Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters - Chapter 3 and Conclusion
Author: Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst Ed.D.
Beers, Kylene, and Robert E. Probst . “Chapter 3 The Responsible Reader" and "Conclusion.” Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters, Scholastic, New York, New York, 2017, pp. 30–43 and 158-163.
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Chapter 3 The Responsible Reader
OBVIOUSLY, THE READER’S RESPONSIVENESS to her own feelings is necessary but insufficient, just as we know the ability to decode is necessary but insufficient. It is the response that connects the reader to the text and demands that she attend to the words on the page. The responsive reader must also be a responsible reader.
She must do more than simply respond. She must—if she is to be responsible— examine the feelings awakened by the text. She should question the thoughts of her own that the text has called to mind, assess the writer’s evidence and logic, speculate about his purposes and his biases, and finally come to some reasoned and responsible conclusions about the text and her reading of it. The response is the beginning, but only the beginning.
It’s pointless to collect information if you do nothing with it. It contributes nothing to your intellectual or emotional growth to notice that you have responded in a particular way to a text, but not give the significance of that response any further thought. It is a waste of time to hear what someone says about a text and then to either reject it out of hand or accept it uncritically. If the text is to provide anything beyond idle amusement, a distraction from the tasks and problems that confront us, or–worse–a way for others to manipulate us, then there must be an element of responsibility in the act of reading.
Responsibility to the Text
Take a look at two conversations, the first between sixth graders. These students are discussing a line from Chapter 11 of Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.
Brendon: Why did it say, “It was a metal thing”?
Sharon: It didn’t say that. He’s in the wilderness. There isn’t any metal. Except his hatchet. Was it talking about his hatchet?
Brendon: No. But it did too say it was a metal thing. See right here. Page 98. Oh. Wait. It says, “It was a mental thing.” Oh. That’s really different.
And now this one between fifth graders… These students are discussing an article from the September 5, 2016, issue of Junior Scholastic titled “China’s Left-Behind Children.”
Lila: That article, about the left-behind children in China. I didn’t know anything about that.
Ellie: Me neither. I thought it was good that the Chinese government was going to try to do something.
Lila They won’t do anything.
Ellie: That’s not what it said.
Lila: That doesn’t matter. Just because the government says they are doing something doesn’t mean anything.
One aspect of responsibility, and the one that has perhaps been most heavily emphasized by state standards, is responsibility to the text. While we, of course, want students who pay attention to what’s in the text, we know that the most responsible reading requires that students pay attention to their own responses, their own thoughts, their own reactions. Responsible reading is rooted in a reader’s response, and that response attends to both the words on the page and the thoughts the reader brings with her.
Yet, the attention to the reader’s response has sometimes been seen as a dismissal of the words on the page. Fearing that, some advocate encouraging students to focus their attention on what is there, in print, on the page. If a response should be offered, it is, too often, seen as an unimportant idea, one to be heard and then discounted.
Reading responsibly requires attending to what’s on the page. Such attention does not mean the reader’s responses should be relegated to mere opinion. Both what’s on the page and what’s in the head are important. Focusing on the reader to the neglect of the text, or focusing on the text to the neglect of the reader, is problematic. To encourage and expect nothing more of students than unexamined statements of feelings is to encourage intellectual laziness. And to encourage only extracting of information, memorizing of details, and the like, is to reduce reading to an unrewarding exercise.
In an effort to encourage responsible attention to the text, the profession has sometimes allowed us to reduce the reader to a subordinate, and almost insignificant, position. In an effort to encourage students to read carefully and closely, we may have suggested that the reader’s job is little more than that of extracting, accepting, and assimilating what the text offers. It seems to us that responsibility to the text might be differently conceived.
Certainly it involves trying to figure out and acknowledge what the text says. To impute to the text any assertions it does not make is simply to perpetrate a fraud. To deny or ignore assertions that the text does make is equally irresponsible. Those intellectual failings become more obvious-and dangerous-when confronting significant issues. Texts dealing with human rights, climate change, clean water, and other such important matters may have great consequence in our lives. They merit serious and responsible attention. And to think our students don’t consider such issues is wrong. In Chapter 12, we share tough issues wrong. In Chapter 12, we share tough issues students want to discuss. Our democracy is best served when we encourage students to begin at an early age to pay close attention both to what the text says and to what they feel and think as they read. Not one or the other, but both.
