Critical Reading Answer Key

[Lorna Schildt]

Theprocess that we have been going through in order to read more critically follows the same steps in a variety of types of texts. Those steps include: observe, interpret, question, seek additional resources and information, and then revise/synthesize. Once we understand this process, it is one that we can repeat in a variety of types of text. In this work we are applying this process to stories.

A few weeks ago, we started with the picture book Stepping Stones, written by Margriet Ruurs and illustrated with artwork by Nizar Ali Badr. I chose this book because it deals with the concept of Syrian refugees, which is a topic that I believe my students carry a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions and bias about. In addition, it is a topic that deals with our current world in a way that requires my students to build a bigger understanding of the context of this book in order to fully understand the book and also the world. It is also a topic that I believe our students need to know about if they are going to grow up to vote for people who will make decisions that will affect the lives of Syrian refugees and refugees from other places. So this work that we are doing, it can start with ANY book, but these are some of the considerations that led me to this particular book.

This was where we started to INTERPRET what we observed. We looked at what we were given in the text and then I asked the students to talk to those around them about what they understood about the book and the life of the family that was being described. And then, as a class, we talked about what this story helped us to understand about the life of this one family, about refugees in general, and about the world that we are living in. We pointed to the specific information that helped us to understand the lives of other people and then also the specific information that helped us to better understand our world.

So we had OBSERVED what we were told, we INTERPRETED what this information helped us to understand and now it was time to QUESTION that information in order to push us towards additional information that would expand our understanding.

When we finished reading, I asked them to go back to the places where they put question marks and this time, write out, in the margin, the specific question that they were left with. I then asked them to turn to a few people near them and share some of their questions.

On the next day, we used a Google document to gather all of the questions that we had as we read through the book for the second time. This document and this document show the work that we did. At this point, I needed to do some work with my students to help them navigate the immense number of questions that they were left with. I told my students that it was unreasonable to think that they would take time to seek out answers to every single one of those questions in order to help them to understand this text. So we had to do some work with the questions we were left with. Since we are doing this work early on in the year, a lot of our learning needs to revolve around the kinds of questions that we are using to move us forward into inquiry. As the year goes on, my students will get better at asking big questions, but since our year together is just starting, the heavy lifting work for this round of using this process comes at the start, where we are learning to ask better and bigger questions. Because we are spending a lot of time learning in the QUESTION phase of this process, I will take away some of the stress on the other phases of the process we are using to read critically.

So after creating a giant list of questions, the first thing that we did was to look through our list of questions and sort them into the questions that were important in helping to grow our understanding and the questions that we could probably save for later. I modeled my thinking about a few of our questions and then had the students use the first three pages of THIS CHART in order to continue sorting the questions we had asked.

This then, guided us into our next phase of our critical reading process, GATHERING ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND INFORMATION. I want my students to know that often our questions become useless, if we do not use them to lead us to additional resources that can give us enough information to answer them. But, because it is still early in our school year and I have not done lessons with students on finding reliable sources, I wanted to guide this inquiry work by curating a list of resources for them to use. This is one way that I can make up for the time that we put into the previous phase of our critical reading process (asking questions).

So, I looked at the questions we were left with, I thought about what printed resources I had in my classroom and then I sought out additional digital resources that I felt comfortable having the kids use. One of the things that I want to make sure that we work on in 5th grade is expanding our definition of what a text is. The truth is that our students are navigate a world much different than the one I grew up in. They are taking in information in so many ways and yet in school we are only teaching them to navigate a very narrowly defined concept of text. Our students get really good at reading responsibly written words printed on paper. They are getting better at learning to navigate written text on a device. But there are so many ways our students take in information and I believe we have a responsibility to teach them to read all of these texts in a responsible and critical way. For that reason, when I gathered resources for my students to use in this guided inquiry, I made sure to bring in not just printed texts, but digital ones as well. Those digital sources needed to include written words and also images and videos. With these ideas in mind, I set out to create a list of resources that my students could use to attempt to answer our six BIG questions.

Before introducing the list of resources to my students, I first gave them THIS NOTE TAKING DOCUMENT and put each of our big questions into one of the charts on our document. This is where my students would gather their new learning from the additional resources they would be gathering. Having this chart gave us the opportunity to discuss two key ideas.

First of all, I wanted to make sure my students gained practice gathering specific evidence from the texts they were exploring in order to answer our big questions. This would help to guarantee that students are connected their answers to actual facts and information found in these resources and not on the half-truths and semi-accurate facts that they thought they knew.

Second of all, the note taking chart leaves space for students to gather information from MULTIPLE sources in order to help them answer a single big question. I wanted my students to start to understand that questions that are big and complex cannot be answered with information from a single source. This is something we will build on throughout the year and I wanted to make sure that we began that discussion with this first guided inquiry.

So after sharing this document with my students, I handed them one common text to start with. As we read through this text together, I modeled how I first reminded myself of the six big questions we were trying to answer and then as I read, I stopped any time I found new information that helped me to answer one of those questions. I modeled adding that information to my chart and asked the students to do the same. After we practiced this process with a printed text, we also practiced as we looked at a single image. I modeled the different ways that we can look for information in these different sources.

After showing the students this process, I finally introduced them to our list of resources. At this point, I felt confident releases the kids to explore these resources on their own, reminding them that they would need to keep track of the information they were finding that helped them to answer one of our big questions. As students began to work, my job was to confer with students individually to help guide them towards resources and help them to track what they were learning on their note taking guide. As I conferred with readers, I was able to continue to instruct them on how to gather information and facts from whatever type of source they happened to be looking at.

And this is where we currently find ourselves. In the next days, I will ask students to focus in on a single question and ensure that they have facts from multiple resources that will help them to answer their chosen question. And then eventually, together, we will practice putting all of our new information in order to compose a written answer to that question in order to share our new knowledge and understanding with others.

And when all of that is done, we will return to our original picture book. We will read Stepping Stones yet again and talk about what we are able to understand now, after walking through this entire process, that we did not understand when we first encountered this book. And in that conversation, we will see the revision of our understanding. My students will see how their understanding of a text, of a story, grew as they stopped to observe, interpret, question, gather additional resources and information and revise/synthesize.

And when this process starts to live inside of my students, this is work that I have faith they will start to do in the world outside of our classroom. And as we apply this process to different types of texts and to different types of reading, we will focus on different phases and in different ways. But the process will remain the same and my hope is that these experiences will start to change the way my students read and the way my students understand the world they live in. And that gives me incredible hope for all of us.

The class culminates with a six- to eight-minute one-on-one CRJ conference where a student shows through their assignments how they have to reflect on their growth, strengths and weaknesses in reading, writing and thinking over the course of the term.

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