Reading the World
Reading well encourages critical thinking, a skill necessary for every day life. Students should be introduced to myriad types and styles of writing in order to deepen their reading comprehension skills. Young people need to be taught to be more critical consumers of information. Thus, reading for class should not just be limited to texts from the literary canon; rather, it should include advertisements, technical writings, news articles, images, and other such alternative sources of information. When students are reading literature rather than informational texts, educators need to assist students in seeing how these texts will help them as well. Educators often justify their book selections for class by qualifying them as “great stories” that help us to “appreciate the writer’s craft.” While these are noble and worthwhile reasons for reading a book, they fail to capture a primary function of literature, namely that it encourages us to consider universal themes and larger social issues. ”Literature enables students to experience a safe ‘practice run’ through the great issues confronting us...” (Gallagher 20). Teaching deeper reading will create more intelligent and able adults once those readers reach the “real world.”
Consider these Key Questions
Apply using: Strategies: Reading the World
Focusing the Reader
Building students’ interest in the text to be read is a major challenge of teaching deep reading. The teacher serves as the guide to the text, leading students to meaningful reflection by being there through every step of the reading, before, during, and after, with before perhaps being the most important. Students need meaningful prior knowledge to build a connection to the text, a reason to read the text, because “how a person feels about a learning situation determines the amount of attention devoted to it”(Gallagher 29). In order to facilitate in depth reading, students need to understand why what they are reading is personally relevant to them. Students’ prior experiences will impact their degree of comprehension. As a result, students who come to a new text with no background knowledge may have trouble understanding and remembering what they have read. We must build a frame for a text in order to ensure that students find it personally relevant. This task enables students to better comprehend a work.
Consider these Key Questions
Apply using: Strategies: Focusing the Reader
Reading and Re-Reading
The ability to read the text at least twice is important to students’ understanding because there are often layers in the text we do not see in our initial reading. The first draft reading, as Gallagher calls it, is dedicated mostly to becoming familiar with the characters, the plot, and the basic elements of the text. Areas of confusion are likely to occur, ands knowing that they will have an opportunity to go back later, students are able to get questions about the essential elements of the text answered before tackling the harder things. It is difficult to read deeper into the text if you are unfamiliar with the basic essence of it. The second draft reading is where we move beyond the text and consider its implications to us as human beings in our current world. After “getting” the basics, we are able to see the fine tuned nuances of the text, things like the foreshadowing, the metaphors, and the truly poignant moments of the characters’ complexities.
Consider these Key Questions
Apply using: Strategies: First-Draft Reading and Strategies: Second-Draft Reading
The Importance of Collaboration
Working in groups with other students is important to the understanding students will take away after working with a text. No single student is going to get everything possible out of the text because “every one of us comes to the printed page with different prior knowledge and experiences, with different viewpoints and biases, with different insights and blind spots” (Gallagher 104). Through the time given to group discussion, students’ eyes will be opened to different viewpoints, understandings, misunderstandings, thoughts, and conclusions. They also learn to speak and discuss appropriately, respectfully, and collaboratively about their own opinions. It can be difficult for a young reader to truly see the universal themes and larger social issues in a text, as discussed in the “Reading the World” theme, on their own. “Having students reflect on their reading by connecting it to a contemporary point of view is essential,” and having them do so as a group, as well as individually, can widen the range of their reflection (Gallagher 20).
Consider these Key Questions
Apply using: Strategies: Collaboration