Closely Reading “Reading Closely”

Should the Common Core-inspired emphasis on close reading be taken to mean that children should arrive upon one agreed understanding, or should it be taken to mean that many different close readings are possible and likely in the classroom? We closely examined what students said during and after a text discussion in their classroom in order to answer the following related research questions: Did a dialogic discussion in which there was no push for students to reach agreement-a communal close reading-still enable students to engage in and witness close readings of the text? What is the relationship between the positions students took publicly during discussion and the positions they took privately when the discussion was over? Our findings suggest that students did engage in close reading in the context of the public discussion. Indeed, they diverged in their textual opinions precisely because differing close readings emphasized different aspects of the text. We also found that students’ private positions did not always align with their public ones, making us wonder whether consensus-driven communal close reading is even a theoretical possibility for more complex text, let alone a desirable one.