Scaffolding CLOSE READING

A co-teacher recently sat in my class to see how we discussed book chapters.

What she saw was students standing up one-by-one and reporting all the things they found in the paragraph assigned to them. It wasn't a perfect class and some students still didn't know what to do. But some stood up, gave all the INFORMATION they found, defined DIFFICULT WORDS, enumerated the FILIPINO DETAILS in the text (as required by our curriculum), and pointed out FIGURES OF SPEECH that were used.

She was amazed and asked how that happened. Quite quickly, I was surprised to recall.

1) I had taught them about FIGURES of SPEECH and FILIPINO DETAILS before. So that's covered.

But I noticed they had a hard time understanding the text of the novel we were reading. And quite often, they skipped parts they didn't understand or which they thought unimportant. So I decided to teach them really close reading.

2) So I asked them to SUMMARIZE what had gone before.

3) Then I READ ALOUD the first paragraph of the new chapter and asked for volunteers to interpret the paragraph. I graded this as a 5-point quiz. The volunteers were lucky because I could ask them an unlimited number of questions until they squeezed all the juice from that single paragraph. This took as long as 10 minutes. Per paragraph!

4) Next session, I did the same thing--sometimes continuing the previous discussion, sometimes with a new chapter. But this time I could only ask 2 QUESTIONS.

5) Then I only asked 1 QUESTION.

6) Then I couldn't ask questions anymore. But I asked for volunteer CLASSMATES to ASK QUESTIONS.

This wasn't working too well because the class was too quiet, and I felt that not everyone was engaged in the lesson. So I did what I'll describe in #8. But before that:

7) I think they also needed a VISUAL way to think about what to do. So I drew paragraph lines on the board. Then I encircled "details" on it and numbered them. I made sure that all the points of the lines were included, and asked them to do the same--INCLUDE EVERY WORD in your interpretation.

This is how the class looked last week:

7) 0 QUESTIONS from me. I gave the student his grade, And if the reporter didn't get a perfect score, anyone in the class could point out the missed detaiil and get the point as bonus for himself. I made it clear that they were not stealing points, but were PICKING UP DETAILS THAT WERE LEFT BEHIND.

So, when I say "4/5" there are hands up almost immediately. And if not, I can see people struggling to find what was skipped. Engagement, check!

This was also a way for those who got a low score to make up for it. But only if they leveled-up. I also avoided giving too many bonus points to a student, and tried to call as many individual students as possible.

NEXT, I think they'll be ready to include NARRATIVE TECHNIQES in the things they notice. Maybe even THEMES or MOTIFS. These are Grade 7 boys, but with the progress they've made by climbing slowly up the ladder, I'm a bit confident.

How do you do this in your own class?