Miss McNaughton discusses best practices in literacy.
Teachers at River Valley School recently completed a four-part training series on close reading. Close reading is a technique that involves an investigation of a short, complex piece of text with the goal of deep understanding of various aspects of the text. The process includes multiple readings of a text, each with a specific purpose. Guided by text-dependent questions, students gradually discover and analyze different levels of meaning through each reading.
River Valley reading specialists conducted training with teachers that focused on creating close reading lessons using the three phases of the close-reading framework, generating text-dependent questions to guide students toward deeper understanding, and discussing the role of close reading in our district’s current curriculum. This training is helping the teachers adjust to the instructional shifts that are occurring with the move to the Common Core State Standards. The new standards include a focus on reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from text. Close reading is one important technique that helps students achieve that goal.