The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

I have a love-hate relationship with Cloze Notes, otherwise known as fill-in-the-blank notes.

Do you use Cloze notes?

HOW do you use them?

Like any teaching tool, Cloze Notes can be used to varying degrees of success. I tend to think of them “Clint Eastwood -style” as “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly”.

Cloze Notes can be GOOD because they can help kids who are reading way behind grade level to keep up with the rest of the class. They can help make sure all students are on the same page. They make sure all students have complete notes, since it is easy for any student to keep up with his or her peers.

Cloze Notes can be BAD because they don’t require a student to actually comprehend anything they are reading or hearing. I could complete Cloze notes in Swedish or Swahili or Samoan because I don’t have to have any clue what they’re about.  Put the original piece of text in front of me, and I can complete an entire page of Cloze Notes in Arabic (which I don’t speak or read at all) and not know anything about what I just wrote.

Cloze Notes can be UGLY when we give them to entire classes just because a tiny number of students are five or more grade levels behind in their reading level. When we teach to the lowest common denominator, we lessen the comprehension of our at-grade level and our above-grade level students. When we give Cloze Notes to a whole class, we don’t give our students an opportunity to try the reading and the comprehending on their own. We assume that they can’t and we take that learning opportunity away from them.

So, are Cloze Notes really that awful?

Well, I think nine times out of ten, they dumb a task down, lower than most of our kids need. And even if they DO need it, it doesn’t allow the kids a chance to stretch upward -- if we do them past the first quarter of the year.

Cloze notes keep a child reading exactly where they are. It does not help them learn to read any better because the KIDS don’t have to do the actual thinking.

Think about it. How could it? The kids don’t have to figure things out for themselves. They don’t have to read. They only have to identify what the next word looks like and copy it down.

Cloze notes don’t teach meaning. Copying doesn’t equal learning.

So, what can we do with Cloze Notes so they DO help our students?

• First, we can think like the best parts  of Cloze Notes. When we do read-alouds, we can teach our students to choral-read the next word aloud when we give them a pause or a cue.
• We can make lesson differentiation decisions where Cloze notes are only used for students who are five or more grade levels behind.
• We can have students create cloze-notes where THEY make strategic blanks and explain WHY they chose those blanks -- and what term goes in them.
• We can use Cloze Notes for their original purpose -- to gauge fluency in reading. The Original Cloze Notes were where the teacher omitted every 7th or 10th word to see if readers were following along.
• We can teach note-taking strategies that help students create their own meaning -- even struggling readers and writers. Try Cornell Notes or Outlining.

What’s your take on Cloze Notes? When is the appropriate time to use them? Have you experimented to see if there are strategies that better increase comprehension for your struggling readers? As always, I love to hear from you! Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org