Equipping Students to Read Nonfiction

“The major problem with simply telling kids what they need to know is that for the rest of their lives, there will be a great many people happy and eager to do precisely that. There’s no doubt that this would be a faster, more efficient way of getting content to them. But in the long run, although this very direct type of instruction might help raise test scores, it won’t help raise students who are independent thinkers.” (Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst, Reading Nonfiction: Notice and Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies, p. 32)

How can we raise students who are independent thinkers? According to Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst, it is teaching students how to read nonfiction. I loved this book. After 30+ years of teaching English, ranging from 4th through 12th grade and including Advanced Placement (AP), I still relish discovering new tools to give students to engage them with their own learning. Reading Nonfiction: Notice and Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies is practical, research based, applies across grade levels and subject areas (social studies, science, math), and filled with stories (as well as links to videos) of what students using the ideas actually looks like. It builds on reading strategies and academic conversation. And it is immensely readable. I can’t wait to get back to school and start using what I’ve learned! (And I also really want to read the authors’ previous book about reading fiction, but it will have to wait until next summer.)

To counter students either reading to answer pre-formulated questions by the teacher or the textbook, or simply saying, “I don’t get it,” Beers and Probst offer the following guidance: Approach the text with curiosity (3 questions), look for 5 signposts in the text to give traction on the questions, and use specific activities for building, repairing, or solidifying understanding (your answers to those questions). Here’s what that looks like:   

A curious stance comes to a text asking the following 3 questions:

1. What surprised me? This raises the expectation that readers should find surprising things in a text. The authors say, “Fiction invites us into the writer’s imagined world; nonfiction intrudes into ours and purports to tell us something about it” (39).
2. What did the author think I already knew? This takes the onus of confusion off the reader, puts it on the writer, and yet gives the reader a fix on what exactly the missing piece that is essential for understanding is, and thus empowers the reader to find or figure it out. 
3. What challenged, changed, or confirmed what I already knew? This raises the expectation that nonfiction should impact a reader’s thinking. It is fully respectable to change one’s thinking when one encounters new information, or the information may offer me new ways of explaining what I already understood.

Yet students can’t always identify what exactly it was in the text that surprised, confused, or challenged them. Or they can’t even get traction on answering those questions. The 5 signposts offer students specific spots to look for in the text that can give traction with the questions:

1. Contrasts and Contradictions: These can be within the text or between the text and the reader’s own experience or understanding.
2. Extreme or Absolute Language: This includes words like everyone/always, but also expands to include loaded language, propaganda, and anything that seems to be stated surprisingly strongly.
3. Numbers and Stats: In addition to numbers written both as numerals (2) and in words (two), this includes vaguer amounts like a few, a majority, most.
4. Quoted Words: It helps to identify why the author chose these words from this person.
5. Word Gaps: When students don’t understand words, it may be because they have multiple meaning, are specific to the field, or are given sufficient clues in the context.

Finally, Beers and Probst offer 7 strategies--specific activities for building, fixing, or solidifying understanding (answers to your questions). They can be used before reading to build an anticipatory set, during reading to fix confusion as it occurs, or after reading to reflect on what was learned. All of the strategies send readers back to the text repeatedly, deepening understanding with each reading “draft.”

• Before reading (2): Possible Sentences, KWL 2.0 (“want to know” flows directly out of what you know—what else do you wonder about what you already know? 2 learn columns—one for answers to the L questions, and another for anything else you learned)
• During reading (3): Somebody Wanted But So (structure for summarizing), Syntax Surgery (when looking carefully at pronoun reference, missing words, or other complex syntactical issues can help), Sketch to Stretch (when visualizing has failed).
• After reading (2): Genre Reformulation, Poster.

I’m already planning how I will use these stances, signposts, and strategies with specific pieces of nonfiction I’m using for background information in the novel study in my combined 6th and 7th grade English class in September. And I’d love to do a book discussion of this across grade levels and disciplines—anywhere nonfiction is read. The authors include in the signposts different questions to be asked by elementary, middle, and high school students—and the high school questions are differentiated by discipline, with different questions for history, science, and math. 

For instance, for the nonfiction signpost Numbers and Stats, they take the generalizable lesson “When the author uses specific numbers or provides statistical information, you need to stop and ask yourself…” 

• Elementary students: “What does this make me wonder about?” (For elementary, this question is the same for all the signposts. Brilliant, eh?”
• Middle school students: “Why did the author use these numbers or amounts?”
• High school students:
• History: "How do these numbers help me see patterns occurring across time, regions, and cultures? What do these numbers help me see?” 
• Science: “What purpose do these numbers serve in this context? Do these numbers help prove a point?”
• Math (in a word problem): “What question is the author asking me, and how do those numbers help?” 

Anyone want to read it again with me?