During my staff development days last August, I participated in a workshop on teaching students difficult texts. That experience prompted me to spend significant time and energy this year focusing on, in the workshop presenter Kelly Gallagher’s words, creating “deeper readers.” The concepts Gallagher shared with me and my fellow teachers directly connect to this week’s readings, particularly The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (TEAPOD) and “How Experts Differ From Novices,” by recognizing the importance of teaching students to embrace difficulty while demanding that they think more critically.

While reading TEAPOD, I immediately began questioning: How exactly can I incorporate Salvatori and Donahue’s methods into my classroom? Because it seems apparent that students cannot successfully embrace difficulty without first developing some level of self-awareness, I decided to focus first on helping my readers, 10^th grade English students, determine their “repertoires.” The authors’ word choice to describe students’ prior knowledge and skills appeals to me because, unlike much educational jargon, “repertoire” has an artistic, edgy sound to it that I think many of my students would like to identify with. It has undertones of musicality, talent, the makings of an engaging performance. I imagine the word, slipped into our daily blackboard agenda, will at the very least pique my students’ curiosity, and could even go so far as to generate some enthusiasm for what will hopefully be an effective reading strategy.

Though the authors suggest establishing students’ repertoires through poetry analysis, I am approaching a unit on detective fiction; therefore, I’ve decided to start where I am. So instead of having students question and reflect on their beliefs about poetry, I will ask them to do the same exercise with detective fiction: What experiences have they had with mystery stories as a child? A teenager? Did they love watching Scooby Doo reruns and always finger the Red Herring? Have they consumed page-turner mysteries as summer beach reads, watched Saturday marathons of Law & Order SVU, or seen any Agatha Christie film adaptations? Did they watch Murder, She Wrote with their grandmothers? (No, that was me…). Do they posses powers of intuition and reasoning similar to the best detectives? Are they keen observers? You get the idea… . Responding to such questions will allow students to start examining their prior assumptions, expectations, and emotions; my hope is that by considering all of these, we can eliminate some of the barriers to engaged, critical reading that would have otherwise developed.

With this newfound awareness, my students will tackle The Difficulty Paper as discussed in TEAPOD, reflecting their struggles in the Poe short story I’m assigning to them. I’m eager to see how this level of meta-cognition affects their readings, and if it immediately lends itself to a deeper understanding of the text. Because many students are accustomed to answering primarily literal, plot-based questions on a first read, I’m interested to see the results of their reflections. My students will be completing those papers in the coming week, so I’ll keep you posted on their progress…

Karen Goldman