Last year, I wrote a guest post for the Grammarly blog about writing, and how it is one of the most important skills you can develop. Today, this post on Iserotope (one of my favorite teacher blogs) inspired me to write a sequel about the importance of reading.

Specifically: the importance of reading fiction.

You might think that I’m a big fan of reading because it makes you a better writer. Or that it allows you to explore parts of the shared human experience that may be difficult to explain in a non-fiction format. Both of those things are true. But they’re not the reasons why I’m such a big fan of fiction.

The internet has made readers out of many, many people that almost never pick up a book in their entire lives. They read blogs, they read the news, and they read pithy little status updates from their friends. It may not be heavy duty stuff, but it is reading.

Without the kind of brain that sorts through the incredible amount of information we take in every day (174 newspapers worth, apparently) and makes connections between the relevant bits, we’d be no smarter on Tuesday than we were on Monday. And we would be getting quickly left behind by our friends, our family, and (most important, job-wise) our colleagues.

The ability to build mental bridges between all the random things we read and organize it all into a coherent network is a skill that is vital to a knowledge worker — and we’re all knowledge workers to some extent. This is what allows us to learn a lesson in one context and apply it broadly to other aspects of our life.

Nowhere is that kind of a talent development more naturally and organically than through fiction.

When a child reads the Chronicles of Narnia, for example, he is learning about the importance of exploration, of honesty, and of virtues like courage and forgiveness. He isn’t reading a pamphlet that spells it all out in bullet points. It’s not a blog post or a self-help book, but it is something that has the potential to stick with him for the rest of his life. And it’s a foundation upon which many of lessons can be based.

The more fiction we read — and the more great English teachers we have — the more we see that these works of fiction are more than simple stories or diversions. And we begin to connect the lessons we learn in one book with those we learn in another. We draw parallels, create connections, and build mental bridges.

The better we get at that, the more suited we are to dive into our modern world, where more information is created every year than the year before it. Understanding how to make sense of it all is not just a nice bonus. It is an essential element to being employable and staying relevant.

Sure, we can create high-level college courses to teach kids how to connect seemingly unrelated thoughts and build functional databases in their brain. We can call it “Mental Data Filing 101″ or something, and claim it’s a new science.

Or we can give them some great books to read as kids and they’ll start doing it on their own.

Don’t let an obsession with The Test strip fiction from our curriculum. There are cheap, online flashcards to help with test prep. (Did I mention we make those?) And there are excellent tutors out there to fill in the gaps. Teachers have skills that go far beyond preparing students to take a test. Let’s make use of them.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

In my previous post, I wrote about introducing storytelling techniques (especially dramatic ones) as an aid to teaching literature. In my fourth and final post as a guest here, I’ll to share some ideas for using storytelling in the classroom to teach history.

I’ve got a powerful personal memory along these lines from my senior year in high school. (It was in 1971-2, so you can do the math and figure out how old I am!) I had a brilliant and innovative American History teacher, whose assignments were, to put it mildly, dramatic. For example, he had one class break up into two groups and act out the American Civil War, using the entire high school campus as a stage.

But to me, his most memorable assignment was a less flamboyant one. My group was assigned to write and perform a play portraying the ideological conflict between the African-American Civil Rights leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. A former slave, Washington advocated a “go slow” strategy to achieving racial equality; a historian and sociologist, Du Bois’s advocated a much more aggressive approach. The play was framed as a debate between the two.

Our group divided up tasks, ranging from research to typing. The actual writing and directing fell to me. It was a formative experience. I’ve been around theater since before I can remember, but it was the first time I’d really written a play. I’ve gone on to write more plays than I can count, many of them published and/or performed, and some of them award-winners. So really, this assignment was the beginning of a quasi-career. Also, exploring the polarity of thought between Washington and Du Bois helped form my own political worldview, especially concerning approaches to social activism.

Over the decades, I’ve kept a yellowed, mimeographed copy of this play, which lies in front of me right now. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s not bad for a high school student, and it brings back memories of one of the most stimulating intellectual experiences of my youth. It’s no small testament to the strength of classroom storytelling that an assignment like this can still resonate in one’s mind after 40 years!

