Complex Text Decoded: How To Design Lessons And Use Strategies That Target Authentic Texts, Sep/2015

If you believe it's important to give students the opportunity to read a wide variety of texts for different purposes and along a spectrum of difficulty and length, then that means you will occasionally engage them in complex text. Fortunately, here's the ultimate guide to help you

1. Equip your students with appropriate tools to comprehend complex text.
2. Ensure students understand and apply knowledge from challenging reading assignments in every subject.
3. Develop your students’ abilities to become better lifelong readers.

Kathy Glass offers a wealth of proven strategies for designing lessons that incorporate a close examination of text and encourage students to delve deeply into content. Includes strategies for prereading, text-dependent questions, vocabulary, and assessment.

About The Authors:

Kathy T. Glass consults nationally with schools and districts, presents at conferences, and teaches seminars for university and county programs delivering customized professional development. A former master teacher, she has been in education for more than 25 years and works with administrators and teachers in groups of varying sizes from kindergarten through high school. Her expertise revolves around areas of curriculum and instruction, such as implementation of the ELA Common Core State Standards or other standards-based curricula; backward design; differentiated tools, strategies, and assessments; pre-, formative, self-, and summative assessments; writing instruction and assessment; unit and yearlong curriculum maps; text-dependent questions; and engaging instructional strategies that facilitate close reading. By providing educators with practical application of research-based methods, she works to strengthen their teaching or coaching and extend their professional capacities to help improve student achievement.

In addition to this book, she has written Mapping Comprehensive Units to the ELA Common Core Standards, 6–12 (Corwin, 2013) and K–5 (Corwin, 2012); Lesson Design for Differentiated Instruction, Grades 4–9 (Corwin, 2009); Curriculum Mapping: A Step-by- Step Guide to Creating Curriculum Year Overviews (Corwin, 2007); and Curriculum Design for Writing Instruction: Creating Standards-Based Lesson Plans and Rubrics (Corwin, 2005). With Cindy Strickland, she has coauthored the Staff Development Guide for the Parallel Curriculum (Corwin, 2009). In addition, Kathy served as a differentiation consultant for Pearson Learning's social studies textbook series for K–5 (2013).

Originally from Indianapolis, Kathy resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.