Chapter 8: Extending Meaning

I feel that this section is really important because it is after-reading strategies that will help cement the more abstract ideas in a student's mind. When you read a poem, you are only engaged for a few minutes during the reading, but you can be engaged for much longer AFTER the reading is over. My favorite part of this chapter was the scales section. I feel that these can be used multiple times, especially when reading a novel. I hope to use scales so that the students can track their changes in beliefs throughout the story. Maybe at the beginning, the student thinks that what one character did was wrong, then throughout the story the student realizes that maybe what they did was actually right or the only option so their beliefs can change. I also like that in the Likert Scale picture there is no "Neutral" option. I feel like it forces students to pick a side and then you can use these results to potentially debate the subject.

Later on in the chapter I really liked the "Most Important Word" exercise. I feel that if you can get students to identify themes or main ideas, it will be easier to work them down to finer details in the text. You need to start with big ideas then work down toward more specific ideas. By using the worksheet for the Most Important Word exercise, you can help them apply the big ideas to the smaller details, such as characters, settings, plot, and conflicts.

One quote that really stood out to me is in the reflections part of the chapter. Beers says, "I'm most frustrated when I visit classrooms in which the teacher obviously still views comprehension as a product and not a process." From a student's standpoint, I hated it when teachers just expected you to know what to do and how to do it. When you treat comprehension as a process, you would use different strategies and modeling to get the students to where they need to be, instead of just handing them a question sheet and turning it back in as just a homework assignment or just giving a quiz over the previous nights reading at the beginning of class. I feel all teachers should keep this quote in mind when teaching in order to become better educators.