Three Reads & How We Peel Back the Layers

Teaching reading is not as simple as assign reading, read the reading, talk about the reading. It is also not as simple as having students answer some questions or writing an essay about it.

Reading is a process that requires our brains to work overtime in decoding symbols – through detangling single letters, full words, assigned meanings of the words, all to forming ideas (which are largely symbolic until we define and analyze them), and then being able to communicate about them (talk and/or write about it). Did I lose you? Wouldn’t be surprised if I did – writing that was a doozy – because reading and thinking about what we read are a doozy. I’m trying to get underneath the idea that reading is something we just do. It is not. It takes work to do it well.

Let’s pause for a moment and think about how we come to understand what we read. When we read something for the first times, we are working to comprehend what we are reading – to keep up, to follow, to understand on a basic level what is going on. If we were to take a test after that initial reading without processing, we would likely fail it unless all of the questions were comprehension questions.

The truth is that we do not really understand anything with any depth until we can through the second reading. Like watching a movie for a second time, in our second reading of a text, our cognition begins to shift to things that are more satisfying for our minds … we begin to get into the why of the writing. The purpose of it. Our minds love to analyze and our hearts love to feel, so if we enjoyed these in the first reading, we are going to go to a deeper level with both in the second.

Then, there is the third reading. Here I think of seeing a movie for the third time. I don’t know about you, but by a third viewing, I am now beginning to enjoy observing and wondering at how the film was made. That level of analysis brings pleasure on yet a whole new level. The same is true of a third reading. By the third reading, we understand the text well enough to say why we think it was written, and so in the third reading, we begin to be able to connect how the author’s language choices and their impacts directly develop the author’s purpose - the author’s why.

When I assign reading, I come to it with this understanding, which has become a guiding philosophy and approach when I “teach” reading, which I don’t really do (they came to me reading – thank you parents and kindergarten teachers), I need the students to do the learning, so they need to do the unpacking. I am there to coach and guide, but they must do the work if they are to grow.

When I began to teach AP Literature and Composition, I felt the pressure to help my students to understand a text deeply and quickly enough to be able to write an essay about it, in 40 minutes (there were three of them). It was through helping my students reach these goals that I found myself voicing to them again and again, “You have to reread it – you are going to miss the deep stuff the first time out.” After tiring of my own repetition, I realized that I needed to create a protocol that would require that they reread, and so I did. I called it Three Reads. Once they learned it, they got good and fast at it – and it paid off. More importantly, I began to teach all of my students the protocol, and guess what? It benefitted all of them, especially the struggling learners.

The complaint about Three Reads is, well, the three readings. If it is simply assigned to the students without the teacher doing it with them (modeling) a couple of times and then having students do it in small groups (building confidence), before releasing them to do it on their own, students are going to lack the confidence to do it, and that feels BAD. They will shut down. They will say, “I hate it.”

However, if students are walked through it until they can do it on their own, it actually builds their confidence as they begin to catch things they used to not see. They start to feel “smart,” as some will verbalize proudly. Most did not know they could read let alone analyze a text until they learn like this. And when they complain? Compare it to them seeing their favorite movie, and say, “We are doing the same thing you have done with your movie – we are “rewatching” so that we can peel back layers and see what we didn’t see before. Isn’t that fun?”

Beyond the Three Reads Protocol, below you will find other resources that I have developed over the years to guide students through reading assignments.