This book really breaks down the process highly engaged readers go through as they are reading, and he encourages readers to become engaged by creating assignments that put them in the books. He wants them to think like the characters, or fill in the gaps that authors leave in a book so you can jump to your own conclusions. Jeffrey Wilhelm transferred from teaching high school English to middle school English, and in his new class load were three sessions of remedial eighth grade English. He tried everything he could think of to get these students to read, but the just gave up stating that they hated reading. At nights he would go home and read to his daughter, his niece and a neighbor boy. While reading with them he realised that they employ reading techniques that older students seem to lose along the way, such as connecting the text to their lives, acting out the text, and visualizing.
Wilhelm started his classes for four years with a reading inventory, asking if the students liked reading, and what they liked to read. He found that half of his students didn’t read outside of class. He also found that students who are not strong readers don’t enjoy surprises while reading. They feel that the author is trying to trip them up.
When Wilhelm started his year of research with his classes, he chose three highly engaged students to study. One was a male and the other two were female. He interviewed these students and recorded their reading habits and strategies. He found that while these students are all engaged, they still go about reading in slightly different ways. The male student would be sucked into the world of the book he was reading. He would essentially become one of the characters and temporarily “live” in the book world, meshing his world with it. The girls were not quite so literal in their reading. When he first asked his students how they read, they replied that teachers don’t usually care about how a student reads. I think this information should be very important to teachers. Without knowing how your students read how can you teach them literature? Wilhelm persisted and eventually created opportunities for the students to show him how they read. He had the students participate in Symbolic Story Representations (SRI) . For SRIs the students recreated scenes from the book they are reading with cutouts. They would have a cutout to represent themselves and they would show where they were in the story while they were reading. Some students become a friend of the character, or they are invisible and can just see everything that is going on. I think this would be interesting to do, but it might be difficult to get students to take this seriously. I think I could get a similar result if I have students draw a scene and have them represent themselves in the scene. This would not take nearly as much time as the SRI. Wilhelm came to think of student responses to literature as in 10 different dimensions. He then divided these dimensions into three different categories, Evocative, Connective, and Reflective. By indicating the different dimensions, not only can we see how engaged the student is, we can also see that there are different purposes and ways of reading, Just because a student is reading a text one way doesn't mean it is the right or wrong way, they just might be trying to get something else out of the reading than what you intended.
Wilhelm discovered that to be engaged in the reading the reader has to see what is going on. In a conversation with a reader who said he didn’t experience anything while he was reading a story, the reader told him that he “can’t think about it, talk about it, do anything about it,” if he couldn't see it. With other readers he discovered that when they did describe a character it was not always consistent with the descriptions of the character, one boy describing a retired teacher by comparing her to his young athletic science teacher, even though he knows how old people are when they retire. Later Wilhelm realized that some of these students enjoyed and “got” comic books that have “sophisticated humor,” leading him to believe that the images along with the text helped them to understand the text. He brought in a number of illustrated texts, like comic books, graphic novels, and stories with illustrations. The reluctant readers ambushed the texts, while the engaged readers mostly ignored them. Later he has students draw what they read. He found that some students have sketchy ideas of what characters and settings look like before they draw, but when they draw they need to fill in the sketches, and this allows them to have a more complete image of what they are reading. Wilhelm also states that having students visualize the text in various ways helps students remember what they read. This is something I should have tried with one of my students last semester. He couldn't remember anything he read. He also had a hard time finding the words to describe something we had just read together. If he was able to draw things as they happen it is possible that he would have an easier time remembering. We say that we need to experience what we learn with as many senses as possible: we read it (see), we say it (feel), and we hear it (hear). Drawing is just a new way to experience what we read.
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