Learning to Question the Text
What we see is that our young readers are inclined not to question a text. Parents and teachers and other adults they trust tell them things they need to know. Why wouldn’t a text do the same? Consider this conversation with a second grader. He’s discussing an article he just read titled “Are Trampolines Dangerous?”
Kylene: What did the author decide? Are trampolines too dangerous to jump on?
Darius: I think it said too dangerous.
Kylene: Why is that?
Darius: It said that the little girl broke her tooth. And now her parents won’t let her jump on her friend’s trampoline. My friend has a trampoline and my parents won’t let me jump on it. They say it is too dangerous. They heard about a boy, he was jumping, and he fell off and now he can’t walk.
Kylene: Did the author mention how to make jumping on a trampoline safer?
Darius: [Darius looks back through the text.] Yes. You can just have one person jump at a time. And no flips.
Kylene: So, does this author think they are safe to jump on?
Darius: They aren’t. You can’t jump on them.
Kylene: I agree with your opinion and what your parents have told . you. But does the author have an opinion?
Darius: He thinks they are bad.
Kylene: What about this section where he discusses how to make jumping on them be safer?
Darius: I don’t know. Maybe he is saying they could be safe. I think the author maybe he doesn’t know.
Darius is young and he’s just beginning to learn how to examine a text. We aren’t concerned that it took a nudge for him to recognize that his opinion of the danger level of trampolines wasn’t emphatically shared by the author. Asking younger students to critically examine their response requires we stay alert to the comments they make. When students make assertions that are not supported by the text, rephrasing those comments and asking them to find support in the text help them understand what’s in the text and what is not. It’s far too easy, for children and adults, to add to the text what is not there. Asking for evidence to support a response is always important.
We’re more concerned with the following conversation with a fourth grader about an article regarding headphones and loud music. This student has decided what the author believes based solely on what he, the reader, thinks.
In this article (“Doctor Says It’s Best to Keep Volume at Medium or Lower with Ear Buds’), an ear surgeon outlines the pros and cons of three types of headphones that people wear while listening to music. His final conclusion is that there are benefits and problems with all types of headphones and the best thing to do is to keep music at a low volume.
Kylene: Did anything surprise you about what Dr. Pearlman said?
Luke: I was surprised that he said it doesn’t matter if you wear headphones or ear buds. They are both okay.
Kylene: Did Dr. Pearlman say they are both okay?
Luke: Yeah. They are both okay.
Kylene: Can you show me where it says that?
Luke: It says, “Pearlman can’t tell patients what kinds of headphones to use.”
Kylene: What does the next sentence say?
Luke: “All of them have different benefits and problems.”
Kylene: Did you read the different benefits and downsides?
Luke: He doesn’t say don’t wear ear buds so I wear mine.
Kylene: What did he say about the volume of music?
Luke: He doesn’t like music.
Kylene: I didn’t see that. Where did you find that?
Luke: Well, he says to keep the volume down.
Kylene: Right.
Luke: Everyone who likes music likes loud music.
Luke’s opinion about the value of loud music was so strong that he drew conclusions about Dr. Pearlman that the text did not support.
While Darius was willing to distinguish between what the text says and what he thought, Luke was not. We aren’t asking readers to let go of their own opinions, but we do want them to recognize the distinction between what they bring to the text and what the text has brought to them. And, when warranted, we want them to be willing to change their minds. When readers are aware of the contribution both they and the text make, comments might look like this:
- This word caused my confusion.
- This assertion caused me to distrust the author.
- This allayed my doubts and convinced me that the author may be right.
- This makes me suspect of the author’s intentions.
Okay. We know of no elementary-aged child, well, actually no child of any age, who will use this language. Here’s what you’re more likely to hear and how you might respond:
We encourage this responsibility to the text by asking kids to keep three big questions in mind
- What surprised me?
-
What did the author think
I already know? - What changed, challenged, or confirmed my thinking?
These prompts most certainly require that students think about their own responses, but they are responses that come directly from the text. Don’t be reluctant to ask children to “Show me what in the text caused that surprise” or “Where did the author need to tell you more?”
