Kristin Ackerman
March 2, 2012
I had some preconceived notions about a struggling fourth grader reader that I sat down to confer with last week. After administering a running record, I faced my new friend and asked him what he knew about himself as a reader. His response let me know that he was keenly aware that comprehension was his biggest challenge. When I asked if I could give him a trick to try, he was hesitant, but indulged me.
"There is a strategy called Check for Understanding. Have you ever heard of it?" I asked. He indicated that he had. "Do you know the secret of making that strategy work for you?"
There was a long pause, followed by a slow, "No, I can't do it."
Without missing a beat, I said, "Oh, let me show you the secret! The trick is to stop and see if you can remember what you just read." I modeled with a short passage, stopping often so he could glimpse what it really looks like when a reader Checks for Understanding.
Slightly nervous, he tried it on his own, breaking his short passage into even smaller sections and stopping long enough after each to restate what he'd just read. At the end, he put all the ideas together, proclaiming with a smile and a blush of pleasure, "Hey, I did it, I remembered what I just read!"
Another practice ended in a couple of high-fives and an articulation of the goal, strategy, and newly learned secret to success.
My preconceived notions proved to be incorrect. I'd thought he was unwilling to use strategies, but the underlying issue was that he didn't know how to access them himself. He'd been taught the strategy, but didn't internalize the secret to it's success, so he lacked the practical knowledge of how to make it work when he was reading.
"You know," I mentioned at the conference end, "You said 'No, I can't do that', but I think you really meant 'I don't know how to do that.' Maybe from now on, instead of saying 'No, I can't do that' you might ask 'How do I do that?' instead."
I've been haunted by my own words ever since. Do I, do we, when faced with daunting expectations and intense demands, ever say, "No, I can't do that"? How might our own worlds open up if we substituted, "How can I do that?"