10/6/2014 Reading Is About More Than 'Evidence' - Education Week

Published   Online:   September   30,   2014

Published   in   Print:   October   1,   2014,   as   Isn't   Reading   About   More   Than   'Evidence'?
COMMENTARY

Reading  Is  About  More  Than  'Evidence'

By  Mia  Hood

"But  what  does  the  evidence  say?”

It  was  an  unusually  hot  spring  day  on  the  Lower  East
Side  of  Manhattan,  and  I  was  visiting  a  class  of  8th
graders  who  had  organized  themselves  into  book  clubs.
The  club  meetings  that  day  overflowed  into  the  hallway
outside  the  classroom.  The  air  conditioning  didn’t.  I  sat
with  a  club  that  was  discussing  Jerry  Spinelli’s  Stargirl.

As  a  teacher-­educator,  I  had  come  to  the  school  a  week

earlier  to  reconnect  with  a  real  classroom  full  of  real
kids,  learning  from  a  really  great  teacher.  I  had
commandeered  the  teacher’s  desk,  sifted  through  stacks
of  her  students’  work,  and  imposed  on  her  for  her
wisdom  and  resources.  When  she  asked  me  to  take
some  observation  notes  during  the  book  club  meetings,
I  gladly  obliged.

The  club  members  sat  against  the  walls  on  either  side
of  the  hallway,  legs  stretched  out,  notebooks  splayed
over  their  laps.  They  were  fanning  themselves  with
their  cracked-­open  copies  of  the  novel  and  discussing  a
pivotal  scene  between  the  characters  Leo  and  Stargirl
when  one  member  asked,  “But  what  does  the  evidence
say?”  They  all  stopped  fanning  and  dutifully  flipped
through  pages  tiled  over  with  sticky  notes  to  find  the
scene  under  discussion—to  determine  “what  the
evidence”  said.

The  teacher  in  me  instinctively  recorded  the  student’s

question  in  the  “+”  column  on  the  observation  form.
Without  prompting  and  under  only  my  loose
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supervision,  she  had  asked  her  peers  to  anchor  their
discussion  in  Spinelli’s  words,  to  scrutinize  the  text,  and  to  hold  themselves  accountable  to  it.

And  I  might  have  written  just  that  in  the  notes  column  on  the  form,  except  that  the  question
started  looking  odd  to  me.  What  does  the  evidence  say?  Would  this  question  have  sounded  normal
to  my  ear  three  years  ago,  when  I  last  taught?  Back  then,  my  students  and  I  discussed,  perhaps,
pulling  evidence  from  text  to  support  interpretations.  But  this  equation  of  text  and  evidence—this
interchangeability  of  the  terms—struck  me  as  a  new  phenomenon.

Anyone  teaching  or  learning  in  K-­12  classrooms  must  accept  the  primacy  of  textual  evidence.  The
"Reading:  Literature"  section  of  the  Common  Core  State  Standards  for  English/language  arts

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10/6/2014 Reading Is About More Than 'Evidence' - Education Week

directs  students  to  “cite  specific  textual  evidence  when  writing  or  speaking  to  support  conclusions
drawn  from  the  text.”  I  don’t  dispute  the  letter  or  the  spirit  of  this,  but  it  seems  like  our  focus  on
evidence  has  altered  the  way  we  see  text.  We’ve  come  to  see  text  as  evidence,  and  only  evidence.

After  that  first  moment  of  strangeness,  similar  moments  began  to  fall  like "When  students
rain.  My  colleague,  a  former  science  teacher,  asked  me  to  explain  how read  in  this  way,
reading  teachers  use  “think-­alouds”  (a  teacher’s  narration  of  her  thinking they  don't
about  a  text)  to  impart  comprehension  strategies.  He  asked  if  their  purpose recognize  all  that
is  to  present  the  evidence  that  supports  the  teacher’s  claims  about  a  text. text  does  and  can
For  a  moment,  I  was  tempted  to  accept  this  explanation,  but  I  realized do  besides  serving
that,  if  I  did,  I’d  be  assuming  that  our  thoughts  arrive  in  our  minds  as as  evidence."
claims,  and  words  arrive  on  the  page  as  evidence.  I  clarified  that  the
purpose  of  a  think-­aloud  is  to  show  what  the  text  makes  us  think  as  we  read  it  and  how,  through
this  thinking,  we  make  sense  of  its  meanings.

A  few  weeks  later,  another  colleague  and  I  were  designing  a  reading  curriculum.  She  suggested
this  daily  objective:  “Students  will  categorize  evidence  from  a  nonfiction  text  by  subtopic.”

How  strange  to  think  of  the  information  we  gather  from  a  nonfiction  text  as  “evidence.”  Evidence  of
what?  I  thought.  I  suggested  we  keep  her  objective,  but  replace  “evidence”  with  the  word
“information.”

I  suspect  that  this  confusion  of  terms  is  unintentional.  But  if  our  ways  of  speaking  about  text  have
seeped  into  our  students’  ways  of  thinking  about  it,  if  they’ve  come  to  think  that  text’s  raison
d’etre  is  to  serve  as  evidence,  their  experience  of  reading  has  been  fundamentally  changed.

