"I read it, but I don't get it" - Cris Tovani

First off, I love this book.
How he started his classroom by telling the students basically how stupid book reports were and how he even used to cheat reading too was great. It was interesting to hear about his way. I guess thinking about it, my way of 'cheating reading' was skimming. I skimmed the first chapter, then one or two in the middle, and then the end. That is how I used to write book reports. Unless I was actually interested in the book, then I read the entire thing. But to be honest, my skimming is what got me through most of my humanities classes here at Eastern. One thing Tovani mentioned was seven strategies used by successful readers "existing knowledge, ask questions, draw inferences, monitor their comprehension, "fix-up" strategies when meaning breaks down, determine what is important, and synthesize information". I have actually been over these strategies before in my ESL classes, even though they were explicitly said like they are in this book. Even right now, we are talking about the steps of pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading and activities and things that you can do in each step. Which is awesome because that relates so much to that article we read from the Universities of California. So I have all of this background knowledge from different classes and main topics for me to connect and even apply to my own classroom.
Along with the strategies, he also talked about six cues that readers use, which I actually really liked. They are graphophonic cues, lexical cues, syntactic cues, semantic cues, schematic cues, and pragmatic cues. Again, this relates back to my ESL classes and how English language learners learn to read. The connections from this book to my classes were numerous and helpful. They may even be more helpful for that class than this class.

Tovani mentioned in chapter three in the subsection "Thinking Aloud" that "thinking aloud show students how an expert reader makes sense of the text. By sharing your thinking out loud, you make the elusive process of comprehension more concrete." (26). Again, with my connection to ESL, I can understand this and the fact that it also provides that auditory/visual effect for reading. If you are reading something that is also on a screen, you can talk out loud as you question things when you pre-read. One example would be the titles and sub-titles. Before you start reading, you can go over the title and sub-titles found within the text and draw inferences maybe make predictions, maybe even talk about it and think about what you already know relating to them.

One concept that was widely used throughout the book was self-monitoring. How students need to be in charge of their own reading and be "conscious of the thinking taking place inside his head." (35).  Throughout any lesson, we have to make sure students are the spotlight, not ourselves. We should be trying our hardest to make students more aware of the capability they have on their own and the responsibility they have. Students are in charge of their own choices and their own learning. It's just like that saying, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink", you can give students everything they need to succeed, but you can't make them succeed, that is up to them. You are just there to support and set them up for success.

Tovani provided an appendix full of worksheets that he personally used within his classroom. Just looking through them, I can already see the potential for many of them to be applied to my current edTPA. I enjoyed the fact that they are focused on the students' connections, inferences, predictions, thoughts, and opinions. All of the worksheets he provided could encourage students to do these things on their own when reading on their own later in life. These worksheets connect with the strategies he provided within the first chapter. They are a great way of explicitly showing the students how to use the strategies he gives them.