What is the difference between learning to read and reading to learn?

What is the difference between learning to read and reading to learn?

 Chapter 4- Real rigor:  Connecting students with assessable text.

 Tovani explains that most text we use in our content are inconsiderate text. They are written at a higher reading level than our students’ reading capabilities. As teachers we need to remember that not every student in are ninth-grade class reads the ninth grade level. If our text is difficult for our strongest readers, then how well will our struggling readers do? We are most likely setting them up for failure.

Often our struggling readers become behavioral problems in the classroom. They become bored and disruptive because they can't keep up. So what can we do about this? According to Tovani we can adapt  our teaching by introducing assessable texts. We can introduce reading materials to complement the content in our texts such as magazine articles, newspaper articles, and other books in the content area. According to Tovani, an assessable text should be interesting, well-written, and appropriately matched to the level of the students reading them. Knowing that all of our students are not accomplished readers, we could provide our struggling readers with an alternative text. WHAT? I know some of you may be thinking that Tovani is suggesting that we lower our rigor. What she is suggesting is that we don't just teach to our content, but we teacher content to our students.

She gives the example of a literature class where the stronger readers read the book Huckleberry Finn, while the struggling readers read the book Finn (2001) by Matthew Olson. The concepts in Finn mirrored those of Mark Twain's masterpiece. After both groups completed their reading, they were able to have group discussions on the similarities and differences. They were able to discuss the main literary themes that the literature teacher was focusing. I see this as a win-win situation both the mature readers and the struggling readers were able to gain the same knowledge and insight into literature to reading texts that were appropriate to their reading level, without sacrificing rigor.

On page 38 Tovani includes a statement by Richard Allington (2002b) that addresses the problem of harder books.

“Unfortunately, the idea of harder textbooks has captured the attention of educators and policymakers interested in raising academic achievement. But harder books won't foster the growth of content learning. Think about your own attempts to acquire new content knowledge. Imagine you want to learn about building a website. Do you reject the books you might use because they are too easy? Do you say to yourself,”Gosh, only 11 words on this page that I cannot pronounce---not hard enough for me!”

We are all going to have students in our classrooms that are struggling readers. If we don't teach our students how to read our content, or provide them with accessible texts how can we expect them to read to learn.  I believe there is no difference in teaching children to read, and reading to learn, they both go hand-in-hand and cannot have one without the other. 

At the end of each chapter Tovani includes a list titled “what works”. I believe that this summary of each chapter is important to my classmates so I will include them at the end of each blog.

What works: ChrisTovani  “Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?” page 49

What works:

1. Provide a choice of reading material. Don't limit students’ ability to think about your content because the textbook is too large. Collect assessable text related to your field.

Teaching points: good readers know that background knowledge improves comprehension. If they have limited knowledge about a topic, they find reasons to build their background knowledge. This enables them to read more difficult text.

2. Demonstrate how your content connects to the real world. Current events-whether local or international-can almost always be applied to concepts being taught in the classroom.

Teaching points: good readers use information from a variety of sources to connect to daily events that affect their lives. They blur boundaries between information sources and look for patterns.

3. Give students opportunities to read provocative text. If it is boring you, it will be boring to them.

Teaching point: good readers know when to abandon a text. They will not read text that has no information or use in their daily lives.

4. Don't expect the textbooks to do your job. You are the expert on the content. Use the reading material, including the textbook, to go beyond the learning in the classroom.

Teaching point: good readers apprentice themselves to content experts. They rely on those who have mastered the content to demonstrate through reading, writing and talking how learning happens in the discipline.