Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

Going Deep with Award Winning Books:
Close reading and text-dependent questions

Introduction

One major shift of the Common Core State Standards is to have reading, writing, listening and speaking grounded in evidence, from both literary and informational texts. The texts will become more complex as students move through the grades, and assignments will become more rigorous as students are required to provide more and more textual evidence to support their thinking. As a result, terms like “close reading” and “text-dependent questions” are getting a lot of attention.

While the standards don't specifically state that you must use text-dependent questions and conduct close readings of text, the shifts around complexity and evidence suggest that the work of the standards will require going deep into texts and wrestling with them to reach greater understanding.  Leading students back into the text with the use of carefully crafted questions is one way to accomplish that work. In this installment of our Common Core series, we will provide resources for you to learn more about this hot topic and a dozen examples using Caldecott Award-winning books to help you get started.