I’m having a good time working with the ideas I’ve gleaned from Vicki Vinton’s wonderful book, What Readers Really Do.

Details matter

One idea I’ve tried to run with this year is her very simple (but powerful) idea that reading is primarily an inductive, rather than a deductive process, meaning that we find our way through a piece of writing by noticing what the author says and then create “theories” about what is happening (inferences). We also hold open the idea that our theories are rough draft understandings. She has developed a simple T-chart that she calls a Know – Wonder chart to support this thinking and make it visible. I’ve used it extensively this year and have seen some good thinking result from it. We are starting to form some habits of mind as we practice noticing in many different situations with many different texts.

Read-aloud as laboratory

One of the places we’ve practiced this is in our class read aloud. Right now I’m reading Bruce Coville’s, Goblins in the Castle. I enjoy the characters, William and Igor, as well as the nice marriage of humor with kind of creepy description. It’s a really fun book to read out loud to third graders. They fall in love with Igor and, if the North Tower chapter coincides with Halloween as it did this year, that’s an extra special bonus!

At the end of this post is a link to a short (4:37) audio clip of a conversation that started our read aloud on October 29th this year. We began our discussion with reminding ourselves of some of the conversation we’ve had about the book as a way for us to get into it again. It’s an example of how we are trying to use details to puzzle out the meaning of the story. Here’s what I learned from listening to the clip.

Details are BUILDING BLOCKS of thinking

Vinton’s ideas about inductive reading are really a nice entry into the text for all sorts of kids. No matter what their experience with texts, they are able to notice things. By noticing things, and talking about them together, the kids are beginning to learn what is important to attend to and what is less important. Like learning any skill, one learns to think by practicing thinking! Winnowing the important from the less important is a difficult concept to teach, in my experience. The less experienced the reader, of course, the more difficult it is to find the wheat, and different texts hide the grain in different places. I can’t over-emphasize the importance of lots of practice, coupled with some good conversation for learning how to think.

You can hear some of how this conversation works to promote meaning-making in the clip. You’ll hear students bring up ideas and then back them up with details from the story. You’ll also hear one student in particular — in a very loud way!! 🙂 — argue that we don’t have enough information to make a real decision yet about Igor’s character. This is really nice to hear, as third graders often jump to conclusions quite readily when they feel knowing an “answer” is what is valued. A close attention to details seems to help them spend longer in wait-and-see mode. As we practice noticing, it becomes more interesting to gather and put information together as the story unfolds than it is to be the first one to a “right answer.” In fact, I’m noticing that the students don’t worry about the answer being “right” as much as they are interested in trying to fit the details together in a way that makes sense.

Another example of students making meaning (not in this clip, unfortunately) was a conversation early in the story about the unfortunate disappearance of William’s nurse, who fell into the moat and was never seen again. This was surprising information in a story for third graders (rather gruesome, I suppose), so the children hung onto it as being very important for quite a ways into the story. I think it makes perfect sense to hang onto something that is surprising and different. I resisted entering in to challenge their belief that Nurse might return, that she wasn’t really dead, or somehow that she might be found down in the dungeon as Igor’s wife. (Yes. That was one “theory”, because, after all, wouldn’t be great if William could somehow get a “family out of all this?”) Finally, though, they had to give up on the Nurse coming back into the story because, as one student said, “If the Nurse was coming back, we would have some hint by now that she was still around!”

After they gave up on Nurse, we could discuss why Coville might have introduced her and then done away with her so quickly. No one came to a conclusion about the importance of Nurse to the story, but we did talk about how this detail added a sense of loss and mystery. Some thought that maybe the author wanted us to feel William’s loneliness even more deeply. We are letting our judgment sit for right now, until we get more information. Maybe we’ll come back to our questions when the story is over.

Learning to talk and listen

A second benefit of this inductive approach (and one that you can also hear in the clip) is that it gives us some concrete details to think about together as we learn how to talk to and learn from each other. We’ve had some very interesting discussions about what details might mean, which are important, and why they are important. In the audio clip, you can hear examples of the way kids are adding onto each others’ thoughts, even using words like: “I’d like to add onto what X said.” What is exciting for me is to see that they are doing this because conversation helps them think, which is really why we do that kind of talk in the first place. Academic conversation isn’t just an exercise for them, now. There appears to be real meaning being created and that gives the conversation a reason for being.

There’s more to think about in this clip, and from the longer clip (not linked) from which I drew this excerpt. I’m still listening to it to help me understand how I can do a better job, but I offer it to you as an imperfect window into our classroom.

Here’s the link to the Coville read aloud (4:37). It takes you to an outside page where I can post video and audio. Also, it’s a classroom not a studio, so…sometimes you have to concentrate to hear what is said. 🙂