I+Read+It+Response

**by Cris Tovani**
This is my favorite text book that I’ve ever read. Maybe it was because for once I got to choose what book I read for a class, and this text was immediately relatable to my real classroom, not some far-off in the future imagined dream job. It was truly and immediately helpful to my real life. From the moment I picked up this book I kept it next to me like a bible, a manual for my teaching, something I flipped through and referred to any time I thought of a question for my reading recovery students. It followed me in the evenings as I read before bed, and it came along for tire changes and other errands to fill those waiting times. It was such an easy, informative, and motivating read, I could hardly put it down, and I found myself waiting for the next chance to pick it up again. It opened up a whole line of thinking on reading and teaching reading in the upper grades.

The book read more easily than any other text I have known, and related back to my experiences I was having with my own students through almost every anecdote. I could try out the activities in my classroom and get nearly identical results. The only problem I had with the book was that I read it so fast that I couldn’t truly process or remember all of the information.

As an undergrad, I took a defensive stance against anything “reading,” especially in my methods classes. I already knew I intended to focus on middle-school level teaching, so what use would I have for phonics and phonemes, and silly little activities with goofy animals and elementary literature? I faithfully finished every project like the good student that I am, but with no enthusiasm and no intention of learning anything, because I surely wouldn’t be needing it.

My stance hasn’t changed much, but I do wish I had been given a key piece of information and presented with a choice to follow through on it. It’s a simple matter of the difference between “learning to read” and “reading to learn.” When I thought about older students and teaching reading, I only thought about “learning to read” - decoding - because that’s what those elementary-emphasis teaching classes focused on. The teaching of comprehension wasn’t covered much, but it should have been, and I should have been given the option of concentrating on it.

Since I was an early, avid reader myself, I didn’t understand that there is so much more to reading than simple decoding. I thought that once you could say all the words, even if you had to look up the occasional unknown one, then you were all set. The meaning just comes as naturally as it does when someone is speaking to you in a conversation. This book opened my eyes to a whole new world. And there is sort of an opposite as well: just because a student can’t pronounce all the words correctly, doesn’t mean he doesn’t totally “get it.” It goes both ways.

Meta-cognition is a word I had heard, and knew the meaning of, but didn’t realize how closely it tied into reading until this text. I am aware of my own comprehension when I read, though I am not aware that I’m doing it. Is that an oxymoron? For many years I’ve known that I am a “skimmer.” If I see a long passage of description, and I don’t really care what a house or a field looks like, I will quickly move down the page until I see either action or dialogue, and continue as if I missed nothing. I also read at an alarmingly fast rate, grasping at the next bit of plot and moving forward so quickly that I usually lose almost every detail of the book once I close that back cover. But – and here’s a big difference between me and my students – I am aware of my own choice, and I still realize it when I’m lost in a novel or confused about a character I don’t remember being introduced to, and I go back and fix it.

My students won’t do that. They won’t skim well, they won’t realize when they’re lost, they won’t ask themselves what piece of information they’re missing, and they certainly will not spend any extra time reading to go back and find the missing information, thereby ensuring understanding. Meta-cognition, the realization that something isn’t quite right and something needs to be done to fix it, is what my students are sorely lacking in. My job as a READING teacher for upper-level students is to teach them how to be aware of their own comprehension, and learn to fix it when they get stuck.

The first major step is getting students to realize when they’re confused, to recognize that they aren’t getting it and that something needs to be done about it. Many students in middle school have been “fake-reading” for years, and are so used to it that it’s become a habit. They are usually just biding their time until another student will answer the teacher’s questions, or better yet, the teacher will provide the class with the answers and nobody has to do the work. Struggling readers just don’t know when they’re struggling, so they don’t even realize that there’s anything to do about it. Some students actually think it’s the teacher’s job to know when they are stuck and how to get them “unstuck.” Also, they might be afraid of the “re-read” strategy that’s been thrown around all too often. If there’s anything worse than reading, it’s got to be re-reading something you didn’t get (and therefore didn’t enjoy) the first time.

The author provides 6 strategies for teachers to help readers decide if they are stuck in text. Once the readers learn to recognize where and how they are stuck, they are on the path to comprehension. Instead of just re-reading in the same manner that got them confused the first time, students can be taught eleven “Fix-up” strategies to help them understand the text. Over the next few chapters of the book, the strategies are gone over in more detail, with examples and anecdotes from the author’s real classes and students. The book ends with a large supply of worksheets for classroom use.

Even as a lifelong reader, I found many of the strategies in the book to be helpful. It’s especially nice to hear that these strategies aren’t meant to be something readers do unconsciously, without giving comprehension another thought. For years I was reluctant to admit that I used any strategies, because as a good reader it just came naturally, right? But that’s not true, and I needed this book to help me realize that sharing my own experiences as a reader, and being able to portray my experiences and my own use of the strategies, is the best thing I can do for my students.