As a matter of fact, I do have to teach reading!

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?  by Cris Tovani
  Introduction and Chapter 1 

I'm barely into this book and already, I am a fan of this author.  In her introduction, she describes herself as "The Stupid Lady from Denver," because she overheard one student calling her that to another student as she readied herself to teach reading strategies at an alternative high school.  With a classroom of students and 20 teachers observing, she had to figure out how to engage these high school kids in a text about viruses, which she herself did not find terribly interesting.  But with a handful of strategies, she gets students on her side, time and again, whether she's visiting schools around the country or working at her home school in Aurora, CO.  She works with at-risk students that are still struggling to read in high school, with high-performing students who are preparing for college-level reading, and with many of her own colleagues in finding ways to help their students read well no matter the content area and get themselves "unstuck" when they do have problems with comprehension. 

She offers no quick fixes, and she feels one of the biggest stumbling blocks for secondary level teachers is the idea that students master reading in elementary school and should therefore be proficient in middle and high school.  I never considered this, but her point is quite valid--the type of reading students do at the secondary level require new reading skills and strategies that they cannot possibly be expected to have ahead of time.  Sure, there are always some proficient readers that have no trouble transitioning from the easier readings of childhood to the complex readings of high school and even college, but for many students, they need a different and more effective bag of tricks.  This really speaks to one of our course questions about what things we need to be teaching/students need to be learning to become more literate in various content fields; it also addresses our need as teachers to be able to discern when a student is struggling or actually comprehending what we're trying to teach.

She points out that by recognizing the skills of good readers, she has been able to come up with the bag of tricks she recommends to struggling readers.  Her big point is that good readers MONITOR COMPREHENSION.  They don't just stop or plow on when they get confused, either.  They utilize a handful of strategies:

Strategies in this context are "an intentional plan that is flexible and can be adapted to meet the demands of a given situation."  (Tovani, pg. 5)  Some of the strategies she outlines:

• Activating background knowledge to make connections between new knowledge (in the text) and old knowledge
• Self-questioning while reading to clarify
• Drawing inferences based on textual clues
• Determining main idea versus details
• "Fix-up"strategies to repair areas of confusion
• Sensory images to visualize the reading
• Extending thinking to beyond the text

She goes on to elaborate about the "fix-up" strategies as ways a reader can get her/himself unstuck when encountering a confusing part of the text.  She lists several:

• Finding a way to connect the text with your life, your knowledge of the world and/or another text
• Make a prediction about what's coming next
• Stop and think about you've read so far and how it fits with this problem-area
• Ask yourself questions about what you've read so far and try to answer
• Reflect in writing about what you've read (I do this a lot--try to take notes in my own words so that I'm sure I'm able to articulate what I've absorbed)
• Retell
• Reread
• Notice patterns in the text structure
• Slow down your reading or speed it up 

Tovani makes sure to point out that these "fix-up" strategies are all means to an end--getting purposefully engaged in the reading--and some may work for some students and some may not.

I'm looking forward to reading more in this very accessible text.  I anticipate finding a lot of "tricks" that I may be able to employ down the line to help my students.