Learning cycles that deepen students’ interactions with text

Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2015). Learning cycles that deepen students’ interactions with text. Voices from the Middle, 22(4), 15-19.


Asking the right kinds of questions is the key to helping students interact deeply with texts, according to this succinct but idea-packed article by three of today’s leading experts on the concept of “close reading”. Fisher, Frey and Lapp here propose a “learning cycle” that involves the asking of three types of questions during three successive readings of a text:

1. What does the text say?
2. How does the text work?
3. What does the text mean?

The first question’s purpose is to determine generally the basic ideas and details that are important to students’ understanding the text. The second question gets at authors’ intentions and writing decisions. The third question focuses on the larger meanings of the text, what some teachers call the “big ideas” about life, the world, and the human condition that those who read deeply can discover. These meanings are the ones that lead to those important connections between texts and prior knowledge, texts and other texts, and of course, texts and one’s own life. Fisher and colleagues write about texts “inspiring” students, and it is at this third level that such inspiration seems most likely, though perhaps it may occur also at the second level if a reader sees a text as a “mentor text” as writers like Katie Wood Ray have described.

This article is directed toward middle school teachers (though its ideas could be adapted to any level), and contains helpful, concrete ideas that a teacher could use to plan a learning cycle like those that are described here. Sample questions are provided for each of the question levels, and even more helpful, there is a table of “language frames” that provide scaffolding for students (and teachers!) that follows the five steps of argumentation. I can see myself devising prompts for my own teacher education courses using these frames. They could be used for many topics and texts, and for any teaching area. I also can see myself then devising an assignment requiring the future teachers I work with to devise questions that they could use with a text they plan to teach to students in their field experiences.

In a sidebar, there is a link to further information in my favorite professional web site, www. Readwritethink.org. If a teacher is interested in trying Fisher et al’s suggestions, I recommend going to that link and reading the additional information provided there.

As a final thought, I appreciated the discussion of “inspired” reading that opened this article. The practical aspects the authors so generously provided may rivet most teachers more than that opening discussion, but the issue of inspiration when reading is the most important point in the article. Inspiration, to me, is another way of describing engagement. Another word for this kind of reading was Louise Rosenblatt’s “aesthetic” stance. All of these concepts are about a deep kind of interaction with a text, of being “into” what we read. My thoughts on this are that if students are to be inspired by texts, their teachers must first be inspired, and as a university teacher educator, I know that fostering that kind of inspiration in future teachers is an ongoing challenge. No matter who is doing the teaching and learning, this is all about first finding the inspiration oneself, and then being able to model and scaffold that inspiration for the learners we work with. That is the big challenge of teaching, and also its greatest joy.