Now we’ll get down to specifics. Let’s say that you’re teaching a unit on the American Civil War. Students quickly (and understandably) get bored learning by rote the names of generals and the dates of battles. Besides, such inert facts don’t give any sense of the issues, philosophies, agonies, and passions involved in that cataclysmic conflict. Dramatic storytelling can be a key to deeper understanding. I’ll toss out just four possible basic situations:

• War breaks out in April 1861. Soon afterward in Philadelphia, a congregation of Quakers (The Religious Society of Friends) struggles with matters of conscience. On one hand, Quakers have long devoted themselves to the abolition of slavery and have actively participated in the Underground Railroad; on the other hand, Quakers have always been pacifistic. What should Quakers do now that the country is waging a war to end slavery—adhere to pacifism and resist conscription, or compromise their beliefs and join and support the Union Army? Write and perform a scene in which members of the congregation debate these choices.
• While the war was raging, the publisher and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned the U.S. Constitution as “a Covenant with Death, an Agreement with Hell” because it allowed the continuance of slavery. Meanwhile, the former slave and journalist Frederick Douglass contended that the Constitution offered the surest means for abolishing slavery. Write and perform a scene in which Garrison and Douglass meet in a public place. Garrison is there to burn a copy of the Constitution; Douglass is there to pass out copies of it hot off his own printing press. They debate their positions to the crowd while engaged in these activities.
• In Union-occupied South Carolina, an African-American family hears news of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. The family now finds itself free. Write and perform a scene in which grandparents, parents, and children discuss dreams, dilemmas, possibilities, and choices. Have them consider both the Emancipation’s promises and limitations. While they are now “freedmen” encouraged to join the fight against slavery, the Emancipation does not yet end slavery altogether.

This is just a sampling of scenarios. Needless to say, the possibilities for the Civil War are practically unlimited. Also needless to say, it is easy to dream up endless assignments for any episode, period, or era in all of human history. Here I’ve suggested scenes that range from the intimately personal (the slave family) to the political and philosophical (Garrison and Douglass). I think it’s good to seek out such a range for greater resonance.

But I should caution that the instructions above aren’t really sufficient. They’re just a starting-point. Without a lot of clarity, this assignment won’t fully deliver the goods. My high school teacher, for example, was extremely specific about setting, story, and themes. He also took care that my group was prepared with a great deal of background information, making research part of the assignment.

I like ending this series of posts with one about history. It hints at how storytelling in the classroom encourages critical thinking, a vital but elusive goal in whatever subject you might be teaching. And it hints at the power of having students step into someone else’s shoes, relating even experiences of long ago and far away to one’s own contemporary, everyday life. Storytelling makes teaching and learning up-close, personal, and real.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You can learn more about Wim and his work at his website.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

In my last two posts, I hinted at how storytelling—especially improvisations and scripted scenes—can be used to teach almost any subject. Here I’m going to make some specific suggestions about a widely-taught work of literature.

Say you’re teaching Hamlet to your English class. Your students, of course, approach the play with dread. After all, “Shakespeare is so hard!” Well, I’ve edited and contributed to 11 educational editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and I don’t see any reason why this should be true. The problem is often a simple lack of pre-reading work. Students aren’t prepared to approach Hamlet’s daunting opening scene with its shivering guards spouting lots of exposition while the old king’s ghost silently comes and goes. They know nothing of the world they’re about to be plunged into.

This is where it helps to have your students write or act out prequels. First, give them enough information to understand the circumstances that precede the beginning of the play:

• Claudius has murdered his brother, Denmark’s old King Hamlet, by pouring poison into his ear while he was sleeping in his orchard.
• Claudius has hastily married Queen Gertrude, the late king’s wife.
• Claudius has been crowned the new king.
• Young Hamlet, the old king’s son, has returned from school in Wittenberg to attend both the funeral and the wedding.

This background could serve to write a whole new play. But let’s focus on just one scene: King Claudius proposing marriage to Queen Gertrude. Divide your students into groups of three or four. Each group will write a short script or prepare an outline for improvisation; two members of the group will act out their scene, playing Claudius and Gertrude. Assign each of the groups one of these variations:

1. Claudius and Gertrude have been having an affair since before King Hamlet’s death, but Gertrude knows nothing about the murder.
2. Claudius and Gertrude have been having an affair, and Gertrude is aware of the murder.
3. Claudius and Gertrude have never had an affair, and Gertrude knows nothing about the murder.

