Chapter 2 of Tovani’s book also really caught my attention. The title of the chapter was the first thing that got me thinking. “The Realities of Reading” is something that we as teachers think about all the time. As Tovani said in the first paragraph of this chapter, a lot of people (mostly non educators) believe that learning to read is a very simple process and they don’t understand why students in middle and high school are struggling readers. However, as we learned in the article, The DRIVE Model of Reading: Making the Complexity of Reading Accessible (Cartwright and DUke, 2019), the process of reading is not simple and there are a lot specific things happening in our minds when reading. As stated in this article and in Tovani’s book, many of these processes need to be taught.
Tovani discusses two types of struggling readers found in secondary school. They are resistive readers and word callers. Resistive readers are those that can read but choose not to and word callers are those that can decode the words but don’t understand what they read. I don’t have much experience with teaching middle school or high school students as I am a primary/elementary teacher, however I can see how this would be an issue in these grades and how students manage to get away with doing this throughout their secondary school time.
I really connected with the section “Redefining Reading”. Tovani discusses how parents often think that if students are able to decode words then they are good readers. However, reading is more than decoding words. They need to be able to comprehend what they are reading. I had a student in my kindergarten class who was able to read words at a grade 3 level and his parents thought he was an exceptional reader however he could not tell you a thing about the book. Not even the sequence of events that had happened because he was not comprehending what he was reading.
Tovani listed seven strategies that are coined by P. David Pearson and colleagues that were used by successful readers of all ages. The first thing that caught my attention was the use of “successful readers”. I like this term much better than “good readers” that Tovani tends to use throughout her book. I feel that the term good readers implies that someone is a bad reader and that doesn’t go with my idea of teaching children to read. I have more experience of teaching young children to read and my philosophy is that any child that takes an interest in a book, whether they can read it or not, is a good reader. I feel that having enjoyment and purpose of reading is very important at a young age and will later enhance learning the strategies of reading. The other question that I thought about when I read about the seven strategies is “Can we use these strategies to define where a student is in their reading instead of leveled texts that are pushed on children in the school system?” I also have an issue with using leveled texts with young children. I see too many children identify with a letter at the kindergarten and grade one level and get frustrated with having strategies pushed on them instead of having a full comprehension of why they are leaning certain strategies. I wonder if my thinking about leveled texts will change when I teach grade 5 in the upcoming school year?
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