Making Textbook Reading Meaningful

Guthrie and Klauda argue that textbooks are an important part of middle school reading but in Making Textbook Reading Meaningful they say a lot of times these books are at too high of a level for most of our middle school students. Guthrie and Klauda explain five practices that motivate our students to read the textbook rather that actively avoid reading the material. Research shows most of what we learn and know about our basic studies come from reading informational texts. This reading helps students to become self-disciplined, which according to Guthrie and Klauda self-discipline can be more important than IQ tests (Guthrie & Klauda, 2012). The self-discipline needed to be successful comes from reading, not just textbooks but a wide variety …show more content…
I found it unique that in order for our students to build the self-discipline they need to have increased self-efficacy in order to have a high self-efficacy students need to be successful when learning from the textbook. While I was student teaching and taking classes to become a teacher professors and administration would tell us to steer clear of just having our students read the textbook, so I would develop lesson that would use my knowledge or other resources. I found it useful that the authors give teachers proven successful ways to incorporate our textbooks. I will use the different strategies suggested in “building self-efficacy” (Guthrie & Klauda, 2012) to help motivate my student to want to read different texts including the textbook. One way I can get students to read the textbook more is through social motivations. Using social motivation to get students to read their textbooks will be extremely useful in my eighth grade classes. I can have my students read sections and become experts on the section and then teach their classmates what was important, after each section has been taught they class will then have to take an assessment over the information, this will ensure they take the time serious and focus on their reading. These ideas of collaboration are unique in the fact that they …show more content…
I have already started adding videos and different internet sites, but I feel they need to read more. I can do this by incorporating primary source documents, history journals and possibly even historical fiction. I read the picture book version of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and my students always get very interested in his ride and want to know more about what was going on during the time period. This activity shows them the importance of the textbook because most of the questions they have can be answered with their textbooks. Guthrie and Klauda express the importance of letting our students know how valuable our textbook and other information texts are to learning. I would like to start using questions straight from our textbook on our test, this would help to increase the comprehension of informational texts and help to understand their importance. Another way I can help to increase the value of the textbook would be to incorporate it into more of our classroom activities. One activity that I do try to use with my students is think-pair-share, the students would all read the same section of the textbook, then think about what they read, pair up with a partner and discuss what all the got out of the reading and then share that information with a group or the entire classroom. This goes hand in hand with some of the strategies discussed in the article.