Teach a Boy to Think...

During the three months that I decided to teach literacy all of the 7th and 8th grade boys at my school, leaving the girls in the capable hands of a colleague, my mind was opened to just what these facinating creatures do- and don't do- while reading.

In the first month, I decided to try to teach them the the comprehension strategy of visualizing while reading fiction. The night before, while doing some pleasure reading of my own, I caught myself visualizing a scene at the beginning of a chapter. I remember getting to the bottom of that first page, and thinking: "Really? Some people don't do this while they read?" It occurred to me that I visualized the most when there was a descriptive part of the book (like setting up a scene at the beginning of a chapter), when I was confused and trying to figure something out or when a scene reminded me of something a I had experienced before. It also realized that it was the visualizing that really enhanced my experience of the text, that the ability to see the text like a movie in my head was what made the reading enjoyable.

Armed with this discovery, I went into my classroom the next day with a text I was particularly excited to read to the boys: To Build a Fire by Jack London. This is a classic man-vs.-nature tale of a lost explorer who faces death by freezing in the wild. The opportunities London created to visualize with his descriptions of the setting and the details of frostbite were abundant, and so I began.

After reading a particularly detailed scene, I paused and asked the boys how many of them could visualize what was happening in the story. Of the twenty-six students, not one raised their hand. Chalking this up to a vocabulary problem, I rephrased, "When I was just reading that scene to you, how many of you could see it happening in your head like a movie?" Aha! Glimmers of understanding as the cloud of confusion passed, but still, only about six hands were raised. As I surveyed their faces, I quickly recognized that these hands belonged to the boys who voraciously read fantasy like Harry Potter and Eragon. Hmmm....

I stood there at the front of my classroom, book in midair, my mind racing from one thought to the next: Do these boys who read fantasy visualize because they read fantasy or do they enjoy fantasy because they visualize? Is it really possible that twenty of these students don't visualize as they read? No wonder boys hate reading fiction! What else do boys not do while reading that never occurred to me before?

Bruce Pirie is quoted in the Ontario Ministry of Education's Guide, Me Read? No Way! A Practical Guide to Improving Boys' Literacy Skills:

"If we leave [the] processes of reading and writing cloaked in mystery, telling ourselves that it all either comes naturally or else it doesn't, we surrender to voodoo pedagogy. In voodoo, privileged people, objects and rituals are invested with secret magical power, and to some of our students it certainly seems that there must be mysterious, unnamed powers needed to do well in English."

So, I read to them and modelled my own visualizations. We read together and I encouraged them to do the same through drawing and with the support of graphic organizers. We discussed how to incorporate the use of all five senses in visualizing. We read. We practiced. They improved. It had not occurred to many of them before that they actually had a role to play as a reader that came with responsibilities attached to it- like thinking. There were a lot of eyes going left-to-right over print, with very little else going on. This is not reading- a point that they had yet to understand.

It was the possibility for the next steps that really excited me. If you could teach a student how to visualize while reading, what else could you teach them that they might not do otherwise? This was the moment for me as a teacher that I learned that it is possible to teach comprehension strategies, and that there is hope for adolescent readers entering high school who continued to struggle to with reading. My strategies to support these learners prior to this experience really just amounted to offering some textbook-coping strategies and ways to get around text. I knew that I wasn't impacting their actual reading ability because I wasn't actually teaching reading...

yet.

References:

London, Jack. To Build a Fire. www.jacklondons.net/buildafire.html

Me, Read? No Way! A Practical Guide to Improving Boys' Literacy Skills Ontario Ministry of Education. www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/brochure/meread/meread.pdf