Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters

by G. Kylene Beers

Disruptions start with a thought that something needs to be better. And with two questions: What needs to change? What assumptions make that change hard?

Be brave.

Accept failure.

Be open.

Be connected.

Get uncomfortable.

Some texts are tough because we lack enough prior knowledge; others are tough because the vocabulary is technical or obscure; many are tough because the ideas are abstract or the syntax is complex. Some are tough because of the images they share, images of war and pain, of loss and hurt, of hunger and loneliness. Of fear.

We would argue that in today’s world, learning to extract information is not enough. It’s not enough to hold a reader’s interest and it’s not enough to solve our complex problems. We need students who can do more than answer questions; today’s complex world requires that our next generation of leaders be able to raise questions. They need to be able to hold multiple ideas in their minds. They need to be able to see a situation from multiple perspectives. They need to be flexible thinkers who recognize that there will rarely be one correct answer, but instead there will be multiple answers that must be weighed and evaluated.

we must teach students how to read with curiosity. And they need to be willing to raise questions. We want them to ask not only, “What does this text say?” but also, “What does it say to me? How does it change who I am? How might it change what I do in the world?”

FOR KIDS TO BECOME the readers our ever-changing society needs—our democracy needs—the first thing they must do is become responsive readers.

The responsive reader is present, in mind and heart, when he is reading the text.

the responsive reader might be, should be, responsive to the thoughts and reactions of other readers.

That same text, entering different minds, will yield different readings.

Reader's response critosm

If the reader isn’t responsive, if she doesn’t let the text awaken emotion or inspire thoughts, then she can barely be said to be reading at all.

It’s pointless to collect information if you do nothing with it.

It is a waste of time to hear what someone says about a text and then to either reject it out of hand or accept it uncritically.

Focusing on the reader to the neglect of the text, or focusing on the text to the neglect of the reader, is problematic. To encourage and expect nothing more of students than unexamined statements of feelings is to encourage intellectual laziness. And to encourage only extracting of information, memorizing of details, and the like, is to reduce reading to an unrewarding exercise.

recognize the distinction between what they bring to the text and what the text has brought to them. And, when warranted, we want them to be willing to change their minds.

keep three big questions in mind. What surprised me? What did the author think I already know? What changed, challenged, or confirmed my thinking?

Whatever the writer’s motivations may be, the reader clearly bears the responsibility for avoiding gullibility and laziness.

we must come to news ready to sort, to cull, to mull, to test, to confirm, to question, to challenge, to discard—and that’s in addition to just reading the content.

teach them to ask themselves: How does it look? What does it say? How does it make me feel?

Until we teach students to read responsibly, we run the risk of being a nation of readers who not only harm themselves, but potentially harm others as they share not just misinformation but blatant lies.

we have demanded of readers many things we would never do ourselves while reading.

Nonfiction should matter. It mattered enough to the writer that he took the time to write it. It should matter to any reader who takes the time to read it. And that mattering consists of both feeling and thinking about it.

Responsiveness requires that the reader think beyond the four corners of the page; it does not, however, mean dismissing what’s on the page.

What surprised you? What did the author think you already knew? What changed, challenged, or confirmed your thinking?

We ask kids: What did this text help me learn about myself? What did this text help me learn about others? How has this text changed my thinking about the world? How will my actions or feeling change as a result of reading this text? Does this text offer me any of my own Aha Moments? Any Tough Questions? Perhaps my own Words of the Wiser?

Almost one hundred years of research confirm that teaching grammar in isolation does not improve a student’s ability to write a compelling paper and yet that practice is pervasive. Decades of research reveal that giving kids lists of words to learn to spell does not solve spelling problems, yet the Friday spelling test is an institutional rock that isn’t budging. We know that purposeful writing, writing conferences, and writing portfolios are important, and yet too often teachers assign a topic, don’t confer with students, and think a folder with all the writing collected into it is a portfolio.

If a best practice is rooted in what has worked in the past, a next practice speculates about what might be better for the future.

If the goal is “don’t fail,” then the result, we fear, is “don’t innovate.”

doing it, too often on their own. In other words, we made a small disruption fit within a model of education we all know and understand.

Are there practices you follow that cannot be supported by research? Why do you use them? Should you reconsider?

Dov Seidman warns of in How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything. In the preface he explains, “there is a difference between doing something so as to succeed and doing something and achieving success” (p. xxxvi),

“When the profit motive becomes unhinged from the purpose motive, bad things happen” (2009, p. 302). When the purpose motive for school is to help kids become confident, passionate, lifelong learners; to help them discover all they can be; to help them become ethical participants in society; and to instill some habits of mind that value compassion, curiosity, collaboration, and creativity, then the profit motive has less to do with high test scores and more to do with engaged students.

When schools focus less on test scores and more on engagement, we see positive effects: higher attendance rates, fewer discipline referrals; more studentgenerated questions; more comments that reveal inter- and intratextual connections; classroom conversations that are started and maintained by students; and higher test scores (Cotton, 1988).

Differentiation must be grounded in equity, in access, in agency. Differentiation that results in a diminished educational experience for those kids is not only wrong, it is shameful.

Interest is often fleeting, lasting about as long as the video clip we provided for kids to watch. Relevance, by contrast, is always personal.

getting kids’ attention is about creating interest; keeping their attention is all about relevance

When they discover the relevance, their energy for and attention to the task will soar. Getting their attention is about interest; keeping their attention is about relevance.

If you want kids to be better readers, they must read. And if you want them to read a lot, much, perhaps most, of what they read must be what they choose to read.

Early-reading researcher Edmund Burke Huey questioned how readers understood what they were reading. His book Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908) argued that silent reading was “the art of thought getting” (in Pearson & Goodin, 2010, p. 13). He believed that it was during silent reading, not oral reading, that students had the opportunity to think about what was being read and to decide, on their own, what the text meant.

Today, despite common recognition that RRR (or its cousin, Popcorn Reading) invites boredom and anxiety and doesn’t build comprehension, the practice continues (Kuhn, 2016).

we know that children with parents who are barely literate do as well in school as children whose parents have university degrees if the homes have 500 or more books for children

to be about three years academically behind children who grow up with books (and that’s after controlling for issues such as income, home language, and parents’ educational level) (Jumpstart, 2009).

Ten minutes a day of focused silent reading has the potential to change a child’s academic life, and that might, in turn, change her life’s trajectory.

Choice means choice.

fact, kids report that their favorite books and the ones they are most likely to finish are the ones they pick out themselves.

in later school years, everyone reading the same book at the same time won’t actually provide a positive reading experience for all. For many, it will be so negative that not only will we have failed to improve comprehension and fluency, but we will have created a dislike of reading.

If we love the book, we want to devour it. If we hate it, we want to quit reading or at least want the torture to end quickly.