Digging Below the Surface

Let’s have some fun with reading today! I’ve borrowed the following passage from Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12 (I’ll be writing a series of blog posts based on this text in the upcoming weeks that will fall under the umbrella of Reading Across the Content Areas – you can see the first blog post here). Read through the passage, and then answer the following 4 questions (also from Gallagher).

Go ahead . . . I’ll wait . . .

How to Bartle Puzballs

There are tork gooboos of puzballs, including laplies, mushos, and fushos. Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they do not grunto any lipples. In order to geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples, you should bartle the fusho who has rarckled the parshtootoos after her humply fluflu.

1.     How many gooboos of puzballs are there?

2.     What are laplies, mushos, and fushos?

3.     Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they will not what?

4.     How can you geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples?

How’d you do? Here’s the answer key:

1.     There are tork gooboos of puzballs.

2.     Laplies, mushos, and fushos are tork gooboos of puzballs.

3.     They will not grunto any lipples.

4.     You should bartle the fusho who has rarckled her parshtootoos after her humply fluflu (Gallagher, 2004, p. 4).

I’m willing to bet you got all or most of those questions correct. But I’m also willing to bet that you don’t know what gooboos, puzballs, or mushos are and that you don’t have a clue about what you just read in that passage (I know this because Gallagher used nonsense words and made it all up).

This exercise translates right into what we want to avoid in our classrooms when assigning reading. Sure, we can assign reading and ask students to answer questions based on that reading. And our students might get all the questions correct. But do they really understand what they’ve read?

If the questions we ask don’t require higher-order thinking skills (like evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing), then they run the risk of remaining so much on the surface that students can answer them without even understanding what they’ve read (probably similar to the way you were able to answer those questions on gooboos and lipples). This ends up telling us very little to nothing about our students’ understanding, when we need to be striving to effectively check for understanding throughout our lessons and units in order to best help our students grow as learners.

We don’t want our students to be reading in our content areas at a “puzball-level” (Gallagher, 2004, p. 5). We want them to be looking below the surface. We want them to be using higher-order thinking skills.

Try keeping a copy of good old Bloom’s taxonomy where you write your lesson plans and your assessments so that you can easily refer to it. Or run your questions by a colleague (or your district’s friendly instructional coach, wink wink) to get another perspective on them.