How to Do a Close Reading Lesson in Any Subject

Listen to my interview with Jen Serravallo (transcript):

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As I considered how to introduce this post, I started by looking for statistics that could paint a picture of where modern-day students are with their reading skills. I typed “Kids Can’t Read” into my search bar, looked at the results, and realized I could skip this step. I doubt too many people need me to prove that our students, in general, could use some work on their reading skills. They’re not reading often enough, they’re not reading challenging enough material, and their skills are not great. So let’s skip to a solution. I’ve covered lots of literacy-related topics over the years, and this post will be another solid addition to that collection.

Today we’re going to talk about the idea that all teachers — not just English teachers — need to be incorporating reading instruction in their classes. By the middle of elementary school, it is assumed that most students have basic decoding skills — they know how to turn letters into sounds and sounds into words, but reading is a lot more than saying the words on the page. (Last year we explored the debate over early reading instruction.) 

Most academic subjects are taught at least in part with some kind of text, whether it be books, articles, or digital resources, and each field has its own unique vocabulary, syntax, and ways of constructing and interpreting meaning. These texts get more complex as students get older, and the people who know those subjects — teachers of history, science, art, technology, health — these are the best people to help students navigate those discipline-specific texts. But many of them don’t really know how to do that. 

Fortunately, Jen Serravallo does. 

Jen Serravallo has spent the better part of the last two decades supporting teachers in helping students become better readers and writers. Much of this support has come through her best-selling books. 

In her newest book, Teaching Reading Across the Day, she gives us nine research-backed lesson structures for explicitly teaching reading across all content areas. These are ways to teach a reading lesson that can be repeated over and over throughout the year with different texts, taking the guesswork out of reading instruction for all teachers. The nine structures are: read aloud, phonics and spelling, vocabulary, focus, shared reading, close reading, guided inquiry, reader’s theater, and conversation.

“I wanted to offer teachers really predictable research-backed lesson structures that you could really use again and again in every grade level and every subject,” she explains. “And if you know how these nine lesson types go, it can free you up to focus on the details within the lessons. It could free you up to focus more on the responsive instruction that should happen within each lesson. And so these nine are like my toolbox. These are all I use no matter what grade I’m teaching and no matter what subject I’m teaching.”

More than Strategies Alone

Serravallo points out two important qualities that make this book significant:

• Every lesson structure incorporates both knowledge and strategies.
  “A big debate that’s happening right now is about the teaching of strategies,” she says. “Should we be teaching strategies or knowledge and vocabulary? And a lot of districts have adopted core programs recently that are described as knowledge-building curricula based on research that shows how critical it is for kids to have relevant background knowledge in order to comprehend texts. The stance I take in this book is that it’s not an either-or proposition. It’s both-and. Yes, we need to support knowledge and vocabulary, and also, we need to be supporting kids with skills and strategies. So in every one of those nine lesson types, I talk about how to do this.”
  
• The structures are not just strategies; they show you how to teach the whole lesson.
  “A strategy by itself is not a lesson,” she explains. “You need a lesson structure. You need attention to the knowledge and vocabulary together with the skills and strategies. You need procedures. You need ways to prompt and guide kids. And that’s really what this new book is about. It’s about these lesson structures, how to pace them, how to structure them, how to provide feedback. And it can include those strategies, but the strategies aren’t everything.”

A Close Reading Lesson

On the podcast, Serravallo gave us a walk-through of one of those structures: close reading. In her words, a close reading lesson “empowers more experienced readers to delve deeper into complex texts, uncovering layers of meaning through careful exploration, examination, textual analysis, and study. Readers should get more from a text when engaged in a close reading lesson with explicit instruction and guided practice and feedback than they would if they were reading it alone.”

A close reading lesson can be done with a whole class or a small group. As for the text, Serravallo says teachers can choose the format. “You can have kids reading from a shared copy like something enlarged on a Promethean board. You can give kids their own copies of the text and you can have them reading independently. You can have them reading chorally. You can have them listening to you read out loud sections.” She mentions later that the ‘text’ can even be a video.

She says close reading isn’t a strategy teachers will use all the time. “It’s kind of a slow-going structure. You have to really pause a lot and re-read a lot. But what you’re teaching kids to do is how to take a text that’s quite demanding and get more from it because of the pace and the care you’re taking with the approaches and the way that you’re actively engaged with and grappling with the text.”

Teaching Reading Across the Day includes lesson plans, templates, and links to video demonstrations of all nine lesson structures, plus commentary on the decisions made during these lessons to help teachers learn to be responsive to students. To watch Serravallo teach a close reading lesson, click the image below:

Serravallo says her close reading lessons take about 10 to 15 minutes. Here are the steps she follows:

1. Establish a Focus (1 minute)
   “So I’m going to tell them, why did I pick this text? Or what’s the overall purpose for what we’re going, you know, why are we even reading this text? What are we trying to get out of it? Maybe activating some relevant background knowledge if there is any, and possibly previewing a strategy or strategies that we’re going to have to use.”
   
2. Reading and Rereading (8-13 minutes)
   Here the teacher and students read slowly through the text, stopping to process it in chunks. “The teacher is going to prompt students to turn and talk, prompt students to stop and jot and annotate their copy. Prompt students to reread. This is also where you’re going to make decisions as the teacher. Are we going to read this all out loud in one voice chorally? Or am I going to read a section to them and ask them to follow along on their paper? Or am I going to ask them to read the chunk to themselves? And that decision is going to be based on how well you think the kids can read it accurately. So if you think it’s within their reach, you might say, okay, read this next section to yourself and then you offer them the prompt. If you feel like they need more support, you might say, I’m going to read this next section to you.”
   
3. Clarify the Takeaways (1 minute)
   “This is where the teacher is going to articulate, you know, here’s some strategies we practiced today that you can do anytime you’re reading. Or here’s some key information or vocabulary that you’re going to need to remember for the next text that we read or for the next science exploration that we’re going to do together.”

You can find Jen Serravallo on her website at jenniferserravallo.com.
Listen to her other two appearances on the podcast: Episode 107 and Episode 212.