Quotes about Reading
"Interestingly, when teachers ask questions about a text, almost all already know the answer; by contrast, when students ask questions, they almost never already know the answer. Asking questions for which you already know the answer is inauthentic, yet that's the type of questioning that goes on in most classrooms." (Kylene Beers & Bob Probst, 2013, Notice and Note, Strategies for Close Reading, p. 29)
"Rigor, without relevance, is just hard!" Kylene Beers, personal communication
"Rigor is not an attribute of the text but rather a characteristic of our behavior with that text. Put another way, rigor resides in the energy and attention given to the text, not in the text itself." (Kylene Beers & Bob Probst, 2013, Notice and Note, Strategies for Close Reading, p. 20)
"Reading is thinking guided by print." (2003, Lucy Calkins, National Reading Recovery Conference Keynote)
"These kids showed us that images come from the emotions as well as the senses. Readers take the words from the page and stretch and sculpt them until the richness of the story becomes the richness of a memory replete with senses and emotions. Words on the page become recollections anchored in an unforgettable image of one’s own making." (1999, Elin Keene & Susan Zimmerman, Mosaic of Thought, p. 130)
"Visualizing and inferring don’t occur in isolation. Strategies interweave. Inferring occurs at the intersection of questioning, connecting, and print. Visualization strengthens our inferential thinking. When we visualize, we are in fact inferring, but with mental images rather than words and thoughts. Visualizing and inferring are first cousins, the offspring of connecting and questioning. Hand in hand, they enhance understanding." (2003, Stephanie Harvey & Anne Goudvis, Strategies That Work, p. 96)
“Almost all the conventional ways of referring to children who find literacy learning difficult imply a weakness in the children. We take the position that teaching must be designed to meet the needs of each child and that educators must constantly search for effective ways to serve the children they teach. Most learning problems exist not within the child but in the inadequacy of the system to find a way to teach him…Without intervention, they can perpetuate confusions and fall into behaviors that we then diagnose as reading disabilities. What was an early weakness that would respond to instruction becomes a long-term deficit. We need to remember that a difficulty is not necessarily a disability. By intervening early and using a repertoire of different instructional techniques, we can put most children back on track.” (2009, Irene Fountas & Gay Su Pinnell, When Readers Struggle, p. 30)