“Tell me the important information the writer tells about Chester Greenwood,” I asked 3rd student, Thomas*, after our study of the book Chester Greenwood’s Big Idea by Christine A. Economos. Economos’ book recounts the story of the inventor of the earmuffs and in a narrative style describes the process he went through to invent the earmuffs.

“He had big ears and he lived long ago in a small town,” replied Thomas with utmost seriousness. When asked if there was any more important information to remember he carefully paged through the book and answered, “He liked to skate.”

While these details added to the overall understanding of the book, they were merely that- just details. Why did this 3rd grader choose those 3 details to tell me when asked to retell the important information in the book? Why did he choose to leave out the invention of the earmuffs which was central to the entire story?

These are questions I have asked myself numerous times when working with young readers. Many children seem to miss the forest for the trees as the old expression goes. They get caught up in the details and miss the main message of the book they are reading. Helping children to recognize what is most important to remember from a book or piece of text seemed to be a logical next step in our strategy instruction.

Fourth grade teachers began a non-fiction unit at the beginning of our work on determining importance. Non-fiction is often the genre kids struggle with the most, especially when asked to determine which parts of the book are important and which are interesting details. We decided it was crucial to give students very practical, tangible strategies they could use to decide what parts of the text are more important than others.

Looking For Ideas that Repeat

One strategy we taught children to help them determine importance is to look for words or ideas that repeat. This required some teaching and modeling first as not every word that repeats is actually important. The word, the, for example, is repeated countless times in books but is not going to help signal importance. Also, some words might be different but the idea is the same which would be an example of something the repeats. Using some type of recording page, such as the one pictured on the right, can help children track the ideas that repeat and can allow them to analyze those repeating ideas when determining ideas that are important in the text.

If Thomas had recorded words or ideas that repeated when reading about Chester Greenwood, he would have noticed words like earmuffs, invention, and cold repeated often. Analyzing those repeating ideas would have helped Thomas to pull out the ideas that were important in the book.

Text Features

Another strategy we taught to the students was to use various text features as clues to what the author may believe is important. Headings, pictures, bolded words, and various other text features can signal importance. Authors use these features to help draw their reader into the important ideas. Helping students to recognize these text features can also help them to notice which ideas are important.

There were many text features in the book that Thomas had read. Various pictures and headings throughout the book provided clear clues as to what information is important.

Important Information vs. Interesting Details

A final strategy we taught in order to help students determine importance in text was differentiating between important information and interesting details. Just because a child finds a detail interesting, does not necessarily make it important to the overall message or theme of the book. Thomas, for example, found it interesting that Chester Greenwood had big ears. While this detail helped support the explanation of his invention of earmuffs, it wasn’t essential to the book. This strategy required some scaffolding. First we chose facts from the book we were reading and students had to decide if the fact was a piece of important information or just an interesting detail. This was quite difficult for the students as they seemed to think that every piece of information in a book must be important. Referring to the previous strategy of looking for ideas that repeat helped the children to determine if a detail was important information to the overall message of the book or merely a detail that helped support or provide interest in the topic.

We are eager to administer the post assessment for this strategy to see student growth. On the pre- assessment, students were unable to identify any clear strategies for determining importance in text. Responses included phrases such as, “I think really hard about it” or “All things in books are important” which clearly showed the inability of students to differentiate between important information and interesting details. We are hopeful that students now have more concrete strategies to use when determining importance and can apply those strategies to their independent reading.

It has been a long time since I have posted on the progress of our research project. The delay is partly due to lack of progress. As all teachers, we have found ourselves bogged down by the demands of the job. Sickness and snow days have impacted our ability to collaborate and plan. Curricular demands have delayed the administration of pre and post assessments. And the teaching of metacognition and thinking strategies has felt a bit clunky. Our reading curriculum, developed by National Heritage Academies in Grand Rapids, MI, correlates well with common core standards. But the length of the lessons, the frequency of required assessments, and the sheer volume of content has made strategy instruction challenging. While thinking strategies are the big umbrellas underneath which the standards lie, the reality of meshing that instruction with standards and skills based instruction has proven to be challenging.

Despite all of these obstacles, we are happy to report growth. At the beginning of our strategy instruction we gave a pre assessment on both thinking aloud and monitoring for meaning. The students showed growth in both areas. On the thinking aloud assessment, the students grew from an average score of 2.0 (out of a 5 point scale) to a 2.5. On the monitoring for meaning assessment the students grew from an average score of 2.3 to a score of 2.5.