Responsibility to Oneself
That close attention to the words-the responsibility a reader shows to the text-implies and requires a responsibility to oneself as well as the words on the page. That responsibility consists not only of a willingness to acknowledge and defend one’s own thoughts and values, but to change thinking when evidence or reason dictates. A second grader, who read a text about the critical importance of bees in the food chain, adamantly contended, “I don’t like bees because they sting.
We don’t need them.” His strong feelings about bees led him to dismiss what he might have learned if he had read more responsibly. Equally irresponsible is the third grader who read about climate change and responded, “I don’t believe in it. My friend said it isn’t real.” If that child wants to argue with the science presented in the article, that’s one thing. But to dismiss the article because it contradicts what a friend has previously stated is not responsible reading.
Our students are not too young to learn to respect both the words on the page and their own thoughts and values. We seldom have difficulty persuading them to hang on tightly to their own ideas. They come to class, too often, ready to assert that whatever they think, whatever they have come to believe, is flatly, simply, indisputably true and correct. They are often much more willing to defend their thoughts than to reconsider and perhaps modify them. And they should, of course,
defend and protect what is reasoned and defensible. But to hold on to ideas when evidence and reason suggest that a change is sensible is to fail to be responsible to oneself. Somehow, we need to teach them to value change. Not change for changes sake, but change that results from more information, a richer understanding, a sharpened perspective.
They should begin learning, as early as possible, not to misrepresent the text. To do so is to fail in their responsibility to the text, certainly, but even more significantly it is to fail in their responsibility to themselves. To assert that the text says what it does not say, or that it does not say what it, in fact, does say, is to deny themselves the opportunity to think or to learn. Regardless of their age, students are not too young to learn to defend their position when it is defensible and to change it when new information, insight, or reasoning persuades them.
Responsibility to Others
The apparent increase in what has come to be called “fake news” makes the issue of responsibility to others even more important. It has perhaps always been easy to allow ourselves to be led astray by inaccurate or dishonest texts, especially when our emotions are aroused.
If we find that a text angers us, or, on the other hand, greatly pleases us, then we are likely to react quickly, perhaps without checking to see if either the anger or the pleasure is warranted. Now, however, not only can we be led astray by irresponsible texts, but we have the capacity, through social media, to help that text lead hundreds or thousands of others astray. The simple act of retweeting or sharing something online can vastly compound and extend the damage.
News: Fake or Real?
We could spend chapters discussing the differences between news that is reported and news that is invented; in parsing the difference between false and fake. We could take up the struggles that social media sites now face as they decide how to avoid promoting fake news without acting as self-appointed censors. Our right to free speech is a valued freedom in this country and any group that decides to ban this news or that news because the site is deemed “fake” will face scrutiny. The lines between satire, bias, humor, falsehood, and deceit, and how a text is labeled, will grow blurrier as news sources worry more about high ratings than reliable reporting.
Satire has, of course, been a part of our discourse for a long time and most of us have probably had the unsettling experience of momentarily being taken in by something in The Onion or by a Borowitz tongue-in-cheek column.
There is some satisfaction in seeing through the satirist’s invention to the truth that lies beneath it or behind it. The satirist expects the reader to be sharp enough to see the joke, recognize the exaggeration and invention, laugh at the humor in it all, and not be corrupted or misled by the fictitious elements.
Fake news, however, seems to have gone one or two steps further.
It has moved across the line from humorous exaggeration intended to amuse and promote thought, into lies and deceptions quite likely intended to make the author money by inviting readers to click on the site and therefore attracting advertisers (Dewey, 2014; Silverman, 2016). Where the writer of satire relies on the reader’s intelligence and skepticism, the writer of fake news seems to rely instead on the reader’s gullibility and laziness.
Whatever the writer’s motivations may be, the reader clearly bears the responsibility for avoiding gullibility and laziness. If the reader is taken in by invented news stories, he has obviously failed himself. And if he participates in circulating them, through sharing, reacting, and commenting, then he has failed in his responsibility to others.
