What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making

Drawing on their own lives as readers and writers and years of experience working in classrooms as coaches, staff developers, and consultants, Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton offer practical tips for meeting today’s rigorous standards while reminding us of the deeper, enduring purposes and process of reading.

In What Readers Really Do, you’ll peer into the minds and hearts of readers to notice the often invisible thinking work that goes into making meaning of texts―from comprehending where a scene is taking place to constructing thematic interpretations. And you’ll look into the authors’ own teaching minds and hearts as they unpack the moves and decisions they make to design and implement instruction that allows every student to make significant and personally relevant meaning of texts. Along the way, you’ll learn how to:

• notice and name what students are doing as readers to build their identity and agency
• move beyond simple strategy instruction to step students into more complex texts
• show students how readers draft and revise as they read to promote engagement, self-monitoring, and deeper comprehension.

Filled with student voices and classroom examples including read-alouds, small groups, and conferences, What Readers Really Do will challenge, inspire, and empower you to become the insightful, independent teacher your students need you to be. And it will remind both you and your students why and how we really read.

Vicki Vinton is a literacy consultant and writer who has worked in schools and districts across the country and around the world.  She is the author of Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach (2017), and coauthor of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making and The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language.  Vicki is also author of the novel The Jungle Law. Additionally, you can find Vicki online, at the popular literacy blog To Make a Prairie (www.tomakeaprairie.com).

Dorothy Barnhouse is the coauthor of the Heinemann title What Readers Really Do. She has built her professional life around her love of reading and writing. A freelance editor and writer for many years, she began teaching through a fellowship at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She is currently a literacy consultant working in elementary, middle, and high schools in New York City and across the country. Dorothy also teaches graduate and undergraduate writing workshops and has received several grants for her writing, including one from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Email planningservices@heinemann.com if you would like to contact Dorothy Barnhouse directly about professional development support.