AVReading Newsletter November

Analyzing Dynamic Texts

We continue our examination of  the Common Core State Standards this year, by looking at the third anchor standard which asks students to “analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.”  Again, you will probably observe that this is certainly a different approach to reading or examining a text, at least in comparison to our former model of reading which focused more simply on understanding main idea, inference, and evaluating credibility.  For anchor standard three, students are asked to consider the text as a whole, to consider how things change over the duration of that text.  

 

For literature, this means that readers will have to look at how a given character develops or transforms over the course of a story.  Of course, it assumes that at least one of the characters is actually dynamic, meaning they evolve or change, which is generally true of the texts we choose, but not always.  In cases where the characters are dynamic, teachers will need to help students recognize first how they change and second what causes that change.  To do this, it will mean helping them to re-read and review sections of text to take a second or even third look at what the text says to suggest that change.

For content readings (social studies and science), anchor standard three will ask readers to consider communities, cultures, or systems that evolve or change over the course of the text.  However, you might notice that not all of your readings will lend themselves to this type of analysis.  For example, the DNA chapter might not be organized in terms of a dynamic evolution.  Instead, it might start with general principles of DNA and move into more specific details of how it is structured and how it operates.  In this case, the DNA itself isn’t really changing or evolving, so it wouldn’t really pay to examine the text in such a fashion.  In a broader sense, you might ask students to consider how the text is organized and how it “moves” from broad to specific principles, but that is really the territory of another anchor standard.  

 For this month’s newsletter, I will offer a graphic organizers  that will enable readers to consider how people, events, or ideas interact or change through the course of the text.  One is designed using the language of fiction, while the other is more broadly worded to accommodate a content field.

Find the full newsletter here.