Perception and the Truth

Many credit Lee Atwater with the quote, “Perception is reality.” And when viewing your own life, does this not ring true? One would never consider a turtle to be a speedy creature, but then again, that depends on who is doing the considering.

Perspectives have much to do with experiences, schema, and interpretation. Author’s bring their own unique perspectives to the texts they write. They select what they will reveal to the reader explicitly and implicitly, how the text will be organized, and how their point of view will be carried out. Often the author’s own ideas begin as incomplete thoughts, twisting and turning through the process of writing, changing and evolving until they come out the other side into a cohesive whole. At times, the characters of novels reveal themselves to the authors through the storytelling, and take on a life of their own, and yet, the author still has command over what will be revealed through the character’s dialogue, actions, and thoughts. Despite all this control, readers develop their own interpretation based upon the evidence within the text, but also their own personal perspectives. Other experiences with texts, the world, and other people affect how they view what the author reveals. Therefore, readers apply their own connections to develop their own perspective, but must also examine the evidence within the text to understand what the author directly reveals as well as infer to gain meaning from underlying messages, ideas, and themes.

Common Core emphasizes the importance of point of view, devoting standard six for Reading Literature and Informational Text to this concept. Why is it so significant? Understanding the role of point of view allows the reader to think critically about a piece. What are the author’s motives and purposes in writing a text? What context or historical background does the author emerge from? How does this affect the portrayal of events? Readers must understand the effects of their own perceptions and the author’s point of view in order to get at the truth of what they are reading. Even then, that gets us to a deeper question – what is the truth?

Using Close Reading and Questioning

Earlier in the year I wrote about the importance of close readings and what they entailed. As close readings are an essential part of Common Core standards, teachers will need to rethink how they spend their shared reading time block. Teachers accustomed to using textbook models are comfortable with following the steps outlined in the text for a single reading of the story. Some teachers may have extended the reading a second time. Teachers familiar with comprehension strategy instruction may spend several days or a week on one story to focus on a specific comprehension strategy. Lifting the text and examining the text for evidence may be a norm. However, close reading goes beyond both of those. It certainly has elements of comprehension strategy instruction, but demands more time on text, and certainly more student time with challenging texts. Teachers may read the same text for 1-2 weeks for a variety of purposes, sometimes as a whole, other times in small parts. Teachers will need to strategically map out this time, selecting texts with depth, and focusing lessons around content that students need to understand. For example, if a third grade teacher was focusing on the comprehension strategy of questioning, with the objectives of readers ask questions about unknown words, parts, and key details, as well as readers find answer to their questions using the text, background knowledge, inferring, or outside source (with some questions being unanswered), a close reading of The Princess and the Beggar by Anne Sibley O’Brien may look like the following:

Day	Lesson	Charting/Activity	Standards Addressed
1	Read story aloud with students. Stop and pause throughout the reading.	Students write questions on post-it notes throughout the reading, including unknown words and phrases. Have students share and chart their deepest question.	RL 1, RL 4
2	Classifying questions: What type of questions do we ask? (e.g. clarifying, character motives/traits, unknown words or phrases (vocabulary), predicting etc.)	Analyze the questions from day one for how they relate. Group questions and determine categories. Have students work in collaborative groups to determine how they can categorize their questions. As a class discuss questions that didn’t fit into your categories and create any new ones that they may need.	RL 1
3-4	Chart story elements students remember from the day before. Read story aloud again. Discuss the categories from the day before. Tell them today they will examine the category for character traits/motives. As we reread the story, we will examine how the princess, the king, and the beggar think, speak, and behave. Then we will revisit those questions	BEFORE READING: Chart story elements (characters, setting, major events). Chart questions students have about the three different characters. DURING READING: Chart character traits’ motives along with the evidence from the text. Examine how those traits relate to the sequence of events. Revisit questions throughout the reading as they are answered. AFTER READING: Examine which questions were not answered. Can we answer them now? If not, why? Which questions seemed to get at the heart of our characters? Which types of questions got us deeper into understanding the characters? (For example, how and why vs. who)	RL 3
5	Examine just the poem within the story. What is the poem about? Pull the poem apart to determine meaning and infer the point/lesson of the poem. What does this poem reveal about the princess?	Have the poem written up separately from the story so you can pull it apart and discuss meaning as it unfolds and how it relates to the story as a whole. Include questions they have about the poem, and work to find the answers through pulling it apart. Examine the literal and nonliteral language within the poem.	RL 4, RL 5
6	New Words and Phrases: Examine their questions that related to vocabulary. Take words/phrases from day 1 that have not been addressed. Students should have text so they can look closely for evidence.	CHART: Write the new words/phrases, evidence or clues for determining meaning, and images to help us remember the meaning. Give students their own chart too. As the class discusses the words, they should write their thinking on their page and share out. For words without context, provide context (either sentences or pictures) for them to help support inferring for word meaning.	L4
7	Shared Inquiry: Examine a specific text-dependent question, such as, “How does pride play a role in the princess’s decisions?”	Students brainstorm their thinking first, citing text evidence for their answers. Class discussion starts with this question, but then probes beyond based on the conversation. Students have text to use for evidence. Ultimately, the class examines the data of their discussion and revisits their answers from before.	RL 1
8	Revisit Questions from Day 1: Answer and Sort	Whole Class: Examine some questions from day 1: Discuss the questions and their answers, citing evidence. Sort questions by the types of answers (Text, Background Knowledge, Infer, Outside Source/Unanswered)	RL 1
9	Answering Questions and Sorting by T, BK, I, and U/OS	Students work in collaborative groups to find the answers to the questions they sorted on day 2. Where did their answers come from? Cite evidence when answering and sort questions in the end by the categories from day 8.	RL 1
10	Recount	Students write a recount of the story using the brainstorm organizer. Students also determine the lesson of the story. Students share recount with a partner.	RL 2
11	Lesson Discussion	Examine the lessons students wrote from the day before. Organize by teams of similar thinking. Have them get into groups and develop an argument as to why that lesson matches the story. Have a class debate.	RL 2, W 1

