The Art of ComprehensionBy Trevor Andrew Bryan
This summer I have been reading books about the teaching of reading. These are books that are mostly focused on helping kids understand what they are reading and also the joy of stories. I just finished Trevor Andrew Bryan’s book The Art of Comprehension: Exploring Visual Texts to Foster Comprehension, Conversation, and Confidence. Before beginning, I absolutely loved Bryan’s ideas and his framework for supporting students’ comprehension.
In this book, Bryan introduces a framework for reading both illustrations and writing in books. This framework can also be applied when students are crafting their own pieces of writing. The framework includes:
List everything you see (decode)
Determine the mood and support it with evidence from the text
Think about what is causing the mood
Determine a big idea or a topic or a theme from the text
Think about symbols
Make connections (text-to-text, text-to-world, text-to-self)
When teaching and then implementing the framework, you can support students to think critically about what they are reading and analyze the texts. I appreciated how when this is practiced frequently, students can move from recall to grappling with the text and thinking about it in more depth. So, the framework shows teachers how to get students to think critically about texts they read, which is so important for our readers. We want kids to think about what they are reading and make connections to other areas of their lives when reading.
There were many strategies that I found very supportive and I was impressed with how some strategies were better intended for small group work while others could be implemented with the whole class. One of my favorite strategies was for writing and highlighted the connection between reading and writing. It’s one that I plan to model to my students in the fall. This strategy is called Mood Poems. Students work in small groups and using a text that has already been read and discussed through the framework, they write their own poems about the mood in small groups. After the poems are complete, the groups share with each other. After the sharing, it opens up to a discussion in the class and enables students to see more possibilities in the text. This is wonderful because it allows the students to think through the text and generate a poem together and then as a class they can go further to understand the text.
In the final chapter, Trevor Bryan discusses the cycle between understanding and creating and how the two work together. He argues that this is our most important job as educators and parents - to help children engage with this cycle. I loved this ending and found it to be so true!