On the Common Core: "text dependent questions" don't mean "every literal detail"

Check out this Tim Shanahan posting that corrects a potential misperception about what the Common Core's focus on "text dependent questions" really means.

Highlight:

Common Core advocates make a big deal out of the idea that questions should be text dependent. This means you shouldn’t be able to answer a question without reading the text. By all means ask questions that require reading.

However, this is a very low standard. Many text dependent questions simply aren’t worth asking.

Last week I met a teacher who was trying to generate every literal question she could—long lists of questions. She was interpreting close reading as “thorough reading” and she was making sure that her first-graders missed nothing; no detail was too trivial for her text dependent questions.

However, close reading does not necessarily require this kind of intensive, thorough, literal reading.

Close reading asks readers to understand what the text says, how it works, what it means, how it connects up with other texts, what value or quality it has… but none of this requires the reader to come to terms with every fact in a text.

The key is to ask questions that are not only text dependent, but that guide the reader to accomplish those interpretive goals. To do that the questions have to emphasize what is important in the universe of the text.