Turning the Page on Complex Texts: Differentiated Scaffolds for Close Reading Instruction (Grade-Specific Classroom Scenarios for Common Core State Standards)

Ensure all learners become successful close readers. In this powerful resource, the authors examine what features make a text complex. Learn how to select appropriate complex texts and design instruction to meet the needs of every student. Explore grade-specific classroom scenarios that illustrate how to scaffold lessons to foster close reading and deepen comprehension at all stages of K-12 education.

Benefits:

• Gain practical teaching strategies for creating close reading lessons.
• Consider grade-level-specific instructional scenarios that illustrate how to support students' reading comprehension as they learn to read closely.
• Learn how to evaluate a text's complexity and how to ask text-dependent questions that can help students engage with a text.
• Study evidence for why continuous close assessment of student performance is vital for making sure all students learn to closely read complex texts.
• Discover potential contingency scaffolds for the classroom and how to use them to promote student success in closely reading a text.

Contents:
Introduction

Part I: Background and Planning Information
1. Understanding Close Reading
2. Identifying Text Complexity
3. Making Decisions That Support Close Reading Instruction
4. Assessing During Close Reading

Part II: Instructional Scenarios
5. Understanding What the Text Says Through Differentiated Scaffolds
6. Understanding How the Text Works Through Differentiated Scaffolds
7. Understanding What the Text Means Through Differentiated Scaffolds
8. Supporting Knowledge Demands with Differentiated Scaffolds

Epilogue
Appendix A
References and Resources

Diane Lapp, EdD is a distinguished professor of education at San Diego State University and an English teacher and literacy coach at Health Sciences High and Middle College. Previously, she taught elementary and middle school grade levels. Dr. Lapp focuses on instruction that supports learning for a diverse range of students. Her career is founded on the idea that motivation and well-planned, guided instruction must be based on a continuous assessment of strengths and needs shown by the students.

Throughout her career as an educator and education professor, Dr. Lapp has been drawn to urban schools catering to children of poverty who are often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, mistreated, and uncared for because of the unfamiliarity that exists between their families and their teachers. Combining her two current positions, Dr. Lapp established a high school student internship program between HSHMC and a neighborhood pre-K-6 school with a 95 percent population of English learners. Dr. Lapp has authored or edited dozens of books, articles, and speeches. As an educator, she has won numerous awards and, in 2005, was inducted into the International Reading Hall of Fame.

Barbara Moss is coauthor of No More Independent Reading Without Support, part of the Not This, But That series. Barbara is a professor of literacy education at San Diego State University, where she teaches courses at the credential and masters levels. She has been a reading specialist, a reading supervisor, and presently works in an urban San Diego high school as a literacy coach. She has published numerous journal articles, books, and educational materials. Her areas of research interest include informational texts, content area literacy, and children's literature.

Maria C. Grant, EdD, is a professor in secondary education at California State University, Fullerton. She has authored numerous publications centered on science literacy, formative assessment, and reading and has written articles for Educational Leadership and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.

Additionally, she is coauthor of Reading and Writing in Science: Tools to Develop Disciplinary Literacy with Dr. Douglas Fisher. Dr. Grant teaches courses in the credential and graduate programs at CSUF and conducts professional development with teachers at various schools across the country. She is currently director of the Secondary Teacher Education Program and leads the Literacy Summer Seminar Series and the intern program at CSUF.

Kelly Johnson, PhD, is an instructional coach in the San Diego Unified School District where she works with teachers, modeling best practices across the disciplines and grades. She also teaches reading methods, classroom management, and liberal studies at San Diego State University.