Close Reading: I'm a Fan

One of my roles in my new-ish (it's starting to feel not so new anymore, which I think is a good thing) role is planning professional development regarding the shifts in literacy instruction that the Common Core Standards require.  I have been focusing on close reading, which I believe is a fundamental skill that students need in order to squeeze out all the meaning from text they can.  It also forces students to grapple with a complex text, giving them strategies for how to handle tough reading.  In my opinion, close reading is much better than what I used to see all the time in my classroom: telling students to read something and the only thing going on neurologically was motor neurons firing when their eyeballs moved back and forth across the page.
Below is a sample presentation that I will be giving to our middle school staff this week regarding close reading, if you'd care to check it out.  It was my first time using PowToon, so please forgive any errors you see in the timing.  You can check out the resources I used in it here and here and here. Close reading really means getting students to re-read.   But it doesn't mean that they simply fire those motor neurons again to move their eyeballs across a page of text a second time; it means students are re-reading in order to dig deep into the various levels of textual meaning.  It means getting students to annotate while they read so they can be active questioners of the text; it means giving students questions that require they go back to the reading to find evidence to support their answers.  It also means developing student skills at generating their own arguments that are backed with evidence, not just opinions that come from prior experience.  Further, it means getting students to develop strategies for finding meanings of those tier two vocabulary words on their own, and seeing why the author used those particular words in the first place.  It teaches students to slow down when they read, and forces them to see how a reading hangs together as a whole by analyzing its parts.
In other words, it teaches students to think.  And, not only that, it teaches them skills they will actually need to use independently after they graduate.  Much more useful, in my opinion, than most of the content that is held sacrosanct in classrooms these days.  
Does it take more time to do a close read?  Yep.  In fact, that's the one complaint I hear the most about close reading--that it takes too much class time.  But any skill such as this will take more time to teach students at first.  If it is done consistently by all teachers over the course of a school year, then it will become a habit that takes less and less time on the part of the teacher and the student.
And, like I said, it makes students do that "thinking" thing--and teaches them a skill to help them do that thinking on their own, well after they leave your classroom and your content behind.