What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making

What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making by Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton, Heinemann, 2012, 224 pp., 978-0-325-03073-9

Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton draw on their lives as readers, writers, teachers, and literacy consultants to offer practical examples of ways teachers can help children attend to invisible reading work that "often goes unnoticed or that happens so quickly it feels automatic" (p. 1). Barnhouse and Vinton argue that in addition to using current content knowledge to teach and pedagogical knowledge to support learning, teachers who want to effectively teach readers must first notice "their own reading mind(s) at work" (p. 14) and use that knowledge of who they are as readers to help children understand "the way readers think as they read, not what to think" (p. 7). All too often, in a wellintentioned quest to help children understand increasingly complex text (as demanded by the Common Core State Standards), teachers may lose sight of their own history as readers. The authors remind teachers that because adult lives are full of experiences and hard-won insights, "it is unrealistic to think that our students would see the same things we are able to see" in a text (p. 7).

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