We observed that students improved in their ability to think about what they are reading and connect it to their own lives. We also observed that students seemed more aware of difficulties they experienced when reading text. However, we noticed that students continued to have difficulty naming specific things they could do to problem solve when experiencing difficulty and we noticed that while their thinking improved, it often was lacking in depth.

Moving forward we are going to be even more explicit in our instruction of strategies than we have been in the past. The strategy we are currently teaching is Determining Importance. We are working on not only modeling the strategy through thinking aloud, but also helping the students apply it to their independent reading in very concrete ways. We are eager to see our students’ thinking continue to deepen.

The 4th grade students gathered on the floor. Their eyes scanned the classroom, somewhat intimidated by the large number of teachers who had joined them to watch the lesson. Ellin Oliver Keene, author of many books including To Understand, Mosaic of Thought, and Engaging Children, had recently flown in from Colorado to work with teachers in the area and was now modeling a lesson in our school in Byron Center, MI. Teachers stood around the perimeter of the classroom with notebooks in hand, eager to watch Ellin encourage and inspire the students to think deeply about their reading.

“I have a word to teach you, but I’m trying to decide if you can handle it,” she began. “I didn’t learn this word until I was in college.”

“We can handle it! We want to learn it!” shouted all the children.

This brilliant opening drew the children in to beginning to learn about metacognition. Metacognition, the understanding and awareness of our own thought processes, may seem like an unlikely word to teach a class of 4th graders. What could be the purpose of teaching them a word such as this after all?

Our research project is designed to address the problem of the lack of understanding and engagement during independent reading that we have witnessed in many of our students. We have hypothesized that explicitly teaching children thinking strategies will lead to deeper comprehension and more authentic engagement while reading. And the only way a child can successfully employ any of these strategies is to be metacognitive. How can a student monitor for comprehension if she isn’t aware of her thinking? If she isn’t aware of what she is thinking about while she is reading? How can a child engage deeply with a text if he is unaware of the questions he is thinking about while reading a book? The ability to be metacognitive is essential in order for a student to successfully employ reading strategies.

Soon the children appeared to lose all awareness of the large number of adults filling their classroom space as they became engrossed in the lesson. Using the beautiful book, Freedom on the Menu by Carole Boston Weatherford, Ellin modeled her own metacognitive process while reading about the sit ins that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement. At several spots in the book she stopped with the words, “Wait. I need to stop and think about my thinking.”

Gradually, students began raising their hands. “Are you thinking about your thinking?” Ellin asked each child with a voice of excited astonishment. And they were. The children began sharing the thoughts they had while Ellin was reading. Their thinking was amazing. Inspiring. Their thinking lifted the hearts of every adult in that room. At one point Ellin gently replied to a child’s thinking with the words, “That feeling you have, my dear, is righteous indignation.”

The children were then charged with a task. Choose to read or write. The students had the option to read and stop to think about their thinking. They also had the option to write about the thinking they had during the read aloud. One student expressed interest in reading Freedom on the Menu again and spontaneously a committee was formed of students rereading the book and discussing the new thinking they had during the second read. Other students pulled out notebooks and began writing, seemingly oblivious to all the visitors in the room. And many students chose to read.

The work has now begun. There is much more ahead of us. We, the teachers, have to figure out a way to continue this momentum that was started with Ellin’s lesson. We have to continue to equip students with the tools necessary to solve the problems they experience while reading, to determine what is important in the books they read, and to ask the types of questions that lead to deeper thinking. But we have now begun. And there is no doubt that the students are excited to join us on this journey.

A fourth grade teacher and I are teaming up to complete an action research project. This project started with questions regarding problems we noticed in the classroom. Why do some students have trouble finishing books? Why do some students pretend to read during independent reading time instead of being truly engaged in the book they are reading? Why are some students able to read the words on the page yet lack little understanding of what the page was about? Why do some students continue to plow through their books and are seemingly unaware of any comprehension problems they are experiencing?

I believe that the root of all of these problems is the lack of metacognition and an inability to utilize useful strategies when comprehension problems arise. In other words, students appear to lack the ability to think about their own thinking. They are not tuned into the inner voice inside their head. As a wise professor once told me, “The difference between a skilled reader and an unskilled reader is their metacognitive abilities. A skilled reader knows when she stops understanding the text and knows strategies she can use to help herself better understand. An unskilled reader is unaware when she stops understanding and continues to read despite not really knowing what is happening in the book.”

If weak metacognitive abilities and a lack of awareness of useful reading strategies are really at the heart of (or at least a major contributing factor to) why students are disengaging from books, then it is our responsibility to explicitly teach children how to be metacognitive when they read. And we must teach them practical strategies they can use that will help them to be more successful in solving the problems they experience.

