Implementing the CCSS: Comprehension, Close Reading, and the Common Core

1. Implementing the CCSS: Comprehension, Close Reading, and the Common Core P. David Pearson University of California, Berkeley

2. Goals for Today • Answer some nagging questions as we begin the implementation process for the Common Core State Standards… Slides will be posted on www.scienceandliteracy.org

3. So what are these questions? • So what is this close reading business anyway? • Where did close reading come from? • Where is it headed? • Do we really have to forget everything we learned about the role of prior knowledge in stories? • No more picture walks? Pre-reading discussions? On your own questions? • What does it mean for a question to be text-based? Text-dependent? • Does this mean I’ll be asking more literal/factual questions? • If we ban prior knowledge, how will kids figure out whether what they read makes sense?

4. But… • I still support them as long as we can keep our wits about us as we implement them…

5. What sold me on the standards

6. What they said about reading • Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive, reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature. They habitually perform the critical reading necessary to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally. They actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens world views. They reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic. (CCSSO/NGA, 2010, p. 3)

7. So what’s not to Like? • Nothing • Everything I believe in about literacy learning

8. So……. • In 2010, I signed on the dotted line to say these standards are worthy of our professional support and implementation • Ready to go on the road and seek converts. • But the road to paradise has been a little rocky…

9. What is Reading Comprehension? • A demonstration… • I will unfold a very short story, line by line. • Your job is to figure out “what’s going on” at every juncture… • A silent think aloud for you…

10. The End of Elegance • Business had been slow since the latest rise in the price of crude. • Nobody seemed to want anything elegant anymore. • Suddenly a well-dressed man burst through the showroom door, • and headed straight for the most expensive model on the floor.

11. John Ingham peered over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses, • over the the want ad section of the newspaper, • adjusted his loose-fitting jacket to hide the frayed sleeves of his shirt, • and rose to meet the man whose rhinestone stickpin and alligator boots (but were they real?) seemed out of place amidst the dazzling array of steel-gray • Mercedes sedans.

12. “I’ll take this one,” he said confidently, pointing to most expensive model on the floor… • “cash on the line!” • Later, the paperwork complete, John muttered to himself, “I’m glad I didn’t blow this one.” • He added, “What does he know about elegance? What does anyone know about elegance anymore? • Then he smiled wryly as he returned to his newfound pastime.

13. What can we learn from our reading of this passage? • Words in the text COMPEL us as readers to invoke our knowledge to make sense of things. • The more unfamiliar the ideas and words in the text, the harder it is to make the link between text and knowledge. • Yet we always seek the most plausible link to knowledge that we can generate. • Baseball for cricket • AND…Links to other parts of the text are equally important to us

14. What can we learn? • Our internal standard for rendering texts sensible is two-fold: • Does the meaning I assign to a word, phrase, or sentence square with what I have read so far? • Does the meaning I assign to a word, phrase, or sentence square with what I know to be true about the world? • Corresponds to Walter Kintch’s construction-integration model: • Construct a Text Base • Integrate the Text Base with Knowledge to create a Situation Model (some call it a Mental Model) of the meaning of the text… • Change your Knowledge

15. Context Kintchian-derived model… Text 3 Knowledge Base Does 1 Text Base Says 2 Situation Model Means Experience Out in the world Inside the head

16. New and different • Most important: A new model of the comprehension process • Text (what the author left on the page) • Text base (the version a reader creates on a faithful first reading) • Knowledge (what the reader brings from prior experience AND what she has AFTER reading). • Model of meaning for a text • Dubbed the Situation Model (mental model) • A model that accounts for all the facts and resources available in the current situation

17. What’s inside the Knowledge box? • World knowledge (everyday stuff, including social and cultural norms) • Topical knowledge (e.g., dogs and canines) • Disciplinary knowledge (e.g., how history or astronomy or mathematics works)

18. What’s inside the knowledge box? • Knowledge about Language • Phonology • Lexical and morphological • Syntax • Genre • Pragmatics (how language works in the world): Discourse, register, academic language, intention • Orthography (how print relates to speech)