Imagine  reading  along  in  a  novel,  already  anticipating MORE   OPINION

the  question  you’ll  be  required  to  answer,  the  thesis
statement  you’ll  eventually  develop,  or  the  comment
you’ll  make  in  discussion  and  be  required  to  “back  up”
with  evidence.  This  is  reading  the  way  squirrels  put
away  nuts  for  the  long  winter  ahead.  This  is  reading  to
stock  evidence,  to  prepare  for  the  question,  the
assignment,  the  discussion.

The  trouble  is  that  when  students  read  in  this  way,  they Visit   Opinion.
don’t  recognize  all  that  text  does  and  can  do  besides
serving  as  evidence.  The  first  standard  doesn’t  acknowledge  the  way  text  elicits  thinking  and  draws
out  new  ideas,  curiosities,  frustrations,  causes,  and  sometimes  even  pursuits.

Text  does  this  to  me  all  the  time.  In  a  recent  search  for  an  article  about  literacy,  I  happened  upon
a  2000  article  by  scholar  Cynthia  Lewis  in  the  Journal  of  Literacy  Research  on  reader-­response
theory,  which  posits  that  a  reader’s  role  is  not  merely  passive,  but  essential  to  determining  a
work’s  meaning.  It  wasn’t  what  I  expected  (or  needed  for  my  research),  but  it  sent  me  on  a  search
for  other,  similar  critiques  and  prompted  me  to  open  a  discussion  of  reader-­response  theory  with
my  curriculum-­design  colleagues.  Had  I  set  out  reading  Lewis’  work  just  to  stock  evidence  to
support  some  future  claim,  I  would  have  abandoned  it  after  reading  the  abstract.

In  a  “Modern  Love”  essay  for  The  New  York  Times  this  year,  Edan  Lepucki  wrote,  “I  told  myself
terrible  things  every  day,  just  to  see  how  terrible  they  would  feel.”  Her  words  left  me  wondering
and  worrying,  smack  in  the  middle  of  the  work  day,  if  I  don’t  also  occasionally  participate  in  such

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catastrophizing,  in  my  own  kind  of  internal  game  of  mercy.  This  kind  of  reading  is  what  we  used  to
call  a  text-­to-­self  connection  before  we  banished  it  from  our  practice  and  replaced  it  with  so-­called
“text  dependent”  questions  and  answers.

Recently,  I  was  reading  Sherman  Alexie’s  The  Lone  Ranger  and  Tonto  Fistfight  in  Heaven  and
designing  a  series  of  text-­dependent  questions,  just  the  kind  of  questions  that  students  would  need
to  answer  with  evidence.  I  read:  “Victor  imagined  that  his  father’s  tears  could  have  frozen  solid  in
the  severe  reservation  winters  and  shattered  when  they  hit  the  floor.  Sent  millions  of  icy  knives
through  the  air,  each  specific  and  beautiful.  Each  dangerous  and  random.”  With  this  image,  Alexie
elicited  in  me  the  kind  of  emotional  response  that  people  in  my  generation  tend  to  take  to  social
media.  (That’s  what  I  did.)  How  wrong  it  would  be  to  call  this  image  simply  evidence.  Alexie’s
words  aren’t  there  just  to  be  appropriated  into  an  argument.  That  night,  they  helped  me
understand  how  little  I  actually  understood  about  poverty.

Treating  text  as  evidence  may  sharpen  our

understanding  of  what  it  says,  but  it  also  precludes  us
from  using  the  text  in  personally  relevant  ways.  And
while  the  readings  I  described  may  be  personal  and
unpredictable,  they  aren’t  frivolous  or  idiosyncratic.
These  readings  hug  the  text,  but  are  not  bound  to  it.
They’re  born  of  focused  engagement  and  attention  to
not  just  what  the  text  says,  but  why  it  matters.  They
are,  in  fact,  text-­dependent.

If  we  want  to  prepare  students  for  college  and  career,  let’s  teach  them  the  full  range  of  reading
required  of  us  in  college  and  career.  Let’s  teach  them  to  read  for  real  and  relevant  purposes  and
also  to  return  to  the  text  to  search  for  evidence  when  they  must.  Let’s  teach  them  not  only  to  use
text  as  evidence  to  support  claims,  but  also  to  let  the  text  move,  teach,  frustrate,  confuse,  and
compel  them.

Mia  Hood  is  a  graduate  instructor  and  doctoral  student  at  Teachers  College,  Columbia  University,
and  an  assistant  professor  of  practice  at  the  Relay  Graduate  School  of  Education,  in  New  York  City.
She  also  consults  with  schools  across  the  country  on  implementing  and  strengthening  reading  and
writing  workshops,  supporting  diverse  readers  and  writers,  and  developing  assessments.  She
previously  taught  English/language  arts  and  served  as  the  dean  of  instruction  at  KIPP  Truth
Academy  in  Dallas.

Vol.   34,   Issue   06,   Pages   24-­25

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