I Read It, but I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers

153 Pages·2000·0.52 MB·English

by  Cris Tovani

I Read It,
but
I Don’t Get It
Comprehension Strategies for
Adolescent Readers
Cris Tovani
SMOKYHILLHIGH SCHOOL, AURORA, COLORADO
Foreword by Ellin Oliver Keene
Stenhouse Publishers Portland, Maine
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
Stenhouse Publishers
www.stenhouse.com
Copyright © 2000 by Cris Tovani
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any informa-
tion storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and students for permission to
reproduce borrowed material. We regret any oversights that may have occurred and will
be pleased to rectify them in subsequent reprints of the work.
Credits
Page 18: Adapted from the Public Education and Business Coalition’s (PEBC) Literacy
Platform. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission of the PEBC, Denver,
Colorado.
Page 25: Home buyer/robber story from J. W. Pichert and R. C. Anderson, “Taking
Different Perspectives on a Story.” Copyright © 1977. Journal of Educational
Psychology69 (4): 309–315. Reprinted by permission.
Page 68: “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Red Suitcase.
Copyright © 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Page 71: From If I Die in a Combat Zone,by Tim O’Brien, copyright © 1973 by Tim
O’Brien. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tovani, Cris.
I read it, but I don’t get it : comprehension strategies for adolescent readers / Cris
Tovani ; foreword by Ellin Keene.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 1-57110-089-X
1. Reading comprehension. 2. Reading (Secondary) 3. Reading—Remedial teaching I.
Title: Comprehension strategies for adolescent readers. II. Title.
LB1050.45.T68 2000
428.4’3—dc21 00-058798
Interior design by Ron Kosciak, Dragonfly Design
Cover design by Martha Drury
Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free paper
05 04 03 02 01 9 8 7 6
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
To my first and finest teachers, Mom and Dad
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
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I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
Contents
Foreword by Ellin Oliver Keene vii
Acknowledgments xi
Part 1 Setting the Stage 1
1 Fake Reading 1
2 The Realities of Reading 13
Part 2 In Support of Strategic Reading 23
3 Purposes for Reading: Access Tools 23
4 Conversations with Cantos: Tracking Confusion to Its Source 35
5 Fix It! 49
6 Connecting the New to the Known 63
7 What Do You Wonder? 79
8 Outlandish Responses: Taking Inferences Too Far 97
9 “What’s the Plan?” 107
Part 3 Access Tools 113
A Double-Entry Diaries 115
B Comprehension Constructors 121
C Coding Sheets 135
Works Cited 139
v
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
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I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
Foreword
Have you ever found yourself in a spot—perhaps a deserted stretch of
beach, hiking through untouched snow, in the midst of a great city
swirling with energy, or in a museum new to you where you first lay eyes
on a painting that brings a lump to your throat—and you get the sense
that you are home, that you belong? It is rare that we experience that
sense of being home in a professional setting, but that is exactly what I
experience when I am in Cris Tovani’s classroom.
Welcome home. I Read It, but I Don’t Get Itis going to sound very close
to home if you work with middle and high school kids. It is going to make
you remember all over again why you love these kids and this work so
much. And it’s going to equip you with a huge cache of new ways to
approach and extend the kids’ comprehension, whether they are reading
the lunch menu or Tolstoy.
Throughout my first reading of this book, I asked myself, How can Cris
nail it like this? How can she record so perfectly the experiences, the frus-
trations, and the hilarity of working with middle and high school kids?
Even more astonishing, how can she make me flash back across the years
(many, believe me) to find my teenaged self slumped in a chair, smirking
and getting ready to “fake out Mrs. Fill-in-the-Blank” with how I had read
the assigned book or the dreaded selection from the English anthology
and understood it so well that I could nod knowingly and look thoughtful
enough not to be called on?
Cris can nail it because she deeply understands and cares about adoles-
cents and because she understands reading, inside out, upside down, and
backwards. That’s a powerful combination in this era when so many stu-
dents have applied their considerable intellectual capacity and energy to
fake-read for the whole of their school lives. We can all recall dozens,
maybe even hundreds, of upper elementary, middle, and high school stu-
dents who read fluently, pronounce words magnificently and have very
little notion of the meaning, to say nothing of insight, about what they’ve
just read. What can be done to help these kids? Is it too late?
How do we find ourselves in this quagmire? How is it that thousands of
middle and high school students can read words but struggle to construct
meaning? I am reminded of a book I read on parenting when my daughter
was a toddler. In a particularly memorable passage, the distinguished
vii
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
viii I Read It, but I Don’t Get It
