Reading Tough Texts

We have enjoyed faculty conversations this week on student feedback and deep reading and thought it would be appropriate to share the 2016 SoTL article “Varied Responses as a Means to the Richness of Discourse: Reading Tough Texts through Speaking and Writing.” This paper by Carol Thompson and Michael Kleine explores communication response styles that enrich understanding of complex ideas and promotes student use of metacognition to reflect deeply about what they are learning. Through the use of a response heuristic list the authors employ a whole-language approach in an effort to enhance student reading and theme-based classroom discourse.

The findings point to the combined process of reflection and discussion as the nexus for intellectual and personal growth and presenting the texts in this way heightened student awareness of themselves as communicators. The heuristic list prompted students to see a text in multiple ways, a characteristic of deep learning. Finally, another outcome of this study was that the authors came closer to generating a community of discourse in a learning community of scholars through collective co-construction of meaning.

Thompson, C. L., & Kleine, M. W. (2016). Varied Responses as a Means to the Richness of Discourse: Reading Tough Texts through Speaking and Writing. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(1), n1. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1542&context=ij-sotl