Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading, Chapter 7

With the emphasis on analyzing and interpreting patterns, chapter seven of Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading (DTfDR) reminded me the most of what I loved about What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making (WRRD) by Dorothy Barnhouse & Vicki Vinton. Since reading WRRD I have been working with kids, and in my own reading, to track patterns in texts.

Before WRRD, my reading instruction had been primarily based on teaching and exploring Thinking/Comprehension strategies (Connect, Question, Create Mental Images, Infer, Determine Importance, Synthesize). I can’t overstate the value I’ve found in exploring the thinking strategies across the curriculum and in the development of my own thinking. Learning about the thinking strategies in Mosaic of Thought shaped not only how I approach text, but how I approach learning. The thinking strategies are the very foundation of what I model for kids, when I model thinking.

What Readers Really Do added a new path to my reading instruction. Beyond thinking about what was in the learner’s head, WWRD encouraged me to look for patterns in the text itself. This opened up conversations with the author. As powerful as I found the idea, however, I wasn’t communicating it well to students until I found Notice and Note.

Once I found Notice and Note, the signposts became the patterns my students and I were most fluent in tracking. Along with Beers & Probst’s guiding questions, the signposts have led to great conversations among the readers in my classroom, and between individual readers and the authors of the books they’re reading. The signposts are patterns both the students and I have been able to successfully track and create meaning with.

On to Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading and this sentence: “...(T)hey need to notice and question patterns, then keep reading with those questions in mind, using them, in effect, as lines of inquiry that lead to the deeper layers of a text.” This encompasses what I see as my next step with my learners, my major work in reading this year: learning with students how to turn “noticing a pattern” other than the signposts into a line of inquiry worth pursuing. I foresee the pages of chapter seven, especially “Looking Closely at a Problem-Solving Session,” tabbed and tattered as I follow Vicki’s lead in this evolution. I can’t wait to see what we discover!  

So, too, until reading chapter seven, I’d never thought of the significance patterns breaking. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to look back in What Readers Really Do and see that it was an idea explored there, but at the time I read WRRD the idea of patterns was, in itself, my next step. I had to sit with that idea for a while and let it marinate. I’m not sure I could have travelled with Vicki to the deeper analysis that’s involved in looking at patterns breaking. Now I’m ready. 

Finally, “Rich Tasks.” This is an idea I’ve been exploring for the past year and a half with a study of Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindsets. As with analyzing and interpreting patterns, I’m still not there. However, I love the cross-curricular connection and believe that using this lens, internalizing the definition, using the criteria as a filter for the opportunities I design will improve the quality of everything I do with learners. I see designing rich tasks as a “next practice” as Beers & Probst refer to next-gen “best practice” in Disrupting Thinking.