What Readers Do!

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading: Content Comprehension, Grades 6-12 by Cris Tovani [Brianne Campagna]

Tovani, C. (2004). Do I really have to teach reading? : Content comprehension, grades 6-12. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers

Key Strategies and Points:

A strategy is an intentional plan adapted to a contextual situation. Strategies provide options for thinking about text in comprehension and extracting and inferring meaning (Tovani, 2004, p. 5).

Chapter 1: Introduction: “I’m the Stupid Lady from Denver…”

Thinking Strategies by Proficient Readers & Writers (Tovani, 2004, p. 5)

• ACTIVATING BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE, MAKING CONNECTIONS between new and known information
• SELF-QUESTIONING text for clarification and meaning-making
• DRAWING INFERENCES using background knowledge and textual clues
• DISTINGUISHING IMPORTANCE in details and main idea
• UTILIZING SENSORY, IMAGES to enhance comprehension and visualize reading

(Tovani, 2004, p. 5)

MAKE CONNECTION BETWEEN TEXT AND:

• your life
• the world
• another text

MAKE PREDICTIONS

STOP & CONTEMPLATE WHAT YOU HAVE READ

ASK YOURSELF A QUESTION AND TRY TO ANSWER IT

REFLECT IN WRITING WHAT YOU HAVE JUT READ

VISUALIZE

USE PRINT CONVENTIONS

RETELL WHAT YOU HAVE READ

REREAD

RECOGNIZE PATTERNS IN TEXT STRUCTURE

ADJUST READING RATE- SLOW DOWN or SPEED UP

Chapter 2: The "So What?" of Reading Comprehension

Double-Entry Diaries: considered an "access tool" that help students to slow down as they read and begin to track their thinking. Steps are as follows:

• Divide a piece of notebook paper in half lengthwise
• Left-hand column is where students copy quotes or words directly from the text. This represents literal information from the text
• Right-hand column is where students are able to share their thinking or summarize. This represents the inferential and critical thinking
• Students can choose how they structure their right-hand column that work for them

"So What?" Thinking Strategy: an adapted version of the double-entry diaries. The steps are as follows:

1. Read the text
2. Make a connection
3. Utilize a Thinking Strategy - asking questions, drawing conclusion, visualizing, etc.
4. Ask "So What?"
5. How does this thinking help you better understand the text?
6. Bring the thinking back to the text
7. Repeat

Essential Elements of Comprehension Instruction:

• Fully assess the text that students are expected to read. Assess how interesting it is, the readability, the accessibility, and the relevance of the text.
• Give students a foundation of how you make sense of a text by explicitly modeling your thinking process to students
• Define the relevance and purpose of reading the text you are providing students with
• Give student the chance to apply the information they have rad and interpreted

Other Important Teaching Points:

• Provide students with numerous strategies because some practices will work better for various students
• Encourage students to ask their own questions when reading a text rather than relying on the end-of-the-chapter questions of guided outlines
• Teach students the importance of rereading text or returning to texts in the future to build upon prior knowledge or new knowledge

Chapter 3: Parallel Experiences: Tapping the Mother Lode

Mental Modeling: Explicitly portraying the processes and strategies teachers use themselves while reading texts to their students. This allows:

• Students to recognize how skilled readers and writers decipher texts
• Add to a number of options students have to decide how to go about making sense of a text
• Help students to grasp the idea that understanding texts are ongoing thinking processes

Other Important Teaching Points:

• Share with students how you overcame any difficulty in reading a challenging piece of text
• Identify what the students in your class may be struggling with and model strategies to help these difficulties

Chapter 4: Real Rigor: Connecting Students with Accessible Text

What is Accessible Text?

