Using Pictures to Read

In chapter six Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse, Tovani shows her class a picture of a shark jumping out of the water about to attack a man dangling from a rope ladder attached to a helicopter. Above the image it states that the photo is real. She asks the students “what do you think?”  After a while the students start to respond to the photo thinking it is a fake, and Tovani asks them why they think it is a fake. 

What she did was engage her readers with as little text as possible, but despite the lack of text the point of the exercise was to show that how they “read” the picture by asking questions, make connections, and making determinations on the sources authenticity is what all readers should do while reading text. She points out that thinking while reading is difficult to gage since it is “complex” and “invisible”.  The only way to measure the students thinking, while reading is for them to be able to talk about it or write it down some way. 

This is where note taking comes into play.  Below are her guidelines she for her students:

1.       Write the thinking next to the words on the page that cause you to have the thought.

2.       If there isn’t room on the text to write, draw a line showing the teacher where the thinking is written.

3.       Don’t copy the text; respond to it.

4.       Merely underlining text is not enough.  Thinking about the text must accompany the underling.

5.       There is no one way to respond to text.  Here are some possible options: Ask a question, make a connection to something familiar, give an opinion, draw a conclusion, and make a statement.

Even though this is a blog and not notes, I am aware of the fact that I broke her third rule by just copying the text, and lol, if we’re being honest, I’ve underlined a lot of the passages from this book.  That being said, maybe this is why some students have trouble with text because speaking as a person that has problems with text, if I do not grasp the text no matter how many times I read it I am not going to be able to respond to the text if I do not understand it, or care about the content. 

Example being the Rosenblatt article, I could read the words, but I had no idea what the author was talking about.  I would read a sentence, and just go “huh?”. It seemed so silly to me that this level of reading comprehension was required to understand something so simple.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of reading, but the only take away I got from the Rosenblatt article was that the author seemed a bit pretentious, or at the very least, made the article more important that is.   

Sorry, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, but I do believe that Tovani is correct in regards that the only way to gage what has been learned through reading is through talking about it or writing about it, and some of her guidelines I think I will give a try in my classroom.