Each of these scenarios is possible; indeed, critics, directors, and actors have been trying to choose among them for centuries. And obviously, these variations open up widely different interpretations of the play itself—the motives behind its characters and what they do. As your groups get to work, wander among them and drop all kinds of hints and suggestions, taking care to pose them as questions:

• Did Gertrude and Claudius marry out of love or purely for political reasons?
• How much did Gertrude love King Hamlet, if at all?
• Does Gertrude love Claudius, or does she fear him?
• If Gertrude doesn’t know about the murder, is it because Claudius has cunningly deceived her, or because she is in a semi-willful state of denial?
• If Gertrude does know about the murder, was she Claudius’s accomplice, or did she find out about it after the fact?

And so on; the possibilities are just about endless. The idea is to provoke as rich a variety of possible scenes as you and your students can think up.

Some resulting scenes might be disappointing. Perhaps one group won’t get much further than to have Claudius ask, “Gertrude, will you marry me?” and have Gertrude reply, “I will, Claudius.” Don’t be too hard on groups that fall short like this. With some luck, you’ll get one or two scenes that are striking, even disturbing. I can imagine some fairly inventive students arriving at the following variation:

Claudius proposes to Gertrude on bended knee. But Gertrude has been suspicious of him since her husband’s mysterious death. She questions him cautiously, trying to find out if he was Hamlet’s murderer. Claudius won’t confess the deed, but turns menacing. He tells Gertrude that she must marry him and make him Denmark’s king—or she might face her husband’s fate. She marries him out of sheer terror and dares not question him further.

Of course, other scenes might paint very different pictures—for example, Gertrude utterly free of suspicion, a grieving widow innocently comforted by Claudius’s proposal of marriage.

After performing their prequels, students will be better prepared to read a play that is celebrated for its layers of ambiguity, its depth and mystery. They can review their scenes while reading the play. They may want to change their assumptions about what happened between Claudius and Gertrude during that fateful proposal, based on evidence that Shakespeare supplies (or doesn’t supply) in the text. A key moment is young Hamlet’s ruthless verbal assault on his mother in Act 3, scene 4, which is loaded with suspicions about what Gertrude knew and when she knew it.

A prequel is only one option for enriching your students’ experience with this play. There are also possible sequels (How does Fortinbras fare as Denmark’s new ruler?) and even “midquels” (Just what happens during Hamlet’s offstage adventure with the pirates in Act 4?).

I hope it’s obvious that my suggestions about Hamlet can be applied to just about any dramatic or fictional work. Right now, my daughter is reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in her English class. I’ve got my own ideas about how classroom storytelling could explore Golding’s theme of humanity’s innate savagery. Do students agree that marooned boys would inevitably lapse into brutality? They might select key moments from the novel and act them out so that they turn out differently, testing whether their own narratives are more or less plausible than Golding’s. Certainly, a sequel about the rehabilitation of the surviving boys would be interesting and informative.

In my last post, I mentioned using stories in History classes. I’ll write about that in my next post, after the holidays.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You can learn more about Wim and his work at his website.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

To continue my thoughts on narrative in the classroom, I’ll begin (appropriately) with a story.

When I was a college sophomore theater student, I belonged to a small acting group called ETC—The Educational Theater Company. Our job was to put on scenes in classrooms all over the college campus (and sometimes in nearby public schools) at a moment’s notice. Most of the work requested from us was predictable—scenes from classic plays, readers theater performances of fiction and poetry, all that sort of thing. But occasionally, we’d get an assignment that was obviously meant to stump us.

For example, an English Comp instructor asked us to come into his classroom and perform a piece about footnotes, informing students fully about style, format, punctuation, etc. The instructor chortled when he made the request. I’m sure he came up with other plans for that class period, doubtful that we would even show up.

But we surprised him and ourselves, using no media except our own bodies. We created a madcap sketch that portrayed self-creating footnotes, full of slapstick conflict. To be honest, we stole liberally from the late comic genius Victor Borges’s mimed and vocalized “phonetic punctuation.” The result was hilarious—and informative. Our sketch was no substitute for The Chicago Manual of Style or The MLA Handbook, but students left the classroom with an enriched understanding of footnotes—and refreshed by hearty laughter.

Our “Footnotes Sketch” became a campus hit. Instructors in all departments demanded that we perform it several times a week—somewhat to my chagrin, as my brilliant portrayal of Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie went largely unrequested. ETC wasn’t easily stumped after all.

