Defining Unison Reading to someone who knows nothing about Genre Practice is sometimes a difficult task. Take, for example, this recent interaction with a literacy coach:
Coach: “So what exactly is Unison Reading?”
Kim: “It’s an approach to small-group reading instruction where…”
Coach: “So, it’s like Guided Reading.”
Kim: “No, it’s not Guided Reading. All of the students read aloud in unison…”
Coach: “Oh, so it’s like Guided Reading with choral reading.”
Kim: “No, it’s not Guided Reading. See, as the kids read, they bring up their confusions, questions, realizations, and…”
Coach: “I get it. It’s like choral reading in Guided Reading, but pausing to talk about things.”
    You get the picture.
    In all honesty, I can’t blame the coach. After all, it’s our natural inclination as learners to organize new knowledge into neat, color-coded files of existing knowledge. Everything the coach knew about “small-group reading instruction” came from a previously existing format.
    But at its heart, Unison Reading isn’t just a variation of practice X, Y, or Z.
To perfectly illustrate this, I realized I needed a new definition of Unison Reading. In doing so, I would be better equipped in my next attempt to explain it. I might even get to finish my explanation without interruption.
    I found that definition in a pretty unlikely place—a Time magazine article about the series finale of the television show Lost. The article’s author, James Poniewozik, wrote that Lost re-defined television in the way it challenged viewers. Of the show’s intricate plots, he said, “It’s tough to wrap your mind around alone; you…need a community. As soon as an episode airs, Lost fans online swarm it like ants, picking it clean for morsels of meaning.”
    And isn’t it the same in Unison Reading? For many children, the act of reading is far from easily understood. It is tough to wrap their minds around alone. But when you have a community with a joint intention, you can swarm a text like a colony of ants and pick it clean for every last morsel of meaning.
    But the analogy doesn’t end here. When Poniewozik asked the show’s creators about the show’s end, they said they expected their viewers to have questions such as, “So what did they mean by that?” Says Lost’s co-creator Damon Lindeof, “We would throw it back at the audience, ‘Well, what did it mean to you? Your own personal relationship with Lost actually trumps any intention that we had as storytellers.”
    You’ll notice the creators of Lost are no different than the teachers who facilitate Unison Reading. When children pose questions, the teacher doesn’t simply give them the answer; the teacher throws it back to the students and asks questions like, “How are we going to figure it out?” or “What did it mean to you?” The teachers leave it to the kids to find their relationship with the text and with each other in order to create meaning.    
    With this explanation, surely the literacy coach would have understood Unison Reading is very different from Guided Reading. After all, traditional, teacher-centered approaches to reading rarely invite readers to join as a community around a joint purpose They also do little in the way of allowing the teacher to relinquish power back to the students.
    With this in mind, the next time people ask me to define Unison Reading, I will likely analogize, “Unison Reading is to Lost as Guided Reading is to…well… Gilligan’s Island.” And if they don’t seem to understand the analogy right off the bat, maybe they will have be perplexed enough to listen as I define Unison Reading in more practical terms…without interruption.