Social Media and the News
Responsible reading of the news is more critical now than ever before because so much of the news we all read comes to us from social media sites. In 2016, 62 percent of U.S. adults reported they get at least some of their news from social media, with 18 percent saying all their news comes from social media (Pew Research Center, 2016). We know there are days when we are part of that 18 percent. We’re fast out the door in the morning, quick into a school with kids or a workshop with teachers, then off to an airplane to do it again the next day in another city. If the plane has an Internet connection, we log on and try to catch up on what’s been happening in the world. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter become our window to the universe.
On those days, we’ve discovered that there was a missing Red Rump Tarantula in Brooklyn; that Tim Horton’s will stop serving pork due to Muslim demands; that Pope Francis endorsed Trump for President; that a protester at a Trump rally was paid $3,500. All of those stories, all of them, were fake. They were indeed “stories.” We both fell for one of them as we wondered just what would happen when that Red Rump Tarantula had her babies, which was the reason the owner gave for posting the warning signs about her throughout a certain area of Brooklyn.
On social media sites, the “news” is quickly disseminated. We may see that 3.5k have shared it, another 1K have commented, and that it’s trending. Surely all those people can’t be duped. This story must be the real thing. The danger in assuming that the story is real means we must put more effort into the reading of news; we must work harder, something that’s tough to do at the end of a long day. But we can’t look at a news item and presume truth. Instead, we must come to news ready to sort, to cull, to mull, to test, to confirm, to question, to challenge, to discard—and that’s in addition to just reading the content. If we don’t, we find ourselves wondering if that escaped tarantula in Brooklyn could find itself in Texas or Florida. If fake news writers are counting on people to be dumb, then we must be smart. We must muster the stamina to be responsible.
Helping Kids Spot Fake News
Perhaps rather than wondering which story we should approach skeptically–this one yes, that one no-we might teach our readers to do three things as they look at any news stories, especially when they begin to look at stories online. Let’s teach them to ask themselves:
- How does it look?
- What does it say?
- How does it make me feel?
How Does It Look?
When we ask kids to think about how a story looks, we want them checking out the headlines, the photos, and the URL. All caps in headlines, or headlines filled with extreme language, photos that present unlikely information, and URLs that don’t end in .com, gov, edu, org, or net are worth reconsidering. For example, the URL abcnews.com.co takes us to a source of fake news. That “co” ending should raise a red flag. A quick search of “how to identify fake URLS” will show you several articles that help you learn to identify fake website addresses.
What Does It Say?
When we ask students to think about what the news story says, we want them to ask themselves questions about the topic, about the language, and about the author. If the topic doesn’t seem credible, it might not be. We should have realized that a story about a lost pregnant tarantula just didn’t seem right. Or if the language is extreme, then there’s probably a problem. And if the author can’t be found or there’s a name but you can’t find out information about the author, think twice before sharing.
How Does It Make You Feel?
Finally, when we ask students to think about how the article makes them feel, we want them to be aware of particular responses: If it makes them excessively angry, scared, or, on the other hand, reaffirmed and smug, then they ought to do some checking before sharing.
When students begin to read news stories wondering how it looks, what it says, and how it makes them feel, we tell them that if any response raises a concern, then the first thing they should do is step away from the share button! Next, they should look to see if other news sources are reporting the same information. If not, then they should not trust the story. Or,
they can head to a source such as Snopes.com to see if the information can be verified.
Until we teach students to read responsibly, we run the risk of being a nation of readers who not only harm themselves, but potentially harm others as they share not just misinformation but blatant lies.
Turn and Talk
- Would you and your colleagues say that responsibility in reading must be both to the text and to oneself, or exclusively to the text?
- What’s the result for our society if we fail to raise readers who are both responsive and responsible?
- How much are you influenced by fake news? What’s happening in your school to help teach your students how to critically evaluate news sources?
- Would you say that the spread of fake news is a threat to our democracy?
Conclusion: And Where the Story Goes Next
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN with you and your students in mind. We don’t have our own classrooms anymore, but we think it is critical that if we write about teaching then we must actually teach.
So, when principals or teachers invite us into classrooms, we go. We teach kids. We try something new. We sit shoulder to shoulder with you when the lesson turns out poorly-because that sometimes happens— to figure out what to do better next time. We try to answer your questions about how something worked when the lesson goes well. We learn beside you, and that learning always informs our work. Without you, without your willingness to open your doors to us, we could not do what we do.
