After identifying a struggle amongst our students with understanding text and being able to effectively answer questions with text-based evidence, Sarah walked department leaders through a close reading process to help teach chunk of this strategy to fellow teachers. Over 3-5 months, students in all core classes were taught each piece of the strategy, each piece building on the previous one. Students learned how to work through unknown words, breakdown questions, format their answers with evidence from the text, and more. Teachers modeled their thinking, provided feedback, used student examples, and developed clear rubrics to assess student work.

     The strength behind this process was in the plan of attack of rolling out this strategy schoolwide. It was not taught to the whole staff on a professional development day and then never followed up on. It was teacher led, teacher tested, teacher approved which allowed us to eventually see this strategy ingrained in our students when they read. Even in year 2, returning students were automatically doing this close reading strategy on their own. We noticed that our students were able to write more coherent answers with appropriate textual evidence and better comprehend what they were reading because we gave them a means to slow down and work through difficult or lengthy texts. 

     Consistency with implementing this strategy schoolwide, coupled with Sarah's knowledge of literacy strategies and teaching experience with struggling readers, resulted in our school increasing our reading scores across the board. Thanks to her, our staff had a way to help students in any subject understand what they read and be able to effectively show what they know!

Rebekah Engleright

7th grade Social Studies Teacher

PLC leader/Department Chair