7 Keys to Comprehension Book Review by ChristineMM

Title: 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It!
Authors: Susan Zimmermann and Chryse Hutchins
Publication: Three Rivers Press, 2003
ISBN: 0761515496

How this book came to me: I was discussing homeschooling my children on my blog and mentioned teaching the topic of reading comprehension. A kind blog reader said this was an excellent book. I read varied Amazon customer reviews which made me suspect this book might not be worth buying, so I borrowed it using interlibrary loan, from the public library.

Overall rating: 3 stars out of 5

My bottom line summary is this: this is a good book for a parent of a schooled child who has not ever read anything about teaching children to read or teaching reading comprehension because it covers very basic information. Beyond that it may either fall short on equipping a parent with a game plan for actually putting these ideas into action OR it may be too time and energy intensive for parents to choose to use these ideas in real life. If a parent or a homeschooling parent has ever read anything else on this topic this may be repetitive or ‘too basic’. I also suspect (hope) that this is too simplistic for school teachers who I think should have learned all of this in college while obtaining their bachelor’s degree in education or definitely while obtaining their master’s degree in reading. As a side note librarians who may be interested in reading this book, I would imagine, that they already know this information too.

Here is my longer review:

I read this book cover to cover, made notes and digested it for a month, then scanned the book again. I have mixed feelings about this book and felt that a 3 star (out of five) rating is fair. On the one hand some things are good, some parts are ‘too basic’ and others are ‘not enough information’.

The authors state the book is for both parents (of schooled children) and teachers. I, as a homeschooling parent/teacher am in a bit of a different position falling somewhere in between the two. (I say that because I didn’t attend college to earn a degree in education. My knowledge about teaching my children comes from attending conferences and hearing lectures and also being self-taught from reading books such as this one, including sometimes reading books published for use by school teachers and/or librarians.)

I want to also make clear that the book is really only for children who are just learning to read spanning through the end of the elementary grades. This book does not really cover middle school or high school students, in my opinion because it doesn’t ever discuss getting into discussions on controversial topics. It gives no guidance on handling discussions of ‘touchy subjects’ or uncomfortable material, highly emotional material and so on (rape, divorce, racism). The book really centers on discussing easy picture books. The opinion that I feel this is best for the elementary grades is verified also by the choice of books the authors use, which are mostly picture books and then the few juvenile fiction that the publishers state are for grades 9-12.

The book was very easy to read and is written in simple language. They layout with the wide margins and plenty of white space on the page will not scare off readers, especially the parents of schooled children who may not be accustomed to reading non-fiction books about teaching methods of children. The book is not boring.

The authors explain briefly the ‘old fashioned way’ of teaching and judging reading comprehension versus the new way: “Reading comprehension (now) has to do with thinking, learning, and expanding a reader’s knowledge and horizons. It has to do with building on past knowledge, mastering new information, connecting with the minds of those you’ve never met.” Sounds terrific! The authors then break down reading comprehension into seven ‘keys’ and the book’s main content is explaining those seven components.

The perhaps over-simplified explanations of the seven keys as I said are probably best for parents who are not well read on reading and teaching reading (in general). The seven keys are: sensory images, background knowledge, questioning, drawing inferences, determining importance, synthesizing, and fix-up strategies. The information, I am guessing, is too simple for school teachers. I say this because the concepts are so simplistic that these ideas must have been taught to the teacher in college while obtaining their education degree---I hope.

Another reason why I think the book is too simplistic is that some very basic concepts are said that are ‘old news’. While I have not read a lot of books on the niche topic of teaching (just) reading comprehension, I have read books about teaching children to read, and getting children to love reading and books. Some of these ‘keys’ and the foundations they explain in the book are ‘the same old same old’ such as a reader has to know a little about the topic or they may not understand all that is in the book, which many teachers have heard before and which parents I surely hope have heard before (such as if they read mainstream parenting magazines). I am talking about simple ideas such as the importance of reading aloud to children, if they hear good vocabulary they will expand their vocabulary and have an easier time reading those harder words to themselves later on, and that they must have base knowledge in order to understand a book on that topic.

What the authors also do is present for each key; a classroom group discussion exercise that they say the teacher can (should) do with their students. First this is not entirely useful for the parent of a schooled child who is seeking to work one on one, because the reason the group discussion works so well is because there are many students in the group contributing their answers to the questions which then helps the students who did not know the answer and was not contributing to the discussion. These exercises just won’t work equally well in a 1:1 setting at home all the time because if the parent asks a question and the child does not know the answer then the parent will have no choice but to feed them the answer—therefore this ends up being more of a lecture than a true ‘discussion’ (the lecture is not suggested as a good teaching method by these authors and I agree). For that reason also the homeschooling parent such as myself is left with not a lot of ideas on how to work with their child on reading comprehension.