While our work in multiple classrooms does not give us what the majority of you have—a year of getting to know one group of children well—it does give us the chance to know what’s happening in schools throughout this nation. Because of work that carries us to rural schools and urban schools, to primary schools and high schools, to the poorest schools and some of the wealthiest schools, to public schools and charter schools and private schools, to the smallest districts with only two or three schools and to the largest districts that bus more kids daily than are found in some states, we have a view of what’s happening across the nation that we know others might lack. That perspective demands we reject sweeping claims from any politician or policy maker who declares our nation’s schools are failing. Such generalized indictments are not only wrong, they are shameful. Once those men and women have walked our nation’s schools’ hallways, taught in those classrooms, worked with teachers, listened to principals, and sat beside students as they teach them something new and difficult, then they can make proclamations; until then, we’d prefer they not.
Do we see problems? Of course we do. We know you do, too. Do we meet some teachers who should leave this profession? Yes. Maybe you’ve met some of them, too. Are there schools that are struggling? Yes. But is the whole system failing? No. As our friend and colleague Hal Foster said, “America’s schools work; they just don’t work for all kids.” And that’s the problem. They don’t work for all kids. A great education shouldn’t be a result of living in the right neighborhood. It shouldn’t happen because a student is assigned to one particular teacher. And it
certainly shouldn’t be left to the luck of the right lottery ticket that lets this student but not that one into the better school on the other side of town. A childs education is too important to leave to chance.
We want to ensure that when people read about the successes of a school, those successes are not tied to a zip code. All children in every school deserve an education that inspires curiosity, encourages creativity, requires critical thinking, urges collaboration, and nurtures compassion. All children deserve robust school and classroom libraries.
All children deserve a curriculum filled with fine arts. All deserve science labs, engineering labs, coding labs, and language labs. All deserve history classes that explore the past so that we understand the present and can perhaps avoid pitfalls in the future, and they deserve math classes that develop their ability to reason as well as compute. All deserve language arts classes filled with purposeful writing, choice reading, and compelling talk. All deserve physical education classes that let children run, play, and develop strong bodies. All deserve buildings that all too often only our wealthiest enjoy. We have never understood a city that will allow some schools to sit in abject disrepair while others, perhaps only a mile or two away, look like the campuses of small elite colleges.
We write this conclusion thinking of Manuel. We met him several years ago, in a school in San Antonio, Texas. The school was in an impoverished neighborhood, and the principal and teachers had worked hard to turn it into nothing short of an oasis. The younger children all but ran into school each day, and even the older ones with their “I’m cool” look, arrived grinning widely. We taught our lesson and thought it went well. After the lesson, all the kids left, except one boy who stayed behind to help us straighten desks.
We had noticed that he had been quiet during class, doing little we had asked. So we thought it interesting that he was now obviously lingering to talk. We asked him how he thought we did teaching the lesson. “Okay, I guess.” We asked him how we could change it, to make it more helpful for other kids. He replied, “I don’t know.” We waited. He finally said, “You seem like nice people and all, but I’m not sure how what you said is going to help me get off this street.” He said that as he raised the Venetian blinds that covered the view of a brightly decorated asphalt lot: the school’s playground.
Beyond that was an empty field that had not been mowed in a while. The buildings across the street were old and some had graffiti on their walls. The area looked tired. We suddenly felt tired, too.
Manuel stood there, not angry, not rude, just resigned. The look in his eyes was a look no kid should have. He went on:
“My parents come here to make sure me and my brothers get a good chance at a better life. They work hard. My dad has two jobs and my mom has a job that is six days a week. I want to do something to help them. I want to help them. But every year is only about make sure you pass the test. I want to do something to help them. I want to get us off this street.”
The dream of one little boy: to help his parents. The dream of two parents: to help their kids. And the place those dreams can come true: in our nation’s schools. But for that to happen, we must begin to think about big issues: the practices we embrace, what relevance really means, how we share books with children, what talk should be in a classroom.
