3 ways to help your students become strategic readers.

Two decade ago, when I was a new researcher in the field of writing, I wrote articles titled "Learning to Make Writing Hard" and "Make It Messy to Make It Clear." In-them, I agreed that we grow as writers not only by writing fast and fluently, but also by slowing down to revise, rework, and rethink our first drafts. Lately, I've been thinking about applying the same principle to reading.

The Value of Revision in Reading

Most of us agree that revision is an important part of the writing craft. But I think for many of us it's new to consider the value of revision in reading. We want kids to read fluently and unself-consciously, to lose themselves in dreaming the dream of a story. To do that well, though, young readers must have strategies for figuring out difficult texts and for finding meaning between lines and pages. It's important for them to bring so much intelligence and insight to their reading that even time spent with simple texts can be multilayered and full of new thoughts.

In this column, I suggest ways to encourage all children to become strategic readers with the tools they need to rework, reread, and reconsider texts.

STRATEGY 1: Brainstorm Ways To Read Difficult Texts

When my colleagues and I pull our chairs alongside a child whose reading seems to be on cruise control, we are often tempted to challenge that child by suggesting a higher-level text. Kathy Doyle, a fifth-grade teacher and member of the Teachers College Reading Project, takes this idea one step further. She asks her students to find articles, poems, and essays that they think are too hard for them to read now, but will be just right in a year. Using those examples, Kathy and her students talk about how all of us as readers struggle with certain texts, and go on to compile a list of strategies to use when we encounter them. Those strategies have included the following.

* I take time to look the text over before I read it and ask myself, What kind of text is this? I think about other texts that might be like this one - stories, letters, magazine articles, for example.

* I read and then reread.

* I ask someone to read the beginning aloud to me so I can get the tone and gist of it.

* I read the beginning over more than once so I can get my bearings.

* I read with a friend and we stop to talk a lot. We retell what's been said so far and look back to try to keep things straight in our minds.

Kathy and her students often find themselves trying out one another's strategies and discussing how they work for them.

STRATEGY 2: Explore Layers of Meaning in Easier Books

When Kathleen Tolen, another colleague, wanted to help her fifth graders learn to make reading more challenging, she invited them all to join her in a study of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad easy-reader series! "I wanted my kids to see how they can use their minds to find and make layers of meaning in texts," Kathleen says. Her students noticed instances when Frog and Toad acted out of character. They compared Frog and Toad to each other, as well as to people in their lives. One group concluded that since Frog is green and Toad is brown, Lobel wrote the stories to show kids how to have good interfacial friendships. Another group decided that Frog and Toad were a couple after rereading the texts for evidence, such as the characters' tendency to wake each other up in the morning.

STRATEGY 3: Reread and Rethink Texts Together

At Wooster Lower School in Danbury, Connecticut, my second-grade son Evan and his classmates use partnership conversations as invitations to think deeply about texts. In pairs, the children explore and find evidence of hunches they have about the literature. They meet three times a week, and their conversations are kept on course by charts, diagrams, and maps. For example, Evan and Jane have been reading The Wizard of Oz series together. Every day, at the beginning of independent reading, they talk over what they read the previous night. At first, the two children documented pages on which they found evidence that the Scarecrow, contrary to his reputation, is the scholar in the group, and that the Cowardly Lion is actually the most courageous. Now they are extending their hunches across all the Oz books by drawing maps and diagrams that show connections among the people and places. Evan and Jane are able to have these conversations because their teachers listen to how they respond to the books, help them to recognize their hunches, and guide them toward gathering evidence to prove their theories.

Around the classroom, other children read in partnerships. Each pair has a hunch to pursue, an angle of vision that steers their talk.

LUCY McCORMICK CALKINS is founding director of the renowned Teachers College Writing Project, a national coalition of teachers, teacher-educators, professors, and writers. She also codirects the Teachers College Reading Project. Lucy is the author of The Art of Teaching Writing (Heinemann, 1995), is currently working on a book for parents, and plans to soon begin writing The Art of Teaching Reading.