href="#ue2f8c94c-386e-5e2f-892e-098fc760e7ff">READING TWICE AND ANNOTATINGReading a PassageUsing Literary and Rhetorical Text DevicesSummaryChapter 3: Comprehension QuestionsABOUT 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
