Subjects Matter: Pages 99-113; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter 6

(Beers, pages 73-74) “Dependent readers are dependent in part because of their passive reading. The challenge we face is to get them thinking about the selection and how they will read the selection before they begin the text.”
I tend to think of pre-reading strategies like the trailer to a movie. Do we ever plop down $7 to see a movie that we know absolutely nothing about? I know I’m too frugal for that! Even on the rare occasion that my husband wants to see one, I at least find out what it’s about before I go. I some sort of connection. The trailer is designed to get us interested in the movie and think about what might happen, so that we’ll want to see it. We aren’t shown the minute details or resolution of the film…just enough to pique our interest. That’s exactly what a pre-reading strategy is meant to do—get students interested and thinking about the text before they actually read it. If we don’t get our students involved in the text before they actually begin reading it, then how can we expect them to be remotely interested in the text itself? Yes, there are times that I’ll go see a movie just because who is in it (can anyone say Matthew McConaughey?) but that’s kin to liking a favorite author…how many of our struggling readers have a favorite author? Not many…which is why we have to get them interested in reading the text some other way! Using a pre-reading strategy is the first step into making students active readers! Once we get them started, we have to keep them going…we’ll talk about that on another thread!

Okay, the readings this time are chock full of pre-reading strategies. What would really be cool is if you try one of the strategies mentioned by Beers or Daniels/Zemelman with your students and write about the experience. That is, of course, if you’re a classroom teacher!

Subjects Matter: Chapter 3; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter 3

Subjects Matter
(Page 40) “They (textbooks) are intentionally ‘content-overloaded’ with facts, dates, formulas and taxonomies. They introduce vocabulary and concepts at a blind rate. They are overly structured and highly orderly, packing information into labeled slots, as densely as possible.”
Amen! When we’re familiar with the content, the textbook doesn’t seem that difficult to read. But have you tried picking up a textbook lately from a content area that you’re not very familiar with? For the last two instructional moments I’ve done for the faculty, I’ve grabbed some textbooks from the bookroom so that that I could show how the strategy could be used in various contents. It was certainly no picnic! I had a very hard time reading some of them, and by most people’s definition, I’m a pretty good reader! There was vocabulary that probably would be considered basic to the content area, but I wasn’t completely sure what some of the words meant, so I had a difficult time making sense of what I was reading. Can you imagine what are students who aren’t such great readers go through when they’re assigned pages of the textbook to read???

When Kids Can’t Read

(Page 36) “…we can’t fix the reading problem by buying a particular program; instead, as teachers, we must learn how to teach students to comprehend texts.”
It certainly would make things easy if there was a magic program that we could administer to all of our students to make them great readers, but that just isn’t going to happen! Or, how about if we could just hand students a worksheet and they could do it?!? I think the operative word in Beers’ statement is how. Students can do the work if they understand how to do it. I just met with a middle school administrator the other day who wanted to know if I knew a reading series that one of his self-contained teachers could use with her class. I told him that there really isn’t anything effective where the teacher will just be able to give it to the students and be done with it, but what will work is putting some authentic literature in the students’ hands and have the teacher use best practices with it. Good teaching is hard work! If we want our students to become successful readers and writers, we’re going to have to look at the individual students to see what we need to work on. (Hmmmm…this sounds a little like differentiated instruction!)