11 Tips to Turn Every Student Into a Close Reader

Let’s face it, close reading isn’t often a skill that comes naturally. When our students get a new reading assignment, their first instinct is often to race to the finish line rather than engage deeply with a text.

Getting students to slow down, engage with the text in different ways, and reflect as they read are challenges for every teacher, and are the goals of close reading. They’re also at the heart of the Common Core English Language Arts standards. There’s no magic way to turn your class into top-notch readers overnight, but there are specific close reading skills you can teach that will help your students now and down the line.

In Harlem, NY, Mark Gillingham, senior researcher with the Great Books Foundation, watches a group of seventh-grade students reading aloud “The White Umbrella.” At one moment the narration becomes unclear and the students begin debating which character is actually speaking. Their genuine interest in figuring out who is speaking drives them to read, reread, and discuss the section. “This close reading of text that leads to authentic discussion is what the Great Books Foundation wants to cultivate in ALL readers,” says Gillingham.

The key is learning how to annotate effectively. “When students are drawing conclusions as they annotate their texts, they’re using high level reading comprehension skills,” says Linda Barrett, senior training consultant with the Great Books Foundation. “As their annotation improves, students may begin marking the points when a character makes a decision or when an author uses a specific literary tool.”

Nurturing these higher-level skills takes time and many different techniques. You can begin to strengthen close reading in your classroom with these eleven expert tips.

1. Be a Close Reader Yourself
As you teach close reading, it’s important that you know the text backwards and forwards. Every time you raise an issue or ask a question for discussion (e.g. “How do we know that Macbeth feels guilty?”), you’ll know how to help your students find the textual evidence and where it’s located in the text. Modeling close reading through your class discussion is as important as direct instruction in close reading.

2. Teach “Stretch Texts”
The purpose for having students learn close reading skills, says Gillingham, is to enable them to read increasingly complex texts over time. As you choose texts to use with your students, think about your purpose behind each text. Look for stories or articles that raise authentic questions and could be interpreted differently depending on each student’s background knowledge or prior reading. If you’re working with a novel, focus on a section that lends itself to ambiguity and interpretation. And be sure to occasionally assign “stretch texts” in class. These are texts that you wouldn’t expect students to read independently, such as a critical essay or short piece of philosophy. “It’s a text that’s meant to be difficult,” says Gillingham, “and may require up to a week of study.”

3. Teach Students to Look for the Evidence
If your students leave your class understanding how to provide evidence from the text, consider your year an unqualified success. It’s the most central skill of the Common Core standards, says Elfreida Hiebert, president and CEO of Text Project. “The Common Core,” says Hiebert, “focuses our attention on what content the text is helping us gain.” Push students to go beyond recounting facts and plot points. As you’re planning, think about what higher order questions you can ask in class discussion and written assignments.

4. Always Set a Purpose for Reading
After your students have read a text through once, help them dig deeper by setting a specific purpose for reading it again. That purpose could be to track a concept or theme, or to analyze how an author uses a literary element or creates tone. Giving students something specific to focus on requires that they return to the text and really focus.

5. Differentiate Your Instruction
Even if students aren’t able to close read a novel independently, they can still apply strategies to a passage. Students may listen to an oral reading of the text, work in a small group with teacher support, or work with a partner to reread a text and prepare for discussion. If the majority of your class is not ready for independent close reading, keep in mind that the overarching idea is to get students to think about different ways that people can interpret text and build their own arguments around text, which can be done with picture books or read alouds as well as novels and short stories.

6. Focus on Making Connections
Rather than asking students a myriad of comprehension questions, focus their reading experiences around connecting with and remembering the text. Plan and ask questions that help you understand if students understand the text, and where they need to dig deeper into the big ideas. Hiebert suggests focusing on how the text relates to what the student has previously read, and what else they might learn about the topic after reading this selection.

7. Model it First
If students are new to close reading, spend time modeling how to think about a prompt and how to annotate the text. You might want to use a document camera to project pages of the text and read through and annotate a passage around a central question, modeling your thinking. After you do a few pages, release the work to students and have them take the lead.

8. Let Them Make Mistakes
If some of your students have clearly misinterpreted the text, ask them to explain their thinking or help you see the connection they’ve made. This gives them a great opportunity to practice finding textual evidence. Students may also chime in with other interpretations. The important thing is that students clarify and refine their thinking strategies, not that everyone has the same “right” answer.

9. Close Read Across the Curriculum
Once students are familiar with close reading in one content area, expand the process to other texts and content areas. Close reading can happen in science, social studies, math, and other subjects. Students can spend time delving into charts and graphs in science, discussing a math concept, or working to truly understand the various interpretations of speech in social studies.

10. Use Student Questions to Drive Discussion
Here’s one technique to consider. During Great Books discussions, teachers start by compiling student and teacher questions that come from the text. Once the questions are compiled in a list, the teacher supports the students in reviewing all the questions, identifying ones that are similar and answering some of the factual questions that only require a short answer. Together, the class discusses the questions and decides which are the most interesting and worthy of further exploration. This is a great way to help your students learn to ask higher-order questions and to write good thesis statements.

11. Listen to Your Students
Along with close reading the text, you need to close read your students. When you begin to let students’ questions and ideas about the text take the lead, you’ll find your class will be much more invested in the reading. Your role will be to keep them grounded to the close reading process. If a student makes an assertion, can the class find the textual evidence for it? If not, why not? Is a new theory needed? As you probe into your students’ questions, you’ll learn more about where your students are and give them opportunities to engage deeper with the text. Ultimately, says Gillingham, “you are learning everything you can from your students.”

