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.