As part of a required text for class, we are reading Subjects Matter: Every Teacher's Guide to Content-Area Reading, by Daniels and Zemelman. The first chapter discusses reading as part of student learning. There is more to reading than meets the eye. Readers need to be able to comprehend and understand the information or text they are reading. Without certain reading strategies, students will get lost in the pages and won't be productive readers.
One story that Daniels and Zemelman shares with us is that of students at Best Practices High School. At BPHS, teachers believe in "real reading." Textbooks are filled with lots of information, but it's not real. Textbooks don't contain life or stories that students can relate to. Part of what grabs students' attention in a book, or other literary device, is being able to relate the story to something they have experienced or can relate to. In one specific classroom, students read Fast Food Nation, a book about the fast-food and meat-packing industries. Sure the content was a bit graphic, but the message was something that every students could relate to. This book was just one part of a complex unit in which students compiled multiple sources about worker conditions, slaughterhouses, and fast-food companies in order to find meaning and create personal opinions, with evidence to support their ideas.
Students are always told to read, but they were never taught to read with meaning. There is a difference between reading and understanding. In order for students to understand what they are reading, they need to be able to relate to the text and have a conversation with it. Students should be able to ask questions and formulate opinions when reading specific texts, allowing them to connect with it and create a relationship with the text. Once that occurs, and students actually care about what they are reading, then they will remember the text better, get more out of it, and be able to think about the information they have gathered.
Reading is harder than you think, at least when it is done effectively
Your sentence, "Students are always told to read, but they were never taught to read with meaning" really stuck out to me, because as a student (even now) I will always read and complete the homework, but when the teacher asks what the chapter was about I can't give an answer. Its like somehow the entire content of the reading assignment disappeared into my mind, but now I realized that I need to just read with meaning. Like you said, students need to relate to stories in textbooks. If students are able to make connections, they will have better recollection of the topics discussed.
ReplyDeleteSarah, I completely agree with you. Reading is not an easy task and to read with meaning is what will help students succeed. Sure, reading textbooks will provide the students with detailed information on the topic at hand but if the student is not engaged in the reading it will be useless for them to read it. They may not get the details the author is trying to display for the students and therefore they won't see the big picture. Best Practice High School is doing a good thing by providing the students with books that the students can relate to. The students described in our reading enjoyed what they read and showed that by completing their assignments with passion (I think of the boys in the McDonalds example). Getting a student engaged in the assignment can be extremely difficult but trying different strategies can help make this a little easier.
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