Cris Tovani's book is a very insightful and helpful collection of anecdotes and strategies designed to highlight the importance of reading and how to teach students to read better.
One of the first things that really caught my attention was the level of student disarmament and the book-wide emphasis on student engagement. These are students that have often disengaged in middle school and "faked it" up until the point you meet them. As described in the early part of the book, most of them had been subjected to negative experiences with reading and had disengaged to the point of being hostile at reading. Their previous classes never tackled reading comprehension because they assumed that all of the students could read, so their previous classes focused on content and left struggling readers increasingly behind. By addressing this concern immediately, Tovani also includes the autobiographical aspect at the start of a class to increase the community feeling and created a positive learning environment in which the students could learn together, much like her reading group in which she had successfully learned to read in her 30s.
Even at the collegiate level, reading comprehension skills may not necessarily be there. On the extreme end, I know that a large number of students in our class (my prognosis from talking with them) glanced over, skipped over parts, or didn't read the Paulo Freire chapters because of their difficulty.
Another great aspect of this text is the wealth of techniques and strategies that Tovani writes about which can be used to great effect for increasing student reading comprehension. It is easy to discount some of these strategies from my perspective as someone who comprehends at a decent level and it provokes me to want to resort to methods that enable my reading comprehension, but different methods could work for struggling students.
Overall, I am enjoying this text and look forward to finishing it over this weekend.
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