Janet Kaylor is an ARI regional coach and an avid reader of professional books for educators. This is her first review for the ABPC blog and the Instructional Partners network.
by Janet F. Kaylor
Nothing makes my day more than to have a trusted friend “bless” a book. When a book has been given the thumbs-up by a trusted colleague or friend, I know that I am in for a great read and that my learning and life will be enriched.
If a friend blesses a professional read and it happens to include references from my most revered researchers in the literacy world like Louise Rosenblatt, Stephanie Harvey, Anne Goudvis, Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell et. al… then I know the blessing will be two-fold!
Giving my blessing to Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives (Solution Tree, 2011) by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Diane Lapp is easy because I have entered into a reader-author relationship with these trusted research friends on many other occasions, and I have never been disappointed with the depth of understanding they facilitate.
I found Fisher, Frye & Lapp’s book because I was looking for a resource to help me make the most of the new Alabama College and Career Ready Standards (CCRS). I found myself looking for research-based insights that would guide me to the right approaches for heightening the level of rigor in the schools and classrooms where I work. This book delivers.
Deep learning through deep reading
Ultimately, Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives reads like a language arts guide, a content-literacy sourcebook with great advice about instruction and about navigating the web and technical subjects. The elements that make this compact book (just 175 pp.) a great resource to educators are:
- The need for, and power of, discourse is emphasized throughout the book, affirming the evidence that learning does not take place in silence. Deep learning can only develop with focused conversations among students. (p. 5)
- Metacognition is at the forefront of learning and the authors expertly link this to the Common Core and our College and Career Ready Standards.
- There are extensive examples of teacher friendly graphic organizers, rubrics, language frames and other researched models to scaffold instruction. These resources can really support teachers’ learning about what instruction using our new standards needs to look like and include. Increasing rigor means that practitioners will need well designed scaffolds to make our students successful.
- The authors include actual student-teacher dialogue, offering examples of what learning and discourse looks like when students “read like detectives” — reasoning through text, identifying, discussing using accountable talk, and writing using evidence.
- Fisher, Frey & Lapp emphasize orientation back to the text as teachers discuss the author’s craft with their students and note how passages are carefully written to carry a story. (p.5)
- The reading-writing connection is always visible. Examples (p. 50, 60 & 107) of student writing are very useful for practitioners as they refine their expectations for student learning.
- The authors define vocabulary like evidence, ethos, pathos, logos, thesis – and a lot of other vocabulary essential for promoting metacognition among “student detectives.”
- The authors place emphasis on the reader and text, mirroring the CCRS emphasis on text complexity.
The authors help us connect CCRS to best practices
What I love most about Teaching Students to read Like Detectives is the way Fisher, Frye & Lapp really connect some dots inside the Common Core and our College and Career Ready Standards, linking them to sound research and thought leaders in the field of literacy. The authors draw us in by taking us through a historical perspective—from our country’s earliest attempts to define literacy to the ever-growing information overload that requires us to shift and adjust our definition of literacy more often.
Today, so much information with little questioning by the reader is “a dangerous recipe” — a statement that really caught my eye because our young readers need to approach information with a healthy dose of skepticism (p. 31). It is a caution we should all heed as we adopt instructional practices offered in the book to teach essential discernment in the 21st century.
Giving my blessing to Teaching Students to Read like Detectives is easy. As an educator, I can take the practices offered in Fisher, Frey & Lapp’s book and provide support for best practices in classrooms. These supports will be blessings to all students as they will learn and grow into college and career readiness and beyond.
What professional book can you bless?
Janet Kaylor has been an educator for 22 years in north Alabama, including stints in Madison County as a special education teacher and Madison City as a literacy coach. This is her ninth year providing regional support to the 12 districts in the AAMU/UAH region for The Alabama Reading Initiative. As proof that Janet loves school, she’s attended JSU, UAB, UAH and AAMU! Her first degree was a BA in Communication and her first (brief) career was healthcare marketing. We hope to lure her into more book reviewing!
