Shades of Meaning by Donna Santman

Notes from Shades of Meaning that apply to our studio work~


Why read?  "I do want to argue that one of the major reasons - I hope the major reason - we read is to let books lead us to think about our lives and the world in which we live.  This is not a small thing.  We read to invent lives for ourselves, to reimagine the world around us.  Wolfgang Iser says that the novel was invented to allow us to explore social norms.  often novels are written in opposition to social conventions of the day in order to provide us with a context to explore the world in which we live and to rethink the way that world works.  If this is the case, I want to read and I want my kids to read in a way that will allow us to do this well.  And, I believe we can do this by paying attention to the details (81).

"...To read well in a big way, however, is to move beyond these first, quick ideas and to figure out how the text positions us to think abou tthese issues. ... Answering these questions requires that we lean in and read closely, that we pay attention to what's really going on in the stories we are reading and think about symbolism of the details.  In this way, trying to get it right, trying to read in a way that will build a rich story world full of meaning, matters most of all (81)."

Transactional Reading:

• "Comprehension, interpretation, and critique involve the reader putting something into the reading event, something that is not present in the text itself."  
• Vaclav Havel, "Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs."
• No text (or utterance in speech) is explicit; listeners and readers always must participate in restoring what is missing or filling in implications.
• LOVE THIS:  Readers must bring their memory of experience to a reading event in order to make the text live in their minds.  They must activate their understanding of language, of human intention, of what is likely to occur in the physical world, to infer the meanings of phrases and sentences.  They must use their assumptions of what people are like to attribute motivations to characters and understand what is going on in narrative scenes.  They must connect their understandings of this text to many other texts in order to develop interpretation, a sense of how this text is saying something into the great human conversation.  And they must compare the claims of this text to the world they know in order to critique its assumptions or challenge the existing world.  From literal understanding through the interpretive to the critical, readers must restore missing elements, must co-author what they read (xv).
• The reader must occupy at least two different positions:  she must speak for the text and speak for herself.  She must make sense of what the text is saying (thoughts she could not have made by herself) and also make an answer in response to the text.  Understanding can consist of nothing less (xv).

Possible Outcomes:

1. Strong readers can envision - they can build the world of a story in their minds.
2. Strong readers can read between the lines - they can construct not only what literally happens on the page but also see the deeper meaning behind the words.  They understand that often the literal words imply more, and they try to ask questions that allow them to unpack the belief systems a text suggests.
3. Strong readers can let a story lead them to develop big ideas about the world of the story and, by extension, their own worlds (25).
4. Strong readers open themselves up to problems worth grappling with (125).

**A new kind of rigor becomes possible when the teacher focuses not on the excellent elements of a shared text but on the habits of mind that are characteristic of excellent readers.  (discovered through self-observation!)

Studio Frame of Mind?  I have since learned that when trouble shows its face in my room, I'm lucky.  You see, I now view trouble as possibility.  I see it as an opportunity to teach, as the content of my lessons.  In fact, now I not only hope for trouble but search for it.  I constantly try to problematize my kids' work so that I can think about things to teach them.  Sometimes it feels like I am complaining about them a lot of focusing only on what they cannot do.  But while I try to be sensitive to looking for strengths to build on, I am not afraid to name struggles.  It's there that I find my best cues for teaching (34).  

• This is formative assessment
• Goal:  Look for patterns - look for ways that students did or did not make sense of the text. 
• Turn your discoveries into curriculum.

"Teaching and Learning Structures"
Reading involves thinking, and teaching reading involves externalizing thinking so that students can participate in it with their teacher and later internalize it (x).


Teaching focuses on what the students are doing RIGHT NOW in order to have the fullest possible experience of the text (xi).

1. Read Alouds - Lit Discussions
2. Mini-lessons always end with how students will transfer their learning into IR.
3. Using Anchor Texts:  Allow for small lessons throughout the year using familiar texts.  "Help kids begin to attend to more of the texts they are reading by returning to a familiar text and demonstrating for the kids what it sounds like in your mind when you understand it.  Using a familiar text allows the kids to focus more on your demonstration than on trying to read the story itself (63)."
   1. Read and comprehend
   2. Discuss
   3. Reread - text focus
   4. Reread - instructional focus
   5. Reread - issue, interpretation, critical reading focus
   6. use with small groups and individually during "with" lessons
4. Conferring:  interrupting, redirecting, and extending
5. Collaborative Reading:  Partners and/or small groups creates support and accountability often needed to get kids to stay engaged with the text they are reading. (Be sure to provide plenty of time for IR.)  Discussions create intertextuality.