• Interesting, well-written, and at the appropriate reading level for a specific classroom of students
• Often short enough to be read in one class period or sitting
• It enables students to make connections between school curriculum and the real world by showcasing reading and writing that is done in the real world

Text Sets:

• Text sets were an idea developed in elementary classrooms and brought to high school classes
• Text sets provide students with several option of ways in which to obtain information, contain a variety of texts that vary in length, readability, and structure. These texts should be accessible and give students the opportunities to practice reading strategies they have learned
• They can be organized in the classroom by units of study, genre, themes, or authors
• Examples include: poems, picture books, the civil war, catalogs, primary sources, etc.
• You can have students evaluate text sets by writing letters to future users of the text sets, observing student interaction with a text set, or asking questions about the pieces in a text set

Other Important Teaching Points

• Provide students with more options of reading materials than just their textbook. Do not rely solely on a textbook to teach a subject, you can use reading materials to go beyond the content in a textbook in the classroom
• Show students how their subjects bridge with the real world
• Provide students with the chance to read interesting, provocative texts

Chapter 5: "Why Am I Reading This?"

Instructional Purposes: Provide students with a concrete lens in which they should be reading their texts. To develop an instructional purpose you should:

• Decide on what students should learn through reading the text and develop the essential information in the text
• Try to predict what parts in the text might cause students difficulty
• Model for the students how you would overcome the difficulties in the text
• Model which strategies and tools worked best for you while reading the text and how they might go about using those tools

Points that may help you develop a possible purpose:

• Search for the details that stand out as interesting in the text
• Piece together a connection between the title, subtitle, and the body of the text
• Ask and record questions that arise while reading
• Try to establish the writer's opinion and then compare and contrast it with your won
• Make a real world connection to the piece
• Understand the background of the author and how this may affect the text

Other Important Teaching Points:

• Read for various purposes - skip, skim, scan, peruse text and be selective about the type of reading you can do.
• Clarify instructional purpose and intent (with always making connections to authenticity and relevance to their lives)
• Make authentic connections and relevancy to student lives

Chapter 6: Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse

Marking Texts: To get students started with marking texts you can have them begin by:

• Marking one quote in the text and reacting to it
• Writing down their questions about the text as they come to the student
• Remind students not to copy down the text, but respond to it
• Make concrete statements about what is being said

Possible Uses of sticky notes:

• Mark a point quickly to be able to come back to it (elaboration, clarification, question)
• Mark a confusing part to remember to ask for clarification
• Parking Lot a point to remember to share later

Possible uses of Highlighters:

• Use different colors to distinguish between different things. For example, yellow highlighters could signify confusing parts of the text
• Highlight parts of the text that emphasize the instructional purpose

Visual Strategies:

• Whole-Group Thinking: Developing a chart as a class can enable students to think and share publicly while allowing students to learn how to mark and think about a text
• Comprehension Constructors: Help students to visualize what they are reading by providing them with a very abstract guideline or outline to the text
• Visual representations

Other Important Teaching Points:

• Teach students to look for context clues for overall understandings
• Question the author and content. Not everything written in textbooks may be accurate or true
• Invite other ways of showing understanding and comprehension
• Guide and model Think Alouds and different notetaking strategies in remembering the important information in the text

Chapter 7: Group Work that Grows Understanding

Why is it Important to have students discuss their Readings in Small Groups?

Small Groups are important because the discussion stimulate higher levels of thinking, social skills, listening skills, holds students accountable, helps students remember the information they read, offers different perspectives, and promotes deeper understanding.

Concerns for Group Work and Some Solutions:

The student doesn't want to be in a group without their friends

• As a student: tough it out and then request a group change for the next project
• As a teacher: agree to honor group requests when it is possible

The student does not want to be in a group in which some students do not do their portion of the work

• As a student: understand that you cannot force anyone to complete their share of the work, but always agree to finish your own part
• As a teacher: Do not give group grades and try to take note of who is contributing to the group and who is not and respond accordingly

The student does not like being in a group where they feel no one will help them understand the task at hand

• As a student: Agree to help peer group members if they are able to and ask the group if they need help at varying points in the group activities
• As a teacher: model how a group should complete an activity together and try to observe what is going on well and what needs improvement and alter the group work as needed

