Reading Nonfiction (part 3): Building Models

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Photo Credit: Mike via Compfight

I’ve been trying to puzzle out why nonfiction reading, whether it be my reading aloud to the kids or our small group work with nonfiction text, looks and sounds so different than the fiction we read and talk about. While the kids in my classroom like to read nonfiction, and enjoy when I read it aloud, we don’t seem to have the depth of conversation, we don’t linger in the text or the idea behind the text nearly as long as when we read fiction together. I do more talking and explaining, and the kids have a less “speculative” stance than happens during our talk about fiction.

I’d like that to change.

I’ve been thinking about my own reading practices to help me figure out what I do that makes nonfiction not just compelling, but something that I mull over, toss around, linger over. I do a lot of nonfiction reading. In fact, there was a time not long ago that I just wasn’t so interested in fiction. (That’s changed!) How can I help students feel the warmth, to draw closer to the fire? 1

One thing I do that kids don’t do in my classroom is create a model of the ideas I’ve encountered in the text.

The idea of creating a model comes from scientists, who often create models of complex phenomena to help them mull things over a bit. Sometimes these are computer models (my partner is working with a team of geographers to map various vegetation-types that have occurred under different climate regimes since the last Ice Age), sometimes they are conceptual models (say, for instance, the origin of dogs based on DNA evidence, known behavior patterns of wolves, and archeological evidence.)

The thing with models is that they operate like a kind of “rough draft” that Vicki Vinton and Dorothy Barnhouse talk about in their book, What Readers Really Do. Both models and rough drafts are based on the best available evidence and are mutable; as new evidence is acquired, they change.

What makes model creation just a bit different is that they often are ways to take complex ideas and make them simpler to understand and play with. Models allow scientists to engage in some “If…, then…”-type discussion. These discussions then reinforce parts of the model, or show the weak areas. Discussion occurs during the creation of the model (lots and lots of clear description) and when scientists poke and prod the model to detect and shore up weak areas.

Perhaps our discussion could be enhanced by making explicit what scientists do? If so, we’d need to spend time talking/creating a model and clearly describing what is happening with each part. We might need to look at our model and do some “If…, then…” thinking to see what new information we might need so we could test our model, and explore the weak areas. Finally, as we gained new knowledge we would need to talk about how that changed our model.

Could I do that kind of thinking with nonfiction texts? It might be interesting to try.

Footnote

  1. For an example of how I’ve created a model from nonficiton text, check out this post about Dan Willingham’s book and how it has helped me understand how people learn. I’ve presented a version of this model to the kids and we use it to help us be more strategic about our learning.

2 thoughts on “Reading Nonfiction (part 3): Building Models

    • I’ve been following your work with the illustrate note taking and am really intrigued. I suspect that these two emerge from the same place and can walk together in a similar direction.

      I’m starting to see that the what is important (remember that book?) about this kind of reading is to slow down to notice, to look with all of one’s being, but also, crucially, to connect what we see and to map what is known and unknown. I think I have a post about this in me this weekend from some work we’ve been doing with the wordless graphic novel, The Arrival, by Shaun Tan.

      As always, I’m inspired by the work you are doing!

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