If I had to name the ONE book that has most influenced my teaching practices in guiding students through challenging texts, it would have to be Deeper Reading by Kelly Gallagher. A high school English teacher, presenter, instructional coach, and author of a number of books, Kelly Gallagher is well known for his educational leadership in English and Language Arts instruction. In this book, he presents specific strategies that teachers can use to help students better comprehend and appreciate more advanced works of literature.
If your curriculum includes novel studies or advanced literature of any kind, I think you’ll find the strategies align well with the tools of depth and complexity. There is also an entire chapter devoted to the planning of deeper reading lessons, with an emphasis on backward planning.
With colleagues, several years ago, I participated in a Deeper Reading book study, and each week I returned to my classroom with new ideas. I’ll share just two take-aways that changed the way I helped my students navigate through more advanced literature and nonfiction.
FOCUSING THE READER
An entire chapter in the book is devoted to emphasizing the importance of preparing students prior to reading a challenging passage, poem, or chapter. Although the use of “anticipatory” strategies is well established, tailoring a particular strategy to the reading for the day is not necessarily something I’d considered. One strategy, called WORD SCRAMBLE PREDICTION, is especially effective before reading a climactic chapter with students. Here’s how it works: Create a list of a dozen or so key words, all of which are found in the chapter or reading. Scramble the words so that they are not in the same order as they appear in the text. Then, give students five minutes to write predictions of what will take place in the chapter or story. Allow several volunteers to share before actually reading the text. When I tried this, my students couldn’t wait to see if their predictions were even close! (NOTE: I also used this strategy once in a staff development meeting and it turns out that teachers become highly engaged, too, when this is used prior to reading text!)
This anticipatory strategy is just one example of how to get readers focused; others include suggestions for student collaboration and discussion. The explanations in the book of how to effectively use each strategy set it apart. It’s easy to overlook this important stage in presenting challenging text, but I was convinced, and I’ve returned to this chapter often in preparing novel studies.
USING METAPHORS TO DEEPEN COMPREHENSION
Chapter Five of the book is devoted to the value of “bringing metaphorical thinking into the teaching of literature.” There are examples of how to introduce metaphorical language and descriptions of metaphorical graphic organizers that help students analyze, on a deeper level, characters, setting, plot and structure of a text.
After reading this chapter, I decided to introduce my 5th-grade gifted students to metaphorical thinking by sharing the poem “O, Captain, My Captain,” which is usually introduced in middle or high school. I felt the poem would provide just the right amount of challenge, and I thought it would be fun to guide them in analyzing the literal meaning of the words before revealing the extended metaphor. And it WAS fun! Students enjoy lessons with a twist or a surprise ending, and this became a favorite lesson of mine.
You can find the lesson plan here. Surprisingly, in the three years I taught 8th-grade Literature, I followed the same lesson plan and my middle-schoolers were just as surprised when the deeper meaning of the poem was revealed.
Please consider adding Deeper Reading to your professional library! There’s an illustration in the very first chapter called “How to Bartle Puzballs” that is a really fun way to illustrate -for students AND teachers- the difference between shallow and deeper reading!
What professional books have influenced your teaching of gifted and advanced students? We’d love to hear about them in comments below! You may also be interested in Deeper Reading (Part 2): 3 Simple Ideas to Engage Advanced Readers of All Ages.