ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Flygare is a former classroom teacher, English department chair, professional developer, and building-level leader. During his twenty-six-year career teaching high school English, he taught nearly every course in the department. Jeff developed classes in mythology, Shakespeare, philosophy, and comparative religions, and worked with social studies colleagues to create an interdisciplinary class called world studies, which he team-taught successfully for seventeen years. He taught advanced placement (AP) English classes for twenty-one years and served as an AP English literature reader and table leader for Educational Testing Service for many years.
Jeff also has a strong theatrical background, working first as an actor and then as a director at a major regional theater company in Colorado. He directed many high school productions, both traditional and Shakespearean. As a Marzano Research associate, Jeff travels around the United States and across the world to work with educators on topics involving curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, a master’s degree in English from the University of Colorado Denver, and a master’s degree in education with an endorsement in gifted education from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
ABOUT MARZANO RESEARCH
Marzano Research is a joint venture between Solution Tree and Dr. Robert J. Marzano. Marzano Research combines Dr. Marzano’s fifty years of educational research with continuous action research in all major areas of schooling in order to provide effective and accessible instructional strategies, leadership strategies, and classroom assessment strategies that are always at the forefront of best practice. By providing such an all-inclusive research-into-practice resource center, Marzano Research provides teachers and principals with the tools they need to effect profound and immediate improvement in student achievement.
INTRODUCTION
Close Reading in the Secondary Classroom is part of a series of books collectively referred to as The Classroom Strategies Series. This series aims to provide teachers, as well as building and district administrators, with an in-depth treatment of research-based instructional strategies that can be used in the classroom to enhance student achievement. Many of the strategies addressed in this series have been covered in other works, such as Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001), Classroom Management That Works (Marzano, 2003), The New Art and Science of Teaching (Marzano, 2017), and Effective Supervision (Marzano, Frontier, & Livingston, 2011). Although those works devoted a chapter or part of a chapter to particular strategies, The Classroom Strategies Series devotes an entire book to an instructional strategy or set of related strategies.
The purpose of this book is to provide a method and associated strategies to secondary classroom teachers for introducing and developing students’ skill of close reading. Today, with the emphasis on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), as well as individual state standards on literacy and critical thinking, close reading has become a vital skill for all secondary students (whether or not they pursue postsecondary education). Further, close reading is a skill that applies far beyond the English language arts classroom. Thus, Close Reading in the Secondary Classroom is aimed at a wide range of secondary teachers, not only those who teach traditional reading curricula. The strategies suggested here are useful in the mathematics and physical education classrooms just as much as they are in an English language arts or social studies classroom.
Close Reading in the Secondary Classroom begins with a discussion of why close reading is a vital skill to secondary students. The first chapter defines close reading, describes its importance, and discusses the history of literary criticism. The specific steps of the close reading process are listed at the end of the chapter.
The six steps of this process include:
1. Prereading (covered in chapter 2)
2. Reading twice and annotating (covered in chapter 3)
3. Generating questions (covered in chapter 4)
4. Reading analytically (covered in chapter 4)
5. Discussing as a class or analyzing individually (covered in chapter 5)
6. Using processing activities (covered in chapter 5)
Please note that chapters 4 and 5 each cover two steps. Chapters 2 through 5 present a thorough discussion of each step in the close reading process, with instructional strategies and suggestions for implementing each step in the classroom. On the whole, this process provides students with a structure for understanding and mastering close reading of challenging texts. Chapter 6 briefly examines the issues around planning for and assessment of close reading with secondary students. Because close reading is a robust and complicated skill that will be used in most classrooms throughout the entire school year, teachers need to consider special issues when planning instruction and assessment.
Definition of Close Reading
For some people, close reading means re-encountering the text many times, gaining insights through the response of the reader to new elements in the text with each additional reading. For others, close reading is the act of focusing on a selection of text with a particular lens, looking at what the text has to offer when one looks for something specific.
In this book, close reading is a way to drill down into a selected text and approach what an author is doing on a deep level. An easy way to further define close reading is to see the activity as an attempt to deeply understand a text by looking at the author’s choices and their effects. As noted in this resource, students need to focus on the formalist elements of the text for creating meaning. Once they have identified meaning through these methods, they may find enhanced importance to their own reaction to the text. We live in a world of accountability in public education, and that accountability sometimes comes in the form of standardized tests. In a test situation, it is especially important for the student to be able to analyze the text in a manner that arrives at a commonly accepted meaning—one that can be a correct answer to a test item. Forms of analysis based outside the text are too subjective. One cannot know a great deal about the author’s intentions, and one can often know too much about the reader’s reactions. When a reader first encounters a text, he or she often ponders what is happening. In other words, the reader first wants to understand plot, literal meaning, and other surface-level concerns. Beyond that, the reader might wonder what the author is doing in the text. Such analysis is deeper than asking what is happening because it looks to the effect a text has on the reader. A text may create an emotional response in the reader, it may emphasize a point, or an author may attempt to manipulate