Tovani Chapter 4

In chapter 4 Tovani discusses a time in which she was brought in to find out why so many students were failing their history course. While making observations and asking questions, she discovered that the text being used in the course was way too difficult for the students who were having problems understanding anf making connections to the text. When she presented her finding to the principal she was met with negativity. He stated that they paid way too much for those books and that new books weren’t going to be an option. She then met with the staff and informed them that the books were too difficult and caused the teachers to cover too much information with the students.

This led to the focus of this chapter, which is accessibility of the text and if students can make connections with the text.  I have also seen this happen at my school as well. One of our math teachers start to use a college math transitions book with 10^th graders and it was way too difficult for them because I was a college level text. Student complained, parents complained and eventually the teacher was reprimanded. A new book was used but students had to play catch up and struggled very much that year.

According to Tovani the solution for problems like this relies on text choice based and the accessibility of the text. Tovani states,  "When students are always given text that is too hard for them to read on their own, they begin to associate school reading with reading that is pointless" (p.41). This is a mistakes that  I think happens fairly often. This is why it is so important to really review readings and text that we se with our students to ensure that they are appropriate for our students.  I think that in this day and age where AP and college prep course are highly sought after, teachers tend to think that the text we utilize need to be extremely rigorous. However, according to Tovani if we do that all it will do is turn students away and cause them to dislike academic reading.

Tovani also discussed utilizing text sets as a way to avoid making the aforementioned mistakes.  These sets can be used to break up reading time and can vary in difficult and length. This gives students more accessibility because they can chose what is interesting to them and these texts have the information needed to help students progress. This idea is great because one can apply to any content field and it will be successful. It is important to give students choice in reading materials, opportunities to utilize relevant texts, and give students interesting texts to review. It is also important to not put all of our faith in textbooks because the information can be passed on in so many other forms. I try to do this as much as I can and have actually drifted away from using a single textbook with my students. I prefer to use a variety of readings with my students and honestly they respond really well to this.