Other Important Teaching Points:

• Model for students how to appropriately engage in a discussion
• Always give students specific feedback about their discussion and what is going well and suggestions for improvement
• Only ask students to discuss pieces that are significant enough to discuss
• Try to predict the stumbling blocks that might occur in the group activities to attempt to limit them from occurring

Chapter 8: "What Do I Do with all these Sticky Notes?" Assessment that Drives Instruction

• It is important to use many different forms of assessment when looking at student's reading
• As a class, it is helpful to set goals for students and on an individual basis at multiple times throughout a school year
• Response logs allow teachers to get to know students and what they enjoy reading outside of the classroom. It also enable teachers to assess student understanding of reading strategies
• Quick conferences with students help a teacher to get a quick grasp on which students are understanding the reading and the task and which students are not

Other Important Teaching Points:

• Determine what you want to assess and give a variety of ways in which to do so
• Design assessments that act as checkpoints for understanding throughout the learning process
• Allow students to learn how to use the assessment tools to be sure that format does not interfere with the students ability to show understanding

Chapter 9: "Did I Miss Anything? Did I Miss Everything?" Last Thoughts

These teaching strategies are to aid teachers in the classroom, but it is up to a teacher to trust in the fact that they know what they are doing to be confident in implementation.

Potential Advantages and Disadvantages of the Author’s Approaches:

I found many of the approaches to be extremely applicable because they were all developed through real experiences with real students in a real classroom. The first and foremost advantage to these strategies are that they are practical and relevant. They had all been tested through implementation and tweaked and then integrated back into the classroom again. I personally have confidence in the strategies provided because Tovani provided detailed stories about how both students and teachers reacted to various tools and why she believed they worked. I believe the advantages in her strategies are the focus on student engagement. Tovani gets at the heart of what intervenes with student success when reading by talking to real students. She then proposes strategies that consistently give students a purpose behind their readings, which in turn engages the students with their assigned texts. Tovani provides numerous tools that are very different from each other, therefore applicable to various learning styles. Any type of student can pick this book up and find a strategy that could work for them. Going along with this, Tovani provides strategies for individual silent reading, small group reading, and whole class reading, thus making this book relevant for varied reading situations.

Potential disadvantages to this book is that it focuses on struggling readers, without giving many suggestions for gifted and talented students. Do I really have to teach reading to my gifted and talented students? Of course most these approaches can be utilized by gifted students the same as a lower achieving student, however, these approaches do not seem to be designed for high achieving readers. Another disadvantage to these strategies is that they require a lot of extra attention and time in the classroom dedicated to English Language Arts. These activities to get students engaged with their readings are time consuming inside and outside of the classroom. If you require students to do these handwritten strategies outside of the classroom, you might have to consider reducing homework in other subjects. If you require students to integrate group work on their reading often, it could potentially eat away at time in other subject areas inside the classroom. However, with that being said, it is a loss cause to have students read material that they are not comprehending or making sense of, therefore, it may be in the best interest of the students to take this time to teach reading strategies or discuss texts as a group in class.

Recommendations and Why?

Tovani is a teacher practitioner who learns from the students she teaches and learns alongside them. Her personal stories and interaction engages the reader in authentic teaching strategies from the perspective of her students and what she has learned from them and knows from effective practice. Tovani is a teacher curious to want to learn more.

Suggestions for how to integrate the ideas from your selection into classroom practices:

Reading Tovani reminds me of a quote by former Gallup principal Robert Zigmund:

If you want kids to read and write and think, the evidence is overwhelming: aim at their higher mental processes, not their lower one. Let them initiate their learning activities for their own purposes. Put them in a language environment where all the aspects of language are used, the way they are in real life. Make them read and write and think and talk to each other all the time. Give them good coaching and corrective feedback right when they need it, and surround them with adults who read and write and think and talk to each other all the time. There's no mystery about this. That's what works (p. 80 source unknown).