to a gradual understanding of its meaning. Taken from achievethecore.org

16. Text-Dependent Questions Step Six: Identify the Standards That Are Being Addressed Take stock of what standards are being addressed in the series of questions and decide if any other standards are suited to being a focus for this text (forming additional questions that exercise those standards). Taken from achievethecore.org

17. Text-Dependent Questions Step Seven: Create the Culminating Assessment Develop a culminating activity around the key ideas or understandings identified earlier that reflects (a) mastery of one or more of the standards, (b) involves writing, and (c) is structured to be completed by students independently. Taken from achievethecore.org

18. Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson In winter I get up at nightAnd dress by yellow candle-light.In summer quite the other way,I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and seeThe birds still hopping on the tree,Or hear the grown-up people's feetStill going past me in the streets And does it not seem hard to you,When all the sky is clear and blue,And I should like so much to play,To have to go to bed by day? Taken from http://www.bcsaschools.org/pdfdocs/Third%20and%20Fourth%20Grade.pdf

19. Bed in Summer Read the first stanza. In winter I get up at nightAnd dress by yellow candle-light.In summer quite the other way,I have to go to bed by day. What does the author mean when he said he has to dress by candle light in winter? And what does he mean when said he goes to bed by day?

20. Bed in Summer How is the narrator feeling at the end of the poem? What is his tone? How do you know? What words does the author use to describe the tone?

21. Resources Common Core Website www.corestandards.org MDE Curriculum and Instruction Website http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/ci MDE CCSS Website www.mde.k12.ms.us/ccss PARCC Website www.parcconline.org

22. Contact Information Office of Curriculum and Instruction 601.359.2586 commoncore@mde.k12.ms.us Vincent Segalini – English/Language Arts vsegalini@mde.k12.ms.us