This month, we will continue with our year long goal of examining the Common Core State Standards for Reading and how we can do things within our classrooms to emphasize them. This month we will look at the second standard, which reads as follows:
“Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.”
Again, I will point out that our conceptualization of reading has become much more complex. As evidence, the second standard alone seems to cover most of what we used to consider to be reading-- which means that the other nine standards of common core are going to ask readers to do more and understand more of texts.
Standard two is basically asking the reader to demonstrate three skills: identifying the main idea or theme, explaining how that idea is developed, and summarizing the supporting details used to develop that theme. For our purposes here, I will focus helping students determine the main idea or theme and identifying the supporting details that led them to that conclusion.
When reading fiction, the reader can generally piece together the main idea or theme of the text by simply doing a careful pre-read. For books and novels, a theme is often identified in the closing lines of the book’s summary (found on the inside jacket or the back cover). For short stories, the theme is often loosely suggested by pre-story marginalia or pre-fabricated questions listed at the end. Of course, in rare cases, students must do the heavy lifting themselves by first identifying the most important event of the story and drawing a conclusion about why that event happened.
Finding the main idea in non-fiction is a little less complicated. It can generally be found in the title and opening paragraph with another reference in the closing lines. In cases where the main idea may not be immediately evident, readers have to read the text and then back up to take a bird’s eye view to consider, “What was the gist of this text?” As indicated in last month’s newsletter, one good way of forcing students to ponder the main idea of a text is to remove the text’s title, and ask students to infer it by reading the text and following the author’s argument.
In both cases (fiction and non-fiction), students should have a fairly good idea of the main idea (or theme) before they begin reading the text. When they do, they are able to activate background knowledge and be ready to add information to what they already know about the topic or story at hand.
For the second part of the standard, students are asked to then search for relevant details that support their choice of a main idea / theme. In this case, they must search for and find textual evidence within (not beyond) the text to substantiate their thinking. Considering this, it will be important to help students learn how to write good summaries. This is significant not only for the struggling readers, but for those who are very capable and strong readers. The ability to succinctly re-state the salient ideas of a text (or speech or movie or story) is critical at every level-- from early literacy practices of an emergent reader to the boardrooms of our biggest corporations and banks. Doing so accurately ensures that the discussion moving forward can be based upon some mutually agreed upon details and facts that the group will use to make decisions. Get the full printable newsletter here.
