Active readers/Reading comprehension

I am looking for practical ideas to move students into writing more often and reading more thoroughly.  Many of the readings this week fit the bill.  The idea of the “Difficulty Paper” was particularly interesting to me because I am also interested in getting students to think about how they work, and to think about how they think.   They are very comfortable writing “reaction papers” or “responses”, but they struggle with content when I ask them to think about their own thinking.  The difficulty paper idea, in the Salvatori & Donahue article, is a great way to jump-start this kind of thinking.  When students write about their problems reading the text, they not only begin a sort of analysis of the text, but they also write about their own learning experience.  These papers then turn into asking themselves why – why are they having difficulty.  According to the article, the instructor then uses a few of these papers each week as a starting point for discussion.  This is a great idea too, because all too often, teachers end up summarizing and interpreting the text for the students through our own experiences  (like many of the readings this week address), and don’t get to the issues that are truly troubling the students.

On the other hand, sometimes those interpretive/analytical/summarizing lessons can be very helpful for students who aren’t understanding the material.  I myself have often appreciated a synthesis of challenging material by an expert teacher.  Ideally then we would all go back and re-read, but we don’t, and that too is why teaching the article (poem or story) can be helpful.  Precisely because students do arrive in our classrooms with different experiences and levels of cultural understanding, we teachers do need to provide guidance through a challenging poem or story, and teach students to teach themselves. Getting a sense of how the students are understanding the text before we teach it, can make us more responsive teachers.