Chapter 2

Hello!
Sorry, for a late second post. My time has been taken up by work and hopefully I can get my other posts up by the deadline.

Chapter 2 is titled The "So What?" of Reading Comprehension. Again, this chapter starts with a quote from a senior in high school, "It really isn't hard to avoid reading-you just ask someone what it means, or wait for the teacher to explain it". After I read this quote, I thought to myself, " this is so true!" I see it when I substitute, especially English classes. When the teacher leaves notes about the reading and I am suppose to go over the text with the class, all I hear is silence. No one knew what the text was about. I then tell them what the text meant or what was the underlying message of the text and I then see them write down every word I say. This is how they avoid reading.


In this chapter the author had a student ask, "So what" to every question or response that came from a student. At first she thought this was just the student being difficult, but after going through an assignment she gave her students, she found herself asking, "So what?" The assignment asked the students to make 2 or 3 different connections to a text, she said was hard for any reader to read at first. They were given sticky notes to write these connections down. When she sat down to go through what the students had written down, she felt like she was wasting her time, because the students connections were so "blah". The connections they were making were not the connections she had hoped they would make. It showed that they could not make any meaning of the text.

The author was also going to have teachers come into to her classroom to observe her once again, she could only think of the one student who would say "so what?" to everything. She didn't know if she should send this student on errands so that she was out of the classroom or explain to the observers beforehand about this student's behavior hoping that they would understand. She went back to reading the students' sticky notes and said to herself, maybe I should be asking myself "So what?" She said that it was her fault that their connections were so "blah", because she never showed them how to make meaningful connections to texts to deepen their understanding of the text.

So, the next day she told the class that they did do what she asked of them the day before, but she wanted it to go further. She gave her students a double-entry log with a line down the middle of the paper and told them to quote a connection from the text on the left column and on the right column answer the question, "So what?" It was funny because when she said "So what" she said it in the tone of the student who says that. Here, I started to think of what I do when I have a disruptive student in class. When a student acts like the student in the author's class I sometimes do what the author did. I mean it might sound childish, but it works; the student is no longer disruptive. The student the author imitated was no longer disruptive. Now, as the author walks around her room and overlooks what the students are writing, she sees that they are making a little more deeper connection, but she wanted them to go deeper. She guides them with questions that asks them to re-think about their initial connection to see if they can make more meaningful. One student used a personal connection to make their initial one stronger, and another student used a personal memory to connect to the text and drew up a second connection, but this student used proof from the text to strengthen her connection.

The author goes home after her work day and thinks about the two students connections, how they got to it, and how to help every student make meaningful connections. A realization came to her, that she was stopping her students' thinking too soon! So she came up with 4 principles that guide this type of instruction.
This comes from the book exactly:

Essential Elements of Comprehension Instruction

1: Assess the text students are expected to read. Is it interesting and pertinent to the instructional goal? Is it at the reading level of the students, or is it too difficult? If the text is too difficult, consider how you will make the text more accessible.
2: Provide explicit modeling of your thinking processes. As an expert reader of your content, identify what you do to make sense of text. Share that information with your students.
3: Define a purpose and help students have a clear reason for their reading and writing. Make sure they know how the information they read and write will be used.
4: Teach students how to hold their thinking and give them opportunities to use the information they've held.

For high school teachers, time is a big factor or problem for them. They are asked to teach so much information in such a limited amount of time. I agree with this because when I was looking at the state standards for math, I was thinking of how many weeks are in the school year and how much information we have to teach students. I also considered snow days or cancellations due to water breaks, no electricity, etc and there is not enough time for these students to learn everything. When the lessons get more complicated, the students then start to shut down and give up on trying to understand the content. So, this also takes time away, because we have to go over the material again which is time that could be spent on new material. So, as teachers the advice the author gives is to create a trade-off. She says, "Only you can decide whether it is worth giving up some content for the time it takes to design comprehension instruction that means something to your student" (pg. 19). She says that what she does is not anything great, but she uses "simple practices of good teaching  to design comprehension, lessons, activities, and materials. I give students models, time to practice, and time to think. It's common sense, and a lot of it comes from my own process as a reader."

To end the chapter, she lists 4 solutions, but I don't want to call them "solutions", so I guess ideas that work.
1: Ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?" and "How will it help students think, read, or write more thoughtfully about my content."
2: Remember that one comprehension tool is not more important than another. There is no specific order, sequence, or template for introducing strategies to students.
3: As an expert in your field, as your self, "Is this activity authentic?"
4: Don't isolate strategy instruction into discrete, individual activities from day to day. Plan lessons based on student work from the previous day, using student responses as a way to analyze how thoughtfully kids are approaching text.
After reading idea 4, I thought to myself how is this going to work? I mean, teachers have to provide lesson plans and have to turn them in. I'm not sure if they have to turn them in early, weekly, monthly, or at the end of the school year, but if you have to go based on the previous day then would that make you look sort of unprepared for the next day, right?

I agree with her ideas. I felt that these were simple enough to follow and easy to understand. The idea I have an issue with is the one regarding planning activities from day to day. Other than that I enjoyed reading this chapter and felt that it was very helpful in learning why I have to teach reading in my future math classes.

Renee