Levels of Reading and Wil E Coyote

I can't remember learning to read (so I can't remember being taught to read). I have fond memories of the profound sense of accomplishment I felt when I sat on the red beanbag chair (on their orange shag carpet) in my parents' living room and read out loud (in what I'm sure was the most painfully slow and stuttering tones) Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat. I read. A whole book. By myself (to my poor parents who suffered through every page turn but beamed with pride at the end).

I can remember in high school sitting in Mrs. Rocker's living room next to a fire while eating scones and drinking tea and discussing Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and feeling very adult about the whole experience.

And I can remember taking such pride in the marked-up pages of my books at the University of Michigan that I refused to sell them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. I still have them.

But I don't remember progressing through any sort of levels of reading. Or engaging in different kinds of reading. Or encountering any one text differently from another. Or anyone teaching me how to write notes in the margins of my texts. All of a sudden, I was just at-least-proficient in reading: comprehending what I read, interacting with a text, and knowing when to zoom in and zoom out.

"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to
do, chapels had been churches and poor men's
cottages princes' palaces." --Portia, The Merchant of Venice 

Portia will tell us here that there is a difference, of course, between knowing and doing. When I started teaching at the high school, I "did" long before I "knew." When I assigned reading to my students, I'd say things like, "Close read chapter one of To Kill a Mockingbird; come to class with your book marked up."

It should be no surprise that this kind of assignment produced mixed results. If the results I was looking for were deep understandings of a full chapter of a book and the ability to zoom in on exactly the word or phrase I felt students should note while they were reading while also picking up on all the major themes and ideas AND noting unfamiliar vocabulary, then I got a mixed bag, for sure. Why couldn't my kids all close read? 

The answer is simple: I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't understand that not all reading and writing in texts is "close reading." 

How Zoomed is the reader's Zoom Lens?   
We can't close read everything.
We don't interactively read everything.
We sometimes expect interactive reading while students take on miles-on-the-page reading.

If you disagree with these claims or they don't make sense to you, then this post might be for you.

Miles-on-the-page
I read The Hunger Games trilogy in a weekend. I'd gotten a copy of book one from Scholastic Inc. on a visit to New York, and when I finally cracked the cover, I was hooked. But I didn't close read it. I didn't even interactively read it. I didn't have time; I needed to get to the next page!

In Lemov, Driggs, and Woolway's Reading Reconsidered, this is called "miles on the page" or "quantity reading." And it is a totally reasonable and acceptable approach to consuming lots of text. It also speaks to the idea that "quality reading requires quantity reading. Students must read not only well but also widely and extensively."

So here's the thing--there's a "but also" there. Reading Reconsidered doesn't think of miles-on-the-page reading as one "type" of reading but rather as one component of supporting the growth of young readers. We need our students reading. A lot. They mention that the "time that we allocate to 'reading' [in our classrooms] is in fact spent talking about reading, say, or talking about topics brought about by reading. Less often is that time filled with actual reading: how many road miles students really log with reading is an open question."

So number of pages students read matter. And if we're asking our students to "interactively" or "close read" those pages, they won't cover as many miles. We need to invite them to zoom on out and hit the open road in a book.

Attentive/Interactive
Early on in my teaching, I don't think I was asking my students to do "miles-on-the-page" reading very often. But I was assigning a "miles-on-the-page" volume of reading to them and then asking them to do an entirely different level of reading altogether--attentive reading or, in the language of Reading Reconsidered, Interactive Reading. Interactive Reading (IR)  is when "a reader engages with the text by underlining, marking up key points, and summarizing ideas in the margin."

This! is what I think I wanted my students doing when I was assigning the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Lemov et. al. argue that "in high-performing literacy classrooms, simple habits--how your students mark up text as they read and how they hold a discussion that honors different interpretations--allow inspiring and rigorous instruction to thrive." They also argue that strong literacy programs have a "system for making up" that is "consistent--there [is] a way students [are] taught to do it--but each student mark[s] up different things."

In the school where I work, having teachers collaborate together to create a system for making their thinking visible in IR might be one of the most significant steps we can take in creating cohesiveness in our reading pedagogy. If freshmen coming in learn a system, then sophomores use that system (and expand the tools in it), we'll have a culture of students who understand 1) that there are different levels of interaction with a text and 2) how to make their thinking visible when reading. (Incidentally, the creation of the system alone would be a profound professional development opportunity for the teachers involved--it's really useful for teachers to discuss what they are looking for when assessing student reading; it forces a lot of exciting and important discussion about the teaching of reading.)

Teachers can assess student understanding in their IR notes in the margins of their texts. That's a post for another day, though.

Close
Zoom on in. This is the geek out moment for most literature majors. Give me a half a page of text in Things Fall Apart, and I will mark up every word. I will go from the page level to the paragraph level to the sentence level to the word level. I will notice how many times the main character, Okonkwo, is referred to as fire, flame, ash, smoldering. I will note connections to earlier and later pieces of the text (because I've now read the novel at least fifteen times). I will interpret every Igbo proverb in the margins of the text. The end result of my close read will likely be that there will be more of my writing on the page than there will be of Achebe's.

That's close reading. Lemov and his colleagues define close reading carefully as "the methodical breaking down of the language and structure of a complex passage to establish and analyze its meaning. Teaching students to do it requires layered reading and asking sequenced, text-dependent questions; and it should end whenever possible with mastery expressed through writing."

A "complex passage"--that's not a whole novel. We can't close read a whole novel. We can't even close read a whole chapter without "layered reading." Multiple readings.

And layered readings generally won't happen in a student's dorm room (at least not my student's dorm room) without a very carefully structured set of questions and directions. Most of my students haven't developed the skills to just "close read" without any additional guidance. And that additional guidance takes a lot of planning. This is another opportunity for teachers to collaborate.

Implications--Wrestling Points

• Volume matters. It matters because developing readers should be reading a lot. Regularly. Teachers need to be mindful of how much volume they are assigning (and whether or not their assignments are allowing students to just read). And if volume is the point, then we need to let the students know that is the point, and we need to assess their reading accordingly. 
• If asking students to do Interactive Reading, then don't assign miles-on-the-page volume.
• A successful IR program requires collaboration among teachers in the creation and implementation of a system, and that level of collaboration will ultimately benefit the students in any given program as they spend less time learning the system and more time in the practice of actual reading. 
• If asking students to do Interactive Reading, then don't expect a close reading level of comment or analysis. 
• Close reading requires significant planning on the part of a teacher when working with developing readers. How will we 1) choose the passages and 2) find the time? 

A Final Note

In Kathryn Schulz's excellent TED Talk "On Being Wrong"  she shares the metaphor above for what it feels like when we're wrong. We're Wile E Coyote in the moment before he looks down. We're hanging in mid-air because we haven't realized that we aren't on solid ground any more. But in that moment, being wrong feels remarkably like being right. (And it doesn't make us any less wrong--it just means we don't know it yet.)

 It occurs to me that this is an apt metaphor for trying to grow as a teacher of reading. I don't often get to feel like the roadrunner. And the more I study this area, the more I believe that we're all the coyote. The point, it seems, is to be willing to look down. Often.