"Creating Artifacts that can be Formally Assessed"

1. Literact Notebooks - take notes during minilessons, use during IR, tool to anchor talk
2. Self-reflection - read over their old work and reflect on how they've grown as readers.  "defend learning" with specific examples of how they have changed
3. Reading materials - *All readers should pick "optimal books" - books that would force them to use explicit reading strategies in order to comprehend.  If they felt they were reading books that were a little challenging, they would be more willing to reach for the strategies (54)."  Classroom subscriptions: Muse, Upfront, Choices, short story collections on page 141

Reading Strategies  (Be sure to show kids how you use the same strategies for reading and thinking across genres.  Do this by demonstrating not only with short stories but also with poetry, articles, and essays (63).):

• 4 steps to reading well:
• See and hear the text as you read.  Say the text aloud in our minds in a way that makes it make sense.  Summarize/Reading voices
• When we lose meaning, temporarily interrupt our reading to retell.
• Pack some of the details of the story into our minds. (get a fuller picture of the text and begin to develop some thinking)
• Good readers recognize that the parts of the text go together to build a whole and always try to keep in mind how each part connects to what came before.

• Take time to teach kids how to connect with texts.
• "What's the THAT?" - "I've felt that before."  The question to ask is "What's the THAT?"  It forces us to make more of our connections.  It asks us to generalize between the story and ourselves and therefore find new ways to think about our lives.  It helps us imagine new ways to respond to our parents, siblings, peers, etc. (49)."  The answer is HARD.  We have to ask kids to slow down their minds, to be patient.  Finding words takes time.  The silence that surrounds kids as they search their minds for words to explain their ideas often feels deafening.  It's incredibly tempting to fill that void with qeustions that will lead them through some thinking.  I have learned, however, that I need to be patient, too.  I need to allow them the time to trust that I really do want THEM to find the words to explain what they're connecting to (50).  ...making connections is about exploring what these attributes say about us as people.  It also means connecting to the text on an emotional level and examining those emotions (52).
• Inference: two types  (Not a hierarchy of inference, but rather a way to organize thinking.)
• 1) Figure It Out - those inferences the reader needs in order to make sense of what is really happening in the sotry.  
• Who's in the story? Where are they? What's going on?
• Character's thoughts, feelings, emotions, motivations
• Figure out grammatical references, dialects, etc
• Figure out structure - how and why time and place are moving the way they are... how does this movement contribute to the meaning of the story?
• 2) Making More - those that enrich a reading of the story
• making more of what the characters do, say, and think
• making more of the time and place in which the story occurs
• considering symbolism (names, titles, objects, colors, numbers, shapes, other details)
• theories about the author
• thinking about the fairness at moments in the text
• making personal connections

Active Reading:
The tool used has a clear purpose - externalizing some kind of thinking so that the kids will be able to try the same tool with a similar intellectual purpose.  The text and the tool are means of learning ways of reading that should last each individual student the rest of her or his life (x).

