Deep Reading, Deep Thinking, and their Roles in RAVE-O

Deep Reading, Deep Thinking, and their Roles in RAVE-O

Deep reading is the semi-miraculous apex of our species’ invention of writing that allows us, in Proust’s words, to go “beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own.” It is made possible by the equally semi-miraculous design of the human brain that allows us to build whole new circuits for human inventions like literacy and numeracy. Before we learned to read and write, there was no reading brain circuit. After, a circuit emerged that connects to itself both the most basic perceptual, motoric, and language processes and, over time, the most sophisticated intellectual, linguistic, and affective processes.

It is a story that mirrors the move of evolution from the most basic to the most sophisticated forms of life. It is a story that begins like Helen Keller’s discovery that a thing (water) can be represented by a word that can be represented by letters. In the process of that discovery a brain learns to connect regions across itself that, when integrated, create something new: a reading brain circuit, capable of growing exponentially with every thing read and learned and understood.

Deep reading is what happens when reading moves from the simplest act of decoding a word to the ever increasing complexity of connecting that word to thoughts housed in the content of sentences, stories, books. The humble word used by educators to describe this move to content is “connected text”. What few realize is that underlying those two simple words are multiple, extraordinary cerebral processes with connections that are growing like the mycoworld under a tree’s root system.

Deep reading is what grows from the development of those connected processes in the ever growing reading brain. It begins with the allocation of three essential catalysts for deep reading: attention, time, and effort (never a given in a world tailored for distraction) to activate, connect, and integrate some of the most critical aspects of human thought and feeling. With lightning fast, feed-forward, feedback integration, the processes include the elicitation of the reader’s background knowledge and analogical thinking: for example, is what I read consistent with what I know, or if not, why not? Inferential processes are needed to discern what is meant by the text, the author, the implicit or explicit perspective.

Particularly in fiction, the act of perspective-taking gives the reader the opportunity to “pass over”, theologian John Dunne’s words for moving from our perspective into the thoughts and feelings of others. It is the moment of going beyond ourselves to discover “others”: other people, other times, other cultures, other thoughts that lie outside our knowledge of the world. In this very particular moment of connection, deep reading is a journey outside ourselves guided by an author to discover the world of others in an exchange that will lead us to return the “richer”. Perspective-taking requires of the reading brain regions not only for cognitive empathy, but also affective empathy. We conjoin Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple in our ability to bring intelligence and feeling together when we leave our perspective on the world to think and feel for one moment like others. It is an essential aspect of human development and the basis for a democracy where every perspective is given voice.

Critical thinking is the ‘penultimate’ ( we will return to this word) sum of all the other processes and the connective tissue in their integration. Along with empathy, it may be the most essential and most threatened of the deep reading processes in a digital/AI dominated culture because it requires the most of the three catalysts, Time, Attention, and Effort.

Penultimate implies there is more to come in the reading circuit, but only if the three catalysts allow it.

RAVE-O emphasizes deep reading processes from the start through loveable characters in Minute Stories all chapter books, all of which are decodables. For example, in the Meg and Lil stories, empathy and perspective taking of the experiences of others who are “different” are highlighted. Embodied in characters like the detective Sam Spade, critical thinking is taught along with the perseverance and cognitive patience needed to acquire it. Throughout, T-Lex (Tri-think-asaurus Lex) uses his three heads to teach multiple comprehension (thinking) strategies, while encouraging every student to “think for themselves”. Emphases on deep reading allow not only for better, more nuanced comprehension, but also for more insights and creative thoughts in the reader. Indeed the entire program is directed to unleashing the cognitive, linguistic, and affective strengths all our readers possess, but they didn’t ever realize.