The HILL solution is an expertly tailored plan including teacher education and system-building implemented to fit a school or district’s literacy needs through a combination of onsite and online training and data technology.

Once you have completed all the units, taken all the quizzes, and submitted all course work, we will be notified. You will then be issued an official completion certificate with PDP credit hours noted. Please allow 1-2 business days for this to be sent to you.

These are the PDPs you will earn for completion of our current online trainings:

• Close Reading for the Common Core: 10 PDPs
• Self-Regulated Strategy Development: 12 PDPs

If you have purchased an online training, you will have access to our course materials via this website for one year after purchase. We highly recommend that you download all materials at the beginning of the courses where the course packets are located for easy reference.

Our online courses are completely self-paced. If 2AM is the best time for you to learn, then you are free to take it then!

The one exception is the graduate level intensive Close Reading course we offer through our partner, Commonwealth Learning Online Institute. They partner with institutions so there are more restrictions. Please see their website for details: http://www.commlearnonline.com/facilitated-online-courses/close-reading/

If you feel you need to retake a quiz, please contact us to let us know as soon as possible. We can roll back your course progress to just before the quiz so you can take it again. However, it is not a thing to do lightly. If you have progressed past that section and completed other units and quizzes this will also remove that activity from your account and you will have to take them again.

You will be taught a pre-assessment as part of the course, so you don’t need to assess your students prior to taking the course. The pre-assessment you use will depend on the genre you choose to teach.

No, complete the course first, then keep the online course and materials handy to help guide you in implementation. The plan is take the course, build your lesson plans as you go, practice, and be ready to implement after completion. Your lesson plans and the online materials will guide your implementation with students.

Yes it does! We know some of you have struggled to get through the early stages. It’s a lot of material, but we want you to know that after Stage 3, the going gets easier and as you work through the stages, it begins to come together more. Implementation is an important part of the process that will help solidify your understanding of the material. So, keep going and hopefully you’ll get results as quickly as those who’ve already reached the end of the course! If you do find you have specific questions or points of confusion, please do not hesitate to contact us directly at info@18.223.3.63.

We would want to think about Close Reading instruction with regard to other types of instruction we provide in our classroom: general, on-level instruction for all students (Tier 1) and then differentiated and/or individuated support or supplementation (Tiers 2/3). Provide whole class instruction introducing and modeling the concepts, routines and processes that all students need to know. Then follow up in small group to extend and support the learning. One key point to remember is not to simplify the questions for students who are having difficulty. Since questions serve as key scaffolds to understanding and processing the text, these must remain. However, it is perfectly acceptable to simplify the language of the question. See Module 6: The Role of Talk, and Module 7: Scaffolds and Supports for methods to support, differentiate and extend student learning within a whole class lesson, or a small group lesson.

One of the best ways to address this is through Module 6: The Role of Talk, Units 1-4. When students “Turn and Talk,” or “Think-Pair-Share,” they have the opportunity to practice their responses with a partner before being given the option to share out to the full class. The many benefits of partner talk are discussed in these sections.

As teachers, this is an essential question regarding any challenging routine or practice in our classrooms. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question. The best practice we know of is called the gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson and Gallagher, 1983).  This helps support students as they gradually work towards independence in a skill or strategy. In this resource, Dr. Douglas Fisher cites his research and explains the model for literacy. He explains, “The gradual release of responsibility model of instruction has been documented as an effective approach for improving literacy achievement (Fisher & Frey, 2007), reading comprehension (Lloyd, 2004),and literacy outcomes for English language learners (Kong & Pearson, 2003).”

Yes, there are multiple examples of the facilitator engaging students in close reading lessons and experiences. These examples include Kindergarten, First Grade, and Third Grade students. There are whole class and small group examples in both urban and suburban settings. One lesson is in a class of English Language Learners. The lesson examples are meant to be practical examples of how strategies discussed look with real life students. The hope is that these examples will be generalizable or at least serve as the opportunity to watch a teacher employ such strategies. One interesting feature of the strategies is that the facilitator critiques her instruction at various points throughout the lessons, so she not only models the lessons, but models a self-assessment as a reflective practitioner. The viewer should note that she models such lessons as a “guest teacher,” meaning she does not work with the students pictured on a regular and distributed basis.

You will mostly find these videos in the second half of our Close Reading Online Course. Each example is titled with Modeling as the first word of the label.

Multiple examples of scaffolds at different grade levels are addressed in our Close Reading Online Course in Module 6: The Role of Talk, and Module 7: Scaffolds and Supports.

