Q+A: What reading strategies should I be teaching my students?
A list of the strategies I teach + where they come from
Q:
In writing, I know that I study the mentor texts and teach the writing moves my student writers will need. But where do reading strategies and skills come from? What strategies do middle and high school readers need? And how do I know?
- Many, MANY Community Members
A:
I wonder why reading skills feel so fuzzy compared to writing skills. It feels that way to me, too. Perhaps because most of us were taught from a content-centered perspective that demanded we know the dimensions of the escape tunnel in The Count of Monte Cristo (true story. Sophomore English. Mrs. Ward’s class.), but never tried to teach us how to make an inference. We either inferred or we didn’t.
I’ve written a little bit about this here before, but I think it’s worth revisiting. For starters, people keep asking, which tells me that the resources you need aren’t in your hands quite yet.
When do I teach reading skills?
I used to focus on the content of texts, too. I wanted students to understand every character foil and symbolic moment in Of Mice and Men. But then they only understood Of Mice and Men and weren’t able to analyze characters and symbols in the next text they encountered.
I teach reading skills in our work with Article of the Week. I also hone in on two-three big reading skills with each whole-class text we study together. Then, students continue to practice and practice and practice these same skills in their independent reading (and I check in on that through reading responses and reading conferences).
Which skills?
There are a limited number of reading skills. Whether you are a beginning reader or getting your PhD in English literature, you are doing the same mental tasks (I borrowed these from Kate Roberts) :
Envisioning
Monitoring for Sense
Determing Importance
Inferring
Synthesizing
Interpreting
Analyzing Craft
And, as texts change and grow in their demands as our readers get older, students need to continue to circle back to these basic skills with increasingly challenging texts. Sure, they can make sense of Ivy and Bean and Dork Diaries. But can they make sense of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Clap When You Land? And then can they make sense of The Bluest Eye and Mrs. Dalloway. These are different things, and so the skills need to be re-honed.
Which strategies?
Strategies are just ways of achieving a skill.
My husband is handy around the house, and he has a literal bucketfull of differently-sized screwdrivers. While the mechanical operation is the same, different projects require different sizes or different shapes in order to achieve the same outcome.
Strategies are like screwdrivers.
We teach our students multiple strategies to achieve a skill so that in a variety of different reading situations they will be able to find a strategy that works for them.
One strategy doesn’t magically unlock a skill for every student.
This is good news and bad news.
The bad news: You need to teach multiple strategies for a skill.
The good news: You can let the pressure off.
I know you want a magical list of the perfect strategies that will turn your students into the ultimate readers, but it just doesn’t exist.
Here’s a list of the reading skills I’ve taught over the last few years: