Authors Kylene Beers and Bob Probst reflect on how educators have used the six essential signposts in their book Notice & Note to deepen close reading. Join us as we unpack the evolution of these signposts, the joy of witnessing students naturally citing textual evidence, and the benefits for neurodivergent readers. Learn how picture books can illustrate these techniques for younger readers and how these strategies can enhance comprehension across all grade levels.
Below is a full transcript of the episode:
Kylene Beers:
Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading has been out several years now. During that time we've continued to hear from teachers, hear from students and to look at more and more books to see if we notice the same signposts, new signposts, anything of that sort. I'm wondering with this time that's passed, what has surprised you?
Bob Probst:
I'm not sure that it's a surprise or just a happy fulfillment of what I should have expected. But I think what has possibly pleased me the most, at least, is that focusing more on the students' response to the text has elicited more talk about the text itself, more than I ever got when I asked those questions about the text. But asking questions about how did you read it, what did it do to you, what parts of the text struck you, especially when you can get kids to observe the parts of the text themselves and notice that they have had a response to them.
Kylene:
So a question you just said, how did you read it? I think the way we presented that in the book was more what is it you're noticing right here? What's the contrast and contradiction or what's the aha moment? The point I hear you making is that as they share their answer to the anchor question, "This is what I'm thinking about the contrast," or "Here's what I think the aha moment means," they keep going back to the text.
Bob:
Yeah. Which is, I think, what we would like them to do.
Kylene:
Mm-hmm.
Bob:
We want them to find evidence, we want them to cite moments in the text. If they can cite those moments that have struck them and talk about them, we'll get more interesting conversation than if they wait for us to direct them to a particular passage.
Kylene:
Mm-hmm. And you know, Bob, you're really picking up on something that I've noticed as I've just done more and more research on how do we, Bob and Kylene, make sure we're always helping teachers keep the science of reading in mind. I'm always particularly happy when I'm seeing more and more people recognize that the real science of reading, not a journalistic interpretation, but the real science of reading has always extended way beyond just issues of decoding but also to issues of comprehension.
The research on comprehension tells us if we can get kids to kind of straddle that world of what's in the text and what's in their head, they're always going to have deeper insights. I don't think we anticipated when we wrote Notice & Note all those years ago, how much it would really encourage kids to do that. I mean, were you thinking it would do that and I just overlooked it?
Bob:
I guess I was hoping that it would do that. I don't know whether I was sure that it would. I hoped that it would. Rosenblatt has had emphasized long ago that you pay attention to the transaction. What does the text do to you, for you? What does it awaken within you? If you can begin to talk about that, you almost inevitably go back to saying, "It was this point, it was this passage, this line, these words that triggered my confidence in the writer, my doubt about his position, my anger with something that was said in there." When you do that, you go back to pointing at the text. When you're pointing at the text, you're pointing at evidence, which I would like to see more of, not just from readers, but from public.
Kylene:
Everyone. Yeah.
Bob:
Public in general.
Kylene:
Yeah. I mean, we all need to remember that always putting a comment in the context of what the text, whether the text is a movie, a billboard, an article, a novel, just the expression on someone else's face, putting the context of the text into our own comments is critical.
You know, Bob, that really leads me to the other surprise that I did not expect at all and that's the number of letters we've received from parents, particularly moms and teachers, about how the signposts have helped their neurodivergent kids enter into classroom experiences that those students oftentimes had felt separated from entering. Like the mom who wrote to us and said ... I think her son was sixth, fifth, sixth grade and was on the autism spectrum, and she said that he had never really entered into classroom conversations, especially about literary texts. She is a high school English teacher. She had been reading Notice & Note, and he came home one day, particularly very frustrated, a note showed up from the teacher saying he was in a small group, he didn't have anything to offer. It made him upset. He didn't know how to handle those feelings. The mom taught him, I think just two of the signposts, probably aha moments in contrast and contradictions, because those will occur so often in almost any book.
She said for the first time ever, he sat there and went through a book and because it's concrete in the book, he could say, this is the aha moment. And then she would just hand him the sheet of paper that had the anchor question. How will this aha change something? And he could think about what that might be. Now, not all kids on the autism spectrum might be able to project into the future. This might happen next, but this student could, and she said he couldn't wait to go to school the next day because he knew he was going to look for aha moments. I don't think when we wrote Notice & Note, we were aware how that part of noticing, which is very concrete, would be so helpful to many of the neurodivergent learners.
Bob:
No, I don't think we did, and I should have. Louise Rosenblatt used to say that you can't respond to everything in the text. You have to select what you are going to think about or talk about or focus on. I think an awful lot of kids see a book as just a lot of words, one after the other, lots of pages to turn and flip through. But the signposts give them a way of not just seeing a pile of words, but of seeing certain words and talking about those words. Those words lead to others, especially if you've got a whole class discussing it, because your observation may be here, mine may be over there.
When I hear about yours, I want to look back and see if it confirms what I've got. The discussion can be much, much richer than if you are waiting, as a student, for me as a teacher to point you to that particular part of the text. I had some classes where students just sat there and waited for me to tell them what to think about. I would ask them, "How'd you respond to this text?" And they would say, "What are you talking about? I didn't know what to think about or respond to. You hadn't told me yet. You hadn't raised a question."