• The writing must never take over our reading time.
• Two reasons:  1.  make more of the details of the books we are reading.  2.  think about how this book is positioning us to think about larger issues.  
• We do NOT want to ... "I've noticed that instead of gathering up your thoughts about the details of the text and letting each contribute to the way you think about a small number of very big ideas, many of you are turning each of the details into big issues and developing lots of small thoughts about really big ideas.... (100)."
• C: Article about the 4 Phases of Reading ~ Use reminder stickies: 
• Beginning of the book - try to focus on our thoughts and opinions of the details of the text.
• Middle - we are ready to stop and consider issues the author might want us to explore.  At this point, stop reading and reread all our sticky notes, trying to name the issues that are hiding in the text.
• Write a "middle of the book sticky note" - why?  It forces us to not just let the ideas float around in our heads but to actually develop words to talk about them.  This slows us down and holds us accountable for really thinking about the issues.  Then as we read on, we carry the idea in our heads and think about how it develops across the book.
• End of the book - take time to reconsider the idea we've developed and jot our new thinking on the "end of book" sticky note.  
• Remember, each part of a text connects to the parts that came before.
• Each part of the story or nonfiction piece somehow builds on the preceding parts and that their job as readers was to try to create the text as a whole in their minds.  You connect each part with the parts that came before and predict what is going to happen next in the parts to come.
• Connect the anecdotes with the facts or idea development.  Spend time thinking about how the examples illuminate the idea being explored (62).
• "...picking and choosing across a text as opposed to building the text as a whole is problematic, it is also problematic to attend too much to the text itself.  Reading is a transaction; a relationship develops between the reader and the text that defines meaning.  To make sense of a text, readers bring to it more than their knowledge of the literal words on the page.  They bring all of their understandings and associations to the text to provide a larger context for developing meaning than the words themselves provide (63)."
• CE - coding CE in 6th grade - 
• Read silently to themselves, code text
• Talk to each other, trying to make sense of the text
• try to dig into the messy parts of the ideas we hold
• Review the text and what they wrote and on an index cared write:
• something new they found in the text
• something they had never thought of before.
• Writing helps them to get their minds really going on the ideas (122).

Critical Readers read "closely":

• Reread page 117-118 "Turning Ideas into Problems" - to connect with close reading.
• But too often, the imagining that kids is left on the pages of the text.  The experience ends with the last word on the last page.  The kids rarely thing to take the characters and their stories out of the text and into their own world.  They rarely use reading to imagine possibilities for themselves, to envision not just the world of the tory but also a new and better world for themselves. (87)
• My goal is not just to make the kids want to read and able to read but to help them see reading as a context to examine social issues.  It means teaching them to carry in their minds a set of critical questions that readers use when trying to think about social issues.  Critical readers examine the language and ideas inside the books they read.  Critical readers become personally connected to the books they are reading, but they also let their reading help them examine larger connections between their personal experiences and the social and political system in which we all participate (87).
• What issues are hiding in the text?  There are issues hiding in the books we read.  Not only are there stories and information that we can come to know and think about in small ways, but there are also opportunities to think about ideas that are important to us - ideas that help us imagine ways to live and what we might believe to be just and true in the world (88).
• "Remember an issue is an idea.  It won't be in the text literally.  It's sort of floating behind the words, and when we read the text, we find ourselves thinking about it (88)."
• Transfer:  "Today when you go off and read, try to keep this question in your mind:  What issues are hiding in the text I'm reading? Keep a sticky note in your book to jot them down.  That way you can work with them as you read on and we can talk about them in conferences (88)."
• ?When and why do readers resist the text? "In an attempt to make sense, readers often turned the words into what they expected them to say."  Goal:  open their minds to the possibility that when they read, they might be shifting the meaning of the texts out of resistance to new ideas presented (102).  The goal is to open outselves up to problems worth grapping with (125)."
• Teach students, "Some texts are trying to disrupt their understandins or beliefs about the world, help them to see their miscues and team them how to reconsider their ideas about the texts (105)."  
• C:  PK+NK=BK(synthesize), PK>NK=Review, solidfy/synthesize  (Unknown information fits with known information), PK
• We need to consider our knowledge as a possibility and be willing to revise it when the text challenges what we think we understand (77).
• Confusion can come from "rigid thinking" - they are holding onto understandins without revising when the story/text asked them to (79).
• Use text as 1) evidence that supports ideas (being accountable to the text) AND 2) see the part of the text not as proof for theories they had developed, but as tools for exploration.  Instead of just collecting up the parts, then, kids should have been unpacking them, examining the language used int he text for ways to develop their own ideas (117).  "What will you do next to examine this idea?"
• Critical Questions to Extend our Thinking:

1. What might the writer believe in order to have written this text in this way?
2. What values or assumptions underlie this text?
3. Is the way the text positions us fair or unfair?
4. How does this text compare with others that explore the same issue?
5. Who benefits from this thinking?
6. Whose voices are missing from this text and how does that affect the telling?
7. What could account for this idea? Where did it come from?
8. What are the implications of this thinking?  What are the outcomes?
9. What are some alternatives to this thinking?

What's worth Talking About?

