Teaching Difficult or Ambiguous Works

Focusing Literature Discussion Groups on Comprehension Strategies
Berne, Jennifer I.; Clark, Kathleen F. “Focusing Literature Discussion Groups on Comprehension Strategies.” Reading Teacher, v62 n1 p74-79 Sep 2008.
Berne and Clark focus on the group discussion aspect of children’s literature strategies. By letting students discuss difficult works with their peers they learn to be open to other ideas about a subject, often ideas they did not think of on their own. Berne and Clark point out that prior knowledge is also key in discussion topics. Children often equate different experiences with their own due to a lack of knowledge about a certain time period or its respective social norms.
One example Berne and Clark focus on is the ability of a child to know the difference between fiction, non-fiction, and historical fiction. Several times they are asked if they believe if a certain story is true or could actually happen. Most of the time students exhibit hesitancy in acknowledging facts that are either extremely unsettling or obscure.
Teaching Religious Diversity Through Children's Literature
Green, Connie, and Sandra Oldendorf. “Teaching Religious Diversity Through Children’s Literature.” Childhood Education. Summer 2005.
Green and Oldendorf focus on the increasing diversity within schools, especially religious diversity. One of the most important lessons children learn during schooling is the vast differences between values, beliefs, and morals found within different culture within the United States. The article goes through the many ways teachers can integrate the differing beliefs of the classmates into their curriculum. Alienation by other members of the class is one of the main issues teachers encounter in our current society. To combat this issue, reading children's novels that focus on the cultural heritage of different religions helps children to understand how others view life. Green and Oldendorf specify that this particular approach is only possible if the teacher is open to the ideas of others. Though many would say they are able to not discriminate against religions they do not believe in, they are more apt to discredit the beliefs of others when given their own perspective.
Teaching Reading
Metzger, Margaret. "Teaching Reading." Phi Delta Kappan 80.3 (1998): 240. Professional Development Collection. EBSCO. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.
This article discusses methods to develop skills to comprehend a difficult piece of writing.
Teaching students to read well and making students love to read are two different things. Often, students view reading as a passive activity in which you automatically “get it” or you don’t, and several consider themselves poor readers because they don’t realize people read on many levels and at different speeds. Many students have problems applying general reading strategies to every piece of literature (like point of view and following a plot). Mrs. Metzger attempts to use a modified version of Socratic Seminars to achieve a goal of every student learning reading strategies for understanding difficult texts. Socratic Seminars are based on the work of Mortimer Adler and Dennis Gray. These seminars focus on understanding reading of a short piece of writing through noncompetitive discussion. In addition to group discussions, she focused on how the students read as well as what they were reading. This way they were able to understand how the problem is solved (how a student came up with a response).
To develop comprehension skills, students must be able to read a book and abstract from the details and plot to a general and appropriate statement about meaning and theme. Therefore, to better reach this goal, Mrs. Metzger implemented reading the passage aloud three times, one group discussing, the other group summarizing the important parts of the discussion, and then the entire class articulating the methods used to reach their understandings. The last implementation of articulating methods (as a class) of how individuals reached their understanding was her most significant addition to the Socratic Seminar, which ultimately allowed her to attain her goal of developing comprehension strategies. She also allowed students to take turns leading discussions while she stepped back, and with time students’ comprehension improved as they developed general comprehension skills that allowed them to do the difficult tasks of abstracting, generalizing, and concluding.
Teaching Students About Learning Disabilities Through Children’s Literature
Prater, Mary Anne, Tina Taylor Dyches, and Marissa Johnstun “Teaching Students About Learning Disabilities Through Children’s Literature." Intervention in School and Clinic. 42.1, 2006.
Prater, Dyches, and Johnstun focus more on younger children and their ability to communicate about disabilities through the components of children’s literature. They focus on characterization, illustrations, and textual context and style. There is a certain amount of hesitation when discussing disabilities with children of a certain age, but the authors stress the importance of broaching the subject through a highly relatable character. Through the use of independent, peer paired, and student/teacher paired reading children may become better acquainted with the works and understand them. Following the readings, the authors encourage a discussion time for the children to ask any questions that trouble them or clear up any type of unusual things they encountered while reading. Finally the authors make note of introducing younger classrooms to the idea that the human race is extremely diverse and therefore not all are on the same level.
Indeterminate Texts, Responsive Readers, and the Idea of Difficulty in Literature Learning. Purves, Alan C., and Albany, NY. Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature. “Indeterminate Texts, Responsive Readers, and the Idea of Difficulty in Literature Learning.” Report Series 4.1. 1990. ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.
The study of literature is here divided into three parts: literature as knowledge, derived from the text itself as well as biographical, historical, critical, theoretical, or cultural knowledge surrounding the text; literature as reading and writing, a reflection of current pedagogical practices that encourage students and teachers to view texts as raw materials for demonstrating proficiency in language arts skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening); and literature as the development of habits, preferences, or taste, where literature is valued for its aesthetic qualities. This article argues that knowledge and language arts skills are currently favored by our educational systems dependence on standardized tests, and that the aesthetic could be integrated into this system by phrasing questions about literary value not as questions of personal opinion, but as arguable aesthetic positions that students can learn to defend. All texts are indeterminate in the sense that significance is formed by the act of reading, writing, and speaking about literature, therefore it is the community of readers that ultimately determines the difficulty of any specific text.
The ATOS[TM] Readability Formula for Books and How It Compares to Other Formulas. School Renaissance Inst., Inc., Madison, WI. "The ATOS[TM] Readability Formula for Books and How It Compares to Other Formulas. Report." (2000): ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.
The (Advantage-TASA Open Standard) Readability Formula for Books is a formula that attempts to match students to works of literature within their zone of proximal development (ZPD), the range in which a student can make the greatest gains. Readability formulas analyze texts based on semantic and syntactic difficulty, assigning texts with shorter average words and sentence lengths to lower grade levels and texts with longer average words and sentence lengths to higher grade levels, either using a grade-level scale or a number scale that correlates to age or grade-level. The ATOS Readability Formula for Books uses a grade-level scale for ease of teacher, parent, and student use, and open standard, meaning that the formula used for free by educators and applied to any text, rather than to a set of texts specific to the formula. While measures of ZPD are an important starting place for educators (especially with the growing use of computerized reading programs like Accelerated Reader), they are designed to measure readability or difficulty, rather than appropriateness, and should not be used as an educator’s only guide in determining what text is appropriate for any given student.