This anecdote, though true, may seem rather fanciful and digressive. It is. It’s also dead serious and to the point. Nietzsche wrote of “the seriousness one had as a child, at play.” That’s exactly the spirit I’m here to pursue. My point is that storytelling can enrich any topic in any discipline or class subject—at least I like to think so.

Can such methods be used to teach, say, math? I’ll pass over this question quickly. Math was and is my worst subject, I’m ashamed to say, and I’ve never tried to create any storied teaching materials for it. Nevertheless, I’ll toss out an idea and see if it has any legs.

Say you’re teaching basic coordinate graphing. Mightn’t the x-axis and the y-axis be portrayed as living characters, perhaps with strong disagreements about the data they’re trying to present—not just the raw information, but its meaning? Mightn’t their conflicts be dramatized through dialogue and physical action? And what about the points of data that go into the graph? Are they easily herded and arranged there, or do they put up a bit of a fight? And how can they first be drawn out of hiding?

I’ve never created any storytelling materials about biology either, but I’d like to give it a try. The natural world is rich in stories. The recent passing of the great biologist Lynn Margulis brings one readily to mind. Margulis’s major breakthrough concerned the origin of eukaryotic cells—highly complex cells with nuclei, as opposed to simpler prokaryotic cells such as bacteria. The appearance of eukaryotic cells was a major event in evolutionary history, allowing multicellular organisms like ourselves to eventually appear. But how did eukaryotic cells come to be? Such an evolutionary leap seems to defy imagination.

Margulis’s theory was beautifully simple—and if I may say so, poignantly moving. Once upon a time primeval, two simple prokaryotic cells met. One became engulfed by the other. But instead of mutual destruction, cooperation ensued, and the two cells learned to serve one another. Over millions of years, this process led to eukaryotic cells. Margulis’s idea (which itself seemed all-too-fanciful at the time) bore empirical fruit. Mitochondria and organelles are now recognized to have originated by such a process.

What a drama, eh? And why not stage it in a biology class, either as a scripted sketch or an improvisation? The two cells are characters. They collide and one becomes entangled in the other. They both panic. Can they survive this entanglement? They both fear strangulation. No strangulation ensues, and panic turns to paranoia. The outer cell fears that the engulfed cell will act as a deadly parasite, while engulfed cell fears being digested whole. They make peace and soon realize that they have something to offer one another. The surrounding cell can offer protection, while the engulfed cell can serve as a power source—a primitive mitochondrion. They continue through their lives, much stronger and fitter than before, chatting excitedly about what their union may mean to their progeny down through the ages.

Such a sketch can do more than merely illustrate this model, known as endosymbiotic theory. Margulis controversially claimed that her discovery challenged the Neo-Darwinian assumption that all evolutionary advances come from an endless struggle for survival. As Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan put it, “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.” The classroom sketch may stir a debate as to whether Margulis was right, or whether the endosymbiotic origin of eukaryotic cells actually shows good old-fashioned Survival of the Fittest in action.

To sum up a bit…

Classroom stories may be assigned either individually or in groups. The stories themselves may take the forms of written narratives or dialogues, dramatic improvisations, or rehearsed scripts that can be read at students’ desks or performed in front of the classroom. These days, I’m especially excited about videos. Kids have video cameras even in their cell phones, and many computers these days come with editing software.

In my next blog, I’ll suggest classroom story ideas in subjects that I’m closer to: Literature and History.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You canlearn more about Wim and his work at his website.

guest written by Wim Coleman of Chiron Books.

When it was suggested that I write a guest post for TestSoup about bringing narratives into the classroom, I was immediately thrilled. Then I was daunted.

My wife, Pat Perrin, and I met in Los Angeles in 1986. By the time we got married the next year, we were already collaborating full-time as writers. We’ve been writing together ever since—novels, plays, poems, and many, many different kinds of educational materials (we’ve both been teachers). Through more than two decades of collaboration, we have been obsessed by one single overriding theme: the vital importance of story.

So how to write a single post about bringing narrative into the classroom? I don’t think I can pull it off. It won’t do to just write about how to use stories without first getting into why. So I’ll write more than one post. I’ll devote this first one to Pat’s and my story-centered worldview, hinting at what it has to do with education.

