All this week, as part of CLMOOC (Connected Learning MOOC) focus on doodling and drawing for deeper understanding and creative fun, I’ve been reading Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Bob Probst.
I would read some of the book, highlight salient points, and then circle back around to find a line or phrase that stood out for me about ways we can “disrupt” our schools to provide more avenues for learning for all of our students.
Beers and Probst focus primarily on reading, and press us educators to push back against the “testing climate” and find ways to spark the love of reading in our students.
I would then take that line or phrase for “a walk” in the Pencil app on my iPad and try to illustrate the scene.
I did this all rather quickly, so some came out better than others.
But I like how the doodling and drawing forced me to not just reflect but also to internally defend why I had highlighted what I had in the first place.
Lots of teachers are reading Disrupting Thinking this summer in various online reading groups, I see, and my overall experience with the book itself was a positive one, although I suspect the use of the term “disrupt” is a marketing touch.
The two authors, whom I respect and who have have written important books about teaching, urge us educators to be more thoughtful in how we sustain rich reading lives for our students, as reading is a key to learning in all content areas (not to mention, a key to a creative life). Their emphasis on a framework they call Book-Head-Heart is a logical way to begin to get young readers to move what they are reading beyond test questions and surface knowledge, and more into connecting with their own lives and experiences (in our school, we call this “reading beyond the text”). I’ll probably write a longer review for Middleweb.
Do you doodle when you read?
Peace (think in disruptions),
Kevin