And from all of that thinking, our research project was born. We have set out to determine the current level at which our students are functioning. Not each child’s current reading level. Not the children’s lexiles, NWEA scores, or number of words read in a minute. While all of that information may have its purpose, we have set out to determine something that is rarely measured on any standardized assessment. We want to know how well children are able to think about their thinking. We want to know how efficiently and effectively students are able to utilize strategies when they are reading. And even more importantly, we want to measure how much growth a child demonstrates in those areas when explicit instruction on metacognition and reading strategies is given.

It feels daunting and overwhelming. Doubts about my ability to provide the necessary instruction keep creeping into my mind. And the curricular demands of the school year threaten to steal the time needed to provide this level of explicit instruction. But it is necessary. We need to raise children who not only know how to read, but children who are readers. Children who are able to think deeply about books, who become lost in stories, and who grow as empathetic human beings. The stakes are high and we are eager to begin!

“The beginning of the book was kind of boring. But once I got to the middle it got interesting and then I couldn’t put it down. Now I want to read all the books in the series.”

The above is a quote from my 10 year old son. He shared this insight into his reading life when I was snuggling with him in bed last night. Bedtime is the time of day when I hear his most interesting observations on life. This statement really struck me. This type of persistence is what I desire for all of my students. The ability to know when to keep persevering in a book. The patience needed to get into a story a bit before writing it off as being too boring.

My son is a typical 4th grade boy. He loves building with LEGOS, riding his bike, playing outside, and roughhousing with his brother. His perspective on school is basically that it is necessary. An obligation. In other words, he has been counting the days until summer vacation since January. But somehow, despite his apathetic relationship with school, he is beginning to turn into a reader. More and more I see him choosing to spend his time reading and talking to me about books he is reading.

So what happened that allowed my son to gain the necessary drive to keep going on a book in order to get into the story? And why do so many of my students start and abandon books at a record speed? For starters, my 10 year old didn’t experience difficulty learning how to read. That for sure made things easier. But there is more to it than that. He’s had a fourth grade teacher who values reading and gives her students lots of opportunities to read books, talk about books, and share books with others. If he knows that a friend of his loved a book, he is more motivated to keep reading despite obstacles. We share books together frequently at home, so he equates hearing a good story with the warm feeling of cuddling together on the couch. And finally, we have books everywhere at our house and make frequent trips to the library.

After all this reflection, I’ve come to two conclusions. Reading is a social activity. If we want our young children to persevere through texts, they need to know that they are not doing it alone. There are others reading the books as well, they can talk through the story with a teacher or adult, or they have had friends who have recommended the book. And second, access and choice in text will foster the engagement needed to persevere. When a child has chosen the book (maybe with help or guidance from an adult) or a book has been recommended to the child by a friend, he will have a much greater desire to finish the book successfully. With these foundations in place, I believe that all children can successfully put in the energy needed to finish and enjoy good stories.

Springtime. It conjures up so many feelings. I made it through another long, cold, Michigan winter! I can’t wait to start digging in my flower beds again. And the excitement that long, lazy days at Lake Michigan are almost here.

But springtime also brings feelings of anxiety. Are my students ready for the next grade? Have I prepared them enough? How can I keep them reading this summer? And the most dreaded question of all: How will they do on the standardized test?

I spend my days teaching young children how to read. The children I am blessed to call my students are young boys and girls who experience difficulty with reading. The reasons for their difficulties are as varied as the backgrounds they come from. But they all have that one characteristic in common- learning to read has not been easy. The children I spend my days with are joyful, hardworking, smart, and creative. Many smile when I come to their classrooms to fetch them for their reading lesson. They love to give hugs, wave to me in the hallways, and tell me stories about their lives. They bring me so much joy.

As every teacher knows, springtime may be the season of new life, but it is also the season of testing. Testing. That dreaded word in every child’s vocabulary. A necessary evil that does have some benefits but can also be the cause of so much stress. And the sensitive souls I call my students often experience a lot of that stress during the testing season. Every spring I become so excited when I see the growth my students have made only to be deflated when I see that many of them may have grown but are still performing below grade level. I know we have reaped many benefits from our hard work during the school year, but I want so badly for all of my students to be reading as successfully as their peers.

And so I choose, with much effort, to look at victories that aren’t measured by a test. Victories such as the child who says, “Mrs. S., I could only read short boring books in 2nd grade but now that I am a better reader I can read longer, more exciting books.” Or the mom who writes to say that her child can now read the menu selections at the restaurant by herself. Or the 4th grader who proudly states that he can join his class for lit circles because he doesn’t need as much support from an adult anymore. Those are the true victories. Those are the moments I will hold dear this spring.