Excerpts or whole novels - Tim Shanahan

 link to his article

How to Get High-School Students Reading More Closely

 How to Get High-School Students Reading More Closely

from Marshall Memo 1111 (Nov 3, 2025)

In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez says that with so much text reading
in schools, “sometimes, in some classes, with some students, it can get pretty boring. Pretty
dry.” She interviewed high-school English teachers Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber, who
have an online presence (Much Ado About Teaching) and recently published a book of
strategies for getting students more engaged with texts. Here are three of their ideas:

• Reconstructing poems – A poem is cut up (into lines, phrases, or individual words)
and students put the poem back together, annotate their version, and compare it with the
original. “It’s forcing students to do a close reading of the poem,” says Barber. “If I would
have passed out this poem and said, I want you to do a close reading, their eyes would be
glazed over.” Putting the pieces together gets them slowing down and thinking about lines,
phrases, words, punctuation, and meaning.

• Inferential timeline – Each student is assigned a few pages from a section of the novel
being read by the class and writes on an index card or sticky note the most important thing that
happened on those pages, with a quote that illustrates it. “This is all about decision-making and
cutting out the extraneous details and just focusing on what’s really important,” says Sztabnik.
“Often it’s either character development or increasing conflict or maybe a symbol finally
emerges.” Students post their cards on a timeline on a wall.
Students then stand up, choose another student’s card, and add a new card under it with
an explanation of why they believe that moment was significant in the grand scheme of the
novel. Finally, students do a gallery walk of the whole timeline, taking notes on the inferences
their classmates made.

• Text rendering – The class reads a passage and each student chooses the sentence or
line they think is most important, then the most important phrase within that sentence, then the
most important word in that phrase. Students defend their choices to the full class, then small
groups work together to draw general conclusions about the passage. Barber says she came up
with this idea because students were often vague about where they got an idea from a text (It’s
just there, they’d say). Text rendering gets them reading much more closely and zeroing in on
specific language and meaning.

“3 Fresh Strategies That Get Students Engaged with Texts” by Jennifer Gonzalez, Brian
Sztabnik, and Susan Barber in Cult of Pedagogy, October 26, 2025; Gonazlez can be reached
at gonzjenn@cultofpedagogy.com . Sztabnik and Barber’s book is 100% Engagement.