Re-Centering the Text

Reading together in class is doubly powerful in an age of disruptive technology

I want to share a phrase that I think is important and powerful- especially and increasingly so now, when technology is disrupting both student attention and our own ability as teachers to cause students to engage in basic tasks like writing and reading in ways that build their attentional capacity- steadily, effortfully for an extended period of time. You don’t have to look far to find stories of teachers and even professors bemoaning how hard it is to get students to do assigned reading. Technology creates a not just a myriad of distractions but makes it hard for us to assess what students read (e.g. AI means we can’t trust what’s not written in class)

The phrase is: re-center the text.

It means that one of the most important things we can do in classrooms is to read together.

When we read together as a group from the same text in class several things happen.

I can cause everyone to actually read and I can curate the experience so it is meaningful and causes students to sustain their attention. I can cause students to practice reading the right way, in other words.

When they read it together we can share the experience as a class and that makes the book (and the experience of reading) more meaningful to students. When, say, we all read together and everybody laughs or gasps we are connected through the shared experience of the story.

Reading it in class allows me to build student fluency and to model what expressive reading looks like… and give students the opportunity to copy it and internalize that manner of reading.

Re-centering the text is optimal when:

• It involves a text in hard copy (no screens!),

• The text is something meaningful that students have built a relationship with across multiple lessons (a great novel or short story, say)

• It uses a combination of teacher read aloud, student oral reading (what we call FASE Reading) and bursts of independent reading.

• Quality expressive reading is emphasized

To help you build a mental model of what re-centering looks like, here are some of examples from the TLAC blog of how

Jessica Sliman, Steve Kuninsky, Hannah Lofthus, and Christine Torres

re-center the text.