Reflection for Lesson Three

“It's our responsibility as educators to build students' capacity for independently

comprehending a text through close reading” (Boyles 2013 p.16). Close reading is the last skill that I
wanted to add to my unit. The lesson plan I designed focuses on close reading comprehension by
providing starter passages for my students and quick questions to check for understanding. My ELA’s
will be practicing purposeful reading and learning the right skills to read a passage. They will be taught
the value of re-reading and pre-reading questions in advance. As well as, how this can benefit him or
her as a bilingual learner when reading a new passage. To create this lesson plan, I first started by
looking up the definition of close reading. According to Boyle's (2013), “Essentially, close reading
means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension” (p.5 ). How does one go
about that? I haven’t actually taught this lesson yet, but I wanted to design it to be as relatable as
possible. I created a short passage with examples of times in our lives that we don’t pay attention to
small details. Students will then read a set of 3 short passages that all rely on close reading to answer
the questions. I choose shorter text because they are a great way to practice the skill of close reading
with many examples. As mentioned by Boyle’s (2013), “although we don't want to abandon longer
texts, we should recognize that studying short texts is especially helpful if we want to enable students
with a wide range of reading levels to practice closely reading demanding texts” (p.8).

For starters, I have designed the lesson as more of a we-do than I-do. We, as a class, will
read the first passage. I choose a passage at their reading level, so I will be expecting that the majority
of the class will read the passage with few errors. However, they all have personal dictionaries, and
they can look-up any unknown words in the passage and add it to their semester-long growing
vocabulary sheet. After reading the passage there is a short set of questions I want them to answer.
They will be encouraged to start close reading by reading the question and then re-reading the passage.
This will all happen before they answer any of the questions. After I will ask for volunteers and the
class as a whole to work through the close reading questions. We will talk about what details they
found difficult to find if any. As noted by Close Reading Strategies (2014), “If some of your students
have clearly misinterpreted the text, ask them to explain their thinking or help you see the connection
they’ve made. This gives them a great opportunity to practice finding textual evidence” (p.5).

At the end of my research for this lesson, I came across an article titled “The Closer the
Better? The Perils of an Exclusive Focus on Close Reading.” I choose to read this article to see if
maybe I was only looking at one part of how to teach close reading. Thankfully, this article focuses on
bringing back connection to the classroom. As a non-CCSS teacher, I am very fortunate to not have a
focus on teaching my students for state testing. I found one passage in the text by (Brewer 2019) that
stated: “even a cursory understanding of reading theory reveals that it is impossible for readers to
suspend their personal or contextual readings of a text until after they have understood what they have
read” (p.636). This quote is exactly what I have focused on for this lesson. I want my students to
connect with reading first, then we will read the passages.