Giving purpose to our readers.

The more blogs I read the more interested I get into this world of blogging. I will never write a book or have a paper published but Miles made a comment that made sense to me. Sometimes blogging can be about putting your work out there having followers and all of this without being published. The idea is brilliant and just then do I maybe understand this assignment a little more. I hope you learn something out of the text I'm reading as much as I have already learned from some of yours. 

Do I really have to teach reading is teaching teachers how to teach ourselves. So many times I have said I can't teach reading and I may have started to believe it, but this approach has taught me that I can teach reading. The book challenges the teacher to challenge themselves with challenging pieces of text and to struggle. Sound familiar?

But why am I reading this, Chaper 5. “Sometimes our problem as adult readers is that we see too many reasons or purposes for our students to read a text” (Tavoni, p 51). This is about defining purpose before teaching.

What is your instructional purpose? (Tavoni, p. 59).

1.     Decide what students should know after reading the piece

2.     Anticipate what might cause students difficulty. Are students lacking background knowledge? Will difficult vocabulary interfere with meaning?

3.     Model how you would negotiate difficulty.

4.     What do you want them to be able to do with the information once they have finished reading?

5.     Model how the should hold their thinking and provide tools.

This list that Tavoni writes in the book is really something as a teacher we must do. Not all students will be reading at the same level so having different material for different levels will be important. Anticipate, anticipate, and anticipate, I could not say this enough. I have found myself that the hardest thing have had trouble with is having all of the answers for the students. I know this may come with time and many years of teaching but if we are selecting the right text and aligning my lessons with the readings this will help me anticipate and provide the tools necessary for my students success.

Most students are not going to reread a text and Tavoni suggests that we are up front with what we want our students to do before they read. I think this is great as her example of making her students read a novel and than ask them to write a character sketch after she felt was unfair. Why would we make our students do something we ourselves were not necessarily going to do.  

“Sometimes our students can’t see the importance of something that we ask them to read, they may just read the piece to pass the test” (Tavoni, p. 61). We must give our readers a purpose.