Deeper Reading, Chapters 6, 7, and 9

In chapter 6 of Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher discusses the benefits of making reading a collaborative process in the classroom.  His points were further driven home by the short video of him teaching an article of the week lesson.  Dividing students up into small groups to work through challenging text is such an effective method because students often feel stuck and hopeless when meaning making stalls in individual reading.  The process of being able to simply ask questions aloud is extremely helpful to determining deeper meaning, and should be incorporated into class time reading as often as possible.  The layers of understanding that each reader brings to the text based on his or her own personal experiences should be treated as a valuable resource in the classroom.  Any time a teacher is doing the bulk of the talking, the teacher is probably also doing the bulk of the thinking.  I did appreciate, however, that Gallagher was quick to recognize that too often simply allowing for conversation can leave room for some students to check out and others to do too much of the thinking.  I particularly liked his strategies for calling group members to present at random.  I also observed in the video that he spent a lot of time talking to the students and making sure they were on task. It's hard to know how to set groups up in a meaningful way, but clearly as the school year goes on, students understand what is expected of them in group work if a strong foundation is laid by the teacher.

Chapter 7 discussed the importance of metaphor in reading.  Text is not only enriched with metaphor, but can be understood through metaphor.  This chapter provided a lot of graphic organizer examples for helping students look closely at metaphorical writing, or write their own metaphors to help them dig deeper into meaning in text.  I thought the addition of these organizers was extremely helpful because coming up with interesting graphic organizer concepts can be difficult. Graphic organizers can also easily become busy work if they aren't interesting and focused on the specific task at hand.  I like the ideas provided in this chapter, but I also like opening the floor to students to use their creativity to develop a graphic organizer that is text specific.

Chapter 9 was my favorite of the three chapters because it focused specifically on reading critically as a usable, daily, critical thinking skill.  When reading is made into a purely academic experience, not only does it feel joyless for a lot of readers, but it often also removes the relevancy and context for real world application.  English students at the collegiate level often speak about their studies in terms of the humanities.  An education in the liberal arts not only teaches us how to think, but as David Foster Wallace so beautifully illustrates in his commencement speech "This is Water," it reminds us that, "'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience." Readers need to ultimately learn how to think and learn how to filter.  We want readers to connect with the humanity and the message of text, be it positive or negative, and read the world through the myriad of messages that it bombards them with daily.  Students at the high school level love to seek truth and argue for justice, but it must be made relevant to their lives.  Chapter 9 highlighted a lot of real issues that not only provide students with an exciting topic to investigate further, but also help make students savvier consumers, and ultimately, wiser readers.  When students can make the connection that reading is about understanding the real world, they can learn to be in control of their world because they can read it critically and respond to it in controlled ways. I loved particularly how Gallagher connected his students to the texts by looking for really interesting topics for students to investigate in order to get them excited about reading informational texts.  Forming those habits as a young person can help a person stay involved and informed on critical issues throughout a lifetime.  Ultimately, making reading real world applicable is absolutely necessary if we are going to help our students on the road to becoming truly critical thinkers.