...or Considering a
Balanced Approach to Literacy Instruction
Text Dependent Questions & the Common Core http://www.achievethecore.org/steal-these-tools/text-dependent-questions
As a teacher who was educated at a liberal arts college,
close reading, text dependent questions and academic writing have been part of
my educator tool box since I began teaching in 1998. Now, however, these practices are seeing a
resurgence of emphasis because of the Common Core State Standards.
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| This was one of the ways I introduced my students to what it means to be a good reader. We would discuss which four were accurate according to Nabokov. |
Some of my most vivid college memories include my English
professors asking us to defend our readings of various poems, stories and
novels with evidence from the text. We
read the works of Keats, Kipling, Yeats, Shakespeare, Woolf, Faulkner, Nabokov,
O’Connor and more. Most of my professors didn’t lecture; they
taught us to read closely and defend our responses. We discussed great literary texts and were
encouraged to leave our personal responses behind. In fact, I often say I never really learned
to read critically until my first poetry class with Dr. Whited in 1994.
In my junior year of college a new, dynamic, and cutting-edge
thinker joined the English faculty, and she believed we should be taught
multiple ways of reading and interpreting text.
She challenged our formalist readings and asked us to consider the ideas
of Foucault
and Barthes. While I considered
the idea of authorship coming from outside the text, read the theories, and
practiced them in this professor’s course, I had a difficult time thinking an
approach to reading a text other than the New Critic approach would lead to an
accurate reading of a text. I
successfully argued my point in my final Master’s Capstone Presentation and
went on to teach high school English for the next seven years, utilizing
primarily a formal close reading of text to teach my students to read and
comprehend. My formalist teaching style worked effectively on the Cherokee
Indian Reservation where my students’ performance in writing and reading
improved each year I was at the school.
Flash forward seven years from my master’s capstone
presentation. I was in a new state with
a new curriculum and a new, more diverse population of students and was working
toward my National Board Certification.
A major part of working on National Boards is the intense analysis and
reflection required. I was also
mentoring student teachers from the University of Kentucky. One student teacher, in particular,
challenged my thinking with her dynamic approach and different ways of
considering text. She reminded me of my
college professor. She understood the
ideas of Foucault and Barthes to be relevant to our classroom and she
considered poetry beyond the traditional cannon I so loved and faithfully
taught, even as I paired literature with non-fiction texts. Accordingly, I acquiesced to the importance of
a balanced approach in my high school English classroom and sent an email to my
college professor telling her I should have listened sooner.
So when The Atlantic
published Peg Tyre’s article and Applebee’s response, I decided to reply with my
own thoughts on the importance of academic writing in our classrooms
today. Two days after I blogged about
Tyre’s article, I had the opportunity to hear Manuel Scott speak to my district
about his personal experiences in public education. He shared the story we all saw in the movie Freedom Writers and shared that his
story most resembled that of Manny, a character created by combining multiple
individuals from the original group of Freedom
Writers.
Mr. Scott shared the story of his teacher, Erin Gruwell, and
her persistence, patience, and passion for helping her students learn. She started the year with “dead white guys in
tights” and ultimately combined the beauty of Shakespeare with lyrics by people
like Tupac to make learning more relevant and meaningful to her students. As Mr. Scott shared, his teacher didn’t stop
teaching Shakespeare and the power of words to tell a personal story—she just
hooked the kids with Tupac.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Erin Gruwell’s interview
with The Atlantic and her defense of
teaching students memoir writing. In our rush to improve public education,
I hope we all remember to keep a balanced approach to literacy instruction
because it doesn’t have to be an either/or scenario. We can teach academic writing and memoir
writing, and we can teach the Cannon paired with other non-traditional texts,
both fiction and non-fiction.
My favorite resources
for close reading and text dependent questions in order of personal preference.
Lectures
on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love
Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
The Great Books Foundation:
Shared Inquiry http://www.greatbooks.org/programs-for-all-ages/pd/what-is-shared-inquiry/
Text Dependent Questions & the Common Core http://www.achievethecore.org/steal-these-tools/text-dependent-questions
