“I Read It, But I Don’t Get It” by Cris Tovani

According to Tovani, there are two types of bad readers: those that are “resistive readers” who know how to read but choose not to and those that are “word callers” who can read words but struggle to create meaning out of them. In elementary school, children are supposed to learn how to read and decode words. In middle school and high school, we are supposed to teach our students the techniques to get meaning out of their reading.

Yesterday, I led a reading group of students who had missed a day and needed catching up. The purpose of the reading was to find the similarities and differences between Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” and our world. I started second period by having them create a mental image of what their neighborhood looks like. What are the families like? Then we talked about what we were looking for in the reading. I read aloud as they followed along. Then we stopped to discuss during several parts of the chapter. I could tell that the students had varying levels of experience with thinking about what they were reading as they read it. Discussion of ideas really helped them comprehend the text.

In another case today, a student was behind the rest of his class because of absences. He asked me to read the text for him (of course I didn’t) because he did not want to read it. He knew it was a good book but he just didn’t feel like doing the thinking himself.

My students may not understand that they are learning skills and changing their brains as they read, but they do understand that reading is a process. We are continually paraphrasing, defining, and discussing. Tovani suggests that we discuss with our students our own processes of how we reach conclusions in our readings. And then we can teach them to do the same with their texts by marking them. We should continuously model for them what it means to connect the text to prior knowledge in order to make sense of it.