19. That’s what we know about Comprehension…. But… • How does that knowledge square with the new sheriff in town is saying… • The CCSS • Is the theory of comprehension in the CCSS consistent with Kintsch’s model? • Absolutely! • But the mapping is a little tricky…

20. That’s what we know about Comprehension…. But… • How does that knowledge square with the new sheriff in town is saying… • The CCSS • Is the theory of comprehension in the CCSS consistent with Kintsch’s model? • Absolutely! • But the mapping is a little tricky…

21. Rand (2002) Definition of Reading Comprehension: The process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. • Key Ideas and Details • 1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. • 2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas. • 3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text. • Craft and Structure • 4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone. • 5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole. • 6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text. • Integration of Knowledge and Ideas • 7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.* • 8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence. • 9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take. We use the words extracting and constructing to emphasize both the importance and insufficiency of the text as a determinant of reading comprehension (Rand Reading Study Group, 2002) .

22. Common Core • Standards 1-3: Key ideas and details • Standards 4-6: Craft and structure • Standards 7-9: Integration of knowledge and ideas http://www.scienceandliteracy.org/research/pdavidpearson

23. Consistent with Cognitive Views of Reading Locate and Recall What the text says Key Ideas and Details Integrate and Interpret What the text means Integration of Knowledge and Ideas What the text does Critique and Evaluate Craft and Structure

24. For those who want to see everything at once…

25. So now we know that the CCSS are built upon a modern account of the reading comprehension process? • But how do the standards square with what the new deputy sheriff in town? • i.e., implementation guidelines like… • Publisher’s Guidelines • Aspen Institute Report on Close Reading • Engage NY

27. Text dependency of questions • Regarding the nature of texts: “A significant percentage of tasks and questions are text dependent…Rigorous text-dependent questions require students to demonstrate that they not only can follow the details of what is explicitly statedbut also are able to make valid claims that square with all the evidence in the text. Text-dependent questions do not require information or evidence from outside the text or texts; they establish what follows and what does not follow from the text itself.” (page 6)

28. Stay close to the text • Staying close to the text. “Materials make the text the focus of instruction by avoiding features that distract from the text. Teachers’ guides or students’ editions of curriculum materials should highlight the reading selections…Given the focus of the Common Core State Standards, publishers should be extremely sparing in offering activities that are not text based.”

29. My concern • We will operationally define text dependent as literal, factual questions • Forgetting that LOTS of other questions/tasks are also text-reliant • Compare • What were two reasons pioneers moved west? • What does the author believe about the causes of westward expansion in the United States? • How valid is the claim that author X writes from an ideology of manifest destiny? • YOU DON’T NEED A LITERAL FACTUAL QUESTION TO PROMOTE CLOSE READING… • Fundamental misunderstanding about reading theory: • Every action—critical, inferential, or literal—requires the use of prior knowledge to carry it out… literal intepretive critical

30. Text before all else “The Common Core State Standards call for students to demonstrate a careful understanding of what they read before engaging their opinions, appraisals, or interpretations. Aligned materials should therefore require students to demonstrate that they have followed the details and logic of an author’s argument beforethey are asked to evaluate the thesis or compare the thesis to others.” (page 9)

31. My concern • We will view literal comprehension as a prerequisite to inferential or critical comprehension. • Compare • We could read text X. Then read text Y. Then compare them on Z. • Or just ask them to conduct a comparative reading of X and Y on Z. • Sometimes the comparisonor critiquequestion better rationalizes the close reading

32. My concern • Fundamental misunderstanding of the role of prior knowledge in comprehension. • The text drags prior knowledge along even if you don’t want it to. • Schema Theory Tenet: Words INSTANTIATE schemata • Business had been slow since the oil crisis… • The text cries out for a schema to attach itself to. • Ideas that don’t connect don’t last long enough to allow learning (assimilation or accommodation) to occur • They drop out of memory pretty fast • In one eye and out the other! • The best way to encourage learning that lasts is to connect to PK.

