Using Choice Words in nonfiction reading conferences

Cummins, Sunday. (2011). Using Choice Words in nonfiction reading conferences. Talking Points, 22(2), 9-14.

Cummins , a university researcher spending a year in a third grade classroom, audiotaped conversations she had with the third graders as they were reading nonfiction texts during reading workshop, then analyzed the words she used to assist the children in meaning-making. She showed that what we say when we are interacting with learners can make a big difference in the meaning construction process. The theoretical underpinnings that guided the study come largely from Peter Johnston’s Choice Words, a book I highly recommend to all teachers.

Two things really resonated for me here. The first is the use of open-ended questions when talking with children about their reading. These questions must be carefully chosen to avoid doing the thinking for students and leading them in the direction WE would like them to go. Many of us as teachers like certainty, and want to lead children down a narrow path of understanding. If we take away the thinking prerogative from children, we take away opportunities to learn. When we do for children what they are capable of doing for themselves, we remove their sense of agency as readers. Yes, at times we need to “scaffold”, but oh, what an art that is! It is a fine line between assisting a child just enough so that he or she makes the mental leap (what a joy, to see the “light bulb” come on and the confidence grow!). Cummins here documents her use of some of my favorite teaching questions/prompts: “What are you thinking about?” and “Tell me more about that,” and my all-time favorite, “What do you notice?” These kinds of questions invite learners to share meanings they have constructed rather than asking them to guess what is in a teacher’s head and what answers will please the teacher. They avoid the “guess what I’m thinking” mind-games and honor children as readers and learners.

The second thing that resonated for me was the emphasis on engagement Cummins documented. Not only should teacher talk invite children to engage with text, but also teachers need to genuinely and authentically engage with texts, and to let children see them as co-learners and co-constructors of meaning who are just as “into” the texts as they want the children to be. Modeling engagement with texts is by far the best way of nurturing engagement with texts. Genuine engagement is contagious! Cummins points out that this kind of engagement may come easier with children’s nonfiction than with children’s fiction, because nonfiction may very well include information and topics that we as teachers are not completely familiar with. There is something very precious about learning alongside your students, and opening up your own learning processes to students’ eyes. If they see you reading strategically, making predictions, and revising those predictions, that makes the process that much more real. You are “practicing what you preach” and relating to them as fellow learners and equals. So much of what we do in elementary classrooms has us coming from positions of superiority. At times we act like we don’t know what a text will tell us, but we really do know, and I think children are on to that. Yes, sometimes we do need to be the experts, but not all the time. They need to see us as learners, too.

This was a brief article (I read it in its entirety over lunch) that made a lot out of a relatively small body of data (conversations with eight children on one occasion that ranged from one to five minutes each). I’d like to see more data gathered over a longer period of time. I also would like to know much more about these children and the classroom where they spent their third grade year. I’d like to know more about the implementation of the reading workshop, how it worked, and what role Cummins played in all that. I’d also like to see more investigation of the problem that started all this in the first place: Cummins and the children’s teacher had noticed that the children engaged with nonfiction well when it was read aloud to them, but rarely picked nonfiction for their independent reading. In this article we are not really told if Cummins discovered either causes or cures for that problem, though obviously conversations like the ones she documented could help with that. Perhaps that is another article—we are told the work reported here was part of a larger study, which I will look for.