• Goal:  help kids search for complexity across their reading and teach them to talk through that complexity...can make them face hypocrisy in their own lives and possibly alter their beliefs or behaviors, if they let it (122).
• It's worth talking about when you find yourself no longer reading, but thinking about something bigger...something that impacts you and all of us based on an idea hiding in the text (see Harry Potter example - 85)
• Develop the sense of which of those ideas, topics, issues in text are social issues and which were simply abstractions.
• Move away from thinking there is always one main idea and it's the reader's jobs to find it and name it.
• help them to understand that some ideas are more interesting or compelling than others.
• *The books we read position us to think about issues in particular ways (90).
• Transfer:  "Today I want ot push that work one step further by helping you understand that it is not enough to name the issues.  We must also consider the many different ways in which the texts want us to think about these ideas.  ...  I want you to watch in a way that will make you able to try it yourself in your own reading. I'm going to ask you to try a bit with the person sitting next to you before we go off for IR today (91)."
• While many texts explore the same issues, it doesn't mean they position us to think about them in the same way.  Each issue ... has many facets. ...each of these issues lives in a world.  The world of an issue is made up of everything that's been said, written, sung, thought, uttered, seen, etc. about that issue.  As readers, we need to think about where the particular text we are reading fits into the "issue world."  What does it say to us compared with other texts that explore the same issue (92)?  Gives us a reason to talk about different books together!
• Considering how a text positions us to think about a particular issue, therefore, involves paying attention to the details of the text:  
• character's actions, thoughts, words  (How does the character help me think about this issue?)
• author's choice of words  (How do these words help me to think about this issue?)
• new or more extensive ways of thinking about big ideas  (What is new to my understanding about this issue?
• What symbols are in the text?  (teach lessons that help kids to turn the details of their books - the colors and names and recurring objects or places - into symbols.  Pause and consider the significance of these symbols as a way to imagine new and surprising ideas about their texts and the way the text positions them to think about their lives (99.))

TALK:

Book Clubs:  long-term groups of 4-6 kids whose goal is to read and discuss many books and ultimately to build a reading history together.  This reading history allows each individual in the group to deepen his/her ability to think not only "inside of" a book but also across books.  This creates "intertextuality."  More intertextuality - more looking across texts and letting one text get you to think abou tothers - allows for more well-developed, more nuanced thinking.  It is this complexity of thought that allows kids to find new ways to see, think, and act in the world (22).

1. Task effectively about their reading for the purpose of articulating and thinking through their interpretations.
2. They are accountable for making themselves understood and making sure they understand each other.
3. They are accountable for thinking rigoroursly and presenting information that is accurrate and appropriate to the conversation (21).  Goal:  extend or revise their thinking in the company of others.
1. Research
2. Finding the most justifiable interpretation
1. Learning how to interpret is about learning how to negotiate
2. Most justifiable = more imaginative - that is, the one that pushes you to imagine new possibilities for the text and the world.  It is the one that is most convincing.  You talk about it in ways that compel others to join you on your thinking.  And, it's the one that is most accountable; that is, it takes into account significant parts of the text.
3. Steps:  1) What are the issues hiding in the text?  Name the issues hiding in the text, 2) What is the text saying to me about each of these issues?  Try out the issues - think about what the text might be saying to me about each of these issues, 3) Which one of these is the most interesting?  Which might help me imagine something new? Pick the one that I think is most interesting and might help me imagine new possibilities for my world, 4) How does the text position me to think about this issue?  Focus on just this issue and think about how the text continues to position me to think about it (109).
4. Longer talk - use Language Moves:
1. Words we can use to stretch out an idea by describing what it is not   (this creates new depths in thinking and develops subtle, richer understandings.)
2. Ways to say the same thing with different words
3. Ways to stretch out an idea by saying what it is like.
5. Cannot say:
1. I agree with everything that's been said... (use 4.2)
2. You can have your opinion and I'll have mine... (use 4.1)
6. Sentence Starters:
1. "I agree/disagree with the idea that.... because..."
2. "I see it slightly differently."
3. "I wonder how the part about... fits it." (asks kids to consider more of the text than just the part they are discussing.)
4. "Maybe there is a more imaginative way to think about it." (avoid the cliche statement)
7. Critical Questions to extend our thinking - see below

Q:  What payoff is there for kids to do the work of understanding their reading?
A:  That reading can raise issues of concern for us and help us think through those concerns.