1. Understanding Text Complexity
August, 2012

2. Block party activity: Take quotes from the next 3 slides and put them on several sheets of paper. Cut into strips and put into the middle of the table. Have each person at the table draw a quote. Play music while everyone mingles. When the music stops, each teacher finds 2 others to form a triad. Each person introduces themselves and then reads their quote and explains their interpretation of it. Repeat this process by playing more music.

3. Text Complexity Matters
“Being able to read complex text independently and proficiently is essential for high achievement in college and the workplace and important in numerous life tasks.” *From Appendix A, page 4 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.

4. Why Text Complexity Matters
“Over the last 50 years, the complexity of college and workplace reading has increased, while text complexity in K-12 has remained stagnant.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

5. Why Text Complexity Matters
“Research indicates the demands that college, careers, and citizenship place on readers have either held steady or increased over roughly the last 50 years.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

6. Why Text Complexity Matters
“The difficulty of college textbooks has increased since 1962.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

7. Why Text Complexity Matters
“Students in college are expected to read complex texts with substantially greater independence than are students in typical K-12 programs.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

8. Why Text Complexity Matters
“A 2005 College Board study found that college professors assign more readings from periodicals than do high school teachers.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

9. Why Text Complexity Matters
“The word difficulty of scientific journals and magazines from 1930 to 1990 has increased.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

10. Why Text Complexity Matters
“Workplace reading, measured in Lexiles, exceeds grade 12 complexity significantly, although there is considerable variation.”
Show slide to the group. Have the people with this quote stand up. Pick one or two of them to share the thoughts they shared with others as they mingled around the room.
Adapted from Appendix A, page 2 of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

11. WHAT’S MY LEXILE???

12. Application for student loan College Textbooks W4 Forms CD-DVD Instructions Wall Street Journal Where the Wild THings Are Grapes of Wrath
Have each group guess the Lexile level of each of these publications and record their answers as a group. Give them 5 minutes to do this.

13. Applications for Student Loans: 1270 College Textbooks: 1215
W4 Forms: 1260
CD-DVD Instructions: 1080
Wall Street Journal: 1320
Where the Wild Things Are: 740
Grapes of Wrath: 680
Go through each bullet and share answers. You can ask each table to take turns announcing their guess, or go around the room and listen to every group’s guesses before revealing the answer. This activity is a precursor to a later slide stating that Lexiles don’t always tell the entire picture.

14. Lexile Levels of Occupational Reading Materials
These are Lexile levels of various reading materials in occupations in various career clusters.

15. Lexile Levels of Occupational Reading Materials
Understanding Text Complexity-Rusin

16. http://www. ksde. org/LinkClick. aspx
Visual Representation of the range of complexity of text in existing Core Compared to Common Core
Notice the difference between the range of complexity of the existing core versus the common core expectations.

17. Jigsaw Activity
Use Article from Educational Leadership, March 2012, entitled: “Adolescent Literacy: More Than Remediation.” Need to be in groups of 4. Person #1 reads the introduction and “Increasingly Challenging Texts”. #2 reads “Different Reading for Different Disciplines.” #3 reads “Digital Reading.” #4 reads “How to Support Adolescent Literacy”. Should take 5-10 minutes to actively read their pieces of the article. Each person shares the big ideas of the article with the rest of the group starting with #1 and continuing in numerical order until #4 has finished. Leader needs to keep the time and monitor the sharing to 4-5 minutes per person. Total time for activity: no more than 30 minutes.

18. So what is text complexity anyway?

19. Defining and Describing Text Complexity
Activity: Each group has 3 pieces of 8 x 10 paper with three headings: one headed “Qualitative”, the second one is headed “Quantitative”, and the third one is headed “Reader and Task Considerations”. When the leader releases the group to start, each group will open the yellow envelope of bullet points. The group’s job is to attach the bullet point descriptor to the correct column. Once all bullet points have been placed in a column, the facilitator will give each group one or two large sentence strips with bullet points on them. In the front of the room, have 3 pieces of chart paper, each with a heading stated above. Have each group come up to the front and put their sentence strip on the correct piece of chart paper.

22. What is a lexile?

23. What does Lexile measure
What does Lexile measure? A Lexile® measure is a valuable piece of information about either an individual's reading ability or the difficulty of a text, like a book or magazine article. The Lexile measure is shown as a number with an "L" after it — 880L is 880 Lexile. From:

24. The idea behind the Lexile Framework for reading is simple: if we know how well a student can read and how hard a specific text is to comprehend, we can predict how well that student will likely understand the text.
From:

25. When used together, Lexile measures help find books/articles at appropriate level of difficulty and determine how well that reader will likely comprehend a text. You can also monitor growth over time.
From:

26. How do students get a lexile level?
We use SRI

27. A student gets his or her Lexile reader measure from a reading test or program. Lexile measures can range from below 200L to above 1700L.

28. Key Points to remember...

29. It is best to select books based on a reader’s Lexile range rather than focus on one reader measure. "The “Lexile range” is the suggested range of Lexile measures that a reader should be reading—50L above to 100L below his or her Lexile measure.

30. These are the new Lexile bands by grade level as stated by the Common Core compared to the old Lexile Ranges.
CCSS: Appendix A

31. Be cautious--Lexiles are only one piece of the puzzle
Be cautious--Lexiles are only one piece of the puzzle. Don’t get tricked!