33. Yet another role for knowledge: Monitoring • How do we know that our understanding is good enough? • We use two standards… • Does it square with the textbase I have built thus far in today’s reading? • The last clause, sentence, paragraph, page, and more… • Does it square with what I know to be true about the world? I wonder why Coleman and Pimentel are so down on prior knowledge?

34. So what about Prior Knowledge • Why has it taken a beating in the Publishers’ Criteria • One thought: Too much Indulgence at the trough of prior knowledge • Too much Know, not enough Want to Learn and Learn • Too much picture walk • Too much story swapping about our experiences with roadrunners before reading… • Let’s right the wrongs • Need a mid course correction not a pendulum swing • Knowledge in proper perspective? • Balanced view of knowledge? • Knowledge in the service of understanding

35. But asking kids to hold their prior knowledge at bay… • Is like • Asking dogs not to bark or • Leaves not to fall. • It’s in the nature of things • Dogs bark. • Leaves fall. • Readers use their prior knowledge to render text sensible and figure out what to retain for later.

36. So what’s a body to do? • Embrace the construct of close reading as it has evolved in literary theory, but embrace it ALL. • Look at what the advocates of close reading have said about it.

37. Historically… • Close reading was a reaction to the historicism and psychoanalytic traditions of the 20s in literary theory. • Knowing what Keats had for breakfast won’t help you understand Ode to a Grecian Urn • New Criticism: I. A. Richards, William Empson, Brooks and Warren: a rigorous objective method for extracting the correct meaning of a text. • (what does the text say?)

38. Close Reading in Reader Response: • read through the text to its connections with the reader, other books, history. (what does the text mean?) • Rosenblatt: close reading to transform the meaning of a text according to each reader’s experience • Fish: transform the meaning of a text according to norms of a particular interpretive community

39. Close Reading in Critical Literacy • Read through the text to its ideological underpinnings • (what does the text do?) • Derrida: read closely to uncover a text’s different, often contradictory, meanings because words refer only to conceptual systems of other words and not to fixed meanings or external reality • Get to the subtext…

40. My favorite: A debunking of the idea that the meaning is in the text: From one of the close reading heroes of the past: Mortimer Adler—How to read a book • And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; naturally, you'll have the proper humility as you approach him. But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.

41. Definitions of Close Reading • Mikics: To read closely is to investigate the specific strength of a literary work in as many details as possible. It also means understanding how a text works, how it creates its effects on the most minute level. • Bialostosky: Reading with a productive attentiveness to texts • Berthoff: attending to the interplay of saying and meaning Reminds us of Rand once again: simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning

42. So what’s a body to do? • Embrace the construct of close reading • But make sure that it applies to several purposes for reading • Reading to get the flow of ideas in the piece. • Reading to enhance our knowledge base!!!! • Reading to compare (with another text or body of experience or knowledge • Reading to critique • how good is the argument or the craft or • what is his bias/slant/perspective) • All of these approaches interrogate the text as an evidentiary base. • Develop a set of routines to enact these purposes for close reading

43. My sure fire Close Reading Strategy • What do you think? • What makes you think so? • All about warranting claims about what the text says, means, or does... • From Mary Uboldi, my sophomore and senior English teacher at Healdsburg High School

44. Mr. Martin bought a pack of Camels on Monday night in the most crowded cigar store on Broadway. It was theatre time and seven or ten men were buying cigarettes. The clerk didn’t even glance at Mr. Martin, who put the pack in his overcoat pocket and went out. If any of the staff at F&S had seen him buy cigarettes, they would have been astonished, for it was generally known that Mr. Martin did not smoke, and never had. No one saw him. What you think you know What in the text makes you think so?

45. Look Out For Lightning • Chapter 9, A Warrior Rescue • “Wow, lightning struck that tree!” Dennis yelled. • Wendy had only seen the lightning flash from the corner of her eye, but she could see the black streak along the side of the big oak tree behind the school fence. It looked like someone had just pulled off the bark with a giant potato peeler. • Mrs. Stuard grabbed the microphone. “The game is postponed. Everyone, leave the field and go inside the school until the storm passes.” • Mr. Holmes was already leading the two soccer teams across the field. He unlocked the back door of the school. • People climbed down from the bleachers and walked away from the sidelines as more thunder rumbled. • Wendy looked at the sky, but there were still no cumulonimbus clouds over them and no rain. The lightning video had been right. You didn’t have to be in the middle of a storm for lightning to be dangerous.