It is clear also that the parent of the schooled or homeschooled child (or the teacher) will have to read the entire book and to come up with their own discussion questions. I find this recommendation to be the opposite of what parents of schooled children say they want to do in order to boost their child’s reading comprehension standardized test scores, after the child’s teacher says their child is not faring well on the school’s test. This is also not what many public schools are doing in classrooms in America right now either. What the parents want (on the Internet groups I am a member of) is something cheap they can buy such as a workbook or an Internet site with tests to give the child. Those parents want the child to work in a solitary manner using some purchased item or service as the strategy for helping the child. This book provides a VERY different approach that I doubt most parents of schooled children will be open to doing. Lastly, a very important issue I think is that I feel that the book doesn’t lead parents by the hand enough to come up with their own ‘teaching content’ to move from this book right to working with their children.

The authors also don’t give any suggestions such as how MUCH or how OFTEN to do this with a child at home. Should a book be read and discussed weekly or monthly or how often, for parents of schooled children to help a struggling student at home? How often also should teachers in classrooms be doing this—how many books will the entire classroom read and discuss in a school year? (I’d like to know the answer to that. Friends of mine say that classroom reading and discussions like this happen with one and sometimes two books per school year for grades 4 and 5. That seems like not enough to me.)

I want to make it clear that any parent of a schooled child who reads this entire book and uses the ideas to help their struggling child at home should be applauded as these methods take time and energy. My hat goes off to the parents that actually put these ideas into action!

Regarding teachers, as I said before the basic content is probably stuff they already know. The small section that discusses ways to hold a classroom group discussion is provided. However if this truly is to be a book for teachers as it says it is, I feel this book is too simple, too short and just ‘not enough’.

I also resented the fact that many general concepts are presented without history, as if these authors made them up as unique ideas. People who think these are the authors' own theories may give the authors more credit than they deserve. Actually I felt their lack of crediting other sources borders on plagarism but I'm not a plagarism expert. For example many of these ideas I recall being covered in "The New Read Aloud Handbook" as well as in "How to Read a Book" which is actually a popular and common book for many college students to read (not just education majors).

An example of a teaching method that was not credited as being anyone else's and comes across as being a unique concept of the authors is what they call ‘retelling’, having a child tell the adult about what they read. The formal name for that which they never mention is narration and it was a major part of a student’s education from the Ancient cultures and was continued in the classical education model right up through the Charlotte Mason method of one hundred years ago and is still present today’s classical homeschooling models as laid out in "The Well-Trained Mind" and other books on educating in the classical style.

I have a number of other reasons to think the book is not spectacular. On page 76 the authors discuss the importance of posing questions and having discussions to learn. Sadly, doing that is not the conventional way of teaching in classrooms. Due to the fact that such discussions cannot be graded and that they don’t count as tests they don’t translate easily into the more typical school methods of making children do work on paper that can quickly be graded and answering questions on paper that are a test. As an example the popular Scholastic Accelerated Reader program that many schools use seems to me to be the ‘old method’ that these authors say is not their recommended way to teach this subject. (In that program children read books to themselves and answer simple questions on the computer—they are not open-ended questions and they are not discussions). And therein lies the problem: the way reading comprehension is still being taught in schools today for the bulk of the child’s experience won’t get the reader to the goals these authors would like to see achieved because the model of institutional schooling in American public schools is not set up to handle that model.

Another criticism is that on page 98 the authors use cartoons as an example of inferencing in which the reader must have background knowledge to ‘get it’. Let’s get real here. The Far Side is an adult cartoon based heavily on cultural knowledge and sometimes dated pop culture things that today’s children don’t know about. Actual comics written for children of these ages (8, 9, 10 or whatever) don’t use much inferencing at all since much of the content is presented in a visual format which children of that age find very easy to interpret. The language of comics written for CHILDREN are so simplistic that they are very literal and easy to understand.

The last criticism that I’ll offer as an example of why I am not so happy with the book is that the authors provide book lists as suggested great books to teach each key. I feel the lists are too short and provide little information. Most of the suggestions are picture books. The “longer books” are juvenile fiction that the publishers state are for readers aged 9-12. Some of these titles range from the more simplistic to the ones better for 11 or 12 year old’s (which I know from my experience reading them) but there is nothing to direct parents to which is which. Some of these books also have mature themes such as rape, alcoholism, divorce, and racism—these are not light topics and while they would make for good discussion the authors don’t provide any information about what these books are about NOR do they address how to discuss ‘difficult topics’ with children (at all which surprises me).

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