Excerpt from: Defining “Deep Reading” and “Text-DependentQuestions”
by Christina Hank
Hank reflects on her teaching of The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss.
Deep reading through text-dependent questions, or “Another area where I went astray”
1 / When I asked my students “How did the characters represent the countries involved in the Cold War?” they could answer without having to look back in the text. In fact, because we had already discussed the Cold War and how the countries behaved, they could probably answer that question without having read The Butter Battle Book at all! Again, my question itself did all of the work for the students; I left them no responsibility for dissecting the text.2 / A text-dependent question forces students to go back to the text. It is a question they could not answer if they did not read, and even if they did read, they will still need to refer back to the text to answer the question. In his research in both Texas and Vermont, [David] Coleman found that 80% of the questions students in grades kindergarten through twelve were asked to answer did not require them to go back to the text.
3 / To help teachers understand text-dependent questions, achievethecore.org, created by the Student Achievement Partners, has created exemplar lesson plans and has published its “Guide to Creating Questions for Close Analytic Reading.” Good text-dependent questions, according to the guide, cause students to do at least one of the following tasks:
· Analyze paragraphs on a sentence by sentence basis and sentences on a word by word basis to determine the role played by individual paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or words
· Investigate how meaning can be altered by changing key words and why an author may have chosen one word over another
· Prove each argument in persuasive text, each idea in informational text, each key detail in literary text, and observe how these build to a whole
· Examine how shifts in the direction of an argument or explanation are achieved and the impact of those shifts
· Question why authors choose to begin and end when they do
· Note and assess patterns of writing and what they achieve
· Consider what the text leaves uncertain or unstated
4 / For a student to complete any of these tasks, he or she would have to read and comprehend the text and revisit the text to analyze it. While asking these kinds of questions requires planning in advance–I know I would have a challenging time making them up on the spot!–it is a different kind of planning than we are used to because instead of preparing to give away all the information, we are planning to ask probing questions that guide students in uncovering the information.
Reflection is the heart of our practice.
5 / If I were to teach my Butter Battle lesson again, I would start with reading and get rid of all the frontloading. I would present them with the whole Thanksgiving turkey and have them dig in on their own. I would then guide their learning by pre-planning questions that make them dig deeper and deeper into the levels of meaning: How does the use of the phrase “kinks in his soul” define the view the Yooks have of the Zooks? What causes VanItch to “look quite sickly”? What is Dr. Seuss saying through the growing intensity of the weapons? Why does Dr. Seuss end the book with the “Big-Boy Boomeroo” standoff?
6 / The common core standards ask us to change the kinds of questions we ask and to require our students to do more work on their own. They ask us to let our students unravel the mysteries of reading.
References
http://www.achievethecore.org/
NYSED. (2011, April 28). Bringing the common core to life. Video retrieved fromhttp://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/resources/bringing-the-common-core-to-life.html