Comprehension [Grades K-12]

The Skill, Will, and Thrill of Reading

"Fisher, Frey, and Law take components of effective reading instruction—skills, engagement, relevance—and show teachers how to focus their work in a meaningful way. Plenty of rich, classroom examples from all grade levels illustrate that this work is for everyone!"

"Comprehension inspires me to take action! I want to be deliberate in my selection of texts for students, in my conversations with them, in my questioning, and in my listening to them. We all need to better understand what can make or break a student’s motivation: whether it’s the skill, will, or thrill! I want to make book lovers out of my students, and not just create answerers of uninspiring questions with me expecting the same verbiage year after year. Thank you for fueling the fire to go out and do better by students, especially in this era where often we speed through things for task completion."

"Comprehension challenges the view of teachers as facilitators of literacy activities and begins to demonstrate how teachers can be knowledge builders who break the vicious cycle where students most in need of high-quality reading and writing opportunities end up getting the least. It is particularly relevant for teachers who are working with students that are reading to learn. It illuminates (psychological) variables that can promote a love of reading or contribute to reading avoidance and signals actions that teachers can take to foster a culture of deep reading.
This text contributes to the important debate about knowledge-rich curricula and the role that comprehension plays in an era dominated by smart devices and search engines. The authors elucidate the enduring importance of deep reading as an apprenticeship into ways of thinking and knowing that cultivates what Professor Maryanne Wolf calls cognitive patience: the gateway to contemplative thought, critical analysis, analogic reasoning, and empathy."

"In their new book, Comprehension: The Skill, Will and Thrill of Reading, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Nicole Law challenge teachers to rethink the meaning of comprehension with its emphasis on “what and how” instead of offering students opportunities to think about the “when and why.” The authors explain the thrill of comprehension, showing how reading can shape our identities, how we think about ourselves and others, how we view the world, and ultimately why we take social action. Carefully, this groundbreaking book guides readers into rethinking and re-imagining strategy application, with an emphasis on quantitative measures of readability over the nuances that qualitative measures reveal. Our re-imagining journey continues as the authors discuss the skills young readers practice to develop fluency and automaticity and those such as vocabulary and background knowledge that continue to grow over a lifetime. Using examples from primary grades through high school, they discuss the teaching of comprehension and students’ reactions to the practice that emerges from instruction. They explain the importance of will—student agency—and its relationship to developing literate minds through thinking, questioning, discussing, and problem solving. This is a seminal book that you will read again and again no matter what grade you teach."