The word "dobos" is a Hungarian word meaning "drummer," and many people might think it's called that because of the top layer. It's actually named after Jozsef Dobos, who invented it. In a time when cooling techniques were difficult to come by, Dobos needed a kind of cake that could last for a longer time without refrigeration. It took him a long time, experimenting with different ingredients that would satisfy both flavor and resistance to melting.
It takes a long time to achieve greatness. We have to teach kids to pose their thinking and live with it for a while.
This happens as they allow their thinking about a character or an issue to unfold in a chapter book. They go from seeing Opal's relationship with her father taking dramatic turns in Because of Winn-Dixie. Story events add up and they create new understandings. It's even cooler when you see different readers in the same text debating their ideas in a read-aloud or a book club. That's the stuff of real reading!
In reading, we shouldn't push our interpretations onto kids, or they're not doing the interpretation. They're not the ones who are doing the learning! However, this is a leap of faith. In a recent blog, Vicki Vinton writes about the need for us to give up control a little bit and allow kids to think and talk in a very open-ended way. We need to trust our own teaching so well, that looking at it long term, it will pay off. We need to trust our students' learning so well, that looking at it long term, it's like a carefully constructed Lego castle.
What are some ways to do this?
We have to be careful not to over-scaffold in our teaching. It usually leads kids down a dead end of ideas where they aren't free to explore to the point where they discover an important theory, a light bulb, or a dobostorta. We have to also teach them to pose fewer questions, but to pose a hypothesis. Instead of asking, "Who else will Opal meet because of Winn-Dixie?" we need to state, "It seems like Opal is finally making friends, and it's because of Winn-Dixie." As we read on, we start to see this is true, but that the friends she makes are just as lonely as she is. However, if we give students thinking-proof questions to answer, we really hold them back.
Often, even the student-generated questions and wonderings are so low level, that if they're answered at all, they're just low level recall types of information. If they're not answered enough, then we teach kids to leave a bunch of loose ends to their thinking in books. Sometimes I say to kids, "Don't ask questions when you're thinking. Give answers, even if they're just 'for now' answers." Some really smart people might disagree with this, but I've seen kids writing post-it's with questions that don't get answered, or even if they do, they're such tiny details that they don't really lead anywhere near interpretation.
I'm not bashing predicting here, but often it overshadows other types of thinking. One teacher I know said it nicely, "Don't only think about the future in your book. Think about the past and the present of it." Try to move kids away from exclusively saying things like, "I think Opal will have lots of friends." Instead they should be saying things like, "Winn-Dixie is making everyone less lonely in this story." Rock crushes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Synthesis beats just prediction!
Teaching reading and writing for real is very difficult. You can't just "cover" teaching points and say you're done. It takes a long time to create learning with any kind of depth. The teaching moves outlined in this post are just a part of the solution of how you can create learning that lasts. Imagine what the world would be like if Edison, Einstein, or even Dobos had gone for a quick fix?