There is a short answer and a long answer to this question (no pun intended!)

The short answer is that the best way to do a close read is to choose a shorter, dense portion of text. This may be a poem, a section of an informational article, a paragraph of a speech, or a page or two of a novel. Using lengthy pieces of text is discouraged because the main goal of a Close Reading practice is to have students focus on the words in the text, for a specific purpose. This will be difficult for students to do if they have to “search and find” the right text to focus on. Maintaining the focus of close reading activities is only possible when students are not given the additional task of having to search through a lengthy text to find the word, phrase, sentence or paragraph of focus.

The long answer is: it depends upon many factors. As you know, the development of lesson materials and plans is a recursive process that is informed by many elements including your curriculum, your school’s expectations around curricular implementation, the needs, abilities, and interests of your students, and your skill and comfort levels with Close Reading as well as the intrinsic value you see in the practices. You may need to answer the questions below for yourself as you plan:

Are the texts required by my curriculum sufficiently complex?

One way to gauge this would be to compare such texts to Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards: Text Exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks. You may find this resource at the following link:  http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf. Here you will find texts organized by type within grade level complexity bands.

If we want to attempt to determine whether our texts are sufficiently complex, we would need to understand that the determination of text complexity includes three factors:

1. Quantitative measures of text complexity (Lexile)
2. Qualitative dimensions of text complexity (meaning, structure, language usage, and knowledge demands)
3. Reader and task considerations (student knowledge, motivation and interests)

The first element, Lexile, is easiest to establish as it is a measure of word frequency and sentence length. You may enter the name of the text (or the text itself) here to find the lexile level of the texts in question. This will give you a numeric value that you can compare to the established “stretch lexile bands” in order to determine whether the text are sufficiently complex for your grade level complexity band. You may read about grade level text complexity bands here.

A second element to gauge would be the qualitative aspects of the text in question. You may do this analysis yourself, but understand that this is a subjective evaluation best done in collaboration with other professionals. Included here and here are two resources for determining the complexity of the qualitative aspects of the texts. Use one for informational text analysis and the other for literary text analysis.

The third and final factor to define text complexity is hardest to measure, as it will really depend upon the students before you, and their background knowledge, motivations and interests. There is not an easy formula for this, unfortunately, but it is the most creative aspect of the decision around how complex the text is.

How much time will I plan to spend with the text in question?

The answer to this question may be informed by the text type, or the length of the text. The most important premise here would be to evaluate the qualitative features of the text in order to establish:

1. Are there any key themes or main ideas you would want the student to understand? Follow this up with establishing which short chunks of text may be used by students to examine these themes/ideas.
2. Are there any specific vocabulary words that we would like students to examine through these texts? These may be words/terms that are best taught through having students use them within the context of the passage. Follow this up by establishing which chunks of text may be used for working with and applying these vocabulary words.
3. Are there any syntactical or structural elements to the piece that you would want students to focus on? These may relate to the way punctuation and phrasing are used to support key themes or how the textual/pictorial layout support core ideas. Follow this up, again, by establishing which sections or parts of the text will be used.
   Once you have established your areas of focus, you can decide how much time you want to use to cover these, of if there are non-essential areas that you will eliminate. Whatever you decide, you will have a clearer picture of the amount of text you will be using for Close Reading.

Making these decisions does not rule out the feasibility of using the complete text for purposes other than Close Reading, as there is much value for our students in reading a text to completion. This helps students to build endurance, experience the flow from one section to the next, and ultimately, to become literate individuals who can decide for themselves what to focus on.

There are three main types of Close Reading questions, otherwise known as Text-Dependent Questions. These are:

1. Questions that assess themes and central ideas
2. Questions that assess knowledge of vocabulary
3. Questions that assess syntax and structure

You may learn more about these in our online course, Module 4, Unit 3, Types of Text Dependent Questions.

Not every text is worthy of a close read. It is only texts that are sufficiently complex that lend themselves to a close reading activity. Refer to the “Text Complexity” in the resources section in order to determine how complex a text might be for a particular group of students.

Begin by experimenting with having the student(s) make “text”-based inferences. Reference Module 4, Unit 2: Inferences and Assumptions as a starting point. You may begin your inferencing instruction with a picture as your “text.” Then, as students become more competent and confident, begin to introduce written language. See Module 7: Scaffolds and Supports for reference. Finally, it may be wise to have students use the Inferencing Picture Graphic Organizer (in the TDQs Resources section) to make their thinking visible.