The Importance of Active Thinking in Reading

In today’s keynote, Ms. Stephanie Harvey talked about the importance of active thinking in reading. It reminds me of the keynote given by Prof. Calkins on the first day. She mentioned as teachers we need to explore our self-consciousness and be aware of our own reading preferences as well as when and why our learning levels reached sky high. The process of “pushing” students to have higher-level thinking is stressed in the teaching of reading. “Comprehension is an on-going process of involving thinking. It is the thinking that happens…all readers are developing readers,” Stephanie further mentioned.

A teacher at the beginning of the reading institute told me that she would prefer to ask students just read without putting down their ideas in the middle. She argued that when students started to write while reading, the writing would take for ever. Is that true? I wonder what questions the teacher might ask students before and after their reading, and what she might expect students to learn from their reading. Like Stephanie said today, even we as professional readers are often running our eyes across pages and often times need to go back to the previous pages. So, it is important to keep our young reader conscious and active in the reading process. After they learn envision (visualizing the texts in mind), prediction (predicting the incoming plots), connection (looking for the relationships among characters and chapters as well the connections between the book being read and books read before), interpretation (explaining their findings in the book, e.g., relationships, hidden plots behind conversations, features of characters, etc.), and critical thinking (recognizing the pressures around characters, social stigma on characters, marginalized aspects of the main story, etc.), they will be constantly thinking. The process of thinking while reading will further help improve their comprehension skills.

Keeping different strategies in mind and putting down ideas in the middle of reading, like the teacher said, may hinder students’ reading speed. However, as teachers, we need to think about the ultimate goals of teaching reading. Are we teaching students to merely understand the story plots? Are we teaching students to be speedy readers? Are we teaching students to be thinkers?

Students in China are used to filling blanks and doing multiple choices for reading comprehension after reading articles/books. The nationalized test-oriented instruction has caused many children losing the joys of reading. Furthermore, if a teacher wanted to punish a student, he/she would ask the students to read/write more. What a bad method that extra reading and writing has become painful punishment, instead of something fun and motivating! For teaching upper graders, one feasible way to adapt TC approaches to classrooms in China is, based on the nationally scripted curriculum, to develop topics related to the textbook. Maybe I can connect students’ book-club reading to the national curriculum. For example, when teaching a unit on traveling in foreign countries, we can gather books on foods, sceneries, festivals, people, etc. in other countries, and ask groups to read these books and come back to act as a tour guide to introduce the features they learned from the books… Meanwhile, reading strategies of envision, prediction, connection, critical thinking, etc. can be introduced regardless of the content we will be teaching.

Philosophically speaking, what is the essence of teaching? Teaching for interest? Teaching for motivation? Teaching for “proximal development”? Teaching for lifelong learning? All the strategies will serve for eventual realization of the essence(s) of teaching and learning that we believe in.