Drawing on what we do as readers: Discovering and embedding strategies across the disciplines

Gilles, C., Wang, Y., & Johnson, D. (2016). Drawing on what we do as readers: Discovering and embedding strategies across the disciplines. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 59(6), 675-684.


To be able to teach something, we first have to be able to do it ourselves, and then we need to be able to show our students how to do it. Sound easy? Really, it isn’t. Anyone who has taught knows that we don’t always know how to do what we teach, or we may know how to do it, but we’re not sure exactly what we do or how we do it. That can make it difficult to teach others how to do it, especially when those others do not have the levels of knowledge and experience that we do.

Being an “expert” in a content area may be one thing, but being an expert doesn’t necessarily equate with good teaching. Good teaching means being aware of what we do as experts, and then being able to model and coach students to do those things. These were the processes Gilles and her colleagues looked at in this intensive case study of a team of middle school teachers (data are presented for four of the teachers).

Content literacy researchers have recently been recommending instructional strategies that often require teachers to model and “think aloud” with students to show them how readers think about texts. Students then are asked to practice these same processes, in both collaborative and individual contexts. There is some disagreement about whether there are general strategies for doing this with students that can be applied across content areas, or whether the ways readers think about texts are content-specific and general strategies are not very helpful for teachers. The evidence in the study described here seemed to point to both kinds of strategies being useful. Though there are some specific ways readers think about texts within content areas, there are some general processes, too, that may take specific forms within content areas, but still share commonalities.

In this case study, teachers were first asked to do some reading and to share the kinds of strategies they employed to make sense of what they read. They did this with four texts: two on general topics that were researcher-selected, and two that were both self-selected and content area-specific. The teachers then shared what they did as they read, including what they thought about, how they marked up the texts, questions they asked, connections they made, and any other things they did as they read. This level of awareness, and the reflection required to share that awareness, seemed to be a key step for these teachers. As Gilles et al point out, teachers are often told what they “should” do by “experts”. The approach here positions teachers themselves as experts who ask: “What do I need to do to make sense of this text? How can I show my students how to make sense of this text?” Those two questions get at the heart of what good content area reading instruction is.

Once teachers in the study shared their perceptions of their own reading processes, they were then tasked with incorporating those same processes into their content area instruction. Instruction was observed, and student work samples were collected. Most tellingly, students were then interviewed about what they thought happened in the classroom and what they learned. Teachers were observed modeling in their classrooms the strategies they had reported using in their own reading, and from the findings reported in the article, it seems that the students were in many cases aware of the teacher’s intentions and of their own learning.

I was especially struck by one of the “critical incidences” (pp. 680-682) described near the end of the article. One teacher noted that she had become confused when reading a poem. She shared that confusion, and the strategies she had used to both recognize that confusion and to get past it. The idea that even good readers sometimes get confused, but they do things that help them make sense of what they read, is a valuable idea to help students learn, and this teacher modeled those processes for her students. It took some reflection, some openness, and indeed, some courage for this teacher to share those processes with students, but it taught those students a valuable lesson about reading resourcefulness and resilience.

As a content area literacy educator, I have modeled and shown video examples of think-alouds and other strategies for content literacy instruction, and my teacher candidates have tried planning and implementing instruction that incorporated those strategies. The study described here made me think that there has been a missing step in what I’ve been trying to teach these teacher candidates. I intend to try having them complete tasks that ask them to discover and share what they do as readers, and challenge them to share that with their own students. It’s time to help teachers see themselves as “experts’ and to make reading come alive, for both teachers and students, as something real people do for real meaning-making purposes.