"I Read It, But Don't Get It" response

In I Read It, But I Don’t Get It,” Chris Tovani reminds teachers that it isn’t too late for students to become good readers. Throughout the book, Tovani informs readers about the tips and tricks all future (or current) teachers can use in their classroom to create better readers. First of all, Tovani pointed out the reading is just pronouncing the words. Reading is a very complex system of thinking, asking questions, drawing inferences, comprehending, and constructing meaning. I personally relate to this book and many of the scenarios. I have always been a good reader. I was one of the select few students that could read something and comprehend it. My problem was that if I wasn’t interested in the text, I wouldn’t remember what I read. I didn’t know what to do when I read something and didn’t understand it. Tovani gives us strategies that will help us as readers and as teachers to help make our students better at reading.

To help our students understand what they are reading they need to have a purpose. The purpose can’t be given to the students, they need to create their own. If students have their own purpose they will be more able to remember the information. When you know what to look for you can remember those pieces of the text. I find this very helpful. When I assign short stories or novels in my future classroom the students need to know what their purpose is. Telling them, we’re not just reading this so you can take a test on it will probably help them get more into the story. Connecting what we’re reading or doing to real life situations can help the students determine their own purpose for reading what I assigned. It also helps me determine why I would assign something. I can ask myself what is the purpose of having my students read this, what will they get out of it.

Students also need to know how to identify when they are stuck and what to do about it. Now I remember this being my biggest problem. I knew I wasn’t getting it, but I didn’t know what to do. When we’re stuck on text we no longer create pictures in our head, we begin to day dream, we can’t remember what we read, and there’s no more responding to the text to comprehend it to name a few. Staying engaged in the text is the best way to summarize how to understand what is being read. Making a prediction or asking yourself questions is one of the easiest ways to understand the text. If that doesn’t work thinking about what you read, visualizing it, or physically writing about it may help. If we teach our students how to fix problems they encounter they can apply it to not only our class but other classes and real life as well.

The most important thing that I took from Tovani’s book was to always model what we want our students to do and to allow our students to make connections. Multiple times it comes up that we should model through different processes and think out loud. If students know what to do and why their doing it they will be better prepared when it comes time to do it. With modeling also comes practice. Modeling and letting students practice on something before doing it on an assigned reading will help them understand strategies. Thinking out loud will help both the students and the teacher understand the rationale behind what strategy is being used. Making connections between one assignment, to another, to another class, to something in real life is beneficial to our students. Blurring the lines between classes will help students comprehend both students. Overall, this book is a really good tool to help our students become better readers. It’s never too late to become a good reader.