Borderland

Mosaic of Thought was published in 1997. I didn’t find it until about 2001. It was a book that changed my vision of what it could mean to be a teacher. It changed the way I read. It’s been sitting on a shelf in my classroom for a couple of years, though, and I pulled it down today because I was looking for a little bit of Susan Zimmerman’s and Ellin Oliver Keene’s insight.

To revisit my initial contact with the book: I remember how it felt to go back to the university after being in the classroom for 20 years. I was anxious and hopeful all at the same time. I’d not done anything seriously academic besides teach elementary school after I finished my BEd, and that wasn’t anything to shout about. I’d been accepted into the first cohort of a new reading endorsement program for Alaskan teachers. (I was the only male in the class, which is a short story for another day.) The dean from the School of ED came to talk with us. I remember he said, “This group is the pointy end of the spear for change in our state.” His words were chilling. I just wanted to advance on the pay scale and learn something useful. I began to get a sense of urgency about this program which I’d so casually joined. I also remember him telling us that he’d been a high school track coach years ago – coaching the high jump. He said that coaching track gave him an interesting perspective on a metaphor is used all the time: “Raising the bar.” He told us that policy makers were all talking about raising the bar for what they called failing schools, but in his experience coaching the high jump, you’d be more likely to help an athlete clear a new height by working on technique and going to the weight room. Those two statements gave me a lot to think about.

The graduate students were all teachers with classroom responsibilities. We began trying out new ideas. We began sharing books we found, and Mosaic of Thought was one of them. Zimmerman and Keene write:

For decades many educators believed that teaching reading meant dealing with the visible or audible, rather than cognitive, manifestations of reading. If children completed drill sheets and workbook pages, and sat in their ability groups to discuss the story, the spiral curriculum built into the basal series would ensure that students could comprehend complex text. But we never really considered what they might have been thinking about while they were reading. In fact many children were not (and are not) learning to comprehend using this approach, and they certainly weren’t becoming proficient, independent, confident, critical readers. The belief system that formed the foundation for reading instruction in most American schools appeared to rest on quicksand (p.16).

In addition to being thoughtfully written, Mosaic of Thought showed what it might look like to implement some of the comprehension theory we were learning about. The fascinating thing to me was how wrong all of this new thinking seemed. I don’t mean wrong, as in unjust or mistaken, or in error, but wrong, like unapproved or unsanctioned. None of these progressive ideas was in the teachers’ manuals. Or if they were in the manuals, they didn’t look like the descriptions I read of the innovative classrooms that were the subjects of the research studies. This all seemed very subversive to me. Where were the scripted lessons? The scope and sequence charts? The worksheets? The tests?

Surprisingly, many of the studies that examined the thinking of proficient readers pointed to only seven or eight thinking strategies used consistently by proficient readers. Even more surprisingly, the researchers described the same seven or eight strategies in their findings. Some researchers concluded that if teachers taught these thinking strategies, instead of much of the traditional isolated skills expected to lead inexorably to proficient reading, students who used the strategies would be better equipped to comprehend and analyze text independently. Since it is known which strategies are used most routinely by proficient readers, researchers suggested that teachers focus instructional time and creative energy on helping students gradually learn to use these strategies as they read a variety of texts in all grade levels (p. 21).

You’re probably wondering, what are the strategies that good readers use? Briefly, according to Zimmerman and Keene, they are

• Activating prior knowledge (schema);
• Identifying the main ideas;
• Asking questions of yourself, the text, and the author;
• Creating images;
• Making inferences;
• Retelling what you read;
• Having a variety of strategies for the times when comprehension breaks down.

All of these strategies fall under the broad category of metacognition, also known as self-monitoring strategies. A lot has been written about metacognition, and I will no doubt mention it again because I believe it is THE central issue for teaching people to do anything beyond rote drill and practice. The strategies that are taught in this book are cognitive strategies that are designed to build awareness of the reading processes that we all use, more or less. When I mentioned earlier that the book had an affect on me, I meant that I was never taught any of these strategies in my early education. I used them without knowing it. Reading Mosaic of Thought made me a more reflective reader because I became aware of key things I was doing that I didn’t know about. Recognizing how they help, I can now do them deliberately, which makes reading a lot more interesting. Understanding how these comprehension strategies work makes it possible to implement inquiry lessons into Language Arts. That is a question that I will be following up on later.

Is it subversive to teach this stuff? Maybe, if it isn’t in the teacher’s manual or in the state standards. My school district recently adopted curriculum materials for grades 4-6 that are consistent with the readers workshop approach, and this year I am exploring what they have to offer. Should you teach it anyway? I guess that depends on whether you believe it would help.

Read the book. Mosaic of Thought spawned a big reading comprehension / reader’s workshop movement. I came up with this list of Mosaic of Thought resources that many teachers might find useful.