32. Compare this slide to the next slide.

33. These are the new Lexile bands by grade level as stated by the Common Core compared to the old Lexile Ranges.
CCSS: Appendix A

34. Compare this slide to the next slide.

36. These are the new Lexile bands by grade level as stated by the Common Core compared to the old Lexile Ranges.
CCSS: Appendix A

38. Now let’s practice!
Take a piece of reading and have everyone plug it into Lexile.com to determine the Lexile Level. Check to see if everyone got it right before moving on. Everyone does this with the same piece of reading. We need to pick a common text, and read it and predict lexile before entering it into Lexile.com.

39. Missouri is developing an extensive rubric teachers can use to evaluate the qualitative measures of a text. It is currently not officially released, but it is in draft form and has been shared throughout the district.

40. There is a checklist of questions you can use to evaluate for reader and task considerations. (High School CA PD--hand out these questions and have teachers practice with their piece of reading.) These are questions a teacher must ask him/herself to determine if a particular piece of reading meets the needs of the individual student and the task the teacher is wanting the reader to do. This is up to the individual teacher’s judgement.
All other PD sessions--give the handout with the 3-column table showing characteristics of low, medium, and high-complexity texts. As a group, determine whether the piece of text used earlier to find Lexile meets the low, medium or high complexity range. Do this as a large group to make sure everyone understands the thinking involved in making this determination.

41. Let’s practice some more!
With 2-3 more articles at your table, find the Lexile measure and use the rubric to determine the complexity of the text.
Report out and norm the entire group on levels.

42. Let’s summarize our learning thus far...

43. What are the three factors to consider when determining text complexity?

44. Reader and Task Considerations
Quantitative
Reader and Task Considerations
Qualitative

45. How must our instruction change?

46. Reading Framework for NAEP 2009
Notice that the expectations for the type of reading students must be doing shifts as the student gets older to more nonfiction, informational-types of reading. It is important to note that this is what the STUDENT’s experiences should be. This is not what each teacher should be doing in their classrooms. It is therefore very important for teachers to work together to ensure they are meeting the needs of their students.

47. Includes staged dialogue and brief familiar scenes
Literary
Stories:
Includes children’s adventure stories, folk tales, legends, fables, fantasy, realistic iction, and myth
Poetry:
Includes nursery rhymes and the sub-genres of the narrative poem, limerick, and free verse poem
Dramas:
Includes staged dialogue and brief familiar scenes
This slide points out the differences between Literary and Informational Texts.
INFORMATIONAL TEXT
Includes biographies and autobiographies; books about history, social studies, science, and the arts; technical texts, including directions, forms, and information displayed in graphs, charts, or maps; and digital sources on a range of topics.

48. ACCORDING TO FISHER, FREY, AND LAPP: “
ACCORDING TO FISHER, FREY, AND LAPP: “...SIMPLY SELECTING HARD BOOKS AND TELLING STUDENTS TO READ THEM IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE COURSE OF ACTION.”

49. “Students need to be taught how to read and think about complex texts
Fisher, Frey, and Lapp: Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading, p. 105

50. So how do we do it?

51. Fisher, Frey, and Lapp have written an excellent book regarding text complexity. Chapters 4 & 5 of the book details the strategies they believe teachers should use to help students tackle increasingly complex texts.

54.
Let’s watch an example of close reading. As you are watching, jot down the process you see the teacher using with her students. Once the video is finished, share your notes with others at your table. Come to a consensus at your table as to the process and steps to close reading.

55. Let’s read more about close reading
Let’s read more about close reading. Use the article from Fisher and Frey--skip to the Close Reading portion of the article on pages Read silently at your table and then discuss whether or not you recognized any of these components in the video you just watched.

56. Debrief
As a large group, have each table report out one big idea they learned from the article excerpt.

57. Select short, worthy passages
As a review of the close reading process, go through the next slides one by one and summarize the main points for the group.

58. Reread

59. Read with a pencil

60. Note confusions

61. Model the Text

62. discuss the text

63. ask text dependent questions

80. Needs:
He is alone and lonely (“is a boy who is no one’s friend, whose name the teacher cannot remember”,: the throat that must clear itself and apologize before it speaks”)
He has little at home (“lives behind a raw wood doorway where comes are the color of bad weather (para. 1)
He has lots of responsibilities (feeds the little brothers, picks up the crayons when Arturito drops them in the intersection, waits for the little brothers to take them home after school).
Strengths:
He is trusted with responsibilities (he feeds his little brothers, helps his mama, who is busy with the business of the baby, takes his little brothers to school and back each day.)

81. Hopeful:
eyes the color of caterpillar suggests metamorphosis—what will he become?
the hundred little fingers of red, green, yellow, blue and nubs of black—a rainbow, which occurs after a storm.
Painful:
Geography of scars (para. 3)
History of hurt (para. 3)

82. Breathlessness is important to understand that Salvador is always in motion.

83. ｷ He is more than what we see on the outside.
ｷ He has a past and present that are sometimes painful, but he has joy, too.

84. Salvador means “savior
Salvador means “savior.” Use evidence from the text to show how Salvador is the savior of his family.

85. Notice how these next two questions now move beyond the text, but only after there has been a thorough discussion of the reading first:

86. Next steps