There's a Literacy Crisis. One Classroom Solution Should Be Obvious.

You can't get better at reading until you care about a text. We are English professors who stumbled into a debate about high school pedagogy. We wrote a book to help college instructors teach close reading, the fundamental skill of literary studies. And then, well before it was published, we started hearing from education scholars training high school teachers, and high school teachers themselves, who had caught wind of the book through advance essays and word of mouth. They were interested in how we describe close reading, the tools we provide for teaching it, and the claim we make for its importance.