To jump-start me with this post, Pat suggested that I take a fresh look at the first book we published together, PragMagic (Pocket Books, 1991). In it, we distilled a decade of reporting that had appeared in Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain/Mind Bulletin, a newsletter that had become a clearinghouse for all kinds of research and discoveries in science, health, creativity, psychology, social sciences, and education. Our job was to take all this information and turn it into a whopper of a self-help book. Our emphasis throughout the book was upon story: How can this or that piece of information be used to enrich the story of your life?

I hadn’t looked at the book for a long time (we’ve written lots of others since then). I peeked into the first chapter and noticed a section titled “The Power of Story.” There I found a quote by psychologist-educator Renée Fuller, the creator of the Ball-Stick-Bird phonics program:

“Making stories may, indeed, be fundamental to human thinking. The ability to comprehend a story—that is, to grasp meaning within a given context—may be more basic to human intelligence than anything measured by IQ tests. The need to make our life coherent, to make a story out of it, is probably so basic that we are unaware of its importance.”

Yes, our thinking exactly—except Pat and I would take it even further. We must learn to value even fictional narratives for the insights they can offer. Indeed, it is possible that few, if any, of the stories we live by aren’t, to some extent, fictions.

Around the time Pat and I were working on PragMagic, we also had the privilege of collaborating with cognitive philosopher Daniel C. Dennett on an experimental essay/story called “Media-Neutral,” which eventually appeared in our first novel The Jamais Vu Papers (Harmony/Crown, 1991) In it, a fictional character discovers that he’s a character in a book. Desperate to understand how being fictional affects his life, our character goes to Dennett for advice. “Media-Neutral” was great fun to work on, and Dennett threw himself into his therapist-philosopher role wholeheartedly.

Now, Dennett has taken flack over the years for his assertion that the human self is an “abstraction.” What! Doesn’t this mean that the self doesn’t exist? Not at all, Dennett has explained. An abstraction is a kind of fiction, certainly, but it can have real consequences in the world. Dennett likens the self to a center of gravity:

“A center of gravity is just an abstractum. It’s just a fictional object. But when I say it’s a fictional object, I do not mean to disparage it; it’s a wonderful fictional object, and it has a perfectly legitimate place within serious, sober, echt physical science.”

When you consider, say, what it would take to tip a chair over, you’re thinking, consciously or not, of the chair’s center of gravity. The center of gravity might be a fiction of sorts, but its effect upon the chair is plenty real. The self, suggests Dennett, might be described as a “center of narrative gravity.” I won’t try to explain that concept here; I doubt that I could! Just note the word “narrative.” Consciousness and the human self are outcomes of imaginative storytelling. We can’t get away from stories—indeed, fictional stories—for a single microsecond of our lives.

So we must tend well to our stories. In our memoir/essay “A Mexico of the Mind” (anthologized in Solamente en San Miguel, Windstorm, 2007), Pat and I offered this reflection:

“Storytelling, like all art, like life, is an act of learning—of finding out. We are mistaken to assume that stories of transformation are only about transformation, mere illustrations. Instead, they are transformation itself, acts of practical alchemy, with the power to alter the reality of every receptive person they touch. (That’s why we must learn to recognize a hate-based tale in any garb, and admit that nothing holy feeds on pain.) As we live our stories and tell them, we learn what they are about … and they change … and they transform.”

Taking all this into account, “using narrative in the classroom” sounds almost redundant. The classroom is filled with selves, and therefore with stories. It’s easy to visualize the classroom as a setting where a grand drama unfolds, where all those stories come together in a sweeping narrative. The issue, really, is what “subplots” you, as a teacher, can bring to this overarching story. How can you consciously and deliberately use stories to enhance your students’ learning?

In my next post, I’ll start getting down to brass tacks about that.

About the author: Wim Coleman is a playwright whose works have won national awards and have been presented in New York and Los Angeles, and he is an award-winning poet. He has also been a teacher, and has degrees in Theater, Literature, and Education. He usually writes in collaboration with his wife, Pat Perrin. Together, they have well over 100 publications. They publish independently for young people through ChironBooks. Wim and Pat lived in various parts of the United States before spending thirteen years in San Miguel de Allende, where they created and administered the San Miguel PEN Scholarship Program for at-risk students. They also adopted their daughter, Monse, there. All three of them now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  You can learn more about Wim and his work at his website.

guest written by Shahar Link of Mindspire Tutoring & Test Prep

Here’s a common situation on a reading section of a standardized test: you read the passage, you hit the questions, you do your strategies and techniques and all that, and you still get two or three wrong. When you review the problem, you see immediately what you missed – the answer was right there in the previous sentence! But you totally read that whole paragraph! How did you miss it? What happened?

