In Response to: I Read It, But I Don't Get It

Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It provides helpful insight to teachers, both ELA focused and not, through a relatable explanation of how readers’ minds work and how we can make them work best. As a whole, I found the text to be a helpful reminder of things that I have already hear somewhere in my education. Often, those lessons came from my own middle and high school teachers, so it was beneficial to see another point of view. The important takeaway from this text is to teach the practice and not just the content. Often times, secondary teachers make the assumption that by middle or high school, students have learned to master reading, but that’s just not the case. In order to master a skill, we must critically practice that skill in a way that challenges us, and reading is no exception.

A few of the strategies I appreciated most included the “I Wonder” poems. In order to teach “real world” questioning, Tovani asks her students the very broad question, “what do you wonder?” After some modeling, her students have a list of questions ranging from, “how does aspirin know where to go?” to “why do some people in my family do drugs?” Tovani instructs her students to rewrite their lists of question as poem, and the students created sometimes silly, sometimes serious works of art. This lesson teaches students to think about the world around them critically and curiously. After, they can do that, they can apply their skill to their reading. However, I also appreciated that these poems can provide an opportunity to strengthen the classroom community. Students are invited to be open and honest about their thoughts on the world. Another strategy I liked was that she scaffolded her lessons on close reading. She suggests using a code system to represent background knowledge/connections, questions and inferences/conclusions. However, she points out that the best way to teach this kind of active reading is to have students practice by reading for one of those things at a time before they are set free to mark anything. I liked this because when I was learning how to close read, I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. I just wrote my thoughts on the text, and when I didn’t get the grade that I was hoping for, I just assumed that I needed more writing on the paper. I didn’t exactly know what else to do. Eventually, I understood the level of thinking my teacher was looking for, but it would have been helpful to have clearer expectations as Tovani suggests.