Chapter 13: Creating the Confidence to Respond

As I read Chapter 13, I found myself highly engaged and trying to put myself in the shoes of the struggling readers I will be working with in the future. I especially liked the example Beers used from one of the workshops that she led. The teachers participating in her workshop were hesitant and often reluctant to participate in sharing their thoughts with the larger group as a result of feeling inconfident sharing in front of peers they did not know. This really made me think about how struggling readers must feel when expected to participate in front of their seemingly more capable peers. As teachers I think it's important that we never lose sight of the fact that our students have feelings and many of the behaviors we don't like are designed to mask their feelings of incompetence in front of their peers. Also, I've realized how important it is to create a classroom that encourages risk-taking on the part of students by making sure they know each other's names, making sure diversity is celebrated, and making sure that students know it is unacceptable to make disrespectful comments to each other.
One additional insight I gleaned from this chapter is how important it is to make sure reading is about something more than just being able to answer a few questions at the end of a chapter. I especially liked the lists of possible questions to use that help students figure out what a text means to them.
Finally, the five stages of literary appreciation helped clarify for me where students are at with reading in what grades. I thought the shift from one stage to the next was interesting in terms of how a student's viewpoint changes as he grows older and moves from one grade to the next. I think this information can be very useful when it comes to choosing appropriate texts, as well as finding questions to use to guide students in creating meaning.

Chapter 10: Fluency and Automaticity

In Chapter 10, Beers notes, "It's important to remember that students don't develope automaticity via decoding but rather through repeated exposure to a word they can decode" (p. 205). She continues on to mention that "our dependent readers who are struggling with word recognition may need to see this word as many as forty times" (p. 205). These quotes helped me to consider the importance of frequent exposure to words and reading that our dependent readers need. For our dependent readers, they may be able to sound out a word but may to see the word up to forty times before they can automatically recognize it while reading.
Beers also offers many strategies for helping students improve automaticity and fluency. One strategy that I particularly like is reading aloud to students. Our dependent readers need us to model good expression, phrasing and pacing. By reading aloud to our students on a regular basis, we are modeling for them what it means to be a good reader. Also, I think reading aloud to students offers us a variety of opportunities to directly teach phrasing, for instance. It also allows us to work on comprehension skills which dependent readers often struggle with.
Finally, I like the fact that Beers mentions, "We cannot confuse teaching about reading with the act of reading" (p. 218). It's important to provide our struggling readers with ample opportunities to read texts at their instructional or independent level because repeated practice is what they need in order to become better readers.