This was my first thought when I surveyed the standards. Although there was clear evidence that questioning was a valued strategy, what about the rest? Is it still important for students to visualize? make connections? predict? infer? determine importance? synthesize? Because I believe comprehension strategy works on multiple levels, I was intent on answering these questions, and in my quest have found ways of connecting the standards to strategy instruction although many of the terms are omitted.
There was a bold statement made early on about the frivolity of making connections – how it leads readers into themselves instead of the story, and a backlash against personal response. My initial reaction was to cringe. Isn’t reading always personal? Even technical manuals make sense only through processing relationships and connecting to what you understand. That is why my husband can spend hours reading his airplane manuals and they make sense, and all I see is a bunch of random pieces of information that have little meaning to me. He has the schema, or background knowledge, to make sense of all the bits of information. He relates new data to what he already knows and revises his thinking for new airplanes. He possesses the technical (or tier 3) vocabulary terms to relate to the data, and most likely visualizes the cockpit and how the information is used to fly the airplane.
To me, reading is a process of constantly making connections to, within, and across the texts, so why wouldn’t it be included in the standards? According to Louise Rosenblatt (as cited in Pardo, 2004) there are four components to reading: the reader, the text, the social cultural context, and the transaction. Readers bring their own background knowledge, interact with the features of the text and the author’s intent, and develop meaning based on what they bring to the text that day. It is in this transaction that readers apply a variety of comprehension strategies to determine meaning. As we know, our understanding of text changes over time because we change over time, along with what we are reading for in a text. This personal relationship with text is foundational in how we make meaning.
Although making connections has been contested (and New York has balked at this by adding an eleventh standard on personal response), a case can be made that upon a closer look, there are clear ties to connections within and across texts. And although personal connections are clearly de-emphasized, there are standards that need scaffolding to be attained, and students need to understand how to articulate how they relate to texts to delve deeper into ideas, emotions, and events within texts.
One of the biggest critiques of making connections is that it promotes students to parade their ideas off topic, which leads them further away from the text, rather than closer. However, learning and the integration of ideas are deeply entrenched in making connections. With Common Core, we are being asked to refocus our attention on how we teach connections to make sure students are bringing their knowledge about the world to really explore the “four corners of the text” rather than the corners of their lives. Therefore, instead of abandoning the strategy, we need to make sure we guide students through the text and reexamine the different facets of connections.
Connections examine both the relationships of the reader to the text, but also the relationships of what exists within and across the texts. When thinking about the strategy of making connections, it may be helpful to think about different categories. The first type of connections is the personal relationship between the reader and the text. At this level, readers become aware of how ideas and details within the text relate to their own lives and other stories in their background knowledge. They become purposeful in developing these relationships by categorizing them by text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. An essential essence of this foundation is for the reader to become active in the process of relating to texts, and become cognizant of the interaction between the reader and the text. The second type of connections entails readers developing understanding of textual structures and features, and making connections across texts according to these elements. This type of connection is clearly articulated in the Common Core Standards. Some examples may include genre, writing style, author’s purpose, themes, writing style, and literary tools. Teachers may purposefully select texts by author’s study to examine connections across texts, or writing styles to compare different authors. The third level of making connections examines the relationships within a text. How do the parts relate to the whole? How are the images related to the text? How does understanding the text structure allow the reader to understanding relationships within the text. Connections entail building relationships with texts at a variety of levels. Therefore, when reading the standards, words such as the integration of ideas, relationships and connections may all point towards a comprehension strategy that appeared overlooked – making connections.
Reference
Pardo, L. (2004). What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Comprehension. The Reading Teacher. Vol. 58, No. 3.
Learning is a journey, not an endpoint. 