Kylene:
Those kids might have offered that response because they had had many years of schooling that told them that's what they were supposed to be doing. I think that kids come in curious, excited, engaged as those five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds, but sometimes the system of school itself says, "I'm looking for one right answer." When we do that, we harm that curiosity.
You know, Bob, the last thing that surprised me after the writing of Notice & Note were the tremendous number of elementary teachers who wrote to us and said, "You know, you can use this in elementary school." Because we're both secondary certified English teachers, our experiences are in middle school and high school, we tend to think in terms of middle grade novels, young adult novels. We think of older kids. We did the research for that book by going down to grade four, but we certainly didn't go down to first, second, third grades. So once elementary teachers started writing us saying, "We use the same language. We show kids how to do this," and they begin talking about aha moments, memory moments, contrast and contradictions, I was stunned.
Bob:
Well, since we have heard from the elementary school teachers, we have started looking at picture books. In there the signposts are quite obvious again and again, happens within two or three pages. The aha moment is quite clear when the main character erupts with surprise about something. The picture books are an indication of why the signposts are so popular now in some elementary schools.
Kylene:
I think of the picture storybook Enemy Pie, and on the first page, the main character says, "It's going to be a perfect summer, it's going to be perfect baseball, it's going to be perfect with friends," and then the last line says something, I'm paraphrasing, like, "But it wasn't."
Bob:
Yeah. I think the first page is, "It should have been."
Kylene:
Should have been.
Bob Probst:
"A perfect summer."
Kylene:
From the very first page, if a kid can stop and say on the first page, "This author has set up this contrast and contradiction. I wonder why the character is thinking like that," then they can begin to make accurate predictions as they read, not just predictions that are guesses.
Or in Rosie Revere, Engineer, when towards the end of the story, when the great aunt says to the little girl, "Your invention was a perfect first flop."
Bob:
First, yeah.
Kylene:
And that that's the point. You keep trying and trying. That's a very clear words of the wiser. Was it that second-grader, we've got a tape of her saying those words of the wise tell you what to expect in life. I thought that was great.
Bob:
Yeah, yeah. Or you take a look at Chrysanthemum where the repetition, she loved her name. She would say it over and over as she walked to school. Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum. That repetition sets you up for the break in the repetition when all of a sudden-
Kylene:
She hates her name. And we've had first-graders tell us that that is both, and again and again because saying, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum. And then it's a contrast and contradiction, and I love that those children have recognized that the moves in a text can mean that what looks like one signpost to someone is another signpost to someone else. Because we're not trying to tell kids, "This is a hunt where you've got to identify correctly." Don't we just want them reading more closely?
Bob:
You don't read in order to find the signposts.
Kylene:
Right.
Bob:
Rather the signposts help you through the reading. Just as you don't take a trip to count the stop signs that you're going to see along the way.
Edie:
Thanks for tuning in today. You can read a full transcript and learn more about Notice & Note at blog.heinemann.com.
Dr. Kylene Beers is currently an international literacy consultant and previously was a Senior Reading Researcher at the Comer School Development Program at Yale University. She began her career as a middle school language arts teacher outside of Houston, TX. She is the author or co-author of many best-selling books including When Kids Can’t Read/What Teachers Can Do; Forged by Reading; Disrupting Thinking; Reading Nonfiction; and Notice and Note – Strategies for Close Reading. Disrupting Thinking, which she co-authored with Robert Probst, is a 2018 recipient of the Teachers Choice Awards.
Kylene has served on committees with the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English and is an often-invited keynote speaker to national and state conventions. She has served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English and is currently serving as a board member for the international LitWorld Foundation. She is a recipient of the NCTE Leadership Award and the NCTE Middle Grades Outstanding Teacher award.
Most importantly, Kylene is a teacher who continues to work in classrooms today across the nation as she works shoulder-to-shoulder with teachers and students. When not on an airplane, Kylene lives on her ranch with her husband, Brad, and their fabulous dog, Coda, in central Texas.
Bob Probst is the author of Response and Analysis, he is coeditor (with Kylene Beers and Linda Rief) of Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, and coauthor (with Kylene Beers) of Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading and Reading Nonfiction; Notice & Note Stances Signposts, and Strategies, all published by Heinemann. Bob has also published numerous articles, chapters, and monographs in national and international publications.
Bob began his teaching career as high school English teacher and then became a supervisor of English for a large district in Maryland. He spent most of his academic career at Georgia State University where he is now Professor Emeritus of English Education. After retiring from Georgia State University, he served as a research fellow for Florida International University. Bob is now a consultant to schools, nationally and internationally, focusing on literacy improvement. He works in schools with his colleague and co-author, Kylene Beers.
Bob has served as a member on the Conference on English Board of Directors, an NCTE journal columnist, a member of the national advisory board to American Reading Company, and a member of the NCTE Commission on Reading. In 2004 he was awarded the NCTE’s Exemplary Leadership Award, presented by the Conference on English Leadership.
