Teaching Close Reading Strategies
Turning to the Science of Learning and Development
If reading scientists were pressed to define “close reading” as a discrete cognitive behavior, not as a pedagogical strategy, one challenge would be to distinguish aspects of cognition during acts of close reading from those present in other types of reading. I might point to Mackey’s (1997) study of “good-enough reading” as a candidate “other type” to start with.
Mackey relied on an empirical foundation to infer a type of comprehension response monitoring readers use to keep momentum going during reading while remaining accountable to the text. I’ve often taught it as a pleasure-pain formula in the secondary reading methods course (getting pleasure from literature often means a heavy cognitive load and can make your head hurt in a good way—ignore the complexity and forego the pleasure) and a no-pain/no-gain proposition.
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High school teachers who embrace the centrality of deep, voluntary engagement with complex aesthetic reading as a humanizing influence must understand this balance if they are to nudge learners toward finding pleasure in complexity and ambiguity—and in difficult text. “Good enough” doesn’t quite cut it when you are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s slave in a diamond mine.
Essentially, readers seeking “good enough” comprehension must decide whether to slow down, reread, or even stop the intake of new textual cues and become more accountable to them, bias themselves toward the author, inching their way along a mountain road, what do you mean to say, or move along in the text, plow through obstacles, if the mental model under construction is “good enough” for now. In fact, “close reading” is among the choices of behaviors a reader could deploy to rebalance momentum and accountability, a momentary downshift to make it up an incline.
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Viewed as a facet of Mackey’s “good enough” construct, close reading as first gear in the reading brain is a valuable cognitive strategy when readers face unusual complexity with the intention of constructing an interpretation of the author’s message fully warranted by objective evidence from textual cues. The warrant must include verbatim language with critical analysis. In academic, legal, and scientific circles good enough is rarely good enough. Logical connections, explicit rationales, and the like are crucial.
Sometimes it doesn’t help much to step outside the four corners of a piece of literature even if the author invites you to do so. Just ask T.S. Eliot. Sometimes it is unthinkable to go. Jane Austin—each novel “a square inch of ivory” as one literary critic asserted in a journal article title from fifty years ago—commands close reading of the most joyous kind. William Faulkner, who is maddeningly complex in so many different ways, as anyone who has looked at the opening paragraphs of Sound and Fury knows, answered those who were pissed off when, after three or four readings, they couldn’t get it. “What the hell does it mean?” they demanded. “ “He doesn’t know himself,” barked the elite mob. “Read it again,” he thundered. And we do and will for as long as American literature is read. The pleasure (and the pain) is sublime.
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Darling-Hammond et al. (2023) have proposed a new direction for teacher preparation and professional development, a vision shift, grounded in an emerging cross-disciplinary synthesis of research called “the science of learning and development.” A part of a productive response to the issue of teaching learners to embrace complexity and strategically to lean into difficulty whether reading literary or non-literary texts is visible in this synthesis.
At the core of learning and development science is a holistic focus on the individual learner as a social, emotional, and cognitive being. Applying learning science in the classroom as a teacher in a local community calls for a shift in isolated pedagogical planning within a subject matter curriculum lodged in a scope and sequence chart to nuanced community planning within an activity curriculum inventoried in a teacher’s classroom learning opportunity plan (now called lesson plan), applying local knowledge of circumstances that promote or inhibit engagement in these opportunities. Witness:
It is worth noting that children are currently unacknowledged parts of the curriculum as evidenced by a close reading of the verbs in this passage—children shape learning, connect their prior knowledge, engage, practice, and revise their work. These actions differ considerably from traditional learning behaviors like staying on task, paying attention, taking notes, reading carefully, asking and answering questions. In light of this awareness that learning begins and ends with learners, not with teachers, who provide opportunities, the task of the teacher depends as much on the teacher’s relationships with and knowledge of learners as on subject matter competence and pedagogical knowledge. Teacher learning evolves from their engaged participation in a collaborative, ongoing, resourced, and structured professional community. Implications for teacher preparation, particularly clinical mediated learning in real schools, are profound.
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Designing an opportunity for students to learn to practice close reading, i.e., a deliberate effort to do reading work within the four corners of the text to make and warrant interpretive claims using textual evidence, calls on two distinct pockets of teacher expertise: 1) understanding of reading comprehension processes (coursework in a preparation program) and 2) apprehension of the cultural and historic literacy identities of the students (clinical experience). Planning activities for a reading opportunity to learn of any kind is part of the teaching task and should be grounded in research-based expertise; the other, more central part, is planning a set of teaching moves that accommodate student engagement in the social, emotional, and cognitive aspects inherent in the opportunity to learn enacted for learners grounded in expertise in learning science. That’s what the emerging science points to.
David Coleman’s deep pleasure in King’s Letter and obvious respect for its rhetorical and logical structures come from his own social, emotional, and cognitive investment in it as a tool to promote his vision and as an aspirational text model to study. It would be a powerful centerpiece for a learning opportunity and teaching event. But he doesn’t have a clue about teaching reading comprehension. Nor does he understand the science of learning and development. In his video lesson learners are the problem, not the solution. Teachers keep them engaged through the threat of a failed exam.
Tragically, his misguided policy fence around the four corners of the text coupled with his requirement that student-written essays generally must come from textual sources has introduced yet another distortion into school writing instruction. Jayne Marlink (see her recent ltRRtl podcast) makes a strong case for rethinking how teacher professional development might redress these self-propelling distortions of a) reading as gathering information and b) writing as proving that you know. Through predictable, structured, resourced teacher professional communities of engagement with reading and writing on a personal and professional level, the teaching of teachers can be carried out by teachers themselves. No reason to start from scratch even if it were possible (see Janet Hecsh’s ltRRtl podcast).