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.

 

Should We Use ChatGPT to Make Literature Accessible to Students?

            In this Boston Globe article, MG Prezioso (Harvard University) tees off on teachers who are using AI tools like ChatGPT to simplify texts for students. “As an education researcher, I understand the appeal of AI-adapted texts,” she says. “Classrooms play host to students with a range of language and literacy skills, and AI-adapted materials, which can be translated and tailored to each individual’s reading level, allow students to access the same content – along with supplementary resources, like discussion questions and vocabulary words – at their own pace. This is especially valuable in social studies and the sciences, where information is a prerequisite for conceptual understanding.” But Prezioso has several concerns:

            • Watered-down language – AI-generated text tends to be syntactically repetitive and stylistically flat, she says. Students need to read complex and varied sentences to develop reading comprehension skills. “Why not use authentic texts with additional instructional support, like drawing on background knowledge or helping students break down meaning-filled, ‘juicy’ sentences instead?”

            • Artistic integrity – AI-modified works of fiction, essays, and memoirs can do violence to the original authors’ integrity.

            • Bias – “Can we really trust AI,” asks Prezioso, “with its racial and gender biases, to adapt a novel like Beloved– one that embodies not only Toni Morrison’s lyrical, enchanting style but also the complexities of the black experience?”

            • Love of reading – AI-processed texts simply don’t have the same ability to develop students’ appreciation of authors’ word choice, imagery, and character dialogue. Reading will be a chore, not a joy. “Divorcing a story from its style is like separating humans from atoms,” says Prezioso. “You can try, but if you were to succeed, you would create something entirely different.” There’s already a trend of fewer young people reading for fun, and AI is likely to make things worse.

            As an example, Prezioso takes a passage from the end of The Great Gatsby, a novel often used in high-school English classes:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Now here’s a ChatGPT rendition:

Gatsby believed in the green light, a symbol of the bright future he dreamed of. Each year, that future seemed to slip further away. It was out of reach then, but that didn’t stop him – tomorrow he would try harder, stretch further… and maybe one day, he would achieve it. So we keep moving forward, like boats trying to move against the current, always being pulled back into the past.

“The original is elegant, complex,” says Prezioso. “Its arrangement of words and syntax, from the expanded clauses to the ellipsis and dashes, embodies Gatsby’s yearning for the past, as well as our own faith in, and pursuit of, illusory dreams. The message is tragic, but its tone is  hopeful, leaving us to wonder: are we foolish for beating on, or is the honor in the attempt?” The AI-generated text, on the other hand, is rigid, mechanical, lacks complexity and tone, and distorts Fitzgerald’s message. 

            What makes the original meaningful is that it is “crafted by a person, a breathing, feeling person,” says Prezioso. “There is wisdom in human-crafted words, and it is hard-earned. We mustn’t overlook this wisdom. It’s why we read. It’s what we’ll lose. And it’s something AI will never provide.” 

 

“Teachers Are Using AI to Make Literature Easier for Students to Read. This Is a Terrible Idea” by MG Prezioso in The Boston Globe, April 13, 2025; Prezioso can be reached at mgprezioso@fas.harvard.edu.

Helping Students Read Complex Texts

 Helping Students Read Complex Texts  By cultivating metacognitive reading habits, you can help students remain focused as they persist through challenging material.

Edutopia - summary of research of mindless reading and 8 tips for better comprehension.  7 & 8 are my favorites.

📄 Summary (2 Sentences):

This article outlines research-based strategies to help students build metacognitive awareness while reading complex texts across disciplines. It emphasizes that while attention drift is normal, students can be taught to persist through challenging reading using tools like rereading, annotation, vocabulary previewing, and self-explanation.

Longer summary: Students often lose focus while reading challenging or technical texts, but this struggle can be reduced with explicit instruction in metacognitive reading strategies. Research shows that teaching students how to monitor their understanding, recognize confusion, and apply tools like rereading or vocabulary lookups improves both attention and comprehension. Building background knowledge before reading helps students make meaningful connections and retain more information. Teachers can also boost comprehension by previewing key vocabulary with visuals and context rather than relying solely on definitions. Strategies like annotating, reading aloud, and paraphrasing key ideas in students’ own words help them stay engaged and process content more deeply. Modeling these strategies out loud while reading difficult texts can normalize the struggle and show students how to persist. Ultimately, students need a toolbox of strategies and the confidence to use them flexibly when tackling complex material across content areas.

📘 Danielson Domain:

Domain 3: Instruction – 3c: Engaging Students in Learning and 3e: Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness

Also aligns with Domain 1: Planning and Preparation – 1e: Designing Coherent Instruction and 1f: Designing Student Assessments

🏷️ Keywords:

Complex texts

Metacognitive reading strategies

Annotation

Useful for cross-disciplinary PD, especially when collaborating with science, history, or CTE teachers on supporting reading in their content areas. This article can also serve as a tool to help teachers reflect on how well they model reading processes and provide scaffolds for independence. Could be repurposed into a quick teacher checklist or mini-PD on “What to do when students get lost in a text.”

Shanahan on Reading Comprehension Versus Learning

 from Marshall Memo 1022

Timothy Shanahan on Reading Comprehension Versus Learning

            In this online article, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) distinguishes between reading comprehension and learning from a text. “It’s an important distinction if we seek to teach reading effectively,” he says. Here are his thoughts on each:

            • Comprehension – This is basically grasping the meaning and meaningfulness of what’s read, which is important to getting it into memory. Some see teaching comprehension as mostly for the elementary grades. Before the current emphasis on reading strategies, comprehension instruction was often about having students practice answering questions about passages. The increasing emphasis on teaching reading strategies was supposed to make students active readers, applying their metacognition, practicing discrete skills (main idea, inferencing) being aware of whether they were understanding, and being able to apply the skills to new texts.