We need to recognize that reading ought to change us. Reading ought to lead to thinking that is disrupting, that shakes us up, that makes us wonder, that challenges us. Such thinking sets us on a path to change, if not the world, then at least ourselves.
Reading as a Changemaker
To change, we have come to believe, is the fundamental reason for reading. And this is what we need to teach our students. If a changemaker-as a person—is one who inspires, who offers creative solutions to social problems, who mentors, who.collaborates-then we see no reason why texts should not be viewed as changemakers.
They can be viewed as changemakers if we recognize that we read for a far more critical reason than to be able to answer someone else’s questions; we read to raise our own questions. We read to explore, to wonder, to grow, to become what we did not even know we might want to be. We read to change.
Change is, at least, the fundamental reason for the serious reading we do. In the realm of nonfiction, it is the reading of (or listening to) political speeches, research articles, commentaries on economic issues, editorials about public policy, and the like. For our youngest students, it is reading to learn about the world and the people in it. All of those texts we read to sharpen our thinking and improve our understanding or, in other words, to change ourselves. The reading we do in those early chapter books and later literary novels and poetry we encounter, from Maurice Sendak to Beverly Cleary to Laurie Halse Anderson and Robert Frost, we do to deepen our insight into ourselves and perhaps into human nature in general. That reading changes us. Or rather, it enables us to change ourselves, because we wouldn’t want to hand over the responsibility for what we become to someone else, whether a persuasive novelist, an eloquent preacher, or a convincing politician.
Presumably, we want to be able to define ourselves, rather than have our lives sketched out for us by someone else. Reading helps us do that, if we approach it open to that possibility.
What should disappoint us the most as teachers is the student who reads only to confirm what he already thinks. That student is likely to become the adult who views only the television channels that tell him he is correct and has no more thinking to do. In the elementary schools, we don’t often read about highly controversial topics and our youngest students probably don’t regularly watch the news. We don’t expect elementary school children to think through the complexities of difficult global social issues or to negotiate the political choices demanded by such events as elections. But we can nonetheless encourage them toward the approach to texts that will make them more responsive, responsible, and compassionate; we can recognize that they want to think about important issues that affect their neighborhoods and schools.
Perhaps, therefore, the most important thing we do with children is to ask them to consider how they might have revised their thinking as a result of reading. “How has this book or story touched you, made you think again about who you are or what you value? How has this text changed your thinking?” Such questions, in whatever form is most suitable for your students, may be the critical ones. These questions offer an invitation to make the reading meaningful for the reader. And that, after all, is what we should be seeking.
The World of Possible
Many years ago, Louise Rosenblatt said that she wrote Literature as Exploration as a “defense of democracy.” By that she meant, we think, that readers who respected both the text and themselves were essential to preserve a democratic society. Our democracy, after all, is in some sense created and maintained in language. The Constitution, for instance, is expected to control and direct many of the nation’s important decisions. We don’t vest that power in an individual-a dictator or monarch-but rather we require an individual to swear that he or she will be bound by those words. Amending them, when it is found necessary to do so, is an arduous process, in part because as a society we respect those words and want them to govern and protect us.
Words matter in a democracy, and thus it is vitally important that all members of the society respect them and attend closely to them. We will be in jeopardy if the leaders we select use words carelessly or deceitfully, if their words or if their statements are devoid of evidence or rationality. But an educated citizenry, a populace who expects and demands clear and honest discourse, may be able to reject those who would use language to mislead, inflame, or enslave.
Protecting our democracy begins with a respect for the power of words. And where better to develop that respect than in a good book?
If the thinking one does while reading that book disrupts complacency, if that thinking is responsive and responsible, if that thinking encourages compassion for others around us, both near and far, and a willingness to at least hear their stories or arguments, then we will be closer to creating the participants in our society that our democracy not only deserves but demands.
Ultimately, we are teaching children to read the text of their own lives. We want them open to possibility; open to ideas; open to new evidence that encourages a change of opinion. We want them using reading and writing as tools that help them in the re-vision of their own lives. We want them to have a better tomorrow. You are, for so many of these children, their best hope as schools stand as gatekeepers of a better tomorrow. As always, we are proud to stand beside you, though truly, as we have said before, we stand in awe of you. And we are excited to see what you do next.
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