I Read It, But I Don't Get It

This book, I Read It, But I Don't Get It, by Chris Tovani was amazing. It was a great resource for me as an online reading teaching to see how Tovani explained everything so well. She went through reading strategies and reading this book helped me to better understand them in a way I never had before. It was really interesting how she took the reader through a day with her students. It was fun to see their comments. She showed well how she dealt with apathetic students. That helped me a lot since I sometimes get students like that online because I teach some students who are struggling learners and readers. She mentioned in the book the importance of setting a purpose for the reading. I liked reading her reactions to some of the comments by her students. Some students asked her why they had to read a certain way or why they needed to spend so much time learning the strategies. Her answers were valuable and I will use this book often as a resource for my teaching.

This book was an easy and enjoyable read. I would love to read more work by this author. She is great.

I felt that it was easy for me to transfer what I learned in this book to my online teaching. I especially found helpful the part about relating the learning to the lives of students in reading, and activating their prior knowledge. In my reading courses all I ever heard was information about activating the prior knowledge and previous life experience of students, but no one ever really explained why, the purpose of it, or how to carry it out. This book really got to the meat of that and it helped me to see, step by step how to actually carry that out when teaching my students in the classroom.

I liked in the book how the author showed how she spoke to the students as a regular person. I think reading this book gave me my own voice in teaching online and helped me to be more comfortable talking to my students. I think that prior to reading this book I was afraid and did not really know how to really talk to my students. I have been noticing now that in my online teaching I am becoming better by the day at asking my students things and in involving them directly in their lessons. They seem to like this and I am pleased with this progress. If I had not read this book I would not probably have advanced to this level so rapidly, if ever!

Tovani speaks in this book about helping students see how their reading can be related to their lives. Again she explains everything so well and provides excellent examples. This is a book all reading teachers should read over and over.

The core of this book is that students in the classroom of the author are not really comprehending, but are instead just reading the words, not really thinking or reflecting on their reading. The teacher teaches her students exactly how to go about doing that, and it really worked. It gave me a good understand of how to, in turn, do the same with my students. The book and its concept are simple, but the ideas behind it are big and very helpful to reading teachers.

The author of this book explains that students should not give up, but should keep reading when they become confused. They should try different strategies and they need to know which ones will work for each situation. Context clues can be used that will help bring students to understanding. Students also should think of anything, no matter how minute that they know about the subject. Doing so will help them to gain new learning, like scaffolding instruction.