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| Kylene Beers speaking at MCTE Fall Workshop |
On Monday, October 23rd, I went to the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English Fall Workshop to see Kylene Beers and Robert Probst speak on how to help struggling readers.
Beers and Probst want me to change. And you. They want all of us--from K-12--to reconsider reading and what we ask students to do while they read. In their new book Disrupting Thinking, they advocate for three critical changes in the way we teach reading:
- Increase the volume of reading
- Allow students to talk about what they are reading
- Rethink what rigor means
Increase the volume of reading
As an English teacher, I can collectively clap back for all of us and shout: “We know!” We know that the more time children spend on “focused silent reading,” the more words they will be exposed to. We know that the more children read, the higher their reading scores will be. We know that even adding as little as 10 or 15 minutes a day can dramatically shift the academic life of a child. We know!
As I sat in my chair, arms and legs crossed, I mentally huffed, ready to zone out for the rest of point one until Beers said this. If we already know this and have known it for some time, then why aren’t we making any changes? Why do we keep doing the same thing we have always done when we know what works and what could make it better. And I thought, Well I can’t just up and change my whole curriculum. What would I cut to fit in more reading? Those kids need to read Poe and Dickinson and Whitman and Hughes and Fitzgerald and whoever else is on my list of required reading. And, dang it, I need to analyze the crap out of those pieces.
But, do I?
It’s a simple question that makes my job difficult. How much of my curriculum is necessary and how much of it hurts the progress of my students? It’s a question that demands honesty because the stakes are high. If I want students to enjoy reading, to score higher on tests, to find meaning in the world around them, then I have to help them become better readers. I just do.
Allow students to talk about what they are reading
And, unsupervised silent reading won’t cut it. We need to be helping students build skills while they are reading. Beers and Probst say in their book that “if we want to get better at something, then some help, some sort of direction, is probably needed” (129). Beers and Probst suggest mini-lessons before reading time:
...it might be a lesson on how to read with expression, or when to back up and reread or
sketch a picture if a particular passage is confusing. It might be a lesson on the importance of noting text structure or word choice or the author’s use of evidence in building an argument. You teach. You model. You let them practice with you watching. And then you send them off to read what they choose to read. And as they read, you circulate, checking to see if they are applying what you’ve just taught. (131)
Plus, students need a chance to talk to each other. This can become the sketchiest part of the reading. Before any small group reading conversations, I’m constantly thinking: Will students have something to talk about? Will they interact with the text without me feeding them the lines? Will they stare at me, burst into tears, refuse to open their pursed lips long enough to make more than a one-syllable response to the two equally shy students flanking their sides?
Beers and Probst want us to rethink the way these conversations start. Instead of asking “monologic” questions (questions that have a best or right answer), ask “dialogic” questions (questions that do not have a right or best answer and are more discussable). One way to help students think outside one-answer questions is to have students think in three categories: the book, the head, and the heart or BHH. BHH, as explained in chapter six of Disrupting Thinking, is a way for students to start a dialogue with each other on their reading:
Students can answer questions about the text:
What’s this about?
Who’s telling the story?
What does the author want me to know?
Students can answer questions about what they think about the text:
What surprised me?
What does the author think I already know?
What challenged, changed, or confirmed my thinking?
What did I notice?
Students can answer questions about how the text affects them:
What did I learn about me?
How will this help me to be better?
Rethink what rigor means
This type of thinking leads to increased rigor. Probst said at the conference that we need to rethink what rigor actually means. A lot of times, we simple make the text more difficult to increase the rigor and that thinking is dangerous. What can a student do with a text that is above his or her reading level besides getting so frustrated that they just give up? Instead Probst said that “rigor means putting more energy into a text, not making the text harder.” Students need to spend time in a text by rereading, thinking deeply and critically about the author’s perspective and the way the text was structure, and pulling meaning from the text that applies to their own world and selves.
When students stop trying to answer seek-and-find, monologic, one-answer questions about a text and start responding to the conversations in the text, it changes the focus from information seeking to meaning making. Who am I to know where students find relevance in their own reading? It is up to the student to make connections from the reading to their own world. Beers and Probst say that my job is to help them ask the right questions. And those questions need to be dialogic. That doesn't mean there isn't a place for monologic questions. Certainly there is. But what would happen if we started our post-reading conversations reading with dialogic questions instead of monologic questions? What worlds of thinking would we uncover?
The world of possible
In the end, Probst and Beers say they want children to be able to see themselves in the world around them and to be active participants in that world. They say:
Ultimately, we are teaching children to read the text of their own lives. We want them
open to the possibility; open to ideas; open to new evidence that encourages a change of opinion. We want them using reading and writing as tools that help them in the re-vision of their own lives. We want them to have a better tomorrow. (163)
And I guess, for that, I can change. Can you?
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