A large group of coaches and teachers in our state had the joy this week of attending a professional development seminar with Ellin Oliver Keene, author of To Understand and co-author of Mosaics of Thought. She challenged us to ask ourselves the provocative question to which she has devoted much of her recent work:
Is our definition of comprehension worthy of our students' intellectual capacity?
If frequent actions describe intent, then our present and most common definition of comprehension seems to be: the ability to answer questions and retell. In that case, Ellin had another question for us: If all students are expected to be able to do is retell and answer questions, then why do they even need strategy instruction?
Then she asked: How do we pursue a new definition of comprehension?
And she gave us three avenues for that pursuit of that question:
- observing ourselves in the process of comprehending
-observing students in the process of comprehending
-applying a new, and ambitious, discourse to define and describe comprehension
I am inquiring into the first avenue, attending to my own processes of comprehending as I read. I want to see what matters to me, what works for me, what is it that I do in order to comprehend in the act of reading, and what I do to deepen my understanding of the piece or the content afterward? Or, conversely, what gets in the way, or prevents my understanding.
Here is a piece that is interesting , yet challenging enough, for me to have to do a bit of intellectual work to "get it". (It is from one of my very favorite blogs, 37 days by Patti Digh, and relates to this topic as well as another previous entry on understanding.) I am going to read it and note the "voices in my head," as Ellin calls metacognitive awareness. Will you give it a go as well?....to try to name what kinds of thinking you do as you read it? As you share those insights in your comments, we can begin to think/write our way into a new, more ambitions discourse as we work to define and describe our growing understanding of comprehension.
Hi, Christy! I have been noticing that the more I confer with kids and help them name the kinds of thinking they are doing... the more I find myself doing this, too, as I am reading. I was reading a book called If A Tree Falls at Lunch Period, and I was just reading along, enjoying the book. One of the narrators has a poor self-image and makes constant comments about how she is fat, and I found myself thinking, "I wonder if she is really fat or if she just has a poor view of herself. There are so many girls who feel this way." And then suddenly, I heard my own voice in my head say, "hey-- I am questioning the text and making a text-to-world connection!" And then, because I had just listened to Ellin Keene, I found myself saying, "Now, how does that connection help me understand this book?"
ReplyDeleteSo, I was sitting there thinking, ok... how did this happen? That I am hearing this voice in my head as I read? And I think it is because I do this so much at work-- make the thinking visible-- that it has started haoppening all the time for me. I always questioned the text and made inferences, but now I am conscious of it.
So that said to me... we need to continue to do this with students-- make their thinking visible-- so that they will begin to do this on their own.
As I read this piece that you have recommended, I was hearing the voice in my head asking questions and often making connections. At the beginning, I did more asking, because I wasn't familiar with the author and her background. I wondered if Mr. Brilliant was her husband. Then I found out I was right. Later in the piece, when she got to her more profound statements and rhetorical questions, I could feel myself nodding along and making more connections to the world.
Liz