dialogue

i have been reading a book called "strategies that work". it is about how to teach reading comprehension to children. its key point is that reading has less to do with the mechanics of the process, or answering simple comprehension questions, and more to do with the thinking process, the dialogue with the text, if you will, enacted by the reader. in other words, the text is not some dead thing out there with a static message that is transmitted with fidelity into the mind of the accurate reader. rather, the text is like a statement made by a person in a conversation, and to truly "understand" or "comprehend" it, the recipient of that statement (the reader) must respond to it with his/her own thoughts, feelings, inferences, whatever...

i started an experiment with some of my students. i read parts of "wonder" to them. on the first day, i did a lot of talking about what i was thinking about as i read; it's what they call modeling the internal dialogue, or something or other. on the second day, which was yesterday, i read a paragraph to them, and then had them "respond" to the text by writing something on a single post-it. it could be anything, but it was supposed to be a legitimate response to what they had just heard. i told them, emphasized to them, that it was vital that they "turned their brains on" while they were reading. too often, it seems, my students turn reading into some mechanical task, where their mouths move, but their brains flatline. i was encouraging, forcing them to instead be active participants in the dialogue of reading.

it seemed to work. some students wrote their feelings down. some students wrote i wonders, or their personal inferences or predictions...