I Read, But I Don’t Get It

I found Tovani’s book to be very information AND applicable for the classroom.  In my practicum, I have a couple of students who are reluctant readers, and my mentor and I are working on different strategies that might help when working on reading with these students.  I think Tovani gives a lot of different tips and tools to use, and I like that because it gives teachers options; there isn’t a one size fits all approach to helping reluctant readers.  Even in my class, the reluctant readers are different from each other because student A doesn’t like to read period, student B didn’t get a lot of reading instruction in their old district, and student C doesn’t find the chosen literature to be worth reading.  Therefore, these three students are either resistive readers and word callers.  “Resistive readers can read but chose not to.  Word callers can decode the words but don’t understand or remember what they’ve read” (14).  And since these students are different types of reluctant readers, the strategies used to help them become better readers are different.  Therefore, I like Tovani’s book; she doesn’t outline just one-way strategy for helping your students.  There are many ways to help students with their reading, and we, as teachers, shouldn’t lump all students into one strategy and hope it works for all of them.  Tovani sets the book up: she poses questions, uses real-life examples to illustrate, and then goes into depth about how to help students.  For example, section 5 (49-61) is all about helping students overcome confusion while reading; this section is a good example of different tools for helping students with different needs: Making a Connection Between the Text and Your Life, Your Knowledge of the World, or Another Text (51), Ask a Question (52), Write About What You’ve Read (53), just to name a few. 

Something I found interesting about this book was “The House” exercise (25-26).  The EDUC 413 class did this same exercise last quarter because we were looking at different ways to use literacy lens.   I could see myself using this exercise with my ninth graders because the majority of them has some trouble understanding the why behind looking at books through different lens/understandings.  I was talking with my students the other day as we were starting Lord of the Flies; as they are reading the book, they have a specific understanding (or lens) they pick at the beginning of the unit from a list that they track through the rest of the book and write a paper about their understanding.  However, there are some students who still don’t understand the point of having to track an understanding and finding text evidence.  Therefore, using a short, easy to follow text, like “The House,” would be a good introduction to lenses for students before jumping into a novel.

Overall, I liked the book, plan on keeping it on my shelf in my classroom, and want to incorporate different strategies and tools Tovani talks about in her book.  I also want to look into the tools in the back of the book for future lessons and classes.