I’ve been learning about students’ literacy and language development now for thirty-five years. What I’ve noticed is that over the last twenty-five years or so, we’ve learned a great deal about how students learn to read. We’ve gotten better at describing what happens as readers recognize words, build fluency, and make sense of increasingly complex texts. But I wonder if, in becoming more precise about how reading works, we’ve paid less attention to what happens when a reader stays with a text—what happens when we really spend time with a book, wrestle with it, and work to reach a deeper understanding of it.
To effectively “read” a text we need to both decode the words on the page and understand what those words mean. For instance, since Spanish is a second language for me, I might be able to read a page of Don Quixote in Spanish getting most of the pronunciation right, but I would understand very little of the meaning behind the words (and I’d probably struggle with much of the vocabulary).1
When I’m working with a text in the classroom, I’m thinking about these two questions.
How will we first read the text?
How will we deepen our understanding of the text?
The first question explores how students will first encounter the text. Perhaps they will read it at home to themselves as homework. The teacher might read the book aloud to the class. Pairs might read it back and forth to each other. During this time, we know students will reach varying levels of understanding depending on their reading abilities. In the daily life of schooling, it’s at this stage that I think we mistakenly build in assessments of student learning. Middle or high school students might be assigned a chapter of a book at night and then return to class to be greeted by the dreaded “pop quiz.”
Instead we might think about how we might help all students reach a deep understanding of the text. This will obviously vary by age group, reading level, and language proficiency. When I taught English language learners, we would need to first work through the text at the word and sentence level, defining difficult vocabulary and practicing pronunciation before we were able to get to the deeper meaning behind the words. Once we achieved an understanding of the text at the surface level, we were then able to have the more complex conversations about the meanings within the text and how they related to our own “lived worlds and perceptual realities,”2 to quote philosopher Maxine Greene.
Last week in Bend, Oregon, we led a professional development day kicking off the school year for North Star Elementary School. The session was about how we approach teaching topics and texts that are different from our own cultural backgrounds. The day was titled Imagining Mexico based on a quote by writer Carlos Fuentes3:
I am Mexican by will and by imagination.
With imagination as a guiding idea, we decided to build the day (and the curriculum we’re developing for elementary school social studies) around specific artists from Mexico and the concept of portraiture. Our guiding question was, “How does art show who we are?”
We began by looking at portraits by Frida Kahlo and then read the book Frida and her Animalitos by Monica Brown and John Parra.
To read the text out loud, we performed a “Wild Reading” of the text involving choral and back-and-forth reading as well as three-part movement animal performances. It was certainly wild and engaging, but as mentioned above, a lively reading doesn’t necessarily show actual comprehension of the text.
Character Portraits
To comprehend the text, we first asked participants to write (or draw) “Frida” on a post-it note in the center of the table. Then, in small groups, participants constructed a “word portrait” of Frida with evidence from the text.
Here were the instructions:
I explained how important it is for students to return to the text to find evidence—hence the importance of using actual quotes from the text. What I loved seeing was how participants had the actual books in hand and were flipping pages, rereading passages, and discussing what the text revealed about Frida. The overall activity took about fifteen minutes. In a classroom, after completing this group activity, students might be asked to write a character portrait using evidence from the text.
Although this was aimed at younger students, it would work equally well for secondary-level students even when working with longer novels, short stories, or plays.
Reading a text once is just the beginning. After initially reading the text, students need to return to it, spend time with it, and discover meanings they may not have noticed on an initial reading. This is what I’ve previously described in Tip of the Iceberg. Vocabulary, decoding, and even basic narrative understanding are the beginning of the journey.
Character Portrait Process
Choose a character. Write the character’s name, create a symbol, or draw a sketch on a Post-it note placed in the center of the table.
Return to the text. In small groups, have students reread and find words, phrases, or passages that reveal something important about the character.
Build a word portrait. Around the character’s name, students add qualities they notice along with quotations from the text that support their thinking.
Share and discuss. Groups present their portraits, explaining what they discovered about the character and pointing to the textual evidence that led them there.
Bonus: How Far I Hope We’ve Come
A profound discussion with Henry Winkler— a window into where we were in literacy understanding in the 50s/60s.
In Spanish, once you know the letter/sound relationship you can read almost anything fairly fluently, even if you don’t know the meaning. In English the relationship between letters and sounds is much less predictable.
Greene, Maxine. “The Lived World.” The Education Feminism Reader, 1994.
Fuentes, Carlos. “How I Started to Write.” The Grey-Wolf Annual of Multi-Cultural Literacy, 1988.