Chapter 3 - What Lies Beneath

The chapter begins with a passage from the book Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra
Cisneros entitled “Salvador, Late or Early”. It is a very difficult piece to comprehend even for the most gifted reader on the first reading. It did evoke a picture in my mind with the descriptive language it contained. As the author stated, the piece did leave me with an impression but no clear picture. The interpretation was mine to make.
The author chose this passage to use in a workshop where she was conducting a session in comprehension. It was her intent to challenge the participants at that conference to experience what their students experience: "to struggle as their students sometimes struggle, to be on the edge of understanding, but not quite there." Even she admits that she was forced to think more critically and carefully about her own thinking as she read the piece.
At the conference many voiced their own interpretations concerning the piece: each with a slightly different slant, some critical, others liking the piece immensely. These educated adult professionals all agreed that it was all about engagement with the text. We know whether or not we are engaged with the text and what strategies to utilize if needed. It was concluded that students are not as engaged with text as they should be and that they do not know when or if they comprehend a given piece.

She mentions a first grade classroom in a bad area of the city that she had visited at a previous time to the attendees at the conference. It was fall and the class was conducted by a masterfully highly respected teacher with much experience. She read to her students not one but three different books during the span of a week. The same response was elicited from the students – lack of engagement. The members of her session on comprehension shared experiences from their own classrooms all different but eerily speaking to the same problem that “the children were missing out on the pleasure of losing themselves in a book or learning passionately from its content”.

This teacher was anything but defeated. She needed to get her students engaged with their reading and began taking steps to solve the problem. She thought aloud about difficulties by modeling as she read: asking questions, sharing her own interpretations, wondering out loud what the author meant, slowly soliciting interpretations from her students; a slow, long journey.

Upon visiting this teacher at a later point in the year, she saw the same children with a different attitude toward reading. The teacher had worked on different strategies to encourage her students to be engaged with the text. She had used a model developed by David Pearson’s, process of the Gradual Release of Responsibility. Ultimately, she helped the students to think about their own thinking. They were using metacognition to comprehend their reading; a central piece in the mosaic of reading.


Key Ideas of Using Metacognition

Proficient readers monitor their comprehension during reading – understanding, not understanding , whether information is critical or not
Proficient readers can identify when text is comprehensible and the degree to which they understand it
Proficient readers can identify confusing themes, ideas, and/or surface elements and can use a variety of different means to solve the problems they have
Proficient readers are aware of what they need to comprehend in relation to their purpose of reading.
Many readers must learn how to pause, consider the meanings in text, reflect on their understandings and use different strategies to enhance their understanding.

I am not at all enjoying the author’s approach to describing and introducing us to the different parts of the mosaic of thought. I’m a sort of cut and dry type of person. Give me the information, examples of how to use that information or applications of that information and then let me apply it. After reading three chapters I understand that her long descriptive, colorful and vivid narratives seem to be her style, I am not enjoying or looking forward to reading the next chapters. The book does not make me want me to be engaged with my purpose of reading - for information. The book seems to take the long way around to make her point.

Chapter 2: Mind Journeys

In chapter 2, Keene starts the chapter off visiting what appears to be the ideal classroom. It is large, inviting, full of sunlight, decorated as if a home itself, it looks great and smells even better. The students are all engaged with a book of their choice around the classroom. While it does seem to be the perfect environment to foster a love of reading and learning, the teacher confides in Keene that she feels she isn't really teaching. Keene chooses this point to further reminisce into her own past as a teacher and a reader. We learn of her and her colleagues' experiences both hating to teach from basal readers and to give excessive worksheets, and loving their own discussions about books they loved and were currently reading. Many places started shifting from textbook instruction to more hands-on, discussion based teaching strategies. There especially was a need for this shift after more and more data showed the same thing: too many students could read but not comprehend.

The problem later became that the shift was too drastic, and now there was virtually no "teaching" in the classroom, therefore they wanted to find a happy medium. This happy medium started being born when new data surfaced that showed that proficient readers use the same seven or eight strategies when reading. The idea now was to first make students aware of their own thinking when reading, delving further into the world of meta cognition, then helping them improve and develop their own strategies to mirror the strategies that have proven successful. This instruction of meta cognition and reading strategies could be the "teaching" everyone had been longing for, without resorting to basal readers.

These proven strategies that most proficient readers use are: * Activating relevant prior knowledge before, during, and after reading text. * Determining the most important ideas and themes in a text. * Creating visual and other sensory images from text during and after reading. * Drawing inferences from text. * Retelling or synthesizing what they have read. * Utilizing a variety of "fix-up" strategies to repair comprehension when it breaks down.

** This chapter was difficult for me to relate to entirely. Being a special education teacher, I am accustomed to teaching a variety of "fix-up" strategies but I do not feel I spend enough time developing what is not "broken". Also, as many of you have heard me whine about before, I AM teaching from a reading program (SRA Corrective Reading) as per my orders so I definitely do not spend enough time on strategy instruction. I'm looking forward to incorporating the other strategies into my teaching. We're almost done with SRA!

Chapter 1: The Mosaic Takes Shape

In Mosaic of Thought the author Ellin Keene examines what happens when a reader interacts with text. In Chapter 1, Keene analyzes her own thought process after reading the poem First Reader by Billy Collins. She realizes that by rereading certain sections of the poem she is taken on a journey that ranges from her first grade classroom (where her background allowed her to enjoy reading Dick and Jane, but did little for her ability to create meaning and opinions about what she read) to her high school Honors English class where she was asked to look beyond the text and find symbolism in literature (a task she found difficult due to its newness).

At the end of the chapter, Keene writes that the journey she took through the poem is one that good reader's frequently take, but rarely discuss. The importance of having this discussion with ourselves and with children is invaluable in our efforts to construct meaning as we read. Keene writes that meaning from text is constructed socially and by conversing about text we deepen our understanding of virtually everything we read.