How do I create Responsive Readers

If you are friends with  me on Facebook, you have seen several posts over the last few weeks about reading and are aware that I'm pretty passionate about helping kids to love reading.  I'm an avid reader, but I haven't always been, so  I  know for some students, they  just aren't there YET.  As I've been reading Disruptive Thinking by Beers and Probst,  I've been stepping up on that soapbox frequently.  It's a place that I've shied away professionally in my past because I didn't want to burn any bridges, but now, 18 years in, there are some bridges that need to be burned, and one of them is killing the love of reading for our students.

I've been fortunate to teach students from 2nd grade to middle school and one thing I have personally witnessed is the disconnect that occurs between students and reading the older they get.  It has often caused me to question what do we as educators do to perpetuate this disparity.  

Sometimes the love of reading gets lost in the skills of reading.  I started thinking about my own practice and asked myself the following questions in reflection:

1. How many opportunities do/did I offer students to read without completing a task?
2. How many opportunities do/did I offer students to choose their own books?
3. How do/did I foster a love of reading in my students?
4. How do/did I help students choose books that were for them, instead of ones I wanted them to read?

If all I was asking students to do was paraphrase, summarize, write about what they had read, or more, than I wasn't really helping to create a love for reading.  

The moments I let go and let my kids read for enjoyment and talk about what moved them, challenged them, made them angry, made them sad, etc. those were the moments that reading became authentic and my students saw it as more than a task, but something that was important.  

In the words of Beers and Probst, "The text won't matter to them unless it touches them emotionally or intellectually."  And that is my goal....connecting every student to a text that makes them angry or makes them cry.  A text that challenges  what they know and makes them question the world around them.

Am I Extracting or Transacting?

I began reading Kylene Beers and Bob Probst's text Disrupting Thinking this afternoon as a part of our district's department chair book study.  As an avid reader, I was excited to get my hands on this text to see what it may confirm or challenge in my own reading instruction.  I hope that I am a teacher that teaches students to fall in love with reading, but I know  there were many times where the love of the book was secondary to that state assessment that was looming over my head.  I struggled with maintaining the balance of skill instruction in preparation for assessments and closing the door and allowing my students to become immersed in a text that would truly change them as readers.


In chapter 1 of the text, Beers and Probst listed out a list of typical  assignments that had been observed while visiting classrooms...there were many listed that I kept in my toolbox of instruction.

• write a summary
• retell the story
• compare and contrast two characters
• list the steps
• create a timeline
• draw the parts of a cell
• outline the chapter
• cite the evidence
• explain the main idea and supporting details
• answer the questions
• complete the plot structure template
• define the vocabulary words
• discuss the causes and effects

Beers, G. Kylene, and Robert E. Probst. Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. Scholastic Inc., 2017.

When I look at the list above, I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with giving these types of assignments, but I wonder what harm is done to developing readers if this is ALL we do. Are we only teaching students to EXTRACT something from the text each time they read? Do my students only know to EXTRACT evidence to support their answer when we read in class? Is the focus on EXTRACTION activities killing the love of reading with students?

I'm looking carefully at my own practice to see how much of my conversation with teachers is spent discussing EXTRACTING vs. TRANSACTING. Transacting with a text is more than pulling information. It is about interacting with a text in a meaningful way, finding out how books change us and move us. I'm curious to know how we can make reading more about TRANSACTING than EXTRACTING?

Needless to say, my brain is working through all of this and I'm being challenged to reflect.