Mosaic of Thought--Class Notes

Challenges of "teaching reading"

What does it mean to teach reading?

• "visible" elements
• phonics
• decoding
• skills
• main ideas
• suffixes and prefixes
• read and then answer questions
• "invisible" elements:
• comprehension
• cognition
• what the reader thinks about while reading, not after reading

• disengaged, bored students under skill-and-drill
• freewheeling, lively conversations with friends (PEC Book Club)

• no metacognition
• students didn't know when they were or weren't comprehending
• no concept of what a reader/listener is supposed to do
• no attention to details like illustrations

• good readers have strategies for comprehending text
• good readers know when they are having trouble with text, and can solve those troubles
• student readers could become better readers through carefully constructed and elaborately modeled reading strategy instruction

Types of schema:

• text to self: making a connection between what the text says and your own experiences
• text to text: making a connection between what the text says and other texts you've encountered (texts can be films, tv shows, newspaper articles, etc.)
• text to world: making a connection between what the text says and what you know about the ways the world works
• author schema: what you know about the author
• text feature schema: what you know about the type of text you're reading
• building necessary schema: activities completed prior to reading a new, perhaps daunting text

Methods of teaching these schema to students

• modeling
• "gradual release of responsibility" model

New Elements of Schema in this Chapter:

• Author Schema--what we know about author & style, and predictions we can make about future work by that writer
• If I told you we were going to read an excerpt from another poem by ee cummings, what things might you predict we'd find?
• If we were going to read something else by Esme Codell, what would your expectations be?
• Text Feature Schema--what we know about the ways different kinds of text operate, and how that can help us to make predictions about a text before we even begin reading

Common Problems in determing what matters and what doesn't:

• Inability to determine importance when faced with "inconsiderate" text
• "inconsiderate" text is writing that doesn't do anything to "help" the reader comprehend it
• often, the simple task of understanding what's said takes so much attention that determining what's important is more difficult
• Inability to discriminate between important and unimportant information
• This problem is usually tied to purpose: importance depends on what use the information will be put to

Levels of importance:

• Word level: "contentives" carry meaning for a sentence
• Sentence level: key sentences seem more important than others in a given passage or paragraph
• Text level: key ideas, concepts, or themes within the text--these are usually only discovered after the entire text has been read

• Reader's purpose for reading
• Why am I reading this? What do I want to get out of it?
• Reader's prior knowledge about the text's content
• What do I already know about this topic? How does that knowledge help me read for importance?
• Reader's personal beliefs and experiences related to the text
• What do I already believe and think about this topic? Will my prior attitudes affect how I interpret the author's words?
• Reader's level of familiarity with the reading's text features
• What other texts have I read that use similar styles? How did I read those texts? How can that help me read this better?
• Reader's sense of what other readers consider important about the text
• What does my teacher (boss, classmate, spouse, colleague, friend, etc.) probably think is important for me to know?

Kinds of questions we can ask:
Questions ...

• with answers in the reading
• Who taught for Esme on January 13th?
• which require inference to answer
• How do you think Esme feels about Ms. Coil?
• with no certain answers
• What do you think is the best thing Esme does for her kids?
• that clarify meaning
• Why does Esme wait so long before letting the first kid get in the time machine?
• about what's coming next in the book
• Do you think Esme will keep teaching for Mr. Turner?
• about the author's intent
• Why do you think Esme tells us the story of the Time Machine she's built?
• about the author's style
• Why does she include poems in her diary?
• about the format of the text
• Could she have written this book in a format other than the diary? Would another format change anything about what she's saying?

Focus of the chapter is on creation of images during reading as a means of facilitating comprehension

• Sensory images
• five senses--sight, sound, taste, smell, touch
• Emotional images
• feelings evoked in the reader by a text

Inference

• process of creating a personal meaning from text
• combines textual meaning with reader's schema to form new meaning
• inferred meaning is never explicitly stated in the text

What inference does for readers:

• helps draw conclusions
• helps make better predictions
• helps answer questions generated by text
• helps make connections of text to schema for better retention
• helps readers make critical or evaluative judgments about text

Summary: a brief retelling of a text, including the big ideas but not the little details

Synthesis: the creation of a text's meaning by a reader, combining what the text says and what the reader knows. It uses some or all of the reading strategies: activating schema, asking questions, making judgments about importance, visualizing, metacognition

Synthesis: occurs during and after reading

• During:
• monitoring understanding
• fitting together meaning from the content and form of the text
• making predictions and checking them
• looking for recognizable patterns
• revising thoughts about text as reading progresses
• After:
• putting meaning into a condensed form that includes relevant themes
• sharing text's meaning with others for purpose of recommendation or review
• creating a personal meaning for what is read in order to aid memory