“Meaning does not simply reside on the page, ready to be understood whole, nor is it a message simple ‘sent’ by an author and ‘received’ by the reader” (How Smart Readers Think, page 29). This section of the reading got my mind turning. I can easily see how teachers read over a content-area passage and almost assume their students will understand it all. When you are reading something that you know about understanding comes naturally, just like the daydreaming driver example in the reading. However, reading the cricket piece confused me and as this chapter points out, it causes you to actually process through how you’re attempting to read something. This gave me much greater compassion for my students. Obviously knowing nothing about cricket made this very easy to not understand the passage and see where misconceptions could offer. However, I’m interested to see how this would be possible when testing out a reading for future students. As educators we will hopefully know a lot about the content the passage would be covering, which makes it trickier to see where students could get caught up. I think that if you actively engage when picking out content you can look for potential concepts or words that may be content specific that will detract from the students understanding. A potential aide to this could be reviewing the content ahead of time and pulling out words or specific context the students are going to need to fully understand the passage. Then explicitly going over that information with them before giving them the passage. This seems as though it would help students grasp the content more effectively. It could also help “activate their schemes” for various content they may already know about.
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This sweet baby looks like he is really reading the text, however we know that the baby can't actually read. Sometimes we may look at our students and it appears they are reading and understanding when that may not be the case.
Hey Caroline! I really liked reading your post and I totally understand where you are coming from. Reading and writing was never my strong points, so to be completely honest, I was one of those students who did not really understand readings that were given nor textbook chapters that was "supposed" to help me learn the course content. As a person who can understand that perspective and can relate to the student's difficulties, I think its a great idea to introduce the topics of the passages before getting the students to read it. Like mentioned in the chapter, we can help students activate prior knowledge by reviewing some content to get them to think about the topics that might come up in the reading, in which will lead to have an easier time in comprehending the readings because they were already thinking about the ideas present in the text.
Hey Caroline! I really liked reading your post and I totally understand where you are coming from. Reading and writing was never my strong points, so to be completely honest, I was one of those students who did not really understand readings that were given nor textbook chapters that was "supposed" to help me learn the course content. As a person who can understand that perspective and can relate to the student's difficulties, I think its a great idea to introduce the topics of the passages before getting the students to read it. Like mentioned in the chapter, we can help students activate prior knowledge by reviewing some content to get them to think about the topics that might come up in the reading, in which will lead to have an easier time in comprehending the readings because they were already thinking about the ideas present in the text.
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