Book Review: Subjects Matter: Every Teacher's Guide to Content-Area Reading, by Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman
By: Charlie Troughton
Date: February 2007
Summary: Troughton reviews this book by Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman, which shows content-area teachers how to motivate students to read by creating supportive environments, calling on students' natural interests, and using authentic, real-world texts.
$27.00; 288 pages.
I am a social science teacher who now promotes reading and writing in my classroom, so as a site coordinator for the National Reading Initiative (NRI), I seized the opportunity to read this Daniels-Zemelman collaboration. Subjects Matter: Every Teacher's Guide to Content-Area Reading promised to address the significant issues that I hear my content-area colleagues pessimistically voice concerning their role as teachers of reading and writing: "It's the English department's job," "Why didn't they learn this before they got to the high school"? or "I have content material to cover." I, too, have tried to reconcile the difficult task of teaching a subject to students who struggle with minimal interest in the topic and a lack of basic reading comprehension skills.
Early in the book, Zemelman and Daniels clarified my thinking regarding these concerns. They articulate the two key problems linked to reading in secondary subject fields: students are reading the wrong material, and they don't understand what they read. Their description of these two issues—of content (what is read) and cognition (how it is read)—sums up my own trepidations. So, with great anticipation and a glimmer of hope, I delved into this book looking for nuggets that would help inform my inquiry into improving reading in my classroom.
I came away so impressed with Subjects Matter that I've recommended that our writing project site use this text as a tool in a National Reading Initiative content-area reading institute. The book is for every content-area teacher willing to try to make a difference in the reading-writing-learning lives of his or her students. Reading this book allowed me to better articulate three key observations about improving reading comprehension in our classrooms: teaching reading involves bigger concerns than what goes on inside a kid's mind as he or she looks at print; there are some concrete best practices in teaching reading that apply to content-area classrooms; and, finally, as teachers we must remember that reading is an issue of balance—a balance of content and cognition. This review will examine Subjects Matter through these three lenses.
Bigger Concerns
First, the authors convinced me that that reading issues go beyond understanding words on a page. Nor is teaching reading merely a matter of engaging students with comprehension activities, regardless of how practical, cognitive, and strategic they may be. Teaching reading means also dealing with the major issues of motivation, social-community interaction, schoolwide practice, and other environmental factors, some that we can control—and many that we cannot control. To understand the big picture requires a careful look at all of the elements and influences, inside and outside of students' heads, that play into reading.
Several chapters address the "social support" factors that play into effective, successful reading comprehension. Students are most likely to progress as readers when teachers relate the subject to students' personal interests, listen to what students say, know students well, and believe they can do well in school. Students too have a responsibility here. They are more likely to succeed when they treat each other with respect, work together to solve problems, and help each other learn. Parent and community involvement also play a huge role in the process. Educators who build a community of learners in classrooms and throughout the entire school are likely to "to give reading in our subjects the full meaning it deserves." The authors cite a recent study that links increased standardized test scores among students in Chicago with greater attention to social support factors such as these.
One is left with the understanding that cognitive strategies and practices are relatively worthless in the classroom if students don't feel accepted or are turned off to school. Therefore, we need to look at the contexts in which the cognitive strategies can operate. The authors note the advantages to in-depth inquiry projects with real-world reading. Most folks who live and work outside the classroom do not just sit down and read a textbook when they need information; they choose other types of texts as well. The authors urge that these alternative texts also be made available to our students.
The chapters on reading workshops, book clubs, and inquiry units provide contexts that teachers may use in the process of building reading comprehension beyond the performance of isolated tasks and the acquisition of isolated skills. Within these frames reading becomes a primary mode of acquiring knowledge.
Best Practices
Once we recognize the necessity of social support for learning and the importance of meaningful contexts for presenting curriculum, we can then make use of the repertoire of best practices that are described in depth in the book. Chapter two lays the groundwork for a fundamental understanding of the mental processes of reading that students use to access content—ironically, abilities they may not even know they possess. These include the acts of visualizing, connecting, questioning, inferring, evaluating, and self-monitoring. All of these functions are explicated in detail that will help teachers show students more efficient ways to use them. The authors point out that schools that implement these learning strategies schoolwide are most likely to see students applying what they learn.
The in-depth explanations of strategies are coupled with easy-access, at-a-glance lists throughout the book that busy teachers without a background in reading instruction will appreciate and can periodically revisit. For example, chapter five, "Tools for Thinking: Reading Strategies Across the Curriculum," with its "before," "during" and "after" activities, is a useful reference section for teachers who want to help students engage with, understand, think about, and apply the reading they do.
Balance
Perhaps the most significant idea of this book is encapsulated in the term "balance": the balance of cognition and content; the balance of textbooks and "real-world" text; the balance of theory and practice; the balance of strategies and environmental factors; and even the balance of teacher control and student choice.
The authors pose a series of thought-provoking comparisons that guide a teacher to evaluate the diversity of the content material accessible to students in the classrooms and/or the school library: textbooks versus other genres, choice versus assigned, fiction versus nonfiction, classics versus contemporary works, hard versus easy, short versus long, primary versus secondary sources, and multiple texts versus single sources. For me, these categories of balance are extremely useful in determining the kind of reading I need to offer my students.
The authors also offer a well-balanced assessment of textbooks for subject-area classrooms. Understanding that textbooks are not likely to go away soon, they write,
Perhaps now it is clearer than ever why we must change not just how we teach reading, but what we ask kids to read. We need to use textbooks more appropriately (and sparingly), as the reference books that they are, and also infuse the curriculum with authentic, real-world nonfiction—the kind of informational, expository, persuasive texts that adults really read. (47)
Content-area teachers are urged to supplement textbooks with material that is genuine, readable, current, accurate, and well written, but there is also an entire, especially welcome chapter devoted to ways to efficiently use textbooks as a learning tool.
The authors supplement their argument for the use of authentic texts with a menu for a balanced diet of reading that they would consider for their own classroom libraries. The list certainly caught my interest. After perusing the recommended reading list of great books for middle and high school students, I wanted to go out and buy E = MC2, A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis, which the authors mention as an example of the kind of interesting, well-written, and informative books that science teachers can make available in their classroom libraries. Of course, the list of suggested books for social science / history also kindled a desire in me to buy many of the titles for my own classroom library.
The end of the book synthesizes the significant concepts of the text by offering students' testimonies. How fitting to finish with what teenagers say! They teach us; they surprise us; they force us to evaluate what we say and do in the classroom.
A colleague recently asked me if there was anything in the book that I did not like. I thought for a moment. "Besides some of the irritating political pokes, no, not really." This book is a useful tool for any teacher willing to reflect on his or her practice, reminding us there is a balance to maintain, many practical strategies to use, and a bigger picture to consider.