Teaching Reading: Beyond the Plot

Ms. Metzger describes her technique for teaching high school students to read well. She may not be able to make all of them love reading, but she can give them the skills to comprehend any difficult piece of text. AS CITIZENS, parents, and reading adults, we worry about our children's inadequate reading skills. Although many students can decode, most are superficial readers, comprehending only surface information. Many students do not know how to comprehend difficult text. They think that if they have passed their eyes over the material, they are finished. Students see reading as a passive activity, in which one either "gets it" automatically or doesn't. Meanwhile, schools talk about increasing literacy, but they are so overwhelmed with children who can't decode that they ignore the majority of mediocre readers. When asked about the subtleties of a particular passage, students stare blankly at the page. They are particularly confused about the point of view and the reliability of the narrator, and they are lost in metaphors. Because students do not realize when an author is playing with them, they assume that all writing is equally important, serious, and true. Sometimes students cannot even follow the plot. Students (and some adults) believe that they are poor readers because they read fiction slowly, even if they read nonfiction very well. They do not understand that good reading has little to do with speed or material. Students (and some adults) start with an assumption of inferiority: "I never get the hidden meaning" or "I have always hated reading. " When students search for hidden meanings, they assume that there is one single answer that teachers or authors are withholding from them. They do not understand that anyone can learn how to read on multiple levels, just as anyone can learn, with effort, increasingly complex skills in sports or computers or music. As a high school teacher, I worry about reading comprehension. I tried all the usual solutions. I read the research, went to conferences, wrote study guides, planned discussion questions, wrote curricula for different reading levels, and varied my pedagogy. My students wrote, discussed, debated, and acted. To a limited extent, these techniques helped students understand a particular text, and they liked the literature more after we studied it. Students claimed that they learned to read better in my class, but many students still slipped past me. Many were just glib in class discussions; the confused kept quiet. Although the vast majority understood an assigned reading after we had worked on it together, they couldn't apply the general strategies to a new piece. Because reading is invisible, I was at a loss. I couldn't follow my students' reading processes. I longed for the certainty of teaching writing, where at least I could look at drafts of papers and figure out where students had gone wrong or right. When a student in literature class offered some outrageously incorrect interpretation, I spent half the class period trying to untangle the confusion. While I helped one student, the others were confused for different reasons or were simply bored. I needed help in two areas: I needed to know what students were thinking as they read, and I needed to reach all students. A Solution Five years ago I solved the problem. Now I am confident that I have a technique to teach high school students to read well. I can't make them love reading, but I can give them the skills to comprehend any difficult piece of text. Even freshmen in a public school can become confident, independent readers. Five years ago I modified a pedagogy known as the Socratic Seminar, sometimes called the Paedeia Approach, based on the work of Mortimer Adler and Dennis Gray. A Socratic Seminar is a focused discussion on a short piece of writing. Noncompetitive discussion moves toward a collective and deeper understanding of the reading rather than to one right answer. …