In turn, teaching nonfiction reading became less than thrilling. As a literacy coach, many teachers have expressed to me this same sentiment by sharing that they much prefer to read a picture book than a dry, nonfiction text. Conversely, Stead suggests that we, as instructors, need to make our students’ experience of reading nonfiction just as rich and thought-provoking as reading literature.
Stead begs the question, “What should we be teaching our learners, and what types of questions should we be asking when working with informational texts?” While much nonfiction comprehension instruction is based on navigating text features and regurgitating facts, Stead focuses on three key levels of understanding.
The foundation or first level of understanding is the literal. This encompasses confirming or changing predictions, retelling, visualizing, summarizing, locating information, locating cause and effect, and identifying problem and solution, among other skills. Much of our teaching of nonfiction begins and ends here.
However, beyond literal understanding lies interpretive understanding. Inferring and making connections fall under this category. Stead provides strategies to teach even the youngest readers how to infer through a series of lessons. Additionally, connections with nonfiction texts are powerful as readers create deeper meaning by activating their schema.
Evaluative understanding allows readers to become text critics by reading, questioning, and analyzing the author’s message. This includes differentiating fact from opinion, the validity or relevance of a piece, author bias, intent, or point of view, as well as tools or crafts the author may have used to affect the reader’s thinking such as playing on emotions or using information that shocks.
Alternately, the RAN (reading and analyzing nonfiction) strategy allows for approximations as students consider “What I THINK I Know”. Then, students read with the purpose of either confirming those facts or adjusting their thinking due to misconceptions. Also, students gather new facts and grow their learning under the heading “New Information” and raise thoughtful questions based on this new information as “Wonderings”. I have used the RAN strategy while working with teachers during their nonfiction units of study and have found it incredibly helpful and practical.
Reality Checks also describes the art of retelling and how, too often, young readers simply copy facts from nonfiction texts rather than internalizing the information. Stead offers a primary process and an upper elementary process for students to deconstruct the text by holding on to key words and phrases and then to reconstruct the information by retelling orally or in writing. This pushes readers to take ownership and helps them retain new learning.
Stead argues that reading to learn is just as important as learning to read and that the two can and should be taught simultaneously. I tend to think he has a point.