Thinking and Reading

There's so much discussion about reading comprehension, and rightfully so.  We want students to be able to understand and synthesize what they are reading so they can both do well in school and enjoy what they are learning.  Comprehension is critical to students learning and to their success.  Yet to stop there with our goals for their literacy is to do them a huge disservice.  A lifelong disservice, in fact.

When I look up "think" in my favorite dictionary - the American Heritage 2nd College Edition from 1982 - I find a surprising array of definitions and synonyms, including: to reason, ponder; to formulate in the mind; to reflect; to judge; to believe; to hope or expect; to remember; to visualize or imagine. When you take all these words and put them into the context of reading, you begin to see the much bigger purpose reading can and is intended to play in our lives.

I once had someone, who didn't see much purpose in reading, say to me, "If you would stop reading all those books and just pay attention around you, you'd probably learn a lot more."  What this person didn't realize is that books are an incredible source of learning.  When we combine our reading with thinking, we are challenged, encouraged, entertained, taught, questioned, inspired, refreshed, and become more of who we were made to be.  Reading, when allowed, changes us.  That change can be for the better or worse.  So our thinking has to begin before we start to read, during the selection process.  And it has to continue after, so that the text is given time to do more than just plant seeds, but to germinate, take root and grow, in the hopes that it will eventually bear good fruit.