Effective close reading should draw students deeper into the nuances of the text. Students should feel empowered and develop a greater understanding of the importance of exploring texts. Close readings should build students’ stamina and drive, and ultimately build a passion for reading, which is one of our foundational goals to begin with.

Does Comprehension Strategy Instruction Fit in with Common Core?

This was my first thought when I surveyed the standards. Although there was clear evidence that questioning was a valued strategy, what about the rest? Is it still important for students to visualize? make connections? predict? infer? determine importance? synthesize? Because I believe comprehension strategy works on multiple levels, I was intent on answering these questions, and in my quest have found ways of connecting the standards to strategy instruction although many of the terms are omitted.

There was a bold statement made early on about the frivolity of making connections – how it leads readers into themselves instead of the story, and a backlash against personal response. My initial reaction was to cringe. Isn’t reading always personal? Even technical manuals make sense only through processing relationships and connecting to what you understand. That is why my husband can spend hours reading his airplane manuals and they make sense, and all I see is a bunch of random pieces of information that have little meaning to me. He has the schema, or background knowledge, to make sense of all the bits of information. He relates new data to what he already knows and revises his thinking for new airplanes. He possesses the technical (or tier 3) vocabulary terms to relate to the data, and most likely visualizes the cockpit and how the information is used to fly the airplane.

To me, reading is a process of constantly making connections to, within, and across the texts, so why wouldn’t it be included in the standards? According to Louise Rosenblatt (as cited in Pardo, 2004) there are four components to reading: the reader, the text, the social cultural context, and the transaction. Readers bring their own background knowledge, interact with the features of the text and the author’s intent, and develop meaning based on what they bring to the text that day. It is in this transaction that readers apply a variety of comprehension strategies to determine meaning. As we know, our understanding of text changes over time because we change over time, along with what we are reading for in a text. This personal relationship with text is foundational in how we make meaning.

Although making connections has been contested (and New York has balked at this by adding an eleventh standard on personal response), a case can be made that upon a closer look, there are clear ties to connections within and across texts. And although personal connections are clearly de-emphasized, there are standards that need scaffolding to be attained, and students need to understand how to articulate how they relate  to texts to delve deeper into ideas, emotions, and events within texts.

One of the biggest critiques of making connections is that it promotes students to parade their ideas off topic, which leads them further away from the text, rather than closer. However, learning and the integration of ideas are deeply entrenched in making connections. With Common Core, we are being asked to refocus our attention on how we teach connections to make sure students are bringing their knowledge about the world to really explore the “four corners of the text” rather than the corners of their lives. Therefore, instead of abandoning the strategy, we need to make sure we guide students through the text and reexamine the different facets of connections.

Connections examine both the relationships of the reader to the text, but also the relationships of what exists within and across the texts. When thinking about the strategy of making connections, it may be helpful to think about different categories. The first type of connections is the personal relationship between the reader and the text. At this level, readers become aware of how ideas and details within the text relate to their own lives and other stories in their background knowledge. They become purposeful in developing these relationships by categorizing them by text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. An essential essence of this foundation is for the reader to become active in the process of relating to texts, and become cognizant of the interaction between the reader and the text. The second type of connections entails readers developing understanding of textual structures and features, and making connections across texts according to these elements. This type of connection is clearly articulated in the Common Core Standards. Some examples may include genre, writing style, author’s purpose, themes, writing style, and literary tools. Teachers may purposefully select texts by author’s study to examine connections across texts, or writing styles to compare different authors. The third level of making connections examines the relationships within a text. How do the parts relate to the whole? How are the images related to the text? How does understanding the text structure allow the reader to understanding relationships within the text. Connections entail building relationships with texts at a variety of levels. Therefore, when reading the standards, words such as the integration of ideas, relationships and connections may all point towards a comprehension strategy that appeared overlooked – making connections.

Reference
Pardo, L. (2004). What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Comprehension. The Reading Teacher. Vol. 58, No. 3.