Tools

Close-Read Tools

Reading passages at or above your grade level is hard enough by itself. Throw a difficult learning task and a new graphic organizer at a student, and the likelihood of failure or disengagement goes through the roof. Instead of creating specific graphic organizers for each unit or passage, our students use on of the general graphic organizers, appropriate for all text, below to remain engaged, and to deepen their understanding as they read.

The "I Notice, I Wonder" chart to the left is given to students so that they can annotate their observations (I Notice) and their curiosities (I Wonder) as they read. This helps me as a teacher know where students are in their knowledge (what they notice,) and it helps me to make sure that future lessons address students' actual curiosities (what they wonder about.)

This is a digital version of the paper assignment above. Great for keeping up with your grades while you're at home or on the go.

Dialectic notes are a great way for students to have a conversation (a dialogue) with the text. They work very well to help students diversify their understanding of a text, because they need to use a wide variety of notations to get full credit. Like the notice / wonder charts above, questions play a huge role in building understanding with dialectic notes.

Mind Mapping is one of the best tools we use to organize information in our ELA classroom. Essentially, we create "mind palaces" or "brain attics" to store information in purposeful, meaningful ways so it can be recalled easily when we need it. Sometimes we use this methodology for simple factual recall (like vocabulary words and definitions) and other times we use it for broad concepts (like quantifying the evolution of equality.)

**While the description of the "brain attic" in the video above is fraught with errors, the idea of a "mind palace" is well supported by cognitive research.**

The "four lines, two circles" summary is a pretty basic way to artistically capture the plot of a story. Generally speaking, grade-level work literally represents what's happening in the story, and above grade level work captures something symbolically significant about the text.

This is the most challenging close-read protocol I use. It's called the "it says, I say, so" protocol. It challenges students to connect current observations to their own understanding, and their broader educational schema. We wait to use this tool until about the middle of the school year.

We originally created this graphic organizer for our murder mystery unit, but found that the observation/inference graphic organizer works very well to deepen students' understanding as they read, to pick out relevant observations, and to practice making realistic inferences. As such, we've started using it with general texts beyond the confines of the murder mystery unit.