Gallagher put it recently in a blog comment, simply become smarter about the world, and the post-reading task is that they need to write a thoughtful 1+ page response. In that case, the purpose I set for my students’ reading is to, as Mr. Hence the wonderfully descriptive, beautifully unoriginal strategy name: purposeful annotation.Īs an example, let’s say I’m helping my students think through the task of purposefully annotating a Kelly Gallagher-esque article of the week. When my students have a text they can write on, the idea, then, is to annotate in a way that supports our purpose for reading and the parameters of our post-reading task (keep in mind that the purpose and the task should line up). what we’re going to do with the reading after we’re done.why we’re doing the reading in the first place and.The big idea is this: what we do when reading should align with Purposeful annotation: here’s what I’m talking about So to help my kids get after it and dominate some life, I’ve now replaced the vague “close reading” with a strategy I call purposeful annotation. We still need to teach kids, across the disciplines, how to wrestle with assigned texts, seeking, like Jacob, whatever blessing they have to bestow. So when I call close reading a buzzword or write the term’s obituary, I don’t want to give you the impression that we should let ourselves cynically dismiss the idea that reading is often hard, analytical - and yes, even “close” - work, especially when we’re dealing with complex, college- or career-level texts assigned by a teacher. While I do try not to take the educational establishment too terribly serious (instead opting to occasionally poke fun at us), I am perhaps excessively serious when it comes to helping students flourish in the long-term. Now before you write me off as a negative person who hates buzzwords just because they’re buzzwords, please don’t. Unfortunately, it took me about a year to realize I was doing this - and I do feel it’s unfortunate because close reading became this confusing, nebulous thing, and I contributed to that. I was one more person contributing to the buzzwordification of close reading. When I first started writing about close reading, I was doing what a lot of people did at the time, and still do: I essentially used the phrase “close reading” instead of the term annotation.
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