Delving into Text with Purpose and Focus

We’re thrilled to introduce you to another new contributing writer, Kelly Tumy. Kelly is a consultant in Texas, former president of TCTELA, incoming editor of the journal English in Texas, and one of the people in this biz that I trust them most. You’ll adore her. You can find out more about Kelly here or connect with her on Instagram @kellyreads_tx. — Rebekah

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(Image designed by K. Tumy via Canva)

A Strategy is Born

When it all boils down to examining any piece of text, two key questions come to mind: What do you know? and How do you know it? We ask much of students today in building analysis skills, and while annotation is a useful and necessary skill to teach and hone in students, I searched for ways to grow my students into thinkers of a text not mere annotators of one.

I found as I progressed in my teaching years, so much of what I was doing in ELA instruction was rote. I structured my classroom in a certain way because of how I was taught or what I was taught to do in college. We annotated for figurative language, for tone, for shifts.

When I began to grow in my craft of teaching, I started seeing I could deviate from the standard practice and really work to engage students. Students want to delve more into a text—they want to be able to figure out the text themselves and dig to find meaning. So, this technique was born.

Start with a Small Text

The key to this success and to the successes that followed in my teaching career was starting with a small, digestible text. This text has been used in lessons from 3^rd grade all the way to 11^th grade. Opening pages of middle grade texts and upper elementary texts are gems. The opening page of Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo is an excellent choice with pure narration and no dialogue, challenging students to ferret out what the author is doing and why she is giving the reader this many details to digest.  The Inheritance Games is another rich text to serve readers well with this technique. Jennifer Lynn Barnes is a master not only of world building but also character creation and sustaining, powerful narratives. Barnes has talked repeatedly about creating characters with a back story, with secrets, and she creates layered and fascinating characters for readers to explore.

We Were Liars is another work of art of the opening page. E. Lockhart crafts a novel worth devouring just based on the promise of the first few lines. She creates a classic unreliable narrator with the first few sentences, “Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family. No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.” Who wouldn’t want to read further? But the true question is, “What is each author doing in these opening pages?” That is what this strategy helps students discover, and starting with a digestible text shows students several things.

(Image designed by K. Tumy via Canva)

First, it shows students authors give many clues about the narrative stage set. This stage—the first page or first chapter—will be realized somehow later in the novel. Your job as a reader is to mine that information, keep in close, and use it to discover as you read. It is not just an opening page; it is a promise of things to come. Second, a smaller text allows you to showcase the author’s craft and texts you find rich in detail. It creates a buzz around a book that may not initially be of interest to your students, but once you preview a text this way, makes it readily available for your students.  

From Foldable to Interactive Presentation

This was born from a 9th grade lesson, and it came off my classroom library shelf. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes has one of the best opening chapters I have ever read. For this exercise, I wanted students to see all the clues an author gives in the smallest number of sentences. What started as a foldable quickly became an interactive tool students incorporated into their own writing and analysis. We delved into each sentence, and I asked the same question starting with the left-hand side. “What do you know?” then I would move straight across to the right-hand side, “How do you know it?” I would not let students move on until they tied the concrete knowledge to a move the author used in his/her writing. Tying the two together helped students not only make sense of what the text was saying, but it helped them see more clearly how authors move exquisitely through a text as they:

• Develop character
• Tie setting to characters
• Link setting to author’s purpose
• Establish conflict early in a narrative
• Foreshadow with past tense

Here is a quick record of some of the work we did together with this text.

(Image from K. Tumy-Classroom work)

Students then examined their independent novels’ first pages and completed the same exercise. Sharing their What/How exercises with each other made them curious not only about the texts others were reading, it made my students look more closely at their own chosen novels.

The Payoff: A Writing Connection

The payoff for working with this strategy came from a class of 11^th grade students. They had used the strategy off and on, and one day Rebecca M. said, “Ms. Tumy, can I use the What/How when I look at Gabriel’s paper?” I asked her to expand her ideas for me. She said, “Well, he has items he repeats in his introduction, and I want to let him know he tells me the same information four times (the what). I need to let him know I already know it, but I also want to tell him which one is most effective (the how).”  There it was: transference and application.

Once students mastered the technique in their reading analysis, it made a move over to their writing. I could hear small whisperings sometimes as they wrote. “What do I know/How do I know it?…Hmmm…” and it was music to my ears. It also became an annotation/analysis strategy for AP English Language students for the reading of a passage on which to base their rhetorical analysis essays. It gave them a foothold when they thought they had none. Small strategies can have a large payoff.

By working with small, digestible, and engaging texts, students can see how authors make small moves to engage readers then transfer and apply those skills to their own writing. Connecting reading and writing, what could be better?

Think about this: what other extensions do you see to this technique? How could social studies teachers use the same strategy with maps or other primary sources?

–Kelly

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