Samantha Cleaver has worked as a special education teacher and instructional coach, as well as an education writer and middle grade author. She is passionate about reading and literacy instruction, using technology in education, and connecting educators who are doing great things. Visit her web site.

Celebrating Tove Jansson and Moomins

January 2014 marks the centennial of the birth of Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson. Her delightful story “The Hemulen Who Loved Silence” (Junior Great Books Series 4, Book Two) is a long-time favorite of Junior Great Books students. If you aren’t familiar with the story, I encourage you to read it—you’re unlikely to encounter a bored Hemulen pleasure-ground ticket puncher whose dream life isn’t what he envisioned elsewhere. I discovered the Moomin books and the world of Moominvalley when I was five, soon after my family transferred to Goose Bay, Labrador, and the strangeness of Jansson’s other-worldy characters and landscape made the strangeness of my new surroundings less intimidating.

Tove Jansson’s life was as rich as her imagination. Born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1914, into a family of the Swedish-speaking minority, her parents were both artists—her mother a designer, her father, a sculptor. Creativity was a given in Jansson’s family, to the extent that her father referred to her as an Artist with a capital A since birth. The family was close and supportive, and spent summers at a cottage on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. “Without a happy childhood,” she once observed, “I would never have started writing.”¹ Readers of her books will recognize Moominvalley life in her description of her youth:

"We lived in a large, dilapidated studio, and through the windows one could see the whole harbour and the roofs of Helsinki. I pitied other children who had to live in ordinary flats, who had living rooms without staircases and sleeping compartments up close to the ceiling, nothing like the mysterious jumble of turntables, sacks with plaster and cases with clay, pieces of wood and iron constructions where one could hide and build in peace. A home without sculptures seemed as naked to me as one without books . . . . " ²

As a young woman, Jansson studied book design in Stockholm and painting in Helsinki, Paris, and Florence. The first hippo-like Moomintroll appeared in public in 1938 when twenty-four-year-old Jansson worked as a cartoonist for a Finnish anti-fascist magazine—she published an anti-Hitler cartoon and signed it with a frowning Moomin. But Jansson drew the first frowning Moomintroll years earlier in an equally surprising location. When they were kids, Jansson and her brother Per used to share thoughts by writing on the outhouse wall at her family’s cottage. After Per wrote a complex quote from a philosopher, Tove wanted to contradict him but the quote "was so impossible to argue with that my only chance was to draw the ugliest figure I could." ³ Tove later said that the horrific war years motivated her to turn the frowning, ugly Moomin into a wide-eyed adventure seeker and observer that developed into the Moomin books.

Her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945, and three more followed by 1950. The Moomin books were wildly popular in Finland and Sweden, and they reached an international audience after the London Evening News began publishing a Moomin comic strip drawn by Jansson in 1952. Eventually Mooomin comic strips ran in twelve countries and hundreds of newspapers, and by the end of her seven-year contract Jansson had drawn more than 10,000 comic strip frames. Moomins grew into a cultural phenomenon—including Russian and Japanese television shows, plays, operas, and a theme park—and the nine books in the Moomin series have been translated into forty-three languages.

The splendid visuals and fun of the Moomin books are enough to captivate young readers, and older readers (including adults) react to the strong narratives of characters responding to uncertainty and pondering the problems of friendship, solitude, and freedom. The books center around the Moomin family—good-natured, naive Moomintroll who loves fun and adventure; his mother, strong, loving Moominmamma who rarely says no; and his top-hat-wearing father, Moominpapa, who loves the sea and keeps track of his many adventures in a book called Memoirs. Like Jansson’s family, the Mommins are eccentric, tolerant of diversity, live close to nature, and value personal freedom. The Moomin household welcomes all needy souls and orphans, and the books introduce a large cast of intriguing, fantastical creatures. Nature and the seasons play a large role in Moomin life, and Jansson’s basic philosophy of acceptance and quest for solitude resonant throughout.

When asked how she perceived her Moomin reading audience, Jansson explained:

I write for myself first, not children. But if my stories are directed toward a certain type of reader, then it has to be a “skrutt.” By that, I mean those who have a hard time fitting in somewhere; those on the fringe, the lost ones. We all try to avoid being viewed as a “skrutt . . . . “ ⁴

Jansson also published novels and short-story collections for adults, and illustrated English and Swedish additions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark, as well as J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. She died in 2001, but never distanced herself too far from the Moomins in her lifetime. "You feel a cold wind on your legs when you step outside Moominvalley Valley, ⁵ she said.

Read more about the official centennial celebration Tove 100—Celebrating the art and life of Tove Jansson

1. Bo Carpelin, translation of “Tove Jansson,” Min väg till barnboken, B. Strömstedt, ed., Bonniers, 1964, as cited in Something About the Author, Volume 41, Anne Commire, ed. Gale, 1985. p.109.

2. Doris de Montreville and Donna Hill, eds., Third Book of Junior Authors. H. W. Wilson, 1972. pp. 147–8.

3. “Tove Jansson and the Moomin Story,” by Pekka Tarkka and Peter Marten, updated April 2010,thisisFINLAND, produced by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and published by the Finland Promotion Board,

4. Carpelin, as cited in Commire, p. 113.

5. "Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words," by Boel Westin, Review by Sue Prideaux

Sharon Crowley works in K–12 marketing at the Great Books Foundation.