By limiting what we choose to read with our students to only certain paragraphs that have energy and skipping over the rest, we give new meaning to the term “narrow and deep”. When we limit the amount of text we choose to read, we can expand the same sentence or structure much more than we would do normally and therefore we move our instruction up to completely new levels of efficiency and ease for our students. It’s kind of like a spoken explication de texte process.
When we really get into one paragraph (or even one sentence!) and read in this narrow and deep way, reading just one paragraph or even just a few lines over the course of an entire class period, I call it Compact Read and Discuss. Because Compact Read and Discuss goes so deeply into a small amount of text, we launch the understanding of our students forward much further in one class than we ever thought possible. I think many of us can agree that normal Read and Discuss can be too shallow and wide, as there is just too much language in the text for the students to deal with.
But if we spend up to half an hour or more on one sentence, if it is the right one, the one that has energy, then that sentence will bring the greatest language gains to our students because of the sheer amount of repetition we are able to bring into the discussion. Of course, we need to do lots of comparing and contrasting with the lives of our students, as we do in normal Read and Discuss. It is good if we can always remember that in our reading classes we are not teaching the novel, we are teaching the language.