What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making

by Vicki Vinton, Dorothy Barnhouse

Overview

Drawing on their own lives as readers and writers and years of experience working in classrooms as coaches, staff developers, and consultants, Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton offer practical tips for meeting today’s rigorous standards while reminding us of the deeper, enduring purposes and process of reading.

In What Readers Really Do, you’ll peer into the minds and hearts of readers to notice the often invisible thinking work that goes into making meaning of texts—from comprehending where a scene is taking place to constructing thematic interpretations. And you’ll look into the authors’ own teaching minds and hearts as they unpack the moves and decisions they make to design and implement instruction that allows every student to make significant and personally relevant meaning of texts. Along the way, you’ll learn how to:

• notice and name what students are doing as readers to build their identity and agency
• move beyond simple strategy instruction to step students into more complex texts
• show students how readers draft and revise as they read to promote engagement, self-monitoring, and deeper comprehension.

Filled with student voices and classroom examples including read-alouds, small groups, and conferences, What Readers Really Do will challenge, inspire, and empower you to become the insightful, independent teacher your students need you to be. And it will remind both you and your students why and how we really read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780325030739
Publisher:	Heinemann
Publication date:	01/10/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	8 - 13 Years

About the Author

Vicki Vinton is a literacy consultant and writer who has worked in schools and districts across the country and around the world. She is the author of Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach (2017), and coauthor of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making and The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language. Vicki is also author of the novel The Jungle Law. Additionally, you can find Vicki online, at the popular literacy blog To Make a Prairie (www.tomakeaprairie.com).

Dorothy Barnhouse is the coauthor of the Heinemann title What Readers Really Do. She has built her professional life around her love of reading and writing. A freelance editor and writer for many years, she began teaching through a fellowship at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She is currently a literacy consultant working in elementary, middle, and high schools in New York City and across the country. Dorothy also teaches graduate and undergraduate writing workshops and has received several grants for her writing, including one from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Email [e-mail] if you would like to contact Dorothy Barnhouse directly about professional development support.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Section I Framing the Process

Introduction: Making Our Foundations and Purposes Visible 1

Effective Teaching: Stepping into and Out of Our Own Heads 2

Our Paths to Becoming Teachers of Reading 4

How to Use this Book 7

Three Philosophical Underpinnings of this Book 10

Helping Student Readers Achieve Agency and Independence 13

Chapter 1 Stalking the Invisible: What Listening to Students Tells Us About Reading Instruction 15

Looking at the Limits of Current Practice 17

Moving Beyond Engagement to Deeper Thinking About a Text 18

Envisioning Instruction That Creates Ability Through Effort 21

Reframing Strategies as Tools, Not Products 24

Drawing on What we do as Readers to Make Our Instruction More Explicit 26

Considering the Instructional Implications 29

Chapter 2 What We Mean by Meaning Making: Noticing and Naming What We Do as Readers 32

Connecting with Ourselves as Readers: An Interactive Experience 33

What Readers Expect from Texts 35

What Readers do to Make Meaning 36

The Role of Talk in Meaning Making: A Process of Drafting and Revising 37

Contemplating What Our Minds and Hearts Were Opened To 39

What Readers Know About How Texts Work 40

Naming the Strands of Thinking Involved in Reading: Comprehension, Understanding, and Evaluation 42

The Benefits of Being True to Our Own Experiences as Readers 44

Section 2 Stepping Into Classrooms

Chapter 3 How Readers Draft and Revise Their Way from Confusion to Clarity 51

What we do as Readers 53

What this Sounds Like in Classrooms 57

What we do as Teachers 63

Making Every Student's Thinking Visible 68

Chapter 4 How Readers Infer the Significance of Details 76

What We Do as Readers 78

What This Sounds Like in Classrooms 83

What We Do as Teachers 89

Making Every Student's Thinking Visible 96

Chapter 5 How Readers Look Closely at Patterns to Draft Understandings 106

What We Do as Readers 109

What This Sounds Like in Classrooms 117

What We Do as Teachers 129

Making Every Student's Thinking Visible 135