Thoughts while reading Tatum's "Teaching Black Adolescent Males"

"Monitoring reading data too easily can become a scorecard of achievement. This can lead teachers to select a text based on the requirements of standardized tests or limit instruction to test-preparation practice...Effective teachers of black males understand that they must go beyond reading instruction. They understand, as my own teachers did, that focusing only on skills and strategies does little to address the turmoil many black youths experience in America, and it may do little to improve their reading achievement...They understood that the texts placed before me had to address some of the psychological and emotional scarring that results from the day-to-day experiences of being black, male, and poor in America. My teachers wanted to help me develop an identity that would be useful outside the walls of my school." (pgs.24-25)

This excerpt makes me think not only about how students may get more out of reading instruction that is relevant to student lives, but that teachers are better teachers when they see a connection between the content of their instruction and their students' lives. I think this is why The Watsons go to Birmingham is my favorite whole class novel. I see that students connect to in a different way, that they identify with characters and situations in rich and meaningful ways.

But I do think that effective instruction of black male readers still needs to incorporate the skills and strategies that help students maximize their comprehension and thinking around the text. I think that this is where I got stymied with comic book club. Students were able to connect and be entertained by what they read, so their engagement and enthusiasm for reading improved. But without targeted instruction around processes that highly literate readers employ, I don't think that their engagement in the text was leveraged as much as it could have been to ingrain good reading practices. So I'm trying to find a middle ground here where boosting engagement can improve comprehension, and vice versa. I think these two areas definitely support each other, and I think a very organic area for enriching this connection is inquiry. Inquiry could be a very powerful lynchpin because it facilitates students to further explore what engaged and excited them in the text. Basically, well-facilitated and scaffolded inquiry should push students to naturally extend their love of texts into deeper thinking and new types of learning. Inquiry also helps students make deeper, more meaningful connections between the text and their own lives, in the spirit that Tatum was describing.