46. Wendy waved at her parents and Dennis’s father as they followed the crowd into the school. • “Get inside, Wendy,” her father said. • Wendy nodded. She turned to follow Dennis and Jessica. Then, she saw Austin and his parents hurrying toward the parking lot. • “Wait!” Wendy shouted. • “Come on,” she said to Dennis and Jessica. They had to stop Austin’s family from getting into their car. Sometimes Austin could be weird, but Wendy didn’t want him or his family to get hurt. • “Stop!” she shouted again as more thunder echoed. • But Austin’s parents kept walking. Dennis ran past Wendy and Jessica. He stopped in front of Austin’s parents. • “Mr. and Mrs. Scott, you have to get into the school until the lightning stops,” Dennis said, gasping to catch his breath.

47. Mr. Scott’s eyes widened. “We’re going home, young man. Did you see what happened to that tree?” • “Kaboom!” Austin’s little sister shouted. • Austin folded his arms. “I didn’t hear anything about cars.” • “Because you were too busy folding paper airplanes,” Jessica said. • Mr. Scott shook his finger in Wendy’s face. “Listen, kids, you all can stay in the school with your families if you want, but we’re leaving.” • Suddenly the sky was filled with light. An explosion echoed and sparks flew as lightning slammed into a van in the middle of the school parking lot. Jessica screamed and everyone dropped to the ground as car alarms were set off. • “We’ve got to get inside,” Wendy said.

48. Mr. Scott nodded. The color had drained from his face. Everyone jumped up and ran back across the soccer field. Mr. Scott grabbed Austin’s sister in his arms. Austin’s mother pulled him by the hand. • Mr. Andrews held the door open as they ran inside the school. • “Did you see that?” Austin gasped. • Wendy nodded. She’d never been so close to a lightning strike. It was the biggest explosion she’d ever heard. And there were sparks coming out of the car. Real sparks! • Mr. Scott stared into Wendy’s eyes. “That van was two rows ahead of our car. We could’ve been walking past it when it the lightning hit.” He put his daughter down and leaned against the wall. “Thank you. You may have saved our lives!”

49. Story Questions • Look Out For Lightning • Chapter 9, A Warrior Rescue • “Wow, lightning struck that tree!” Dennis yelled. • Wendy had only seen the lightning flash from the corner of her eye, but she could see the black streak along the side of the big oak tree behind the school fence. It looked like someone had just pulled off the bark with a giant potato peeler. • Mrs. Stuard grabbed the microphone. “The game is postponed. Everyone, leave the field and go inside the school until the storm passes.” • Mr. Holmes was already leading the two soccer teams across the field. He unlocked the back door of the school. • People climbed down from the bleachers and walked away from the sidelines as more thunder rumbled. • Wendy looked at the sky, but there were still no cumulonimbus clouds over them and no rain. The lightning video had been right. You didn’t have to be in the middle of a storm for lightning to be dangerous. What is the setting of the story and what’s going on? How does that shape the action?

50. Wendy waved at her parents and Dennis’s father as they followed the crowd into the school. • “Get inside, Wendy,” her father said. • Wendy nodded. She turned to follow Dennis and Jessica. Then, she saw Austin and his parents hurrying toward the parking lot. • “Wait!” Wendy shouted. • “Come on,” she said to Dennis and Jessica. They had to stop Austin’s family from getting into their car. Sometimes Austin could be weird, but Wendy didn’t want him or his family to get hurt. • “Stop!” she shouted again as more thunder echoed. • But Austin’s parents kept walking. Dennis ran past Wendy and Jessica. He stopped in front of Austin’s parents. • “Mr. and Mrs. Scott, you have to get into the school until the lightning stops,” Dennis said, gasping to catch his breath. What problem did Wendy recognize? How did Wendy and Dennis try to solve the problem?