In the video of Tapestry Charter School teacher, Andrew Hossack and his fifth grade students, Andrew Hossack used a close reading process to meet learning targets associated with ELA Common Core Standards. This teacher used authentic informational text that related to a unit of study on indigenous people of western New York as the students would be engaged due to having a purpose for the reading. Though differentiation was considered by revealing different amounts of text to students of varying levels, the complexity of the reading was maintained.
The close read procedure that the teacher used continued over the span of a few days. The first part of the process required that student read the article independently for flow. after they identified the learning targets and broke down the important words in the targets. Following the independent reading students talked about “gist”, a word that the teacher used to demonstrate the main idea. Rather than jumping right to the main idea of the reading, the students then read the article again, using annotations. Students would write the gist, in the margins, of various portions of the text. Students talked about the big ideas in the various sentences and circled important words within those sentences.
Students then walk around the room and look at sentences from the text that Mr. Hossack hung around the room and had to decide if the sentences were important to the main idea by using sticky notes to demonstrate their idea. The teacher then closed the lesson with a debriefing, or a summary in which he had the students talking about the contributing factors in the reading that lead to the main idea.
The components in Mr. Hossack’s close reading process include reading, thinking, writing, and talking. Assessment for this lesson was formative and involved whole class discussion, teacher observation of annotation and peer to peer discussion, review of the sticky notes on the sentences that were hung on the wall, and the whole class debriefing session.