            • Learning – Advocates of knowledge acquisition disagree with the content-agnostic approach of reading strategy instruction – the idea that it doesn’t matter what students read because they can apply the strategies they learn to any text. Learning advocates emphasize the importance of high-quality texts and reading several on a topic to deepen learning. They suggest using more-effective reading strategies than answering questions or highlighting text – for example, asking yourself questions about what you’ve read and summarizing a text in your own words. 

            “Certainly,” says Shanahan, “the knowledge crew is right about the importance of books worth reading. This means science and social studies texts. But it also means reading worthwhile literature (cultural touchstones), and fiction that conveys important things about the human condition (our relationships, our motivations, and so on)… Strategy advocates like these ideas, but strategy instruction can get pretty procedural, without much attention to the content.” 

            However, says Shanahan, neither approach is paying enough attention to teaching students how to comprehend. One stresses reading skills, the other knowledge acquisition. So what are reading teachers supposed to do? Shanahan has these suggestions:

            • In directed or guided reading lessons (where students read a text with the guidance and supervision of a teacher) focus on reading valuable texts from which we want students to gain important content knowledge.

            • Ensure that these texts are challenging. “If kids can comprehend the text on their own,” says Shanahan, “then it is not the right text for a reading lesson.” A major goal in teacher-directed reading lessons is helping students “negotiate the difficulties of a text.”

            • Building deep knowledge requires more than just reading and answering questions. Students should read more than one text on a subject, take part in discussions, presentations, and debates, and write reports, critiques, comparisons, and analyses. 

            • Those who advocate teaching comprehension strategies “should get serious about what constitutes comprehension strategy,” says Shanahan. One truly important skill is self-monitoring – being aware of when our eyeballs are reading but we’re not understanding. “Surprisingly, many students, even college-age students, read with little understanding and do nothing about it,” he says. We need to teach students what to do when they don’t understand a word, when a sentence doesn’t make sense, when they get confused about which character or concept is being talked about. Students need to be taught how to solve these problems on their own and develop the tenacity to persist when they are confused. And, adds Shanahan, don’t allow the study strategies to distract from the content that’s being learned.

            Shanahan concludes with a comment on the commonly used study skill of highlighting text. Researchers have found that this is an ineffective strategy. Why? Because many students don’t have enough understanding of the text to know what’s important, and end up highlighting almost everything. A better approach: provide important background knowledge and teach students an important reading strategy: how to use titles, subheadings, boldfacing, graphics, and other clues authors use to structure meaning. 

 

“I Want My Students to Comprehend; Am I Teaching the Wrong Kind of Strategies?” by Timothy Shanahan in Shanahan on Literacy, February 3, 2024;

Surprising Results when Teens Read Spicy Young Adult Novels

 Surprising Results when Teens Read Spicy Young Adult Novels

In this article in Language Arts and Literacy, Gay Ivey (University of North Carolina/

Greensboro) and Peter Johnston (University of Albany) describe the battle lines on book bans

in the U.S. On one side is the fear that certain books will traumatize, radicalize, or undermine

the morals of young people in a time of increasing anxiety, loneliness, depression, and suicide.

On the other side is a passionate argument for unfettered access to ideas, student choice, and

democracy.

But in fact, say Ivey and Johnston, most young adolescents rarely read books on their

own, and if they do pick up controversial books, we know very little about how they react.

To explore these issues, Ivey and Johnston worked with several 8th-grade ELA teachers

who decided to stop assigning works of literature for their whole classes. Instead, they let

students choose from a wide range of young adult books, gave them time to read, and then led

class discussions. Over two years of observing classrooms and interviewing students, then

following up with some students for another two years, Ivey and Johnston came to the

following conclusions:

• Students, most of whom had done little or no independent reading beforehand,

“started reading like crazy – in and out of school – and their reading achievement improved.”

• Students reported that reading engaging stories about characters with complicated

lives made them more empathetic, less judgmental, more likely to understand multiple

viewpoints, and morally stronger. Students reported that they had better self-control,

friendships, and family relationships.

• The notion that teens would be distressed as they read controversial books alone was

the opposite of what happened, say Ivey and Johnston. Kids pestered teachers, family

members, and friends to read the books and talked about the characters, relationships among

them, drugs, sex, and depression. Parents said they welcomed these conversations.

• Far from emulating the unwise choices made by characters in the books, students saw

the stories as cautionary tales and scoffed at the idea that they would make such poor decisions.

“The books helped them to see the consequences of problematic decisions and language,” say

Ivey and Johnston. “The complexities of characters’ lives and the consequences of their

decisions deepened students’ moral thinking while making them grateful for their lives and

families. The books reduced their own self-absorption, diminishing personal concerns that

might otherwise overwhelm them. Bad words and disturbing scenes simply fed bigger

conversations about life and relationships.”

• “Reading and talking about personally meaningful books can provide a literal lifeline

for teens,” conclude Ivey and Johnston. “Somewhere in the arguments about whether books are

‘educationally suitable’ we’ve lost the thread of why we want students to read in the first place,

what they, and we, stand to gain in the process, and what’s at stake.”

“What Happens When Young People Actually Read ‘Disturbing’ Books” by Gay Ivey and

Peter Johnston in Language Arts and Literacy, October 31, 2023; their new book, from which

these ideas were excerpted, is Teens Choosing to Read: Fostering Social, Emotional, and

Intellectual Growth Through Books (TC Press, 2023); the authors can be reached at

mgivey@uncg.edu and pjohnston@albany.edu .