What happened is: you can’t read!

No one wants to hear that they can’t read. Of course I can read! I read all the time!

Of course, we all know how to read, in a sense. But in another sense, that confidence in our reading ability is exactly the problem. In normal everyday reading, we skip words, even whole lines, and don’t really “get” all sorts of things going on in a given text. But it doesn’t matter, as long as we get the gist of it.

But “getting the gist” isn’t enough on a standardized test, like the SAT, ACT, GRE, etc. On these tests, you have to understand everything a question is asking about. (Not necessarily everything in the passage, but everything that relates to any given question.)

So, if you’re not acing the reading section, it’s basically because you can’t read.  For example, if a student is scoring about a 500 (out of 800) on the Critical Reading section of the SAT, he or she is only comprehending basic ideas of what he or she is reading for school. The nuance is going right past him.

The problem isn’t the student’s intelligence. The problem is how we teach reading. Reading is taught at very early ages in American schools, and some children are ready to learn to read in 1^st grade, but some are not. That doesn’t mean they are stupid and will never read well – it means that their brains are not there yet. Walking is similarly developmental– if a child can’t walk at 9 months, it doesn’t mean she’ll never walk! The problem is, after 1^st or 2^nd grade, we don’t teach reading anymore. We just assume that students know how to read. But some never really got it; they weren’t ready yet. So they just do their best to fake it for the rest of school, developing useful coping strategies that can usually get them Bs in their classes (which aren’t hard enough to force them to confront the fact that they can’t read). But on the standardized tests, that won’t cut it.

So with many students, we have to work on the basics – decoding, reading every word, following with your pencil, etc. It’s amazing to me how many students are, in a very literal sense, not reading. They substitute familiar (different) words for unfamiliar words. They skip lines. They jumble up letters. This translates into not understanding anything beyond the main idea.

Once students are actually reading what’s on the page, we can get to work on understanding the text.

That’s where even good readers can get stuck.  Passages on standardized tests are very challenging. If a student is used to reading relatively easy material, she won’t know how to deal with an SAT-level passage. What I explain is that good readers re-read difficult sections of a text that they don’t understand. This is not conventionally taught.

“Slow down!” That’s what most teachers advise students who don’t understand what they read. Supposedly, “slowing down” will increase their comprehension. But think about the last time you read something and understood it well. Did you read it slowly? Probably not – you read at the pace that is comfortable for you: not too fast, not too slow. Slowing down actually ruins the natural rhythm we have when we are fully engaged and understanding a text. Good readers don’t slow down when they don’t understand something – they re-read it, sometimes 3 or 4 times, but at the same pace.

The point is: reading is a rhythmic activity when it is working well, and messing with that rhythm will harm comprehension. Thus, instead of slowing down, we advise students to re-read until they understand the text. Our experience shows that this simple suggestion works wonders.

One last point: we all know that students who read a lot over the course of their academic careers have a much easier time on the reading section of standardized tests. But the question is: do they read a lot because they just like reading? Or do they like reading because they know how to read? Although I’m oversimplifying, I would suggest that the latter is more to the point. People who read a lot find reading comfortable and relatively easy. If one never learned how to read appropriately, one will never be “a reader,” because the experience will always be cognitively uncomfortable. In my experience, making reading more cognitively comfortable is a crucial step toward developing the kind of strong reading habits that make reading on standardized tests a very do-able thing.

In sum, when it comes to reading, Mindspire addresses 2 areas that very few test-prep companies address: 1) basic decoding issues, which are more prevalent than many teachers even realize and 2) how to understand difficult texts appropriately – by re-reading until your brain takes it all in. We believe that these two lessons are hugely valuable to students – not only for a test, but for their academic career in general.

About the author: Shahar Link has coached hundreds of students toward higher scores on standardized tests over the past 15 years.  After earning his Masters degree from Stanford University (with a thesis on the history of IQ testing), Shahar taught high school history and economics for 10 years in New York and California. He recently founded Mindspire Tutoring & Test Prep to put his innovative and effective tutoring system to work for students in the Triangle Area of North Carolina and anyone who has an internet connection.