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. You aren’t thinking outside the box. You’re hunting for a new one. Accept failure. Whatever you’re going to do probably won’t work the first time or the fifteenth. Be open. Disruptions can’t proceed in secret. Tell folks what you’re trying. Document. Put it up online. Be transparent. Be connected. Look around and see who else is trying something similar. Reach out. Talk. Share. Get uncomfortable. Disruptions ought to shake us up as we head into uncharted territory. That’s okay.

Such a reader comes to the text with a determination to learn, and with a desire for the change, slight or dramatic, that learning will bring about. This is a reader who allows her thinking to be disrupted, altered, changed.

All of those tasks are, at their core, about extracting.

We would argue that in today’s world, learning to extract information is not enough.

We ask students why Jess took Maybelle to Terabithia when we should be asking how Terabithia has changed their understanding of who they, the readers, are.

It is only when they link that text to their own experiences that the text will begin to matter, and it may then evoke more rigorous attention,

reflection, and analysis.

And so readers must be aware, not only of the text, but of the effects the text has upon them. They must be responsive. That means they must be alert to their own reactions to the text.

In both instances, she will pause and ask herself essentially, “What does my response—this anxiety or doubt I feel—tell me about what is happening in the world (with this frowning teacher) or in the text (with this frowning character)?”

It is our older readers, we worry, who seem to have learned to set aside their own responses entirely or to have relegated them to a lower status.

Rather than simply collecting facts or trying to remember information that, unless it matters, will remain pointless, he is trying to make sense.

takes in and makes sense of information that matters to him.

awareness of his responses should lead to a close look at what has caused them—

she has the rich resources of many minds brought to bear upon the same text.

The text broadens and enriches the individual’s experience; talking about it with others broadens and enriches the individual’s otherwise limited and narrow insight still further.

She must do more than simply respond. She must—if she is to be responsible—examine the feelings awakened by the text. She should question the thoughts of her own that the text has called to mind, assess the writer’s evidence and logic, speculate about his purposes and his biases, and finally come to some reasoned and responsible conclusions about the text and her reading of it. The response is the beginning, but only the beginning.

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.

the profession has sometimes allowed us to reduce the reader to a subordinate, and almost insignificant, position.

Super important on power structure

We aren’t asking readers to let go of their own opinions, but we do want them to recognize the distinction between what they bring to the text and what the text has brought to them.

1!! Rr

Good questions for critical reading

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

“Show me what in the text caused that surprise” or “Where did the author need to tell you more?”

That close attention to the words—the responsibility a reader shows to the text—implies and requires a responsibility to oneself as well as the words on the page. That responsibility consists not only of a willingness to acknowledge and defend one’s own thoughts and values, but to change thinking when evidence or reason dictates.

You must be willing to enter into a dialogue with the text, to interact and not merely extract.

Nonfiction should not suggest nonfeeling. Nonfiction offers us the chance to learn not only about the world and the people in it, but about ourselves.

The reader we hope will graduate from our schools is one who is open to the possibility of change. To read with a commitment to remaining untouched, unmoved, unchanged is simply to waste one’s time.

Such a reader, a compassionate reader, will approach the nonfiction text with openness, willing to consider the perspectives, motives, reasoning, and evidence he finds there.

the reader must be responsive to the thoughts and feelings

awakened by the text, responsible to both himself and the text, and compassionate and open to the characters and people he finds in the pages, their experiences and ideas, and the reactions of other readers.

This is thinking that is characterized by deep intellectual and emotional engagement with the text and themselves. It is thinking that causes them to view themselves and the world, when warranted, in a new light. It is thinking that is generous and yet skeptical; compassionate and yet critical.

Book. Head. Heart. Our frame to remind kids that they need

This is simply a short, telegraphic phrase to suggest that we need to pay attention to the text, to our thoughts about it, and to what we feel and how we might have changed, no matter how slightly, as a result of reading.

Book, Head, and Heart.

“Of course you must read what’s in the book. The author put those words there for a reason! But you also must read thinking about what’s in your own head, your responses. And finally you must read thinking about what you took to heart—your feelings, commitments, and values.”

Ellin Keene, Laura Robb, Gay Su Pinnell, Irene Fountas, Kelly Gallagher, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey, Rozlyn

We want teachers to instead point students to fix-up strategy charts so that they, on their own, clarify their confusions.

Linda Rief—especially her important text Read Write Think—

Response and Analysis

We want them to reflect on what they are finding in the text.

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

Strategies That Work,

If “in the head” pointed to the thoughts awakened during the reading—the questions, surprises, unanticipated new information, challenges to assumptions—“in the heart” refers more to the feelings aroused by a text.

“In the heart”—what you take to heart—also refers to the student’s sense of self, his values, attitudes, beliefs, and commitments.

the idea of slowly recognizing your own voice was startling. I’d think that your own voice would be one you’d recognize

Get students to recognise their own voice

being in the book feels safer, so I start them there—even when I KNOW I’ll get the more honest and probably much deeper response if I start them either in their head or their heart. And as I look at what you wrote,

What you noticed in the text What happened in you, your thinking, as you read the text What you took to heart, what touched you or made you look at yourself or your world in a new way

the wide range of information these children bring to the table:

These are the Nonfiction signposts.

In education, we don’t talk much about disruptive practices, but it is an issue we ought to address. We tend to be more enamored with “best practices.” Educators borrowed the concept of best practices from the business and medical communities and hold on to it as though it will solve all our problems.