L2N Minutes - November 30, 2017 - 8:00-4:00 SDC

Present: Dr. Carmon, Pachette Dunn, Jeanette Van Vickle, Christy Brooks, Kevin
McDonough, Elizabeth Hunter

● We spent 20 minutes wandering around the room seeing what each school has done
so far with our big year goal: TEXT COMPLEXITY/CLOSE READING
● Things seen: books served up on plates to “eat up stories”, lots of schools did the
True Colors activity with the whole staff and their kids, Neal uses a things called
CUPS annotating and SIBme which records teaching so teachers can watch
themselves afterward and reflect on practice, it chunks it up too. Jordan uses a thing
called SOAPST Analysis Form for informational text: Speaker, Occasion, Audience,
Purpose, Subject, Tone. Little River had a book called Chart Sense: Common Sense
Charts to Teach 3-8 Informational Text and Literature by Rozlyn Linder

Close reading is an instructional strategy used to scaffold deep

understanding of content, concepts, and active reading skills.

● We did a close read of Text Complexity and the CCSS provided in handout. It looked at
elements of complexity of text: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Reader and Task
Factors. We were tasked as a group with summarizing the key phrases that locked in
the “meat” of each of these elements.
○ Our paraphrases:
○ Quantitative factors are features of a text that impact “readability”, these
program weigh word length, frequency and difficulty as well as sentence and
text length and text cohesion. Also, complex themes and text structures fall in
this section, but assign low scores to complex narrative fiction.
■ Paraphrase: This is the objective view, the more measurable elements that
generate scores and data. This is more decoding.
○ Qualitative factors involve an attentive teacher making informed decisions
regarding the difficulty of a text. You can take a level that has been given to a
book but teachers still need to go in and decide if it’s appropriate. To be
considered: Meaning/Purpose, Knowledge demands, visual supports, language
features, text structure
■ Paraphrase: This is the subjective view, this requires an informed
professional to determine text difficulty.This is more about comprehension.
○ Read and task factors involve the outside information that might impact the
difficulty of reading the text; this really boils down to a teacher knowing his/her
students because it involves judgment, experience, and knowledge of students
and subject.
■ Paraphrase: This requires a well-trained professional educator.
● Each school then did a short skit/scenario about a situation they were given and
how a situation could be addressed. Our scenario: About 90% of my students read
 below grade level. Those new textbooks are great, but they can’t read them. I found
some great PowerPOints and youtube videos to teach my current unit instead. Kevin
and Christy presented this situation and the answer was...both ppt and videos will be
great for background knowledge but if you want students to be better readers, they
need to read. Chunking and scaffolding is important in building meaning.
● Complex texts: sheet music, carbon element, Grapes of Wrath (great for diction and
author’s craft). Translated text is sometimes not great for this because things get lost.

Resources: Read, Write, Think “Rubric of Presentation of Scholarly Article” HERE!

● We read an excerpt from “To Kill a Mockingbird”

○ Meaning/Purpose: The book explores how the protagonist discovers how her
town and her family understand race and prejudice.
○ Knowledge Demands: The book asks readers to wrestle with serious moral
issues - how both an individual and southern society before the era of civil
rights conceive of justice.

● The group then looked at Multiple Representations of Equations Summary, we

are analyzing for text complexity.
○ Lexile level - extremely low, verbage
○ Salary + commission is complex, kids don’t understand the way people get
paid. Front loading HOW people get paid, percentages would be crucial to
understanding. Words like “initial fee” would need to be understood before
dealing with the math.
○ Background in what is a coordinate plane is needed as well.
○ Linear Equations would need to be understood as well.
○ Later in the lesson the math-specific vocabulary is more complex.
○ Doing algebra with all letters and no numbers would require backfilling algebra
skills.
○ Connecting the math skill to the graphics would be necessary as well.
○ The real complexity here is related to prior experience and vocabulary.
● Rubric of this informational math text - didn’t have time for this

● Moved to break-out groups with Kenneth Lesher in M-8

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