pediatrician/author was asked by desperate parents why their child still
didn’t sleep through the night at age three. The doctor said simply that
children get good at what they are taught. These parents had inadver-
tently taught their child that waking up in the middle of the night would
be rewarded with milk, rocking, singing, cuddling, and eventually sleep-
ing with Mom and Dad.
In this country, our children have gotten really good at what they have
been taught. They come into elementary school desperate to please their
teachers, who teach them to read words well. The children, for the most
part, learn to do well what they are taught. Juxtapose that scenario on the
increasing call for kids to solve complex problems, work in cooperative
groups to create original products following lengthy research, synthesize
information from a wide variety of sources, and communicate their find-
ings concisely and persuasively. How are we teaching the kids to under-
take these challenges? In this book we see that if kids are taught how to
think they learn and demonstrate that learning in increasingly complex
situations.
InI Read It, but I Don’t Get It,Cris shows that the Jims and Kadees and
Leighas (you’ll meet them all!) of this world can be taught to read and
comprehend with depth and, you’re not going to believe this until you
read the book, zeal. I said zeal. This book reveals how Cris’s honesty and
humor translate into a challenge to kids to find their own capacity to
think while they read. Cris shows how thinking comes to life in classes as
disparate as World Literature and reader’s workshop. She shows how,
through thinking aloud and other powerful teaching strategies, we can
teach kids to manipulate their own thinking in order to understand more
completely.
Cris doesn’t coddle you any more than she coddles the kids in her second-
hour class. She makes it clear that if you are looking for one-shot solu-
tions, easy remedies, and step-by-step processes to implement mindlessly,
this is not the book for you. Cris clearly acknowledges the challenges
teachers face in working with reluctant readers and, interestingly, readers
who have had tremendous success in school without ever thinking deeply
about what they read. Yet she minces no words in saying, dear reader, this
is our responsibility. This is a kindergarten through grade 12 issue and all
of us, no matter the grade or content area we teach, can and must tackle
it.
In each chapter, Cris introduces you to her students and recounts con-
versations, body language, and noises from the kids that will make you
laugh out loud. And with a one-two punch Cris hits you with dozens of
workable ideas that have succeeded in her own classroom. What more
can we ask for than chapters that end with a What Works section? Don’t
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.
Foreword ix
miss the teaching points in these sections. They are, taken collectively,
some of the finest strategies for comprehension that I have ever read.
Building on research that clearly defines thinking strategies proficient
readers use to comprehend, Cris shows how she has taught kids to probe
more deeply, think more profoundly, reflect, and struggle for insight. She
takes us beyond the superficial to show how hard kids work when the
reward is internal: the gratification that comes from discovering their own
intellectual capacity.
Cris is a teacher of teachers as well as of kids. During her time at the
Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC) in Denver, working as a
staff developer with teachers in kindergarten through grade 12 in highly
impacted urban areas and affluent suburbs, Cris gathered and refined
hundreds of teaching strategies that she brings to her work with kids.
That range of experience, in addition to exposing her to hundreds of
teachers and their marvelous work, teaches us that we have far, far more
in common than our grade and departmental, urban and suburban desig-
nations may suggest. Cris teaches us that kids of any age and background
who are treated with respect, trusted to be brilliant, and shown how to be
more proficient readers and writers, will dramatically surpass our highest
expectations.
Does Cris succeed in the classroom? As a staff developer? Superbly.
That is why she gets it so right in this book. She knows these kids, she
knows reading, and she knows that we can help all kids comprehend
deeply and remember that which matters most, to them and to their even-
tual participation in this democracy.
Have you ever found yourself in a spot—perhaps a deserted stretch of
beach, hiking through untouched snow, in the midst of a great city
swirling with energy, or in a museum new to you where you first lay eyes
on a painting that brings a lump to your throat—and you get the sense
that you are home, that you belong? Is it possible to think of your class-
room that way? Is it possible to turn on the lights in your room every
morning knowing that the students with whom you work will understand
more than any you’ve worked with? Wouldn’t it be extraordinary to be in
a profession where you felt like that, where those with whom you work
are thriving? Welcome home. You’ve chosen the right career. You’ve cho-
sen the right book.
Ellin Oliver Keene
August 2000
I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers. Cris Tovani. Copyright © 2000. All rights
reserved. No reproduction without written permission from Stenhouse Publishers.